The Project Gutenberg eBook, Soliloquies in England, by George Santayana

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

AND LATER SOLILOQUIES

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1922

PREFACE

Many of these Soliloquies have appeared in The Athenaeum and one or more in The London Mercury, The Nation, The New Republic, The Dial, and The Journal of Philosophy. The author's thanks are due to the Editors of all these reviews for permission to reprint the articles.

For convenience, three Soliloquies on Liberty, written in 1915, have been placed in the second group; and perhaps it should be added that not a few of the later pieces were written in France, Spain, or Italy, although still for the most part on English themes and under the influence of English impressions.

CONTENTS
[PROLOGUE]
[SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND], 1914-1918
1. [ATMOSPHERE]
2. [GRISAILLE]
3. [PRAISES OF WATER]
4. [THE TWO PARENTS OF VISION]
5. [AVERSION FROM PLATONISM]
6. [CLOUD CASTLES]
7. [CROSS-LIGHTS]
8. [HAMLET'S QUESTION]
9. [THE BRITISH CHARACTER]
10. [SEAFARING]
11. [PRIVACY]
12. [THE LION AND THE UNICORN]
13. [DONS]
14. [APOLOGY FOR SNOBS]
15. [THE HIGHER SNOBBERY]
16. [DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN]
17. [FRIENDSHIPS]
18. [DICKENS]
19. [THE HUMAN SCALE]
20. [ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE]
21. [THE ENGLISH CHURCH]
22. [LEAVING CHURCH]
23. [DEATH-BED MANNERS]
24. [WAR SHRINES]
25. [TIPPERARY]
26. [SKYLARKS]
27. [AT HEAVEN'S GATE]
[LATER SOLILOQUIES], 1918-1921
28. [SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE]
29. [IMAGINATION]
30. [THE WORLD'S A STAGE]
31. [MASKS]
32. [THE TRAGIC MASK]
33. [THE COMIC MASK]
34. [CARNIVAL]
35. [QUEEN MAB]
36. [A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA]
37. [THE CENSOR AND THE POET]
38. [THE MASK OF THE PHILOSOPHER]
39. [THE VOYAGE OF THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER]
40. [CLASSIC LIBERTY]
41. [GERMAN FREEDOM]
42. [LIBERALISM AND CULTURE]
43. [THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM]
44. [JOHN BULL AND HIS PHILOSOPHERS]
45. [OCCAM'S RAZOR]
46. [EMPIRICISM]
47. [THE BRITISH HEGELIANS]
48. [THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY]
49. [THE PSYCHE]
50. [REVERSION TO PLATONISM]
51. [IDEAS]
52. [THE MANSIONS OF HELEN]
53. [THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS]
54. [ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS]
55. [HERMES THE INTERPRETER]

PROLOGUE

The outbreak of war in the year 1914 found me by chance in England, and there I remained, chiefly at Oxford, until the day of the peace. During those five years, in rambles to Iffley and Sandford, to Godstow and Wytham, to the hospitable eminence of Chilswell, to Wood Eaton or Nuneham or Abingdon or Stanton Harcourt,

Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,

these Soliloquies were composed, or the notes scribbled from which they have been expanded. Often over Port Meadow the whirr of aeroplanes sent an iron tremor through these reveries, and the daily casualty list, the constant sight of the wounded, the cadets strangely replacing the undergraduates, made the foreground to these distances. Yet nature and solitude continued to envelop me in their gentleness, and seemed to remain nearer to me than all that was so near. They muffled the importunity of the hour; perhaps its very bitterness and incubus of horror drove my thoughts deeper than they would otherwise have ventured into the maze of reflection and of dreams. It is a single maze, though we traverse it in opposite moods, and distinct threads conduct us; for when the most dire events have assumed their punctiform places in the history of our lives, where they will stand eternally, what are they but absurd episodes in a once tormenting dream? And when our despised night-dreams are regarded and respected as they deserve to be (since all their troubles are actual and all their tints evident), do they prove more arbitrary or less significant than our waking thoughts, or than those more studious daylight fictions which we call history or philosophy? The human mind at best is a sort of song; the music of it runs away with the words, and even the words, which pass for the names of things, are but poor wild symbols for their unfathomed objects. So are these Soliloquies compared with their occasions; and I should be the first to hate their verbiage, if a certain spiritual happiness did not seem to breathe through it, and redeem its irrelevance. Their very abstraction from the time in which they were written may commend them to a free mind. Spirit refuses to be caught in a vice; it triumphs over the existence which begets it. The moving world which feeds it is not its adequate theme. Spirit hates its father and its mother. It spreads from its burning focus into the infinite, careless whether that focus burns to ashes or not. From its pinnacle of earthly time it pours its little life into spheres not temporal nor earthly, and half in playfulness, half in sacrifice, it finds its joy in the irony of eternal things, which know nothing of it.

Spirit, however, cannot fly from matter without material wings; the most abstract art is compacted of images, the most mystical renunciation obeys some passion of the heart. Images and passion, even if they are not easily recognizable in these Soliloquies as now coldly written down, were not absent from them when inwardly spoken. The images were English images, the passion was the love of England and, behind England, of Greece. What I love in Greece and in England is contentment in finitude, fair outward ways, manly perfection and simplicity. Admiration for England, of a certain sort, was instilled into me in my youth. My father (who read the language with ease although he did not speak it) had a profound respect for British polity and British power. In this admiration there was no touch of sentiment nor even of sympathy; behind it lay something like an ulterior contempt, such as we feel for the strong man exhibiting at a fair. The performance may be astonishing but the achievement is mean. So in the middle of the nineteenth century an intelligent foreigner, the native of a country materially impoverished, could look to England for a model of that irresistible energy and public discipline which afterwards were even more conspicuous in Bismarckian Germany and in the United States. It was admiration for material progress, for wealth, for the inimitable gift of success; and it was not free, perhaps, from the poor man's illusion, who jealously sets his heart on prosperity, and lets it blind him to the subtler sources of greatness. We should none of us admire England to-day, if we had to admire it only for its conquering commerce, its pompous noblemen, or its parliamentary government. I feel no great reverence even for the British Navy, which may be in the junk-shop to-morrow; but I heartily like the British sailor, with his clear-cut and dogged way of facing the world. It is health, not policy nor wilfulness, that gives true strength in the moral world, as in the animal kingdom; nature and fortune in the end are on the side of health. There is, or was, a beautifully healthy England hidden from most foreigners; the England of the countryside and of the poets, domestic, sporting, gallant, boyish, of a sure and delicate heart, which it has been mine to feel beating, though not so early in my life as I could have wished. In childhood I saw only Cardiff on a Sunday, and the docks of Liverpool; but books and prints soon opened to me more important vistas. I read the poets; and although British painting, when it tries to idealize human subjects, has always made me laugh, I was quick to discern an ethereal beauty in the landscapes of Turner. Furgueson's Cathedrals of England, too, and the great mansions in the Italian style depicted in the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, revealed to me even when a boy the rare charm that can envelop the most conventional things when they are associated with tender thoughts or with noble ways of living.

It was with a premonition of things noble and tender, and yet conventional, that after a term at the University of Berlin I went to spend my first holidays in England. Those were the great free days of my youth. I had lived familiarly in Spain and in the United States; I had had a glimpse of France and of Germany, and French literature had been my daily bread: it had taught me how to think, but had not given me much to think about. I was not mistaken in surmising that in England I should find a tertium quid, something soberer and juster than anything I yet knew, and at the same time greener and richer. I felt at once that here was a distinctive society, a way of living fundamentally foreign to me, but deeply attractive. At first all gates seemed shut and bristling with incommunication; but soon in some embowered corner I found the stile I might climb over, and the ancient right of way. Those peaceful parks, and those minds no less retired, seemed positively to welcome me; and though I was still divided from them by inevitable partitions, these were in places so thin and yielding, that the separation seemed hardly greater than is requisite for union and sympathy between autonomous minds. Indeed, I was soon satisfied that no climate, no manners, no comrades on earth (where nothing is perfect) could be more congenial to my complexion. Not that I ever had the least desire or tendency to become an Englishman. Nationality and religion are like oar love and loyalty towards women: things too radically intertwined with oar moral essence to be changed honourably, and too accidental to the free mind to be worth changing. My own origins were living within me; by their light I could see clearly that this England was pre-eminently the home of decent happiness and a quiet pleasure in being oneself. I found here the same sort of manliness which I had learned to love in America, yet softer, and not at all obstreperous; a manliness which when refined a little creates the gentleman, since its instinct is to hide its strength for an adequate occasion and for the service of others. It is self-reliant, but with a saving touch of practicality and humour; for there is a becoming self-confidence, based on actual performance, like the confidence of the athlete, and free from any exorbitant estimate of what that performance is worth. Such modesty in strength is entirely absent from the effusive temperament of the Latin, who is cocky and punctilious so long as his conceit holds out, and then utterly humbled and easily corrupted; entirely absent also from the doctrinaire of the German school, in his dense vanity and officiousness, that nothing can put to shame. So much had I come to count on this sort of manliness in the friends of my youth, that without it the most admirable and gifted persons seemed to me hardly men: they fell rather into an ambiguous retinue, the camp followers of man, cleverer but meaner than himself—the priests, politicians, actors, pedagogues, and shopkeepers. The man is he who lives and relies directly on nature, not on the needs or weaknesses of other people. These self-sufficing Englishmen, in their reserve and decision, seemed to me truly men, creatures of fixed rational habit, people in whose somewhat inarticulate society one might feel safe and at home. The low pressure at which their minds seemed to work showed how little they were alarmed about anything: things would all be managed somehow. They were good company even when they said nothing. Their aspect, their habits, their invincible likes and dislikes seemed like an anchor to me in the currents of this turbid age. They were a gift of the gods, like the sunshine or the fresh air or the memory of the Greeks: they were superior beings, and yet more animal than the rest of us, calmer, with a different scale of consciousness and a slower pace of thought. There were glints in them sometimes of a mystical oddity; they loved the wilds; and yet ordinarily they were wonderfully sane and human, and responsive to the right touch. Moreover, these semi-divine animals could talk like men of the world. If some of them, and not the least charming, said little but "Oh, really," and "How stupid of me," I soon discovered how far others could carry scholarly distinction, rich humour, and refinement of diction. I confess, however, that when they were very exquisite or subtle they seemed to me like cut flowers; the finer they were the frailer, and the cleverer the more wrong-headed. Delicacy did not come to them, as to Latin minds, as an added ornament, a finer means of being passionate, a trill in a song that flows full-chested from the whole man; their purity was Puritanism, it came by exclusion of what they thought lower. It impoverished their sympathies, it severed them from their national roots, it turned to affectation or fanaticism, it rendered them acrid and fussy and eccentric and sad. It is truly English, in one sense, to fume against England, individuality tearing its own nest; and often these frantic poses neutralize one another and do no harm on the whole. Nevertheless it is the full-bodied Englishman who has so far ballasted the ship, he who, like Shakespeare, can wear gracefully the fashion of the hour, can play with fancy, and remain a man. When he ceases to be sensual and national, adventurous and steady, reticent and religious, the Englishman is a mad ghost; and wherever he prevails he turns pleasant England, like Greece, into a memory.

Those first holidays of mine, when I was twenty-three years of age, laid the foundation of a lifelong attachment—of which these Soliloquies are a late fruit—to both Oxford and Cambridge: not so much to the learned society of those places as to their picturesque aspects and to the possibility of enjoying there in seclusion the intense companionship of the past and of the beautiful; also the intense companionship of youth, to which more advanced years in themselves are no obstacle, if the soul remains free. I have never liked the taste of academic straw; but there are fat grains and seeds of novelty even at universities, which the lively young wits that twitter in those shades pick up like hungry sparrows, yet without unmitigated seriousness; and unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. Let not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato, in his solemn old age, who said it. He added that our ignominious condition forces us, nevertheless, to be often terribly in earnest. Wanton and transitory as our existence is, and comic as it must appear in the eyes of the happy gods, it is all in all to our mortal nature; and whilst intellectually we may judge ourselves somewhat as the gods might judge us, and may commend our lives to the keeping of eternity, our poor animal souls are caught inextricably in the toils of time, which devours us and all our possessions. The artist playing a farce for others suffers a tragedy in himself. When he aspires to shed as much as possible the delusions of earthly passion, and to look at things joyfully and unselfishly, with the clear eyes of youth, it is not because he feels no weight of affliction, but precisely because he feels its weight to the full, and how final it is. Lest it should seem inhuman of me to have been piping soliloquies whilst Rome was burning, I will transcribe here some desperate verses extorted from me by events during those same years. I am hardly a poet in the magic sense of the word, but when one's thoughts have taken instinctively a metrical form, why should they be forbidden to wear it? I do not ask the reader to admire these sonnets, but to believe them.

A PREMONITION
Cambridge, October 1913
Grey walls, broad fields, fresh voices, rippling weir,
I know you well: ten faces, for each face
That passes smiling, haunt this hallowed place,
And nothing not thrice noted greets me here.
Soft watery winds, wide twilight skies and clear,
Refresh my spirit at its founts of grace,
And a strange sorrow masters me, to pace
These willowed paths, in this autumnal year.
Soon, lovely England, soon thy secular dreams,
Thy lisping comrades, shall be thine no more.
A world's loosed troubles flood thy gated streams
And drown, methinks, thy towers; and the tears start
As if an iron hand had clutched my heart,
And knowledge is a pang, like love of yore.
THE UNDERGRADUATE KILLED IN BATTLE
Oxford, 1915
Sweet as the lawn beneath his sandalled tread,
Or the scarce rippled stream beneath his oar,
So gently buffeted it laughed the more,
His life was, and the few blithe words he said.
One or two poets read he, and reread;
One or two friends with boyish ardour wore
Close to his heart, incurious of the lore
Dodonian woods might murmur overhead.
Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a care,
What, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo!
The earth once won, begins your long despair
That never, never is his bliss for you.
He breathed betimes this clement island air
And in unwitting lordship saw the blue.
THE DARKEST HOUR
Oxford, 1917
Smother thy flickering light, the vigil's o'er.
Hope, early wounded, of his wounds is dead.
Many a night long he smiled, his drooping head
Laid on thy breast, and that brave smile he wore
Not yet from his unbreathing lips is fled.
Enough: on mortal sweetness look no more,
Pent in this charnel-house, fling wide the door
And on the stars that killed him gaze instead.
The world's too vast for hope. The unteachable sun
Rises again and will reflood his sphere,
Blotting with light what yesterday was done;
But the unavailing truth, though dead, lives on,
And in eternal night, unkindly clear,
A cold moon gilds the waves of Acheron.

[SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND]

1914-1918

1

ATMOSPHERE

The stars lie above all countries alike, but the atmosphere that intervenes is denser in one place than in another; and even where it is purest, if once its atoms catch the sunlight, it cuts off the prospect beyond. In some climates the veil of earthly weather is so thick and blotted that even the plodder with his eyes on the ground finds its density inconvenient, and misses his way home. The advantage of having eyes is neutralized at such moments, and it would be better to have retained the power of going on all fours and being guided by scent. In fact human beings everywhere are like marine animals and live in a congenial watery medium, which like themselves is an emanation of mother earth; and they are content for the most part to glide through it horizontally at their native level. They ignore the third, the vertical dimension; or if they ever get some inkling of empty heights or rigid depths where they could not breathe, they dismiss that speculative thought with a shudder, and continue to dart about in their familiar aquarium, immersed in an opaque fluid that cools their passions, protects their intellect from mental dispersion, keeps them from idle gazing, and screens them from impertinent observation by those who have no business in the premises.

The stellar universe that silently surrounds them, if while swimming they ever think of it, seems to them something foreign and not quite credibly reported. How should anything exist so unlike home, so out of scale with their affairs, so little watery, and so little human? Their philosophers confirm them in that incredulity; and the sea-caves hold conclaves of profound thinkers congregated to prove that only fog can be real. The dry, their council decrees, is but a vain abstraction, a mere negative which human imagination opposes to the moist, of which alone, since life is moist, there can be positive experience.

As for the stars, these inspired children of the mist have discovered that they are nothing but postulates of astronomy, imagined for a moment to exist, in order that a beautiful human science may be constructed about them. Duller people, born in the same fog, may not understand so transcendental a philosophy, but they spontaneously frame others of their own, not unlike it in principle. In the middle of the night, when the starlight best manages to pierce to the lowest strata of the air, these good people are asleep; yet occasionally when they are returning somewhat disappointed from a party, or when illness or anxiety or love-hunger keeps them pacing their chamber or tossing in their beds, by chance they may catch a glimpse of a star or two twinkling between their curtains. Idle objects, they say to themselves, like dots upon the wall-paper. Why should there be stars at all, and why so many of them? Certainly they shed a little light and are pretty; and they are a convenience sometimes in the country when there is no moon and no lamp-posts; and they are said to be useful in navigation and to enable the astronomers to calculate sidereal time in addition to solar time, which is doubtless a great satisfaction to them. But all this hardly seems to justify such an expense of matter and energy as is involved in celestial mechanics. To have so much going on so far away, and for such prodigious lengths of time, seems rather futile and terrible. Who knows? Astrologers used to foretell people's character and destiny by their horoscope; perhaps they may turn out to have been more or less right after all, now that science is coming round to support more and more what our fathers called superstitions. There may be some meaning in the stars, a sort of code-language such as Bacon put into Shakespeare's sonnets, which would prove to us, if we could only read it, not how insignificant, but how very important we are in the world, since the very stars are talking about us.

The safest thing, however, is to agree with the great idealists, who say there are really no stars at all. Or, if their philosophy seems insecure—and there are rumours that even the professors are hedging on the subject—we can always take refuge in faith, and think of the heavenly bodies as beautiful new homes in which we are to meet and work together again when we die; and as in time we might grow weary even there, with being every day busier and busier, there must always be other stars at hand for us to move to, each happier and busier than the last; and since we wish to live and to progress for ever, the number of habitable planets provided for us has to be infinite. Certainly faith is far better than science for explaining everything.

So the embryonic soul reasons in her shell of vapour; her huddled philosophy is, as it were, pre-natal, and discredits the possibility of ever peeping into a cold outer world. Yet in time this shell may grow dangerously thin in places, and a little vague light may filter through. Strange promptings and premonitions at the same time may visit the imprisoned spirit, as if it might not be impossible nor inglorious to venture into a world that was not oneself. At last, willy-nilly, the soul may be actually hatched, and may suddenly find herself horribly exposed, cast perhaps on the Arabian desert, or on some high, scorched, open place that resembles it, like the uplands of Castile. There the rarefied atmosphere lets the stars down upon her overwhelmingly, like a veritable host of heaven. There the barren earth entwines few tentacles about the heart; it stretches away dark and empty beneath our feet, a mere footstool for meditation. It is a thing to look away from, too indifferent and accidental even to spurn; for after all it supports us, and though small and extinguished it is one of the stars. In these regions the shepherds first thought of God.

[2]

GRISAILLE

England is pre-eminently a land of atmosphere. A luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavement become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be loved without being possessed. Mists prolong the most sentimental and soothing of hours, the twilight, through the long summer evenings and the whole winter's day. In these country-sides so full of habitations and these towns so full of verdure, lamplight and twilight cross their rays; and the passers-by, mercifully wrapped alike in one crepuscular mantle, are reduced to unison and simplicity, as if sketched at one stroke by the hand of a master.

English landscape, if we think only of the land and the works of man upon it, is seldom on the grand scale. Charming, clement, and eminently habitable, it is almost too domestic, as if only home passions and caged souls could live there. But lift the eyes for a moment above the line of roofs or of tree-tops, and there the grandeur you miss on the earth is spread gloriously before you. The spirit of the atmosphere is not compelled, like the god of pantheism, to descend in order to exist, and wholly to diffuse itself amongst earthly objects. It exists absolutely in its own person as well, and enjoys in the sky, like a true deity, its separate life and being. There the veil of Maya, the heavenly Penelope, is being woven and rent perpetually, and the winds of destiny are always charmingly defeating their apparent intentions. Here is the playground of those early nebulous gods that had the bodies of giants and the minds of children.

In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these tender skies. Here the conflict between light and darkness, like all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is luminous and all is grey.

[3]

PRAISES OF WATER

The transformation of landscape by moisture is no matter of appearance only, no mere optical illusion or effect of liquid stained glass. It is a sort of echo or symbol to our senses of very serious events in prehistoric times. Water, which now seems only to lap the earth or to cloud it, was the chisel which originally carved its surface. They say that when the planet, recently thrown off from the sun, was still on fire, the lighter elements rose in the form of gases around the molten metallic core; and the outer parts of this nucleus in cooling formed a crust of igneous rock which, as the earth contracted, was crushed together and wrinkled like the skin of a raisin. These wrinkles are our mountain chains, made even more rugged and villainous by belated eruptions. On that early earth there was no water. All was sheer peaks, ledges, and chasms, red-hot or coal-black, or of such livid metallic hues, crimson, saffron, and purple, as may still be seen on the shores of the Dead Sea or in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado—rifts that allow us to peep into the infernal regions, happily in those places at least without inhabitants. This hellish sort of landscape, which we must now plunge into the depths to find, was the first general landscape of earth.

As the cooling progressed, however, the steam that was in the upper atmosphere began to condense and to fall in rain. At first the hot drops no doubt sizzled as they fell and rose again immediately in vapour, yet the meteorological cycle was established notwithstanding. The rain that evaporated descended once more, each time colder and more abundant, until it cut channels amongst the crags, ground and polished their fragments into boulders and pebbles, formed pools in the hollows, and finally covered the earth up to its chin with the oceans. Much detritus meantime was washed down from the rocks; it gathered in crevices and along the pockets and slacker reaches of rivers. This sediment was soaked with moisture and mixed with dissolved acids; it became the first soft layer of earth and finally a fertile soil. Water in this way softened the outlines of the mountains, laid the floor of the valleys, and made a leafy and a cloudy place of the planet.

The sages (and some of them much more recent than Thales) tell us that water not only wears away the rocks, but has a singular power of carrying away their subtler elements in solution, especially carbonic acid, of which the atmosphere also is full; and it happens that these elements can combine with the volatile dements of water into innumerable highly complex substances, all of which the atmospheric cycle carries with it wherever it goes; and with these complex substances, which are the requisite materials for living bodies, it everywhere fills the sea and impregnates the land.

Even if life, then, is not actually born of the moist element, it is at least suckled by it; the water-laden atmosphere is the wet nurse, if not the mother, of the earth-soul. The earth has its soul outside its body, as many a philosopher would have wished to have his. The winds that play about it are its breath, the water that rains down and rises again in mist is its circulating blood; and the death of the earth will come when some day it sucks in the atmosphere and the sea, gets its soul inside its body again, turns its animating gases back into solids, and becomes altogether a skeleton of stone.

No wonder that living creatures find things that are fluid and immersed in moisture friendly to the watery core of their own being. Seeds, blood, and tears are liquid; nothing else is so poignant as what passes and flows, like music and love; and if this irreparable fluidity is sad, anything stark and arrested is still sadder. Life is compelled to flow, and things must either flow with it or, like Lot's wife, in the petrified gesture of refusal, remain to mock their own hope.

[4]

THE TWO PARENTS OF VISION

It would seem that when a heavenly body ceases to shine by its own light, it becomes capable of breeding eyes with which to profit by the light other bodies are shedding; whereas, so long as it was itself on fire, no part of it could see. Is life a gift which cooling stars receive from those still incandescent, when some ray falls upon a moist spot, making it a focus of warmth and luminous energy, and reversing at that point the general refrigeration? It is certain, at any rate, that if light did not pour down from the sun no earthly animal would have developed an eye. Yet there was another partner in this business of seeing, who would have flatly refused to undertake it, had the sole profit been the possibility of star-gazing.

Star-gazing is an ulterior platonic homage which we pay to our celestial sources, as a sort of pious acknowledgment of their munificence in unconsciously begetting us. But this is an acknowledgment which they are far from demanding or noticing, not being vain or anxious to be admired, like popular gods; and if we omitted it, they would continue to perform their offices towards us with the same contemptuous regularity. Star-gazing is, therefore, a pure waste of time in the estimation of the other partner in vision, besides celestial light—I mean, that clod of moist earth which the light quickens, that plastic home-keeping parent of the mind, whom we might call old mother Psyche, and whose primary care is to keep the body in order and guide it prudently over the earth's surface. For such a purpose the direct rays of the sun are blinding, and those of the moon and stars fit only to breed lunatics. To mother Psyche it seems a blessing that the view of the infinite from the earth is so often intercepted; else it might have sunk into her heart (for she has watched through many a night in her long vegetative career), and might have stretched her comfortable industrious sanity into a sort of divine madness or reason, very disconcerting in her business. Indeed, she would never have consented to look or to see at all, except for this circumstance, that the rays coming from heavenly bodies are reflected by earthly bodies upon one another; so that by becoming sensitive to light the Psyche could receive a most useful warning of what to seek or to avoid. Instead of merely stretching or poking or sniffing through the world, she could now map it at a glance, and turn instinct into foresight.

This was a great turn in her career, wonderful in its tragic possibilities, and something like falling in love; for her new art brought her a new pleasure and a new unrest, purer and more continual than those drowsy and terrible ones which she knew before. Reflected light is beautiful. The direct downpour of light through space leaves space wonderfully dark, and it falls on the earth indiscriminately upon the wise and the foolish, to warm or to scorch them; but the few rays caught by solid matter or drifting vapour become prismatic, soft, and infinitely varied; not only reporting truly the position and material diversity of things, but adding to them an orchestration in design and colour bewitching to the senses. It was not the stars but the terrestrial atmosphere that the eyes of the flesh were made to see; even mother Psyche can love the light, when it clothes or betrays something else that matters; and the fleshly-spiritual Goethe said most truly: Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben.

[5]

AVERSION FROM PLATONISM

Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve, and in those Mediterranean regions that nurtured the classic mind, by continually repeating the same definite scenes, nature forced it to fix its ideas. Every one learned to think that the earth and the gods were more permanent than himself; he perused them, he returned to them, he studied them at arm's length, and he recognized their external divinity. But where the Atlantic mists envelop everything, though we must repeatedly use the same names for new-born things, as we continue to christen children John and Mary, yet we feel that the facts, like the persons, are never really alike; everything is so fused, merged, and continuous, that whatever element we may choose to say is repeated seems but a mental abstraction and a creature of language. The weather has got into our bones; there is a fog in the brain; the limits of our own being become uncertain to us. Yet what is the harm, if only we move and change inwardly in harmony with the ambient flux? Why this mania for naming and measuring and mastering what is carrying us so merrily along? Why shouldn't the intellect be vague while the heart is comfortable?

[6]

CLOUD CASTLES

The heavens are the most constant thing we know, the skies the most inconstant. Even the Olympian expanse, when blue and cloudless, is an aspect of terrestrial atmosphere in a holiday mood, a sort of gay parasol which the Earth holds up when she walks in the sun, and takes down again when she walks in the shadow; while clouds are veils wrapped more closely about her, and even more friendly to her frailty. Nor are these feminine trappings less lovely for being easily blown about, and always fresh and in the latest fashion. It is a prejudice to suppose that instability must be sad or must be trivial. A new cloud castle is probably well worth an old one; any one of them may equal in beauty the monotonous gold and black vault which it conceals from us, and all of them together certainly surpass that tragic decoration in spiritual suggestion. Something in us no doubt regrets that these airy visions vanish so quickly and are irrecoverable; but this is a sort of fleshly sentimentality of ours and not reasonable. In nature, what disappears never narrows the range of what is yet to be. If we were immortally young, like the atmosphere, the lapse of things would not grieve us, nor would inconstancy be a vice in ourselves. Nobody's future would be blighted by his past; and this perhaps explains the morals of the gods. Change to us is an omen of death, and only in the timeless can we feel secure; but if we were safe in our plastic existence, like nature and the gods of nature, fidelity to a single love might seem foolish in us; being and possessing any one thing would not then be incompatible with sooner or later being and possessing everything else. Nature and substance are like the absolute actor with an equal affinity for every part, and changing sex, age, and station with perfect good grace.

A great principle of charity in morals is not to blame the fishes for their bad taste in liking to live under water. Yet many philosophers seem to have sinned against this reasonable law, since they have blamed life and nature for liking to change, which is as much as to say for liking to live. Certainly life and nature, when they produce thought, turn from themselves towards the eternal, but it is by a glance, itself momentary, that they turn to it; for if they were themselves converted into something changeless, they could neither live, think, nor turn. In the realm of existence it is not sinful to be fugitive nor in bad taste to be new. Accordingly cloud castles have nothing to blush for; if they have a weak hold on existence, so has everything good. We are warned that the day of judgement will be full of surprises: perhaps one of them may be that in heaven things are even more unstable than on earth, and that the mansions reserved for us there are not only many but insecure. Cloud castles are hints to us that eternity has nothing to do with duration, nor beauty with substantial existence, and that even in heaven our bliss would have to be founded on a smiling renunciation. Did Mohammed, I wonder, misunderstand the archangel Gabriel in gathering that celestial beauties (unlike the lights and voices of Dante's paradise) could be embraced as well as admired? And in promising that our heavenly brides would daily recover their virginity, did he simply clothe in a congenial metaphor the fact that they would be different brides every day, and that if we wished to dwell in a true paradise, and not in a quarrelsome and sordid harem, we must never dream of seeing any of them a second time?

Fidelity is a virtue akin to habit and rooted in the inertia of animal life, which would run amok without trusty allies and familiar signals. We have an inveterate love of The Same, because our mortal condition obliges us to reconsider facts and to accumulate possessions; by instinct both the heart and the intellect hug everything they touch, and to let anything go is a sort of death to them. This spirit of pathetic fidelity in us would certainly reproach those ethereal visions for being ephemeral, and Cupid for having wings and no heart; but might not the visiting angels in turn reproach us for clownishness in wishing to detain them? They are not made of flesh and blood; they are not condemned to bear children. Their smile, their voice, and the joy they bring us are the only life they have. They are fertile only like the clouds, in that by dissolving they give place to some other form, no less lovely and elusive than themselves; and perhaps if we took a long view we should not feel that our own passage through existence had a very different quality. We last as a strain of music lasts, and we go where it goes. Is it not enough that matter should illustrate each ideal possibility only once and for a moment, and that Caesar or Shakespeare should figure once in this world? To repeat them would not intensify their reality, while it would impoverish and make ridiculous the pageant of time, like a stage army running round behind the scenes in order to reappear. To come to an end is a virtue when one has had one's day, seeing that in the womb of the infinite there are always other essences no less deserving of existence.

Even cloud castles, however, have a double lien on permanence. A flash of lightning is soon over, yet so long as the earth is wrapped in its present atmosphere, flashes will recur from time to time so very like this one that the mind will make the same comment upon them, and its pronouncements on its past experience will remain applicable to its experience to come. Fleeting things in this way, when they are repeated, survive and are united in the wisdom which they teach us in common. At the same time they inwardly contain something positively eternal, since the essences they manifest are immutable in character, and from their platonic heaven laugh at this inconstant world, into which they peep for a moment, when a chance collocation of atoms suggests one or another of them to our minds. To these essences mind is constitutionally addressed, and into them it likes to sink in its self-forgetfulness. It is only our poor mother Psyche, being justly afraid of growing old, who must grudge the exchange of one vision for another. Material life is sluggish and conservative; it would gladly drag the whole weary length of its past behind it, like a worm afraid of being cut in two in its crawling. It is haunted by a ghostly memory, a wonderful but not successful expedient for calling the dead to life, in order, somewhat inconsistently, to mourn over them and be comforted. Why not kiss our successive pleasures good-bye, simply and without marking our preferences, as we do our children when they file to bed? A free mind does not measure the worth of anything by the worth of anything else. It is itself at least as plastic as nature and has nothing to fear from revolutions. To live in the moment would indeed be brutish and dangerous if we narrowed to a moment the time embraced in our field of view, since with the wider scope of thought come serenity and dominion; but to live in the moment is the only possible life if we consider the spiritual activity itself. The most protracted life, in the actual living, can be nothing but a chain of moments, each the seat of its irrecoverable vision, each a dramatic perspective of the world, seen in the light of a particular passion at a particular juncture. But at each moment the wholeness of mind is spiritual and aesthetic, the wholeness of a meaning or a picture, and no knife can divide it. Its immortality, too, is timeless, like that of the truths and forms in which it is absorbed. Therefore apprehension can afford to hasten all the more trippingly in its career, touching the facts here and there for a moment, and building its cloud castles out of light and air, movement and irony, to let them lapse again without a pang. Contemplation, when it frees itself from animal anxiety about existence, ceases to question and castigate its visions, as if they were mere signals of alarm or hints of hidden treasures; and then it cannot help seeing what treasures these visions hold within themselves, each framing some luminous and divine essence, as a telescope frames a star; and something of their inalienable distinction and firmness seems to linger in our minds, though in the exigencies of our hurried life we must turn away from each of them and forget them.

[7]

CROSS-LIGHTS

They say the sun is a very small star, and the thing is plausible enough in itself, without the proofs which presumably the astronomers can give of it. That which nature produces she is apt to produce in crowds; what she does once, if she has her way, she will do often, with a persistency and monotony which would be intolerable to her if she were endowed with memory; but hers is a life of habit and automatic repetition, varied only when there is some hitch in the clockwork, and she begins hurriedly beating a new tune. Accordingly, what any creature calls the present time, the living interest, the ruling power, or the true religion is almost always but as one leaf in a tree. The same plastic stress which created it creates a million comparable things around it. Yet it is easy for each to ignore its neighbours, and to be shocked at the notion of loving them as itself; for they all have their separate places or seasons, and bloom on their several stems, so that an accident that overwhelms one of them may easily leave the others unscathed. But for all that, they are as multitudinous and similar as the waves of the sea. Take any star at random, like our sun, or any poet, or any idea, and whilst certainly it will be the nearest and warmest to somebody, it is not at all likely to be the greatest of its kind, or even very remarkable.

Nevertheless, in a moral perspective, nearness makes all the difference; and for us the sun is a veritable ruling deity and parent of light; he is the centre and monarch of our home system. Similarly each living being is a sort of sun to itself; this spark within me, by whose light I see at all, is a great sun to me; and considering how wide a berth other spiritual luminaries seem to give me, I must warm myself chiefly by my own combustion, and remain singularly important to myself. This importance belongs to the humour of material existence, visible when I look at my seamy side; it vanishes in so far as my little light actually bums clear, and my intent flies with it to whatever objects its rays can reach, no matter how distant or alien. Yet this very intelligence and scope in me are functions of my inward fire: seeing, too, is burning. An atomic and spark-like form of existence, prevalent in nature, is absolutely essential to spirit; and I find it very acceptable. It is a free, happy, and humble condition. I welcome the minute bulk, the negligible power, the chance quality and oddity of my being, combined as it is with vital independence and adequate fuel in my small bunkers for my brief voyage. On a vaster scale, I think the sun, for all his littleness, has a splendid prerogative, and I honour Phoebus as a happy god. The happiest part of his condition and his best claim to deity lie in this: that he can irradiate and kindle the frozen or vaporous bodies that swim about him; he can create the moonlight and the earthlight, much more powerful than the moonlight. This earthlight, if we could only get far enough from the earth to see it, would seem strangely brilliant and beautiful; it would show sea-tints and snow-tints and sand-tints; there would be greens and purples in it reflected from summer and winter zones, dotted with cinder scars and smoke-wreaths of cities. Yet all these lights are only sunlight, received and returned with thanks.

Nor is this surface shimmer, visible to telescopic observers, the only benefit gained: something is kept back and absorbed; some warmth sinks into the substance of the earth and permeates its watery soil, initiating currents in the sea and air, and quickening many a nest of particles into magnetic and explosive and contagious motions. This life which arises in the earth is an obeisance to the sun. The flowers turn to the light and the eye follows it, animal bodies imbibe it, and send it forth again in glad looks and keen attention; and when dreams and thoughts, even with the eyes shut, play within us like flamelets amongst the coals, it is still the light of the sun, strangely stored and transmuted, that shines in those visions. Certainly intelligence in its cognitive intent is radically immaterial, and nothing could be more heterogeneous from vibrations, attractions, or ethereal currents than the power to make assertions that shall be true or false, relevant or irrelevant to outlying things; but this so spiritual power is profoundly natural; it plainly exhibits an animal awaking to the presence of other bodies that actually surround him, resenting their cruelty or warming to their conquest and absorption. Apart from its roots in animal predicaments, spirit would be wholly inexplicable in its moods and arbitrary in its deliverance. The more ecstatic or the more tragic experience is, the more unmistakably it is the voice of matter. It then obviously retraces and makes incandescent the silent relations of things with things, by which its weal or woe is decided. Sometimes it simply burns in their midst and moves in their company like the sun amongst the stars he ignores; sometimes it gilds in its highly coloured lights the surface of things turned in its direction. Were not the distances between bodies spanned by some universal gravitation (which we are now told may be a sort of light), we may be sure that sense and fancy, which are profoundly vegetative things, would never leap from their source and discount their images in the heroic effort to understand the world. But the fire of life casts its passionate illumination on the dead things that control it, and raises to aesthetic actuality various poetic symbols of their power. Dead things possess, of course, in their own right, their material and logical being, but they borrow from the adventitious interest which a living creature must needs take in them their various moral dignities and all their part in the conscious world. It is intelligible that moralists and psychologists should be absorbed in those reflections of their attention which reach them from things distant or near, and that they should pronounce the whole universe to be nothing but their experience of it, a sort of rainbow or crescent kindly decorating their personal sky. On the same principle the sun (who, being a material creature, would also be subject to egotism) might say that the only substance in the universe was light, and that the earth and moon were nothing but ethereal mirrors palely reflecting his own fire. It would seem absurd to him that the earth or its inhabitants should profess to have any bowels. Inextinguishable laughter and self-assurance would seize him at the report that any dark places existed, or any invisible thoughts. He would never admit that, in all this, he was himself thinking; what we should call his thoughts he would maintain (without thinking!) were evident meteors moving and shining on their own account.

Such are the cross-lights of animal persuasion. Things, when seen, seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and spread their roots in the darkness, which embosoms and creates the light, though the light does not comprehend it. If sensuous evidence flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not see, and they would live in a fool's paradise of lucidity. Fortunately for their wisdom, if not for their comfort, they come upon mysteries and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush governs their fortunes. The proud, who shine by their own light, do not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them; but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining. When we are on the shady side of the earth we can, as a compensation, range in knowledge far beyond our painted atmosphere, and far beyond that little sun who, so long as he shone upon us, seemed to ride at the top of heaven; we can perceive a galaxy of other lights, no less original than he, to which his glory blinded us; we can even discover how he himself, if his hot head of burning hair would only suffer him to notice it, lives subject to their perpetual influence. Beautiful and happy god as Phoebus may be, he is not a just god nor an everlasting one. He is a lyric singer; he is not responsible save to his own heart, and not obliged to know other things. He lives in the eternal, and does not need to be perpetual. And he is often beneficent in his spontaneity, and many of us have cause to thank and to love him. There is an uncovenanted society of spirits, like that of the morning stars singing together, or of all the larks at once in the sky; it is a happy accident of freedom and a conspiracy of solitudes. When people talk together, they are at once entangled in a mesh of instrumentalities, irrelevance, misunderstanding, vanity, and propaganda; and all to no purpose, for why should creatures become alike who are different? But when minds, being naturally akin and each alone in its own heaven, soliloquize in harmony, saying compatible things only because their hearts are similar, then society is friendship in the spirit; and the unison of many thoughts twinkles happily in the night across the void of separation.

[8]

HAMLET'S QUESTION

To be born is painful, and the profit of it so uncertain that we need not wonder if sometimes the mind as well as the body seems to hold back. The winds of February are not colder to a featherless chick than are the surprises which nature and truth bring to our dreaming egotism. It was warm and safe in the egg; exciting enough, too, to feel a new organ throbbing here or a fresh limb growing out there. No suspicion visited the happy creature that these budding domestic functions were but preparations for foreign wars and omens of a disastrous death, to overtake it sooner or later in a barbarous, militant, incomprehensible world. Of death, and even of birth (its ominous counterpart) the embryo had no idea. It believed simply in the tight spherical universe which it knew, and was confident of living in it for ever. It would have thought heaven had fallen if its shell had cracked. How should life be possible in a world of uncertain dimensions, where incalculable blows might fall upon us at any time from any quarter? What a wild philosophy, to invent objects and dangers of which there was absolutely no experience! And yet for us now, accustomed to the buffets and ambitions of life in the open, that pre-natal vegetative dream seems worthless and contemptible, and hardly deserving the name of existence.

Could we have debated Hamlet's question before we were conceived, the answer might well have been doubtful; or rather reason, not serving any prior instinct, could have expressed no preference and must have left the decision to chance. Birth and death are the right moments for absolute courage. But when once the die is cast and we exist, so that Hamlet's question can be put to us, the answer is already given; nature in forming us has compelled us to prejudge the case. She has decreed that all the beasts and many a man should propagate without knowing what they are about; and the infant soul for its part, when once begotten, is constitutionally bent on working out its powers and daring the adventure of life. To have made the great refusal at the beginning, for fear of what shocks and hardships might come, seems to us, now that we are launched, morose and cowardly. Our soul, with its fluttering hopes and alarmed curiosity, is made to flee from death, and seems to think, if we judge by its action, that to miss experience altogether is worse and sadder than any life, however troubled or short. If nature has fooled us in this, she doubtless saw no harm in doing so, and thought it quite compatible with heartily loving us in her rough way. She merely yielded to a tendency to tease which is strangely prevalent among nurses. With a sort of tyrannical fondness, to make us show our paces, she dangled this exciting and unsatisfactory bauble of life before us for a moment, only to laugh at us, and kiss us, and presently lay our head again on her appeasing breast.

The fear which children feel at being left in the dark or alone or among strangers goes somewhat beyond what a useful instinct would require; for they are likely to be still pretty well embosomed and protected, not to say smothered. It is as if the happy inmate of some model gad took alarm at the opening of his cell door, thinking he was to be driven out and forced to take his chances again in this rough wide world, when, in fact, all was well and he was only being invited to walk in the prison garden. Just so when the young mind hears the perilous summons to think, it is usually a false alarm. In its philosophical excursions it is likely to remain well blanketed from the truth and comfortably muffled in its own atmosphere. Groping and empirical in its habits, it will continue in the path it happens to have turned into; for in a fog how should it otherwise choose its direction? Its natural preference is to be guided by touch and smell, but it sometimes finds it convenient to use its eyes and ears as a substitute. So long as the reference to the vegetative soul and its comforts remains dominant, this substitution is harmless. Sights and sounds will then be but flowers in the prisoner's garden, and intelligence a maze through which at best he will find his way home again. Some danger there always is, even in such an outing; for this walled garden has gates into the fields, which by chance may be left open. Sight and sound, in their useful ministrations, may create a new interest, and run into sheer music and star-gazing. The life the senses were meant to serve will then be forgotten; the psychic atmosphere—which of course is indispensable—will be pierced, discounted, and used as a pleasant vehicle to things and to truths; and the motherly soul, having unintentionally given birth to the intellect, will grumble at her runaway and thankless child. As for the truant himself, Hamlet's question will lapse from his view altogether, not because nature has answered it for him beforehand, but because his own disinterestedness and rapture have robbed it of all urgency. Intellect is passionate, and natural, and human enough, as singing is; it is all the purer and keener for having emancipated itself, like singing, from its uses, if it ever had any, and having become a delight in itself. But it is not concerned with its own organs or their longevity; it cannot understand why its mother, the earthly soul, thinks all the good and evil things that happen in this world are of no consequence, if they do not happen to her.

[9]

THE BRITISH CHARACTER

What is it that governs the Englishman? Certainly not intelligence; seldom passion; hardly self-interest, since what we call self-interest is nothing but some dull passion served by a brisk intelligence. The Englishman's heart is perhaps capricious or silent; it is seldom designing or mean. There are nations where people are always innocently explaining how they have been lying and cheating in small matters, to get out of some predicament, or secure some advantage; that seems to them a part of the art of living. Such is not the Englishman's way: it is easier for him to face or to break opposition than to circumvent it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention, we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humours. Nowhere do we come oftener upon those two social abortions—the affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived on nuts, or was in correspondence through a medium with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had been disgustingly housed when last in prison? Where else would a young woman, in dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that her parents were odious, and that she desired a husband but no children, or children without a husband? It is true that these novelties soon become the conventions of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted en bloc in emotional desperation, as when people are converted; and the oddest sects demand the strictest self-surrender. Nevertheless, when people are dissident and supercilious by temperament, they manage to wear their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some lordly adaptation into a part of their own person.

Let me come to the point boldly; what governs the Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the weather in his soul. It is nothing particularly spiritual or mysterious. When he has taken his exercise and is drinking his tea or his beer and lighting his pipe; when, in his garden or by his fire, he sprawls in an aggressively comfortable chair; when, well-washed and well-brushed, he resolutely turns in church to the east and recites the Creed (with genuflexions, if he likes genuflexions) without in the least implying that he believes one word of it; when he hears or sings the most crudely sentimental and thinnest of popular songs, unmoved but not disgusted; when he makes up his mind who is his best friend or his favourite poet; when he adopts a party or a sweetheart; when he is hunting or shooting or boating, or striding through the fields; when he is choosing his clothes or his profession—never is it a precise reason, or purpose, or outer fact that determines him; it is always the atmosphere of his inner man.

To say that this atmosphere was simply a sense of physical well-being, of coursing blood and a prosperous digestion, would be far too gross; for while psychic weather is all that, it is also a witness to some settled disposition, some ripening inclination for this or that, deeply rooted in the soul. It gives a sense of direction in life which is virtually a code of ethics, and a religion behind religion. On the other hand, to say it was the vision of any ideal or allegiance to any principle would be making it far too articulate and abstract. The inner atmosphere, when compelled to condense into words, may precipitate some curt maxim or over-simple theory as a sort of war-cry; but its puerile language does it injustice, because it broods at a much deeper level than language or even thought. It is a mass of dumb instincts and allegiances, the love of a certain quality of life, to be maintained manfully. It is pregnant with many a stubborn assertion and rejection. It fights under its trivial fluttering opinions like a smoking battleship under its flags and signals; you must consider, not what they are, but why they have been hoisted and will not be lowered. One is tempted at times to turn away in despair from the most delightful acquaintance—the picture of manliness, grace, simplicity, and honour, apparently rich in knowledge and humour—because of some enormous platitude he reverts to, some hopelessly stupid little dogma from which one knows that nothing can ever liberate him. The reformer must give him up; but why should one wish to reform a person so much better than oneself? He is like a thoroughbred horse, satisfying to the trained eye, docile to the light touch, and coursing in most wonderful unison with you through the open world. What do you care what words he uses? Are you impatient with the lark because he sings rather than talks? and if he could talk, would you be irritated by his curious opinions? Of course, if any one positively asserts what is contrary to fact, there is an error, though the error may be harmless; and most divergencies between men should interest us rather than offend us, because they are effects of perspective, or of legitimate diversity in experience and interests. Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards. Jupiter decided the most intricate questions with a nod, and a very few words and no gestures suffice for the Englishman to make his inner mind felt most unequivocably when occasion requires.

Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.

[10]

SEAFARING

All peoples that dwell by the sea sometimes venture out upon it. The boys are eager to swim and sail, and the men may be turned into habitual navigators by the spirit of enterprise or by necessity. But some races take to the water more kindly than others, either because they love the waves more or the furrow less. We may imagine that sheer distress drove the Norse fishermen and pirates into their open boats. The ocean they explored was rough and desolate; the fish and the pillaged foreigner had to compensate them for their privations. They quitted their fiords and brackish islands dreaming of happier lands. But with the Greeks and the English the case was somewhat different. There are no happier lands than theirs; and they set forth for the most part on summer seas, towards wilder and less populous regions. They went armed, of course, and ready to give battle: they had no scruples about carrying home anything they might purloin or obtain by enormously advantageous barter, but they were not in quest of softer climes or foreign models; their home remained their ideal. They were scarcely willing to settle in foreign parts unless they could live their home life there.

This love of home merged in their minds with the love of liberty; it was a loyalty inwardly grounded and not a mere tribute to habit or external influences. They could consequently retain their manners wherever they went, and could found free colonies, almost as Greek or as English as the mother country; for it was not Greece that originally formed the Greeks nor England the English, but the other way round; the Greeks and the English, wherever they might be, spun their institutions about them like a cocoon. Certainly the geographical environment was favourable; the skies and waters that embosomed them—when in their migrations they had reached those climes—simply met their native genius half-way and allowed it to bloom as it had not elsewhere. But the winds could carry that same seed to fructify in other soils; and as there were many Greek cities sprung from one, so there are several local Englands in Great Britain, and others all over the world. Even people who are not heirs of these nations according to the flesh may assimilate their spirit in some measure. All men are Greek in the best sense in so far as they are rational, and live and think on the human scale; and all are English in so far as their souls are individual, each the imperturbably dominant cell in its own organism, each faithful to its inner oracle.

Life at sea is very favourable to this empire of personal liberty. The inner man, the hereditary Psyche that breeds the body and its discursive thoughts, craves to exercise ascendancy; it is essentially a formative principle, an organ of government. Mere solitude and monastic reverie, such as a hermit or satirist may enjoy even in great cities, weary and oppress the Englishman. He wants to do something or else to play at something. His thoughts are not vivid and substantial enough for company; his passions are too nebulous to define their innate objects, until accident offers something that perhaps may serve. At sea there is always something doing: you must mind the helm, the sails, or the engines; you must keep things shipshape; brasses must be always bright and eyes sharp; decorum is essential, since discipline is so; you may even dress for dinner and read prayers on Sunday. This routine does not trespass on the liberty and reserve of your inner man. You can exchange a few hearty commonplaces with the other officers and sailors, or even with a casual passenger; now and then you may indulge in a long talk, pacing the deck beneath the stars. There is space, there is the constant shadow of danger, the chance of some adventure at sea or on a strange shore. There is a continual test and tension of character. There are degrees of authority and of competence, but the sailor's art is finite; his ship, however complicated and delicate a creature, has a known structure and known organs; she will not do anything without a reason; she is not too wayward (as is the course of things on terra firma) for a clear-headed man to understand nor for a firm hand to steer. Maritime fortune in its uncertainty has after all not many forms of caprice; its worst tricks are familiar; your life-belt is hanging over your bunk, and you are ready.

Every one grumbles at his lot and at his profession; but what is man that he should ask for more? These buffeting winds, these long hours of deep breathing, these habits of quick decision and sharp movement whet your appetite; you relish your solid plain food, whilst your accustomed drink smooths over the petty worries of the day, and liberates your private musings; and what a companionable thing your pipe is! The women—dear, dogmatic, fussy angels—are not here; that is a relief; and yet you are counting the weeks before you can return to them at home. And all those tender episodes of a more fugitive sort, how merrily you think them over now! more merrily perhaps than you enacted them, since you need not call to mind the little shabby accompaniments and false notes that may have marred them in reality. Your remoter future, too, is smiling enough for an honest man who believes in God and is not a snob in the things of the spirit. You see in your mind's eye a cottage on some sunny hillside over-looking the sea; near it, from a signal-post that is a ship's mast, the flags are flapping in the breeze; your children are playing on the beach—except the eldest, perhaps, already a sailor. There is a blessed simplicity about the sea, with its vast inhumanity islanding and freeing the humanity of man.

[11]

PRIVACY

The secret of English mastery is self-mastery. The Englishman establishes a sort of satisfaction and equilibrium in his inner man, and from that citadel of rightness he easily measures the value of everything that comes within his moral horizon. In what may lie beyond he takes but a feeble interest. Enterprising enough when in a roving mood, and fond of collecting outlandish objects and ideas, he seldom allows his wanderings and discoveries to unhinge his home loyalties or ruffle his self-possession; and he remains, after all his adventures, intellectually as indolent and secure as in the beginning. As to speculative truth, he instinctively halts short of it, as it looms in the distance and threatens to cast a contemptuous and chilling shadow across his life. He would be very severe to any who dreaded cold water and wouldn't learn to swim; yet in the moral world he is himself subject to illusions of timidity. He does not believe, there, in the overwhelming rewards of courage. His chosen life is indeed beautiful—as the shy boy's might be—ill its finitude; all the more beautiful and worth preserving because, like his country, it is an island in the sea. His domestic thermometer and barometer have sufficed to guide him to the right hygiene.

Hygiene does not require telescopes nor microscopes. It is not concerned, like medicine or psychology, with the profound hidden workings of our bodies or minds, complexities hardly less foreign to our discoursing selves than are the mysteries of the great outer world. Hygiene regards only the right regimen of man in his obvious environment, judged by his conscious well-being. If it goes afield at all, it does so in the interests of privacy. All it asks of life is that it should be comely, spontaneous, and unimpeded: all it asks of the earth is that it should be fit for sport and for habitation. Men, to be of the right hygienic sort, must love the earth, and must know how to range in it. This the Englishman knows; and just as, in spite of his insularity, he loves this whole terraqueous globe simply and genuinely, so the earth, turned into mud by the vain stampings of so many garrulous and sickly nations, would doubtless say: Let the Englishman inhabit me, and I shall be green again.

In matters of hygiene the Englishman's maxims are definite and his practice refined. He has discovered what he calls good form, and is obstinately conservative about it, not from inertia, but in the interests of pure vitality. Experience has taught him the uses to which vitality can be put, so as to preserve and refresh it. He knows the right degree of exertion normally required to do things well—to walk or to talk, for instance; he does not saunter nor scramble, he does not gesticulate nor scream. In consequence, perhaps, on extraordinary occasions he fails at first to exert himself enough; and his eloquence is not torrential nor inspired, even at those rare moments when it ought to be so. But when nothing presses, he shows abundant energy, without flurry or excess. In manners and morals, too, he has found the right mean between anarchy and servitude, and the wholesome measure of comfort. What those who dislike him call his hypocrisy is but timeliness in his instincts, and a certain modesty on their part in not intruding upon one another. Your prayers are not necessarily insincere because you pray only in church; you are not concealing a passion if for a time you forget it and slough it off. These alternations are phases of the inner man, not masks put on in turn by some insidious and calculating knave. All the Englishman's attitudes and habits—his out-of-door life, his clubs, his conventicles, his business—when they are spontaneous and truly British, are for the sake of his inner man in its privacy. Other people, unless the game calls for them, are in the way, and uninteresting. His spirit is like Wordsworth's skylark, true to the kindred points of heaven and home; and perhaps these points seem to him kindred only because they are both functions of himself. Home is the centre of his physical and moral comfort, his headquarters in the war of life, where lie his spiritual stores. Heaven is a realm of friendly inspiring breezes and setting suns, enveloping his rambles and his perplexities. The world to him is a theatre for the soliloquy of action. There is a comfortable luxuriousness in all his attitudes. He thinks the prize of life worth winning, but not worth snatching. If you snatch it, as Germans, Jews, and Americans seem inclined to do, you abdicate the sovereignty of your inner man, you miss delight, dignity, and peace; and in that case the prize of life has escaped you.

As the Englishman disdains to peer and is slow to speculate, so he resents any meddling or intrusion into his own preserves. How sedulously he plants out his garden, however tiny, from his neighbours and from the public road! If his windows look unmistakably on the street, at least he fills his window-boxes with the semblance of a hedge or a garden, and scarcely allows the dubious light to filter through his blinds and lace curtains; and the space between them, in the most dingy tenement, is blocked by an artificial plant. He is quite willing not to be able to look out, if only he can prevent other people from looking in. If they did, what would they see? Nothing shocking, surely; his attitude by his fireside is perfectly seemly. He is not throwing anything at the family; very likely they are not at home. Nor has he introduced any low-class person by the tradesman's entrance, in whose company he might blush to be spied. He is not in deshabille; if he has changed any part of his street clothes it has not been from any inclination to be slovenly in private, but on the contrary to vindicate his self-respect and domestic decorum. He does not dress to be seen of men, but of God. His elegance is an expression of comfort, and his comfort a consciousness of elegance. The eyes of men disquiet him, eminently presentable though he be, and he thinks it rude of them to stare, even in simple admiration. It takes tact and patience in strangers—perhaps at first an ostentatious indifference—to reassure him and persuade him that he would be safe in liking them. His frigid exterior is often a cuticle to protect his natural tenderness, which he forces himself not to express, lest it should seem misplaced or clumsy. There is a masculine sort of tenderness which is not fondness, but craving and premonition of things untried; and the young Englishman is full of it. His heart is quiet and full; he has not pumped it dry, like ill-bred children, in tantrums and effusive fancies. On the other hand, passions are atrophied if their expression is long suppressed, and we soon have nothing to say if we never say anything. As he grows old the Englishman may come to suspect, not without reason, that he might not reward too close a perusal. His social bristles will then protect his intellectual weakness, and he will puff himself out to disguise his vacuity.

It is intelligible that a man of deep but inarticulate character should feel more at ease in the fields and woods, at sea or in remote enterprises, than in the press of men. In the world he is obliged to maintain stiffly principles which he would prefer should be taken for granted. Therefore when he sits in silence behind his window curtains, with his newspaper, his wife, or his dog, his monumental passivity is not a real indolence. He is busily reinforcing his character, ruffled by the day's contact with hostile or indifferent things, and he is gathering new strength for the fray. After the concessions imposed upon him by necessity or courtesy, he is recovering his natural tone. To-morrow he will issue forth fresh and confident, and exactly the same as he was yesterday. His character is like his climate, gentle and passing readily from dull to glorious, and back again; variable on the surface, yet perpetually self-restored and invincibly the same.

[12]

THE LION AND THE UNICORN

Every one can see why the Lion should be a symbol for the British nation. This noble animal loves dignified repose. He haunts by preference solitary glades and pastoral landscapes. His movements are slow, he yawns a good deal; he has small squinting eyes high up in his head, a long displeased nose, and a prodigious maw. He apparently has some difficulty in making things out at a distance, as if he had forgotten his spectacles (for he is getting to be an elderly lion now), but he snaps at the flies when they bother him too much. On the whole, he is a tame lion; he has a cage called the Constitution, and a whole parliament of keepers with high wages and a cockney accent; and he submits to all the rules they make for him, growling only when he is short of raw beef. The younger members of the nobility and gentry may ride on his back, and he obligingly lets his tail hang out of the bars, so that the little Americans and the little Irishmen and the little Bolshevists, when they come to jeer at him, may twist it. Yet when the old fellow goes for a walk, how all the domestic and foreign poultry scamper! They know he can spring; his strength when aroused proves altogether surprising and unaccountable, he never seems to mind a blow, and his courage is terrible. The cattle, seeing there is no safety in flight, herd together when he appears on the horizon, and try to look unconscious; the hyenas go to snarl at a distance; the eagles and the serpents aver afterwards that they were asleep. Even the insects that buzz about his ears, and the very vermin in his skin, know him for the king of beasts.

But why should the other supporter of the British arms be the Unicorn? What are the mystic implications of having a single horn? This can hardly be the monster spoken of in Scripture, into the reason for whose existence, whether he be the rhinoceros of natural history or a slip of an inspired pen, it would be blasphemy to inquire. This Unicorn is a creature of mediaeval fancy, a horse rampant argent, only with something queer about his head, as if a croquet-stake had been driven into it, or he wore a very high and attenuated fool's cap. It would be far-fetched to see in this ornament any allusion to deceived husbands, as if in England the alleged injury never seemed worth two horns, or divorce and damages soon removed one of them. More plausible is the view that, as the Lion obviously expresses the British character, so the Unicorn somewhat more subtly expresses the British intellect. Whereas most truths have two faces, and at least half of any solid fact escapes any single view of it, the English mind is monocular; the odd and the singular have a special charm for it. This love of the particular and the original leads the Englishman far afield in the search for it; he collects curios, and taking all the nation together, there is perhaps nothing that some Englishman has not seen, thought, or known; but who sees things as a whole, or anything in its right place? He inevitably rides some hobby. He travels through the wide world with one eye shut, hops all over it on one leg, and plays all his scales with one finger. There is fervour, there is accuracy, there is kindness in his gaze, but there is no comprehension. He will defend the silliest opinion with a mint of learning, and espouse the worst of causes on the highest principles. It is notorious elsewhere that the world is round, that nature has bulk, and three if not four dimensions; it is a truism that things cannot be seen as a whole except in imagination. But imagination, if he has it, the Englishman is too scrupulous to trust; he observes the shapes and the colours of things intently, and behold, they are quite flat, and he challenges you to show why, when every visible part of everything is flat, anything should be supposed to be round. He is a keen reformer, and certainly the world would be much simpler, right opinion would be much lighter and wrong opinion much wronger, if things had no third and no fourth dimension.

Ah, why did those early phrenologists, true and typical Englishmen as they were, denounce the innocent midwife who by a little timely pressure on the infant skull compressed, as they said, "the oval of genius into the flatness of boobyism." Let us not be cowed by a malicious epithet. What some people choose to call boobyism and flatness may be the simplest, the most British, the most scientific philosophy. Your true booby may be only he who, having perforce but a flat view of a flat world, prates of genius and rotundity. Blessed are they whose eye is single. Only when very drunk do we acknowledge our double optics; when sober we endeavour to correct and ignore this visual duplicity and to see as respectably as if we had only one eye. The Unicorn might well say the same thing of two-horned beasts. Such double and crooked weapons are wasteful and absurd. You can use only one horn effectively even if you have two, but in a sidelong and cross-eyed fashion; else your prey simply nestles between, where eye cannot see it nor horn probe it. A single straight horn, on the contrary, is like a lancet; it pierces to the heart of the enemy by a sure frontal attack: nothing like it for pricking a bubble, or pointing to a fact and scathingly asking the Government if they are aware of it. In music likewise every pure melody passes from single note to note, as do the sweet songs of nature. Away with your demoniac orchestras, and your mad pianist, tossing his mane, and banging with his ten fingers and his two feet at once I As to walking on two feet, that also is mere wobbling and, as Schopenhauer observed, a fall perpetually arrested. It is an unstable compromise between going on all fours, if you want to be safe, and standing on one leg, like the exquisite flamingo, if you aspire to be graceful and spiritually sensitive. There is really no biped in nature except ridiculous man, as if the prancing Unicorn had succeeded in always being rampant; your feathered creatures are bipeds only on occasion and in their off moments; essentially they are winged beings, and their legs serve only to prop them when at rest, like the foot-piece of a motor-cycle which you let down when it stops.

The Lion is an actual beast, the Unicorn a chimera; and is not England in fact always buoyed up on one side by some chimera, as on the other by a sense for fact? Illusions are mighty, and must be reckoned with in this world; but it is not necessary to share them or even to understand them from within, because being illusions they do not prophesy the probable consequences of their existence; they are irrelevant in aspect to what they involve in effect. The dove of peace brings new wars, the religion of love instigates crusades and lights faggots, metaphysical idealism in practice is the worship of Mammon, government by the people establishes the boss, free trade creates monopolies, fondness smothers its pet, assurance precipitates disaster, fury ends in smoke and in shaking hands. The shaggy Lion is dimly aware of all this; he is ponderous and taciturn by an instinctive philosophy. Why should he be troubled about the dreams of the Unicorn, more than about those of the nightingale or the spider? He can roughly discount these creatures' habits, in so far as they touch him at all, without deciphering their fantastic minds. That makes the strength of England in the world, the leonine fortitude that helps her, through a thousand stupidities and blunders, always to pull through. But England is also, more than any other country, the land of poetry and of the inner man. Her sunlight and mists, her fields, cliffs, and moors are full of aerial enchantment; it is a land of tenderness and dreams. The whole nation hugs its hallowed shams; there is a real happiness, a sense of safety, in agreeing not to acknowledge the obvious; there is a universal conspiracy of respect for the non-existent. English religion, English philosophy, English law, English domesticity could not get on without this "tendency to feign." And see how admissible, how almost natural this chimera is. A milk-white pony, elegantly Arabian, with a mane like sea-foam, and a tail like a little silvery comet, sensitive nostrils, eyes alight with recognition, a steed such as Phoebus might well water at those springs that lie in the chalices of flowers, a symbol at once of impetuosity and obedience, a heraldic image for the daintiness of Ariel and the purity of Galahad. If somehow we suspect that the poetical creature is light-witted, the stem Lion opposite finds him nevertheless a sprightly and tender companion, as King Lear did his exquisite Fool. Such a Pegasus cannot be a normal horse; he was hatched in a cloud, and at his birth some inexorable ironic deity drove a croquet-stake into his pate, and set an attenuated crown, very like a fool's cap, between his startled ears.

[13]

DONS

Dons are picturesque figures. Their fussy ways and their oddities, personal and intellectual, are as becoming to them as black feathers to the blackbird. Their minds are all gaunt pinnacles, closed gates, and little hidden gardens. A mediaeval tradition survives in their notion of learning and in their manner of life; they are monks flown from the dovecot, scholastics carrying their punctilious habits into the family circle. In the grander ones there may be some assimilation to a prelate, a country gentleman, or a party leader; but the rank and file are modest, industrious pedagogues, sticklers for routine, with a squinting knowledge of old books and of young men. Their politics are narrow and their religion dubious. There was always something slippery in the orthodoxy of scholastics, even in the Middle Ages; they are so eager to define, to correct, and to trace back everything, that they tend to cut the cloth on their own bias, and to make some crotchet of theirs the fulcrum of the universe. The thoughts of these men are like the Sibylline leaves, profound but lost. I should not call them pedants, because what they pursue and insist on in little things is the shadow of something great; trifles, as Michael Angelo said, make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. Yet dry learning and much chewing of the cud take the place amongst them of the two ways men have of really understanding the world—science, which explores it, and sound wit, which estimates humanly the value of science and of everything else.

The function of dons is to expound a few classic documents, and to hand down as large and as pleasant a store as possible of academic habits, maxims, and anecdotes. They peruse with distrust the new books published on the subject of their teaching; they refer to them sometimes sarcastically, but their teaching remains the same. Their conversation with outsiders is painfully amiable for a while; lassitude soon puts the damper on it, unless they can lapse into the academic question of the day, or take up the circle of their good old stories. Their originality runs to interpreting some old text afresh, wearing some odd garment, or frequenting in the holidays some unfrequented spot. When they are bachelors, as properly they should be, their pupils are their chief link with the world of affection, with mischievous and merry things; and in exchange for this whiff of life, which they receive with each yearly invasion of flowering youth, like the fresh scent of hay every summer from the meadows, they furnish those empty minds with some humorous memories, and some shreds of knowledge. It does not matter very much whether what a don says is right or wrong, provided it is quotable; nobody considers his opinions for the matter they convey; the point is that by hearing them the pupils and the public may discover what opinions, and on what subjects, it is possible for mortals to devise. Their maxims are like those of the early Greek philosophers, a proper introduction to the good society of the intellectual world. So are the general systems to which the dons may be addicted, probably some revision of Christian theology, of Platonic mysticism, or of German philosophy. Such foreign doctrines do very well for the dons of successive epochs, native British philosophy not being fitted to edify the minds of the young: those vaster constructions appeal more to the imagination, and their very artificiality and ticklish architecture, like that of a house of cards, are part of their function, calling for paradoxical faith and—what youth loves quite as much—for captious and sophistical argument. They lie in the fourth dimension of human belief, amongst the epicycles which ingenious error describes about the unknown orbit of truth; for the truth is not itself luminous, as wit is; the truth travels silently in the night and requires to be caught by the searchlight of wit to become visible. Meantime the mind plays innocently with its own phosphorescence, which is what we call culture and what dons are created to keep alive. Wit the dons often have, of an oblique kind, in the midst of their much-indulged prejudices and foibles; and what with glints of wit and scraps of learning, the soul is not sent away empty from their door: better fed and healthier, indeed, for these rich crumbs from the banquet of antiquity, when thought was fresh, than if it had been reared on a stuffy diet of useful knowledge, or on some single dogmatic system, to which life-slavery is attached. Poor, brusque, comic, venerable dons! You watched over us tenderly once, whilst you blew your long noses at us and scolded; then we thought only of the roses in your garden, of your succulent dinners, or perhaps of your daughters; but now we understand that you had hearts yourselves, that you were song-birds grown old in your cages, having preferred fidelity to adventure. We catch again the sweet inflection of your cracked notes, and we bless you. You have washed your hands among the innocent; you have loved the beauty of the Lord's house.

[14]

APOLOGY FOR SNOBS

British satirists are very scornful of snobbery; they seem oppressed by the thought that wealth, rank, and finery are hideously inane and that they are hideously powerful. Are these moralists really overcome by a sense of the vanity of human wishes? It would hardly seem so; for they often breathe a sentimental adoration for romantic love or philanthropy or adventure or mystic piety or good cheer or ruthless will—all of them passions as little likely as any snobbish impulse to arise without some illusion or to end without some disappointment. Why this exclusive hostility to the vanities dear to the snob? Have birth, money, and fashion no value whatever? Do they not dazzle the innocent and unsophisticated with a distant image of happiness? Are they not actually, when enjoyed, very comforting and delightful things in their way? What else than this sensitiveness to better social example—which we may call snobbery if we please—lends English life in particular its most characteristic excellences—order without constraint, leisure without apathy, seclusion without solitude, good manners without punctilio, emulation without intrigue, splendour without hollowness? Why such bitterness about the harmless absurdities that may fringe this national discipline? Are these moralists in fact only envious and sulky? Is it sour grapes? It would sometimes seem as if, in England, the less representative a man was the more eagerly he took to literature, and thought that by hating his fellow-men and despising their prevalent feelings he rendered himself eminently fit to be their guide and redeemer.

In fact, there is a philosophical principle implied in snobbery, a principle which is certainly false if made absolute, but which fairly expresses the moral relations of things in a certain perspective. If we all really stood on different steps in a single ladder of progress, then to admire and imitate those above us and to identify ourselves with them by hook or by crook would be simply to accelerate our natural development, to expand into our higher self, and to avoid fatal abysses to the right and to the left of the path marked out for us by our innate vocation. Life would then be like the simple game which children call Follow the Leader; and this scrupulous discipleship would be perfect freedom, since the soul of our leader and our own soul that chooses him would be the same. This principle is precisely that of the transcendental philosophy where it maintains that there is but one spirit in all men, and one logical moral evolution for the world. In fact, it is the Germans rather than the English that are solemn, convinced, and universal snobs. If they do not seem so much snobs in particular, it is because they are snobs überhaupt. It is not only from the nobility that grateful dews descend on their sensitive hearts, as upon open flowers; they yearn also after the professors and the artists, and assiduously dress their domestic mind, so far as the cloth will go, in the latest intellectual fashion. Their respect for what holds the official stage, and holds it for the moment, is beautiful in its completeness. They can change their front without changing their formation. And the occasional pricks and heartburnings of snobbery are entirely drowned, in their case, in its voluminous vicarious joys.

On the whole, however, snobbish sentiment and transcendental philosophy do not express the facts of nature. Men and nations do not really march in single file, as if they were being shepherded into some Noah's Ark. They have perhaps a common root and similar beginnings, but they branch out at every step into forms of life between which there is no further interchange of sap, and no common destiny. Their several fruits become incommensurable in beauty and in value, like the poetry of different languages, and more disparate the more each is perfected after its kind. The whale is not a first sketch for the butterfly, nor its culmination; the mind of an ox is not a fuller expression of that of a rabbit. The poet does not evolve into the general, nor vice versa; nor does a man, in growing further, become a woman, superior as she may be in her own way. That is why snobbery is really a vice: it tempts us to neglect and despise our proper virtues in aping those of other people. If an angel appeared to me displaying his iridescent wings and treble voice and heart fluttering with eternal love, I should say, "Certainly, I congratulate you, but I do not wish to resemble you." Snobbery haunts those who are not reconciled with themselves; evolution is the hope of the immature. You cannot be everything. Why not be what you are?

This contentment with oneself, in its rational mixture of pride with humility, and its infinite indifference to possibilities which to us are impossible, is well understood in the great East—which is a moral as well as a geographical climate. There every one feels that circumstances have not made and cannot unmake the soul. Variations of fortune do not move a man from his inborn centre of gravity. Whatever happens and whatever people say he puts up with as he would with bad weather. He lets them thunder and rage, and continues to sit on his heels in his corner, in the shade or in the sun according to the season, munching his crust of bread, meditating on heaven and earth, and publishing on occasion to the passers-by, or to the wilderness, the revelations he receives from the spirit; and if these are particularly vivid, he will not hesitate to cry, "So saith the Lord," with an equal dignity or assurance whether he be sage, king, or beggar. Such firmness and independence of character are admirable, so long as the expression of them remains merely poetical or moral. It is enough if confessions are sincere, and aspirations true to the heart that utters them. In the heights and the depths we are all solitary, and we are deceived if we think otherwise, even when people say they agree with us, or form a sect under our name. As our radical bodily functions are incorrigibly selfish and persistent, so our ultimate ideals, if they are sincere, must for ever deviate from those of others and find their zenith in a different star. The moral world is round like the heavens, and the directions which life can take are infinitely divergent and unreturning.

But in the world of circumstances, in matters of politics and business, information, and thrift, civilized men move together: their interests, if not identical, are parallel, and their very conflicts and rivalries arise out of this contact and relevance in their aims. Eminence in this worldly sphere is unmistakable. One fortune in money can be measured against another and may be increased to equal it; and in government, fashion, and notoriety some people are unmistakably at the top of the tree, and doubtless deserve to be there, having found the right method of climbing. It is only natural that those who wish to climb too should study and imitate them. Awe and respect for such persons is an honest expression of social idealism: it is an admiration mixed with curiosity and with the desire for propinquity, because their achievements are in our own line of business and a prospective partnership is not out of the question. Their life is the ideal of ours. Yet all such conventional values and instrumentalities, in which we are perhaps absorbed, in the end say nothing to the heart. If by chance, in the shifts of this world, we pop up near the people whom we distantly admired, and reach the crest of the wave in their company, we discover how great an illusion it was that it would be good or possible for us to resemble them; conventional friends, we have no instincts, joys, or memories in common. It is, perhaps, from quite another age or race, from an utterly different setting of worldly tasks and ambitions, that some hint of true friendship and understanding reaches us in our hermitage; and even this hint is probably a hollow reverberation of our own soliloquy. In this slippery competitive earth snobbery is not unreasonable; but in heaven and hell there are no snobs. There every despised demon hugs his favourite vice for ever, and even the smallest of the stars shines with a singular glory.

[15]

THE HIGHER SNOBBERY

To call an attitude snobbish, when the great and good recommend it as the only right attitude, would be to condemn it without trial; yet I do not know how else to name the sentiment that happiness of one sort is better than happiness of another sort, and that perfection in one animal is more admirable than perfection in another. I wish there was a word for this arrangement of excellences in higher and lower classes which did not imply approval or disapproval of such an arrangement. But language is terribly moralistic, and I do not blame the logicians for wishing to invent another which shall convey nothing to the mind with which it has any previous acquaintance. The Psyche, who is the mother of language as well as of intellect, feels things to be good or evil before she notices what other qualities they may have: and she never gets much beyond the first dichotomy of her feminine logic: wretch and darling, nasty and nice. This is perhaps the true reason why Plato, who in some respects had a feminine mind and whose metaphysics follows the lines of language, tells us in one place that the good is the highest of the Ideas, and the source of both essence and existence. Good and bad are certainly the first qualities fixed by words: so that to call a man a snob, for instance, is a very vague description but a very clear insult. Suppose we found on examination that the person in question had a retiring and discriminating disposition, that he shunned the unwashed, that he resembled persons of distinction, and recognized the superiority of those who were really his superiors; we should conclude without hesitation that he was no snob at all, but a respectable, right-minded person. If he had been really a snob, he would have looked up stupidly to what has no true sublimity, like birth without money, would have imitated what was not becoming to his station, and would have shunned company, such as our own, which though perhaps not the most fashionable is undoubtedly the best. As I can see no scientific difference between this snob and that no-snob, I am constrained in my own thoughts to class them together; but in order to remind myself that the same principle may be approved in one case and condemned in the other, I call snobbery, when people approve of it, the higher snobbery.

An interesting advocate of the higher snobbery is Nietzsche. Although his admiring eye is fixed on the superman, who is to supersede our common or garden humanity, the unique excellence of that future being does not seem to lie merely in that he is future, or is destined to be dominant in his day: after all, everything was once future, everything was once the coming thing, and destined to prevail in its day. It is only human to admire and copy the fashion of to-day, whether in clothes, or politics, or literature, or speculation; but I have not yet heard of any snob so far ahead of his times as to love the fashions of doomsday. The worship of evolution, which counts for so much with many higher snobs, does not seem essential in Nietzsche. The superman no doubt is coming, but he is not coming to stay, since the world repeats its evolution in perpetual cycles; and whilst he will give its highest expression to the love of power, it does not appear that he will care very much about controlling external things, or will be able to control them. His superiority is to be intrinsic, and chiefly composed of freedom. It was freedom, I think, that Nietzsche sighed for in his heart, whilst in his cavalierly speculations he talked of power. At least, unless by power he meant power to be oneself, the notion that all nature was animated by the lust of power would lose its plausibility; the ambition which we may poetically attribute to all animals is rather to appropriate such things as serve their use, perfection, or fancy, and to leave all else alone. There are indications that the superman was to be a mystic and a wanderer, like a god visiting the earth, and that what spell he exercised was to flow from him almost unawares, whilst he mused about himself and about higher things. So little was his power to involve subjection to what he worked upon (which is the counterpart of all material power) that he was to disregard the interests of others in a Spartan mood; he was to ride ruthlessly through this nether world, half a poet, half a scourge, with his breast uncovered to every treacherous shaft, and his head high in the air.

Now I will not say whether such a romantic and Byronic life is worth living in itself; there may be creatures whose only happiness is to be like that, although I suspect that Byron and Nietzsche, Lohengrin and Zarathustra, had not mastered the art of Socrates, and did not know what they wanted. In any case, such a Dionysiac career would be good only as the humblest human existence may be so; its excellence would lie in its harmony with the nature of him who follows it, not in its bombast, inflation, or superhumanity. Nietzsche was far from ungenerous or unsympathetic towards the people. He wished them (somewhat contemptuously) to be happy, whilst he and his superman remained poetically wretched; he even said sometimes that in their own sphere they might be perfect, and added—with that sincerity which, in him, redeems so many follies—that nothing could be better than such perfection. But if this admission is to be taken seriously, the superman would be no better than the good slave. The whole principle of the higher snobbery would be abandoned, and Nietzsche in the end would only lead us back to Epictetus.

No, the higher snob will reply, the perfect superman may be no better than the perfect slave, but he is higher. What does this word mean? For the zealous evolutionist it seems to mean later, more complicated, requiring a longer incubation and a more special environment. Therefore what is higher is more expensive, and has a more precarious existence than what is lower; so the lady is higher than the woman, fine art is higher than useful art, and the height of the fashion in fine art is the highest point in it. The higher is the more inclusive, requiring everything else to produce it, and itself producing nothing, or something higher still. Of course the higher is not merely the better; because the standard of excellence itself changes as we proceed, and according to the standard of the lower morality the higher state which abolishes it will be worse. An orchid may not be more beautiful than a lily, but it is higher; philosophy may not be truer than science, nor true at all, but it is higher, because so much more comprehensive; faith may not be more trustworthy than reason, but it is higher; insatiable will may not be more beneficent than contentment in oneself and respect for others, but it is higher; war is higher, though more painful, than peace; perpetual motion is not more reasonable than movement towards an end, and stilts are not more convenient than shoes, but they are higher. In everything the higher, when not the better, means what folly or vanity cannot bear to abandon. Higher is a word by which we defend the indefensible; it is a declaration of impenitence on the part of unreason, a cry to create prejudice in favour of all that tyrannizes over mankind. It is the watchword of the higher snob. The first to use it was Satan, when he declared that he was not satisfied to be anything but the highest; whereas the highest thinks it no derogation to take the form of the lowest since the lowest, too, has its proper perfection, and there is nothing better than that.

[16]

DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN

England has been rich in poets, in novelists, in inventors, in philosophers making new beginnings, in intrepid travellers, in learned men whose researches are a hobby and almost a secret. The land was once rich in saints, and is still rich in enthusiasts. But the official leaders of the English people, the kings, prelates, professors, and politicians, have usually been secondary men; and even they have been far more distinguished in their private capacity than in their official action and mind. English genius is anti-professional; its affinities are with amateurs, and there is something of the amateur in the best English artists, actors, and generals. Delicacy of conscience, mental haze, care not to outrun the impulse of the soul, hold the Englishman back midway in his achievements; there is in him a vague respect for the unknown, a tacit diffidence in his own powers, which dissuade him from venturing on the greatest things or from carrying them out in a comprehensive manner. The truth is the British do not wish to be well led. They are all individualistic and aristocratic at heart, and want no leaders in ultimate things; the inner man must be his own guide. If they had to live under the shadow of a splendid monarch, or a masterful statesman, or an authoritative religion, or a deified state they would not feel free. They wish to peck at their institutions, and tolerate only such institutions as they can peck at. A certain ineptitude thus comes to be amongst them an aptitude for office: it keeps the official from acquiring too great an ascendancy. There is a sort of ostracism by anticipation, to prevent men who are too good from coming forward and upsetting the balance of British liberties; very like the vacuum which is created in America around distinction, and which keeps the national character there so true to type, so much on one lively level. But in England distinction exists, because it escapes into privacy. It is reserved for his Grace in his library and her Ladyship at her tea-table; it fills the nursery with lisping sweetness and intrepid singleness of will; it dwells with the poets in their solitary rambles and midnight questionings; it bends with the scholar over immortal texts; it is shut off from the profane by the high barriers of school and college and hunting-field, by the sanctity and silence of dubs, by the unspoken secrets of church and home.

The greatest distinction of English people, however, is one which, whilst quite personal and private in its scope, is widely diffused and strikingly characteristic of the better part of the nation; I mean, distinction in the way of living. The Englishman does in a distinguished way the simple things that other men might slur over as unimportant or essentially gross or irremediable; he is distinguished—he is disciplined, skilful, and calm—in eating, in sport, in public gatherings, in hardship, in danger, in extremities. It is in physical and rudimentary behaviour that the Englishman is an artist; he is the ideal sailor, the ideal explorer, the ideal comrade in a tight place; he knows how to be clean without fussiness, well-dressed without show, and pleasure-loving without loudness. This is why, although he is the most disliked of men the world over (except where people need some one they can trust) he is also the most imitated. What ferocious Anglophobe, whether a white man or a black man, is not immensely flattered if you pretend to have mistaken him for an Englishman? After all, this imitation of the physical distinction of Englishmen is not absurd; here is something that can be imitated: it is really the easiest way of doing easy things, which only bad education and bad habits have made difficult for most people. There is nothing impossible in adopting afternoon tea, football, and boy scouts; what is impossible, and if possible very foolish, is to adopt English religion, philosophy, or political institutions. But why should any one wish to adopt them? They have their merits, of course, and their propriety at home; but they are blind compromises, and it is not in their principles that the English are distinguished, but only in their practice. Their accents are more choice than their words, and their words more choice than their ideas. This, which might sound like a gibe, is to my mind a ground for great hope and for some envy. Refinement, like charity, should begin at home. First the body ought to be made fit and decent, then speech and manners, and habits justly combining personal initiative with the power of co-operating with others; and then, as this healthy life extends, the world will begin to open out to the mind in the right perspectives: not at first, perhaps never, in its total truth and its real proportions, but with an ever-enlarging appreciation of what, for us, it can contain. The mind of the Englishman, starting in this proud and—humble and profound way from the inner man, pierces very often, in single directions, to the limit of human faculty; and it seems to me to add to his humanity, without injury to his speculation, that he instinctively withdraws again into himself, as he might return home to marry and settle after tempting fortune at the antipodes. His curious knowledge and his personal opinions then become, as it were, mementos of his distant adventures; but his sterling worth lies in himself. He is at his best when free impulse or familiar habit takes an unquestioned lead, and when the mind, not being expected to intervene, beats in easy unison with the scene and the occasion, like a rider at home in the saddle and one with his galloping horse. Then grace returns to him, so angular often in his forced acts and his express tenets; the smile comes unaffectedly, and the blithe quick words flow as they should; arm is linked spontaneously in arm, laughter points the bull's-eye of truth, the whole world and its mysteries, not being pressed, become amiable, and the soul shines happy, and beautiful, and absolute mistress in her comely house. Nothing in him then is gross; all is harmonized, all is touched with natural life. His simplicity becomes wholeness, and he no longer seems dull in any direction, but in all things sound, sensitive, tender, watchful, and brave.

[17]

FRIENDSHIPS

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots. Friendship sometimes rests on sharing early memories, as do brothers and schoolfellows, who often, but for that now affectionate familiarity with the same old days, would dislike and irritate one another extremely. Sometimes it hangs on passing pleasures and amusements, or on special pursuits; sometimes on mere convenience and comparative lack of friction in living together. One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human. But there are youthful friendships of quite another quality, which I seem to have discovered flourishing more often and more frankly in England than in other countries; brief echoes, as it were, of that love of comrades so much celebrated in antiquity. I do not refer to the "friendship of virtue" mentioned by Aristotle, which means, I suppose, community in allegiance or in ideals. It may come to that in the end, considered externally; but community in allegiance or in ideals, if genuine, expresses a common disposition, and its roots are deeper and more physical than itself. The friendship I have in mind is a sense of this initial harmony between two natures, a union of one whole man with another whole man, a sympathy between the centres of their being, radiating from those centres on occasion in unanimous thoughts, but not essentially needing to radiate. Trust here is inwardly grounded; likes and dislikes run together without harness, like the steeds of Aurora; you may take agreement for granted without words; affection is generously independent of all tests or external bonds; it can even bear not to be mutual, not to be recognized; and in any case it shrinks from the blatancy of open vows. In such friendships there is a touch of passion and of shyness; an understanding which does not need to become explicit or complete. There is wine in the cup; it is not to be spilled nor gulped down unrelished, but to be sipped slowly, soberly, in the long summer evening, with the window open to the college garden, and the mind full of all that is sweetest to the mind.

Now there is a mystery here—though it need be no mystery—which some people find strange and distressing and would like to hush up. This profound physical sympathy may sometimes, for a moment, spread to the senses; that is one of its possible radiations, though fugitive; and there is a fashionable psychology at hand to explain all friendship, for that reason, as an aberration of sex. Of course it is such in some people, and in many people it may seem to be such at rare moments; but it would be a plain abuse of language to call a mother's love for her children sexual, even when they are boys, although certainly she could not have that love, nor those children, if she had no sex. Perhaps if we had no sex we should be incapable of tenderness of any sort; but this fact does not make all forms of affection similar in quality nor in tendency. The love of friends is not, like the love of woman, a lyrical prologue to nest—building. Engaging, no doubt, the same radical instincts, in a different environment and at another phase of their development, it turns them, whilst still plastic, in other directions. Human nature is still plastic, especially in the region of emotion, as is proved by the ever-changing forms of religion and art; and it is not a question of right and wrong, nor even, except in extreme cases, of health and disease, but only a question of alternative development, whether the human capacity to love is absorbed in the family cycle, or extends to individual friendships, or to communion with nature or with God. The love of friends in youth, in the cases where it is love rather than friendship, has a mystical tendency. In character, though seldom in intensity, it resembles the dart which, in an ecstatic vision, pierced the heart of Saint Theresa, bursting the normal integument by which the blood is kept coursing through generation after generation, in the closed channel of human existence and human slavery. Love then escapes from that round; it is, in one sense, wasted and sterilized; but in being diverted from its earthly labours it suffuses the whole universe with light; it casts its glowing colours on the sunset, upon the altar, upon the past, upon the truth. The anguished futility of love corrects its own selfishness, its own illusion; gradually the whole world becomes beautiful in its inhuman immensity; our very defeats are transfigured, and we see that it was good for us to have gone up into that mountain.

That such mystic emotions, whether in religion or in friendship, are erotic was well known before the day's of Freud. They have always expressed themselves in erotic language. And why should they not be erotic? Sexual passion is itself an incident in the life of the Psyche, a transitive phase in the great cycle by which life on earth is kept going. It grows insensibly out of bodily self-love, childish play, and love of sensation; it merges in the end, after its midsummer night's dream, into parental and kingly purposes. How casual, how comic, the purely erotic impulse is, and how lightly nature plays with it, may be seen in the passion of jealousy. Jealousy is inseparable from sexual love, and yet jealousy is not itself erotic either in quality or in effect, since it poisons pleasure, turns sympathy into suspicion, love into hate, all in the interests of proprietorship. Why should we be jealous, if we were simply merry? Nature weaves with a wide loom, and crosses the threads; and erotic passion may be as easily provoked peripherally by deeper impulses as be itself the root of other propensities. Lovers sometimes pretend at first to be only friends, and friends have sometimes fancied, at first blush, that they were lovers; it is as easy for one habit or sentiment as for the other to prove the radical one, and to prevail in the end. As for Englishmen, the last thing they would do would be to disguise some base prompting in high-flown language; they would call a spade a spade, if there were occasion. They are shy of words, as of all manifestations; and this very shyness, if it proves that there is at bottom a vital instinct concerned, also proves that it is not intrinsically more erotic than social, nor more social than intellectual. It is each of these things potentially, for such faculties are not divided in nature as they are in language; it may turn into any one of them if accident leads it that way; but it reverts from every casual expression to its central seat, which is the felt harmony of life with life, and of life with nature, with everything that in the pulses of this world beats our own measure, and swells the music of our thoughts.

[18]

DICKENS

If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages of Dickens. Who could not be happy in his world? Yet there is nothing essential to it which the most destructive revolution would be able to destroy. People would still be as different, as absurd, and as charming as are his characters; the springs of kindness and folly in their lives would not be dried up. Indeed, there is much in Dickens which communism, if it came, would only emphasize and render universal. Those schools, those poorhouses, those prisons, with those surviving shreds of family life in them, show us what in the coming age (with some sanitary improvements) would be the nursery and home of everybody. Everybody would be a waif, like Oliver Twist, like Smike, like Pip, and like David Copperfield; and amongst the agents and underlings of social government, to whom all these waifs would be entrusted, there would surely be a goodly sprinkling of Pecksniffs, Squeers's, and Fangs; whilst the Fagins would be everywhere commissioners of the people. Nor would there fail to be, in high places and in low, the occasional sparkle of some Pickwick or Cheeryble Brothers or Sam Weller or Mark Tapley; and the voluble Flora Finchings would be everywhere in evidence, and the strong-minded Betsey Trotwoods in office. There would also be, among the inefficient, many a Dora and Agnes and Little Emily—with her charm but without her tragedy, since this is one of the things which the promised social reform would happily render impossible; I mean, by removing all the disgrace of it. The only element in the world of Dickens which would become obsolete would be the setting, the atmosphere of material instrumentalities and arrangements, as travelling by coach is obsolete; but travelling by rail, by motor, or by airship will emotionally be much the same thing. It is worth noting how such instrumentalities, which absorb modern life, are admired and enjoyed by Dickens, as they were by Homer. The poets ought not to be afraid of them; they exercise the mind congenially, and can be played with joyfully. Consider the black ships and the chariots of Homer, the coaches and river-boats of Dickens, and the aeroplanes of to-day; to what would an unspoiled young mind turn with more interest? Dickens tells us little of English sports, but he shares the sporting nature of the Englishman, to whom the whole material world is a playing—field, the scene giving ample scope to his love of action, legality, and pleasant achievement. His art is to sport according to the rules of the game, and to do things for the sake of doing them, rather than for any ulterior motive.

It is remarkable, in spite of his ardent simplicity and openness of heart, how insensible Dickens was to the greater themes of the human imagination—religion, science, politics, art. He was a waif himself, and utterly disinherited. For example, the terrible heritage of contentious religions which fills the world seems not to exist for him. In this matter he was like a sensitive child, with a most religious disposition, but no religious ideas. Perhaps, properly speaking, he had no ideas on any subject; what he had was a vast sympathetic participation in the daily life of mankind; and what he saw of ancient institutions made him hate them, as needless sources of oppression, misery, selfishness, and rancour. His one political passion was philanthropy, genuine but felt only on its negative, reforming side; of positive utopias or enthusiasms we hear nothing. The political background of Christendom is only, so to speak, an old faded back-drop for his stage; a castle, a frigate, a gallows, and a large female angel with white wings standing above an orphan by an open grave—a decoration which has to serve for all the melodramas in his theatre, intellectually so provincial and poor. Common life as it is lived was varied and lovable enough for Dickens, if only the pests and cruelties could be removed from it. Suffering wounded him, but not vulgarity; whatever pleased his senses and whatever shocked them filled his mind alike with romantic wonder, with the endless delight of observation. Vulgarity—and what can we relish, if we recoil at vulgarity?—was innocent and amusing; in fact, for the humorist, it was the spice of life. There was more piety in being human than in being pious. In reviving Christmas, Dickens transformed it from the celebration of a metaphysical mystery into a feast of overflowing simple kindness and good cheer; the church bells were still there—in the orchestra; and the angels of Bethlehem were still there—painted on the back-curtain. Churches, in his novels, are vague, desolate places where one has ghastly experiences, and where only the pew-opener is human; and such religious and political conflicts as he depicts in Barnaby Rudge and in A Tale of Two Cities are street brawls and prison scenes and conspiracies in taverns, without any indication of the contrasts in mind or interests between the opposed parties. Nor had Dickens any lively sense for fine art, classical tradition, science, or even the manners and feelings of the upper classes in his own time and country: in his novels we may almost say there is no army, no navy, no church, no sport, no distant travel, no daring adventure, no feeling for the watery wastes and the motley nations of the planet, and—luckily, with his notion of them—no lords and ladies. Even love of the traditional sort is hardly in Dickens's sphere—I mean the soldierly passion in which a rather rakish gallantry was sobered by devotion, and loyalty rested on pride. In Dickens love is sentimental or benevolent or merry or sneaking or canine; in his last book he was going to describe a love that was passionate and criminal; but love for him was never chivalrous, never poetical. What he paints most tragically is a quasi-paternal devotion in the old to the young, the love of Mr. Peggotty for Little Emily, or of Solomon Gills for Walter Gay, A series of shabby little adventures, such as might absorb the interest of an average youth, were romantic enough for Dickens.

I say he was disinherited, but he inherited the most terrible negations. Religion lay on him like the weight of the atmosphere, sixteen pounds to the square inch, yet never noticed nor mentioned. He lived and wrote in the shadow of the most awful prohibitions. Hearts petrified by legality and falsified by worldliness offered, indeed, a good subject for a novelist, and Dickens availed himself of it to the extent of always contrasting natural goodness and happiness with whatever is morose; but his morose people were wicked, not virtuous in their own way; so that the protest of his temperament against his environment never took a radical form nor went back to first principles. He needed to feel, in his writing, that he was carrying the sympathies of every man with him. In him conscience was single, and he could not conceive how it could ever be divided in other men. He denounced scandals without exposing shams, and conformed willingly and scrupulously to the proprieties. Lady Dedlock's secret, for instance, he treats as if it were the sin of Adam, remote, mysterious, inexpiable. Mrs. Dombey is not allowed to deceive her husband except by pretending to deceive him. The seduction of Little Emily is left out altogether, with the whole character of Steerforth, the development of which would have been so important in the moral experience of David Copperfield himself. But it is not public prejudice alone that plays the censor over Dickens's art; his own kindness and even weakness of heart act sometimes as marplots. The character of Miss Mowcher, for example, so brilliantly introduced, was evidently intended to be shady, and to play a very important part in the story; but its original in real life, which was recognized, had to be conciliated, and the sequel was omitted and patched up with an apology—itself admirable—for the poor dwarf. Such a sacrifice does honour to Dickens's heart; but artists should meditate on their works in time, and it is easy to remove any too great likeness in a portrait by a few touches making it more consistent than real people are apt to be; and in this case, if the little creature had been really guilty, how much more subtle and tragic her apology for herself might have been, like that of the bastard Edmund in King Lear! So, too, in Dombey and Son, Dickens could not bear to let Walter Gay turn out badly, as he had been meant to do, and to break his uncle's heart as well as the heroine's; he was accordingly transformed into a stage hero miraculously saved from shipwreck, and Florence was not allowed to reward the admirable Toots, as she should have done, with her trembling hand. But Dickens was no free artist; he had more genius than taste, a warm fancy not aided by a thorough understanding of complex characters. He worked under pressure, for money and applause, and often had to cheapen in execution what his inspiration had so vividly conceived.

What, then, is there left, if Dickens has all these limitations? In our romantic disgust we might be tempted to say, Nothing. But in fact almost everything is left, almost everything that counts in the daily life of mankind, or that by its presence or absence can determine whether life shall be worth living or not; because a simple good life is worth-living, and an elaborate bad life is not. There remains in the first place eating and drinking; relished not bestially, but humanly, jovially, as the sane and exhilarating basis for everything else. This is a sound English beginning; but the immediate sequel, as the England of that day presented it to Dickens, is no less delightful. There is the ruddy glow of the hearth; the sparkle of glasses and brasses and well-scrubbed pewter; the savoury fumes of the hot punch, after the tingle of the wintry air; the coaching-scenes, the motley figures and absurd incidents of travel; the changing sights and joys of the road. And then, to balance this, the traffic of ports and cities, the hubbub of crowded streets, the luxury of shop-windows and of palaces not to be entered; the procession of the passers-by, shabby or ludicrously genteel; the dingy look and musty smell of their lodgings; the labyrinth of back-alleys, courts, and mews, with their crying children, and scolding old women, and listless, half-drunken loiterers. These sights, like fables, have a sort of moral in them to which Dickens was very sensitive; the important airs of nobodies on great occasions, the sadness and preoccupation of the great as they hasten by in their mourning or on their pressing affairs; the sadly comic characters of the tavern; the diligence of shopkeepers, like squirrels turning in their cages; the children peeping out everywhere like grass in an untrodden street; the charm of humble things, the nobleness of humble people, the horror of crime, the ghastliness of vice, the deft hand and shining face of virtue passing through the midst of it all; and finally a fresh wind of indifference and change blowing across our troubles and clearing the most lurid sky.

I do not know whether it was Christian charity or naturalistic insight, or a mixture of both (for they are closely akin) that attracted Dickens particularly to the deformed, the half-witted, the abandoned, or those impeded or misunderstood by virtue of some singular inner consecration. The visible moral of these things, when brutal prejudice does not blind us to it, comes very near to true philosophy; one turn of the screw, one flash of reflection, and we have understood nature and human morality and the relation between them.

In his love of roads and wayfarers, of river-ports and wharves and the idle or sinister figures that lounge about them, Dickens was like Walt Whitman; and I think a second Dickens may any day appear in America, when it is possible in that land of hurry to reach the same degree of saturation, the same unquestioning pleasure in the familiar facts. The spirit of Dickens would be better able to do justice to America than was that of Walt Whitman; because America, although it may seem nothing but a noisy nebula to the impressionist, is not a nebula but a concourse of very distinct individual bodies, natural and social, each with its definite interests and story. Walt Whitman had a sort of transcendental philosophy which swallowed the universe whole, supposing there was a universal spirit in things identical with the absolute spirit that observed them; but Dickens was innocent of any such clap-trap, and remained a true spirit in his own person. Kindly and clear-sighted, but self-identical and unequivocally human, he glided through the slums like one of his own little heroes, uncontaminated by their squalor and confusion, courageous and firm in his clear allegiances amid the flux of things, a pale angel at the Carnival, his heart aflame, his voice always flute-like in its tenderness and warning. This is the true relation of spirit to existence, not the other which confuses them; for this earth (I cannot speak for the universe at large) has no spirit of its own, but brings forth spirits only at certain points, in the hearts and brains of frail living creatures, who like insects flit through it, buzzing and gathering what sweets they can; and it is the spaces they traverse in this career, charged with their own moral burden, that they can report on or describe, not things rolling on to infinity in their vain tides. To be hypnotized by that flood would be a heathen idolatry. Accordingly Walt Whitman, in his comprehensive democratic vistas, could never see the trees for the wood, and remained incapable, for all his diffuse love of the human herd, of ever painting a character or telling a story; the very things in which Dickens was a master. It is this life of the individual, as it may be lived in a given nation, that determines the whole value of that nation to the poet, to the moralist, and to the judicious historian. But for the excellence of the typical single life, no nation deserves to be remembered more than the sands of the sea; and America will not be a success, if every American is a failure.

Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the shabby little adventures of the actors in their private capacity replace for him the mock tragedies which they enact before a dreaming public. Mediocrity of circumstances and mediocrity of soul for ever return to the centre of his stage; a more wretched or a grander existence is sometimes broached, but the pendulum soon swings back, and we return, with the relief with which we put on our slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden mediocrity—to mutton and beer, and to love and babies in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid. Dickens is the poet of those acres of yellow brick streets which the traveller sees from the railway viaducts as he approaches London; they need a poet, and they deserve one, since a complete human life may very well be lived there. Their little excitements and sorrows, their hopes and humours are like those of the Wooden Midshipman in Dombey and Son; but the sea is not far off, and the sky—Dickens never forgets it—is above all those brief troubles. He had a sentiment in the presence of this vast flatness of human fates, in spite of their individual pungency, which I think might well be the dominant sentiment of mankind in the future; a sense of happy freedom in littleness, an open-eyed reverence and religion without words. This universal human anonymity is like a sea, an infinitive democratic desert, chock-full and yet the very image of emptiness, with nothing in it for the mind, except, as the Moslems say, the presence of Allah. Awe is the counterpart of humility—and this is perhaps religion enough. The atom in the universal vortex ought to be humble; he ought to see that, materially, he doesn't much matter, and that morally his loves are merely his own, without authority over the universe. He can admit without obloquy that he is what he is; and he can rejoice in his own being, and in that of all other things in so far as he can share it sympathetically. The apportionment of existence and of fortune is in Other Hands; his own portion is contentment, vision, love, and laughter.

Having humility, that most liberating of sentiments, having a true vision of human existence and joy in that vision, Dickens had in a superlative degree the gift of humour, of mimicry, of unrestrained farce. He was the perfect comedian. When people say Dickens exaggerates, it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably have only notions of what things and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value. Their minds run on in the region of discourse, where there are masks only and no faces, ideas and no facts; they have little sense for those living grimaces that play from moment to moment upon the countenance of the world. The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it nevertheless intends all the time to be something different and highly dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world, a world of masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humour is the perception of this illusion, the fact allowed to pierce here and there through the convention, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity. Pure comedy is more radical, cruder, in a certain sense less human; because comedy throws the convention over altogether, revels for a moment in the fact, and brutally says to the notions of mankind, as if it slapped them in the face, There, take that! That's what you really are I At this the polite world pretends to laugh, not tolerantly as it does at humour, but a little angrily. It does not like to see itself by chance in the glass, without having had time to compose its features for demure self-contemplation. "What a bad mirror," it exclaims; "it must be concave or convex; for surely I never looked like that. Mere caricature, farce, and horse play. Dickens exaggerates; I never was so sentimental as that; I never saw anything so dreadful; I don't believe there were ever any people like Quilp, or Squeers, or Serjeant Buzfuz." But the polite world is lying; there are such people; we are such people ourselves in our true moments, in our veritable impulses; but we are careful to stifle and to hide those moments from ourselves and from the world; to purse and pucker ourselves into the mask of our conventional personality; and so simpering, we profess that it is very coarse and inartistic of Dickens to undo our life's work for us in an instant, and remind us of what we are. And as to other people, though we may allow that considered superficially they are often absurd, we do not wish to dwell on their eccentricities, nor to mimic them. On the contrary, it is good manners to look away quickly, to suppress a smile, and to say to ourselves that the ludicrous figure in the street is not at all comic, but a dull ordinary Christian, and that it is foolish to give any importance to the fact that its hat has blown off, that it has slipped on an orange-peel and unintentionally sat on the pavement, that it has a pimple on its nose, that its one tooth projects over its lower lip, that it is angry with things in general, and that it is looking everywhere for the penny which it holds tightly in its hand. That may fairly represent the moral condition of most of us at most times; but we do not want to think of it; we do not want to see; we gloss the fact over; we console ourselves before we are grieved, and reassert our composure before we have laughed. We are afraid, ashamed, anxious to be spared. What displeases us in Dickens is that he does not spare us; he mimics things to the full; he dilates and exhausts and repeats; he wallows. He is too intent on the passing experience to look over his shoulder, and consider whether we have not already understood, and had enough. He is not thinking of us; he is obeying the impulse of the passion, the person, or the story he is enacting. This faculty, which renders him a consummate comedian, is just what alienated from him a later generation in which people of taste were aesthetes and virtuous people were higher snobs; they wanted a mincing art, and he gave them copious improvization, they wanted analysis and development, and he gave them absolute comedy. I must confess, though the fault is mine and not his, that sometimes his absoluteness is too much for me. When I come to the death of Little Nell, or to What the Waves were always Saying, or even to the incorrigible perversities of the pretty Dora, I skip. I can't take my liquor neat in such draughts, and my inner man says to Dickens, Please don't. But then I am a coward in so many ways! There are so many things in this world that I skip, as I skip the undiluted Dickens! When I reach Dover on a rough day, I wait there until the Channel is smoother; am I not travelling for pleasure? But my prudence does not blind me to the admirable virtue of the sailors that cross in all weathers, nor even to the automatic determination of the sea-sick ladies, who might so easily have followed my example, if they were not the slaves of their railway tickets and of their labelled luggage. They are loyal to their tour, and I to my philosophy. Yet as wrapped in my great-coat and sure of a good dinner, I pace the windy pier and soliloquize, I feel the superiority of the bluff tar, glad of breeze, stretching a firm arm to the unsteady passenger, and watching with a masterful thrill of emotion the home cliffs receding and the foreign coasts ahead. It is only courage (which Dickens had without knowing it) and universal kindness (which he knew he had) that are requisite to nerve us for a true vision of this world. And as some of us are cowards about crossing the Channel, and others about "crossing the bar," so almost everybody is a coward about his own humanity. We do not consent to be absurd, though absurd we are. We have no fundamental humility. We do not wish the moments of our lives to be caught by a quick eye in their grotesque initiative, and to be pilloried in this way before our own eyes. For that reason we don't like Dickens, and don't like comedy, and don't like the truth. Dickens could don the comic mask with innocent courage; he could wear it with a grace, ease, and irresistible vivacity seldom given to men. We must go back for anything like it to the very greatest comic poets, to Shakespeare or to Aristophanes. Who else, for instance, could have penned this:

"It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it," urged Mr. Bumble; first looking found to ascertain that his partner had left the room.

"That is no excuse," replied Air. Brownlow. "You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction."

"If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass, a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience."

Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words, Mr. Bumble fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his hands in his pockets, followed his helpmate downstairs.

This is high comedy; the irresistible, absurd, intense dream of the old fool, personifying the law in order to convince and to punish it. I can understand that this sort of thing should not be common in English literature, nor much relished; because pure comedy is scornful, merciless, devastating, holding no door open to anything beyond. Cultivated English feeling winces at this brutality, although the common people love it in clowns and in puppet shows; and I think they are right. Dickens, who surely was tender enough, had so irresistible a comic genius that it carried him beyond the gentle humour which most Englishmen possess to the absolute grotesque reality. Squeers, for instance, when he sips the wretched dilution which he has prepared for his starved and shivering little pupils, smacks his lips and cries: "Here's richness!" It is savage comedy; humour would come in if we understood (what Dickens does not tell us) that the little creatures were duly impressed and thought the thin liquid truly delicious. I suspect that English sensibility prefers the humour and wit of Hamlet to the pure comedy of Falstaff; and that even in Aristophanes it seeks consolation in the lyrical poetry for the flaying of human life in the comedy itself. Tastes are free; but we should not deny that in merciless and rollicking comedy life is caught in the act. The most grotesque creatures of Dickens are not exaggerations or mockeries of something other than themselves; they arise because nature generates them, like toadstools; they exist because they can't help it, as we all do. The fact that these perfectly self-justified beings are absurd appears only by comparison, and from outside; circumstances, or the expectations of other people, make them ridiculous and force them to contradict themselves; but in nature it is no crime to be exceptional. Often, but for the savagery of the average man, it would not even be a misfortune. The sleepy fat boy in Pickwick looks foolish; but in himself he is no more foolish, nor less solidly self-justified, than a pumpkin lying on the ground. Toots seems ridiculous; and we laugh heartily at his incoherence, his beautiful waistcoats, and his extreme modesty; but when did anybody more obviously grow into what he is because he couldn't grow otherwise? So with Mr. Pickwick, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Micawber, and all the rest of this wonderful gallery; they are ridiculous only by accident, and in a context in which they never intended to appear. If Oedipus and Lear and Cleopatra do not seem ridiculous, it is only because tragic reflection has taken them out of the context in which, in real life, they would have figured. If we saw them as facts, and not as emanations of a poet's dream, we should laugh at them till doomsday; what grotesque presumption, what silly whims, what mad contradiction of the simplest realities! Yet we should not laugh at them without feeling how real their griefs were; as real and terrible as the griefs of children and of dreams. But facts, however serious inwardly, are always absurd outwardly; and the just critic of life sees both truths at once, as Cervantes did in Don Quixote. A pompous idealist who does not see the ridiculous in all things is the dupe of his sympathy and abstraction; and a clown, who does not see that these ridiculous creatures are living quite in earnest, is the dupe of his egotism. Dickens saw the absurdity, and understood the life; I think he was a good philosopher.

It is usual to compare Dickens with Thackeray, which is like comparing the grape with the gooseberry; there are obvious points of resemblance, and the gooseberry has some superior qualities of its own; but you can't make red wine of it. The wine of Dickens is of the richest, the purest, the sweetest, the most fortifying to the blood; there is distilled in it, with the perfection of comedy, the perfection of morals. I do not mean, of course, that Dickens appreciated all the values that human life has or might have; that is beyond any man. Even the greatest philosophers, such as Aristotle, have not always much imagination to conceive forms of happiness or folly other than those which their age or their temperament reveals to them; their insight runs only to discovering the principle of happiness, that it is spontaneous life of any sort harmonized with circumstances. The sympathies and imagination of Dickens, vivid in their sphere, were no less limited in range; and of course it was not his business to find philosophic formulas; nevertheless I call his the perfection of morals for two reasons: that he put the distinction between good and evil in the right place, and that he felt this distinction intensely. A moralist might have excellent judgement, he might see what sort of life is spontaneous in a given being and how far it may be harmonized with circumstances, yet his heart might remain cold, he might not suffer nor rejoice with the suffering or joy he foresaw. Humanitarians like Bentham and Mill, who talked about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, might conceivably be moral prigs in their own persons, and they might have been chilled to the bone in their theoretic love of mankind, if they had had the wit to imagine in what, as a matter of fact, the majority would place their happiness. Even if their theory had been correct (which I think it was in intention, though not in statement) they would then not have been perfect moralists, because their maxims would not have expressed their hearts. In expressing their hearts, they ought to have embraced one of those forms of "idealism" by which men fortify themselves in their bitter passions or in their helpless commitments; for they do not wish mankind to be happy in its own way, but in theirs. Dickens was not one of those moralists who summon every man to do himself the greatest violence so that he may not offend them, nor defeat their ideals. Love of the good of others is something that shines in every page of Dickens with a truly celestial splendour. How entirely limpid is his sympathy with life—a sympathy uncontaminated by dogma or pedantry or snobbery or bias of any kind! How generous is this keen, light spirit, how pure this open heart! And yet, in spite of this extreme sensibility, not the least wobbling; no deviation from a just severity of judgement, from an uncompromising distinction between white and black. And this happens as it ought to happen; sympathy is not checked by a flatly contrary prejudice or commandment, by some categorical imperative irrelevant to human nature; the check, like the cheer, comes by tracing the course of spontaneous impulse amid circumstances that inexorably lead it to success or to failure. There is a bed to this stream, freely as the water may flow; when it comes to this precipice it must leap, when it runs over these pebbles it must sing, and when it spreads into that marsh it must become livid and malarial. The very sympathy with human impulse quickens in Dickens the sense of danger; his very joy in joy makes him stem to what kills it. How admirably drawn are his surly villains! No rhetorical vilification of them, as in a sermon; no exaggeration of their qualms or fears; rather a sense of how obvious and human all their courses seem from their own point of view; and yet no sentimental apology for them, no romantic worship of rebels in their madness or crime. The pity of it, the waste of it all, are seen not by a second vision but by the same original vision which revealed the lure and the drift of the passion. Vice is a monster here of such sorry mien, that the longer we see it the more we deplore it; that other sort of vice which Pope found so seductive was perhaps only some innocent impulse artificially suppressed, and called a vice because it broke out inconveniently and displeased the company. True vice is human nature strangled by the suicide of attempting the impossible. Those so self-justified villains of Dickens never elude their fates. Bill Sikes is not let off, neither is Nancy; the oddly benevolent Magwitch does not escape from the net, nor does the unfortunate young Richard Carstone, victim of the Circumlocution Office. The horror and ugliness of their fall are rendered with the hand of a master; we see here, as in the world, that in spite of the romanticists it is not virtue to rush enthusiastically along any road. I think Dickens is one of the best friends mankind has ever had. He has held the mirror up to nature, and of its reflected fragments has composed a fresh world, where the men and women differ from real people only in that they live in a literary medium, so that all ages and places may know them. And they are worth knowing, just as one's neighbours are, for their picturesque characters and their pathetic fates. Their names should be in every child's mouth; they ought to be adopted members of every household. Their stories cause the merriest and the sweetest chimes to ring in the fancy, without confusing our moral judgement or alienating our interest from the motley commonplaces of daily life. In every English-speaking home, in the four quarters of the globe, parents and children will do well to read Dickens aloud of a winter's evening; they will love winter, and one another, and God the better for it. What a wreath that will be of ever-fresh holly, thick with bright berries, to hang to this poet's memory—the very crown he would have chosen!

[19]

THE HUMAN SCALE

Great buildings often have great doors; but great doors are heavy to swing, and if left open they may let in too much cold or glare; so that we sometimes observe a small postern cut into one leaf of the large door for more convenient entrance and exit, and it is seldom or never that the monumental gates yawn in their somnolence. Here is the modest human scale reasserting itself in the midst of a titanic structure, but it reasserts itself with an ill grace and in the interests of frailty; the patch it makes seems unintended and ignominious.

Yet the human scale is not essentially petty; when it does not slip in as a sort of interloper it has nothing to apologize for. Between the infinite and the infinitesimal all sizes are equally central. The Greeks, the Saracens, the English, the Chinese, and Japanese instinctively retain the human scale in all that part of their work which is most characteristic of them and nearest to their affections. A Greek temple or the hall of an English mansion can be spacious and dignified enough, but they do not outrun familiar uses, and they lend their spaciousness and dignity to the mind, instead of crushing it. Everything about them has an air of friendliness and sufficiency; their elegance is not pompous, and if they are noble they are certainly not vast, cold, nor gilded.

The Saracens, Chinese, and Japanese in their various ways use the human scale with even greater refinement, for they apply it also in a sensuous and psychological direction. Not only is the size of their works moderate by preference, like their brief lyrics, but they exactly meet human sensibility by a great delicacy and concentration in design and a fragrant simplicity in workmanship. Everything they make is economical in its beauty and seems to say to us: "I exist only to be enjoyed; there is nothing in me not merely delightful," Here the human scale is not drawn from the human body so much as from the human soul; its faculties are treated with deference—I mean the faculties it really has, not those, like reason, which a flattering philosophy may impute to it.

An English country house which is a cottage in appearance may turn out on examination to be almost a palace in extent and appointments; there is no parade, yet there is great profusion—too much furniture, too many ornaments, too much food, too many flowers, too many people. Everything there is on the human scale except the quantity of things, which is oppressive. The Orientals are poorer, more voluptuous, and more sensitive to calligraphy; they leave empty spaces about them and enjoy one thing at a time and enjoy it longer.

One reason for this greater subtlety and mercifulness in the art of Orientals is perhaps the fiercer assault made on their senses by nature. The Englishman lives in a country which is itself on the human scale, clement at all seasons, charming with a gently inconstant atmospheric charm. The rare humanity of nature in his island permeates his being from boyhood up with a delight that is half sentimental, half physical and sporting. In his fields and moors he grows keen and fond of exertion; there too his friendships and his estimates of men are shaped unawares, as if under some silent superior influence. There he imbibes the impressions that make him tender to poetry. He may not require great subtlety in his poets, but he insists that their sentiment shall have been felt and their images seen, and while the obvious, even the shamelessly obvious, does not irritate him, he hates cheap sublimity and false notes. He respects experience and is master of it in his own field.

Thus the empty spaces with which a delicate art likes to surround itself are supplied for the Englishman by his comradeship with nature, his ranging habits, and the reticence of his imagination. There the unexpressed dimension, the background of pregnant silence, exists for him in all its power. For the Saracen, on the contrary, nature is an abyss: parched deserts, hard mountains, night with its overwhelming moon. Here the human scale is altogether transgressed; nature is cruel, alien, excessive, to be fled from with a veiled face. For a relief and solace he builds his house without windows; he makes his life simple, his religion a single phrase, his art exquisite and slight, like the jet of his fountain. It is sweet and necessary that the works of man should respect the human scale when everything in nature so infinitely transcends it.

Why the Egyptians loved things colossal I do not know, but the taste of the Romans for the grandiose is easier to understand. It seems to have been part and parcel of that yearning for the super-human which filled late antiquity. This yearning took two distinct directions. Among the worldly it fostered imperialism, organization, rhetoric, portentous works, belief in the universality and eternity of Rome, and actual deification of emperors. Among the spiritually-minded it led to a violent abstraction from the world, so that the soul in its inward solitude might feel itself inviolate and divine. The Christians at first belonged of course to the latter party; they detested the inflation of the empire, with its cold veneer of marble and of optimism; they were nothing if not humble and dead to the world. Their catacombs were perforce on the human scale, as a coffin is; but even when they emerged to the surface, they reduced rather than enlarged the temples and basilicas bequeathed to them by the pagans. Apart from a few imperial structures at Constantinople or Ravenna their churches for a thousand years kept to the human scale; often they were diminutive; when necessary they were spread out to hold multitudes, but remained low and in the nature of avenues to a tomb or a shrine. The centre was some sombre precinct, often subterranean, where the inward man might commune with the other world. The sacraments were received with a bowed head; they did not call for architectural vistas. The sumptuousness that in time encrusted these sanctuaries was that of a jewel—the Oriental, interior, concentrated sumptuousness of the cloistered arts. Yet the open-air pagan tradition was not dead. Roman works were everywhere, and not all in ruins, and love of display and of plastic grandiloquence lay hardly dormant in the breast of many. It required only a little prosperity to dispel the mystical humility and detachment which Christianity had brought with it at first; and the human scale of the Christian Greeks yielded at the first opportunity to the gigantic scale of the Romans. Spaces were cleared, vaults were raised, arches were made pointed in order that they might be wider and be poised higher, towers and spires were aimed at the clouds, usually getting only half way, porches became immense caverns. Brunelleschi accomplished a tour de force in his dome and Michelangelo another in his, even more stupendous. These various strained models, straining in divergent directions, have kept artists uneasy and impotent ever since, except when under some benign influence they have recovered the human scale, and in domestic architecture or portrait painting have forgotten to be grand and have become felicitous.

The same movement is perhaps easier to survey in philosophy than in architecture. Scarcely had Socrates brought investigation down from the heavens and limited it to morals—a realm essentially on the human scale—when his pupils hastened to undo his work by projecting their moral system again into the sky, denaturalizing both morals and nature. They imagined a universe circling about man, tempering the light for his eyes and making absolute his childlike wishes and judgements. This was humanism out of scale and out of place, an attempt to cut not the works of man but the universe to human measure. It was the nemesis that overtook the Greeks for having become too complacently human. Earlier the monstrous had played a great part in their religion; henceforth that surrounding immensity having been falsely humanized, their modest humanity itself had to be made monstrous to fill its place.

Hence we see the temples growing larger and larger, the dome introduced, things on the human scale piled on one another to make a sublime fabric, like Saint Sophia, triumphal arches on pedestals not to be passed through, vain columns like towers, with a statue poised on the summit like a weathercock, and finally doors so large that they could not be opened and little doors had to be cut in them for men to use. So the human scale turned up again irrepressibly, but for the moment without its native dignity, because it had been stretched to compass a lifeless dignity quite other than its own.

[20]

ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE

Nests were the first buildings; I suppose the birds built them long before man ceased to be four-footed or four-handed, and to swing by his tail from trees. The nests of man were coverts, something between a hole in the ground and an arbour; a retreat easily turned into a wig-warn, a hut, or a tent, when once man had begun to flay animals and to weave mats. From the tent we can imagine the cart developing—one of the earliest of human habitations—and from the cart the boat: tents, boats, and carts (as the Englishman knows so well) are in a manner more human than houses; they are the shelters of freemen. Some men, those destined to higher things, are migratory; they have imagination, being haunted by absent things, and distance of itself allures them, even if dearth or danger does not drive them on; indeed, dearth and danger would not of themselves act as incentives to migration, if some safer and greener paradise were not present to the fancy. Ranging into varied climates, these men feel the need of that portable shelter which we call clothes; and at a slightly greater distance from their skins, they surround themselves with a second integument, also portable, the tent, cart, or boat. The first home of man is appropriately without foundations, except in the instincts of his soul; and it is only by a slight anchorage to the earth, in some tempting glen or by some flowing river, that the cart, boat, or tent becomes a dwelling-house. Here I see the secret of that paradox, that the English people who have invented the word home, should be such travellers and colonists, and should live so largely and so contentedly abroad. Home is essentially portable; it has no terrene foundation, like a tomb, a well, or an altar; it is an integument of the living man, as the body itself is; and as the body is more than the raiment, and determines its form, so the inner man is more than his dwelling, and causes it to mould and to harden itself round him like a shell, wherever he may be. Home is built round his bed, his cupboard, and his chimney-corner; and such a nest, if it fits his habits, is home all the world over, from Hudson's Bay to Malacca; at least, it becomes home when the inner man, as he is prompted inwardly to do, surrounds himself there with a family; for a home is a nest, and somehow incomplete without an egg to sit on.

This seems to me to be the true genealogy of English architecture, in so far as it is English. Strictly speaking, there is no English architecture at all, only foreign architecture adapted and domesticated in England. But how thoroughly and admirably domesticated I How entirely transmuted inwardly from the classic tragic monumental thing it was, into something which, even if in abstract design it seems unchanged, has a new expression, a new scale, a new subordination of part to part, and as it were a new circulation of the blood within it! It has all been made to bend and to cling like ivy round the inner man; it has all been rendered domestic and converted into a home. Far other was the character proper to nobler architecture in its foreign seats. There it had been essentially military, religious, or civic: it had begun perhaps with a slight modification or rearrangement of great stones lying on the ground, perhaps infinitely rooted in its depths. Its centre was no living person, but some spot with a magic and compulsive influence, or with a communal function; it came to glorify three slabs—the tomb, the hearth, and the altar—and to render them monumental. The tribe or the king had a treasure to be roofed over and walled in; the mound where the dead lay buried was marked with a heap of stones; pillars were set up to the right and to the left of the presiding deity, to dignify the place where he delivered true oracles, and dispensed magic powers. This deity himself was a pillar, scarcely humanized in form, or fantastically named after some animal; and as he grew colossal, and his features took form and colour, his sacred head had to be arched over with more labour and art; and the approach to him was impressively delayed through pylons, courts, narthex, or nave, into the sepulchral darkness of the holy of holies. Similarly defences grew into citadels, and judgement-seats into palaces; and as for individual men, if they did not sleep in the embrasure of some temple gate, or under some public stair, they found cubicles in the galleries of the king's court, or built themselves huts to breed in under the lee of the fortifications.

This sort of architecture has a tragic character; it dominates the soul rather than expresses it, and embodies stabilities and powers far older than any one man, and far more lasting. It confronts each generation like an inexorable deity, like death and war and labour; life is passed, thoughtlessly but not happily, under that awful shadow. Of course, there are acolytes in the temple and pages in the palace that scamper all over the most hallowed precincts, tittering and larking; and the same retreats may seem luminous and friendly afterwards to the poet, the lover, or the mind bereaved; yet in their essential function these monuments are arresting, serious, silent, overwhelming; they are a source of terror and compunction, like tragedy; they are favourable to prayer, ecstasy, and meditation. At other times they become the scene of enormous gatherings, of parades and thrilling celebrations; but always it is a vast affair, like a court ball, in which one insinuates one's littleness into what corner one can, to see and feel the movement of the whole, without playing any great part in it. Even the most amiable forms of classic architecture have this public character. There is the theatre and the circus, into which one must squeeze one's person uncomfortably, in order to subject one's mind to contagious emotions, and the judgements of the crowd; and even the public fountain, at which the housemaids and water-boys wait for their turn, plays for ever far above the heads of the people; as if that Neptune and those dolphins were spouting for their own pleasure, cooling the sunshine for their own bronze limbs, and never caring whether they soused the passing mortal, or quenched his thirst.

All these forms and habits are intensely un-English, and yet England is full of vestiges of them, not only because its fine arts are derived from abroad, but because, however disguised, the same tragic themes must appear everywhere. The tomb, the temple, the fortress are obligatory things; but they become properly English in character only when their public function recedes into the background, and they become interesting to the inner man by virtue of associations or accidents which harmonize them with his sentimental experience. They grow English in growing picturesque. These castles and abbeys were Norman when they were built, they were expressions of domination and fear, hard, crude, practical, and foreign. But now the moat is grass-grown, the cloister in ruins, the headless saints are posts for the roses to creep over, the frowning keep has lost its battlements and become a comfortable mansion mantled with ivy; before it the well-dressed young people play croquet on the lawn; and the chapel, whitewashed within, politely furnished with pews, and politely frequented on Sundays, is embowered in a pretty garden of a graveyard, which the yew seems to sanctify more than the cross, and the flowers to suit better than the inscriptions; there is a bench there round the great tree, where the old villagers sit of an evening, and its branches, far overtopping the church spire with its restored sun-dial, seem to dispense a surer grace and protection than the church itself: they seem more unequivocally the symbol and the work of God. So everything, in its ruin, seems in England to live a new life; and it is only this second life, this cottage built in the fallen stronghold, that is English.

If great architecture has a tragic character, it does not exclude, in the execution, a certain play of fancy, a sportive use of the forms which the needful structure imposes; and these decorative frills or arbitrary variations of theme might be called comic architecture. This is the side of the art which is subject to fashion, and changes under the same influences, with the same swiftness and the same unanimity. But as fashions among peasants sometimes last for ages, so certain decorative themes, although quite arbitrary, sometimes linger on because of the inertia of the eye, which demands what it is used to, or the poverty of invention in the designer. The worst taste and the best taste revel in decoration; but the motive here is play and there display. The Englishman deprecates both; he abominates the tawdry, the theatrical, the unnecessarily elaborate; and at the same time he is shy of novelty and playfulness; give him comfortable old grey clothes, good for all weathers, and comfortable, pleasing, inconspicuous houses, where he can live without feeling a fool or being the victim of his possessions. The comic poses of architecture, which come to him from abroad, together with its tragic structure, he accordingly tones down and neutralizes as far as possible. How gently, for instance, how pleasantly the wave of Italian architecture broke on these grassy shores! The classic line, which is tragic in its simple veracity and fixity, had already been submerged in attempts to vary it; in England, as in France, the Gothic habit of letting each part of a building have its own roof and its own symmetry, at once introduced the picturesque into the most "classic" designs. The Italian scale, too, was at once reduced, and the Italian rhetoric in stone, the baroque and the spectacular, was obliterated. How pleasantly the Palladian forms were fitted to their English setting; how the windows were widened and subdivided, the show pediments forgotten, the wreathed urns shaved into modest globes, the pilasters sensibly broadened into panels, and the classical detail applied to the native Gothic framework, with its gables, chimneys, and high roofs; whence the delightful brood of Jacobean and Queen Anne houses; and in the next generation the so genteel, so judicious Georgian mansion, with its ruddy brick, its broad windows, and its delicate mouldings and accessories of stone. The tragic and the comic were spirited away together, and only the domestic remained.

Nevertheless, at one of the greatest moments in its history, England had seemed to revel in comic art, and to have made it thoroughly its own. Domestic taste had reduced Gothic too, in England, to the human scale; prodigies of height and width in vaulting were not attempted, doors remained modest, hooded, perhaps, with an almost rustic porch; the vast spaces were subdivided, they were encrusted with ornament; the lines became playful, fan-tracery was invented, and floral pendants of stone; the walls became all glass, the ceilings carved bowers, and Gothic seemed on the point of smothering its rational skeleton altogether in luxurious trappings and the millinery of fashion. All England seemed to become one field of the cloth of gold; rooms looked like gilded palanquins or silken tents, roofs were forests of bannerets, pinnacles, and weathercocks; heraldry (a comic art) overspread every garment and utensil. Poetry, too, became euphuistic and labyrinthine and nevertheless friendly and familiar and full of a luscious humour, like the wit of the people. Even prose was a maze of metaphors and conceits, every phrase was embroidered, and no self-respecting person could say yea or nay without some artful circumlocution. It was this outburst of universal comedy that made Shakespeare possible—an exuberant genius in some respects not like a modern Englishman; he rose on the crest of a somewhat exotic wave of passion and vivacity, which at once subsided. Some vestiges of that spirit seem to linger in American manners; but for the most part puritanism killed it; and I do not think we need regret its loss. What could England have been but for the triumph of Protestantism there? Only a coarser France, or a cockney Ireland. The puritan stiffening was essential to raise England to its external dignity and greatness; and it was needed to fortify the inner man, to sober him, and persuade him to be worthy of himself. As for comic art, there is enough of it elsewhere, in the oriental and the French schools, and in painting and drawing, if not in architecture, all the younger artists are experimenting with it. The sort of aestheticism which was the fashion in London at the end of the nineteenth century tried to be playful, and to dote on art for its own sake; but in reality it was full of a perverted moralism; the aesthetes were simply Ruskin's pupils running away from school; they thought it immensely important to be choice, and quite disgraceful to think of morals. The architecture of that time was certainly not comic in my sense of the word, it did not give a free rein to exuberant fancy: it was only railway Gothic. But in England the mists and the ivy and the green sward and the dark screening trees can make endurable even that abortion of the ethics of Ruskin: and with better models, and less wilfulness, I see the fresh building of to-day recovering a national charm: the scale small, the detail polyglot, the arrangement gracious and convenient, the marriage with the green earth and the luminous air, foreseen and prepared for. Domestic architecture in England follows to the letter the advice of Polonius:

Costly thy garment as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy: rich, not gaudy.

[21]

THE ENGLISH CHURCH

Compromise is odious to passionate natures because it seems a surrender, and to intellectual natures because it seems a confusion; but to the inner man, to the profound Psyche within us, whose life is warm, nebulous, and plastic, compromise seems the path of profit and justice. Health has many conditions; life is a resultant of many forces. Are there not several impulses in us at every moment? Are there not several sides to every question? Has not every party caught sight of something veritably right and good? Is not the greatest practicable harmony, or the least dissension, the highest good? And if by the word "truth" we designate not the actual order of the facts, nor the exact description of them, but some inner symbol of reconciliation with reality on our own part, bringing comfort, safety, and assurance, then truth also will lie in compromise: truth will be partly truth to oneself, partly workable convention and plausibility. A man's life as it flows is not a theorem to which there is any one rigid solution. It is composed of many strands and looks to divers issues. There is the love of home and the lure of adventure; there is chastity which is a good, and there is love which is a good also; work must leave room for sport, science for poetry, and reason for prejudice. Can it be a man's duty to annul any of the elements that make up his moral being and, because he possesses a religious tradition, shall he refuse the gifts of his senses, of his affections, of his country and its history, of the ruling science, morality, and taste of his day? Far from it: religion, says the inner man, ought rather to be the highest synthesis of our nature, and make room for all these things. It should not succumb to any dead or foreign authority that ignores or dishonours them. The Englishman finds that he was born a Christian, and therefore wishes to remain a Christian; but his Christianity must be his own, no less plastic and adaptable than his inner man; and it is an axiom with him that nothing can be obligatory for a Christian which is unpalatable to an Englishman.

Only a few years ago, if a traveller landing in England on a Sunday and entering an Anglican church, had been told that the country was Catholic and its church a branch of the Catholic church, his astonishment would have been extreme. "Catholic" is opposed in the first place to national and in the second place to Protestant; how then, he would have asked himself, can a church be Catholic that is so obviously and dismally Protestant, and so narrowly and primly national? Why then this abuse of language? And why this silly provincialism of insisting on always calling Catholics Roman Catholics, as if there were any others, and they were not known by that name all the world over? Nevertheless, the restoration of an elder Anglicanism in our day has somewhat softened these paradoxes; and when we remember how fondly the English screen their instincts in legal fictions and in genteel shams, the paradoxes vanish altogether.

What is Protestantism? It is all things to all men, if they are Protestants: but I see in it three leading motifs: to revert to primitive Christianity, to inspire moral and political reform, and to accept the religious witness of the inner man. Now the Church of England, intensely Protestant as it seemed until the other day, is not Protestant in any of these respects. No established national church could possibly be so. The subjection to Parliament which renders the English church not Catholic, renders it also not Protestant. To a primitive Christian, to a puritan reformer or to a transcendental mystic, a religion established by lay authority is a contradiction in terms; a lay government may be more or less inspired by righteousness, but it cannot mediate salvation. A Protestant is essentially a nonconformist. Moreover, if we examine the theology of the English church, we see that whilst incidentally very heretical, it is still fundamentally Catholic; it admits only a single deposit of faith and one apostolic fountain of grace for all mankind. But in its view heresy in any branch of the church does not cut it off from the tree. Heresy is something to which all churches are liable; the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople fall into it hardly less often or less desperately than the archbishop of Canterbury himself. Heresy is to be conceived as eccentricity within the fold, not as separation from it; it is the tacking of the ship on its voyage. Saint Peter or Saint Paul or both of them must have been heretical in their little controversies; and Christ himself must have had at times, if not always, but a partial view of the truth; for instance, in respect to the date and the material nature of his second coming. Accordingly, although it may be a little trying to the nerves, it is no essential scandal that a curate should be addicted to Mariolatry, or that a dean should be unfortunately ambiguous on the subject of the Incarnation: such rapids and backwaters in the stream of Christian thought only prove how broad and full it is capable of being.

That many Catholic bodies, if not all, should be constantly schismatic or heretical, is therefore no paradox with this conception of the church; and it is obvious that Rome itself is heretical and schismatic on this theory, since it has laid an exaggerated weight on the text about Peter and the keys, and has claimed a jurisdiction Over the eastern patriarchates which was certainly not primitive, and which these patriarchates have never honestly acknowledged. On the other hand, the Church of England belonged to the Western Empire and its Christianity has always been Latin. It broke away from the patriarchate of Rome not at all in sympathy with the claims of Antioch or Constantinople, but notoriously in sympathy with German Protestantism. This revolt was based on the same anti-Catholic and inconsistent motives as the German Reformation—namely, greed and desire for absolute power in princes, zeal in puritan reformers, and impatience of moral and intellectual constraint in the body of the clergy and laity. Nationalism, faith, learning, and licence were curiously mingled in those turbid minds, and the Church of England inherits all that indescribable spiritual confusion. It is national in its morals and manners, mincing in its scholarship, snobbish in its sympathies, sentimental in its emotions. Spiritual minds in the church—of which there are many—suffer under this heredity incubus of worldliness; but what can they avail? Some join the socialists; a few escape to Rome; there at least the worldliness, however conspicuous, is regarded as a vice and not as a virtue. The convert will find no dearth of petty passions, machinations, vanities, tricks, and shameless disbelief; but all this will be, like debauchery, a crust of corruption, avowedly corrupt. It is dirt on the skin, not cancer at the heart. But then the true Catholic has made the great surrender; he has renounced, or never thought of maintaining, the authority of his inner man. He is a catechumen; his teachers will read for him the symptoms of health or disease visible in his thoughts and dispositions; by their discipline—which is an ancient science—they will help him to save his soul; a totally different thing from obeying the impulses or extending the adventures of the transcendental self. The inner man, for the Catholic as for the materialist, is only a pathological phenomenon. Therefore the Englishman, as I conceive him, living in and by his inner man, can never be really a Catholic, either Anglican or Roman; if he likes to call himself by either name, it is equally a masquerade, a fad like a thousand others to which the inner man, so seriously playful, is prone to lend itself. He may go over to Rome on a spiritual tour, as he might abscond for a year and live in Japan with a Japanese wife; but if he is converted really, and becomes a Catholic at heart, for good, and in all simplicity, then he is no longer the man he was. Words cannot measure the chasm that must henceforth separate him from everything at home. I am not surprised that he recoils from so desperate a step. It is not only the outward coarseness and laxity of Catholic manners that offend him; these vices are not universal, and he would not need to share them. But for him, a modern Englishman, with freedom and experiment and reserve in his blood, always nursing within himself the silent love of nature and of rebellion, to go over to Rome is an essential suicide: the inner man must succumb first. Such an Englishman might become a saint, but only by becoming a foreigner.

There is another sense altogether in which the English church might be catholic if it chose. Suppose we lay it down as an axiom that whatever is acceptable to the inner man is good and true, and that whatever is good and true is Christian—Christianity would then be open to every influence which, whilst apparently denaturalizing it, might help to manifest its fulness. It would cast off husk after husk of doctrine, developing the living spirit and feeding it with every substance which it was fitted to absorb. There is nothing new in this process. Christianity was born of such a marriage between the Jewish soul and the Greek. Greek philosophy was absorbed with magnificent results; the restoration of Pauline theology, and the other insights of Protestantism, led to German philosophy, which has been absorbed too; the sloughing off of monasticism and ecclesiasticism have put Christianity in a position to understand and express the modern world; the reduction of revelation, by the higher criticism of the Bible, to its true place in human history, will involve a new change of front; and the absorption of modern science and of democracy would complete the transformation.

To justify this method the church might appeal to an archbishop of Canterbury who—this was in the old days—was also a saint and a great philosopher. Saint Anselm has a famous proof of the existence of God which runs as follows: God exists, because God is, by definition, the most real of beings. According to this argument, if it should turn out that the most real of beings was matter, it would follow that matter was God. This might be thought a consequence drawn in mockery; but I do not mean to deride Saint Anselm, whom I revere, but on the contrary to lay bare the nerve of his argument which if the age had given him scope, and he had not been Arch-bishop of Canterbury, he might have followed to its sublime conclusion, as Spinoza did after him. There is a dignity in existence, in fact, in truth which to some speculative and rapt natures absorbs and cancels every other dignity: and on this principle the English church might, without any sudden or distressing negation, gradually turn its worship to the most real of beings, wheresoever it may be found; and I presume the most real of beings will be the whole of what is found everywhere. A narrower conception of God might at each step give place to a wider one; and the church, instead of embodying one particular revelation and striving to impose it universally through propaganda, might become hospitable to all revelations, and find a place for the inspirations of all ages and countries under the aegis of its own progressive traditions. So the religion of ancient Rome domesticated all the gods; and so the English language, if it should become the medium of international intercourse, might by translation or imitation of other literatures or by the infiltration into it of foreign words and styles, really become a vehicle for all human ideas.

I am not sure whether one party in the English church might not welcome such a destiny; but at present, so far as I can see, the tenderer and more poetical spirits in it take quite another direction. They are trying to recover the insights and practices of mediaeval piety; they are archaistic in devotion. There is a certain romance in their decision to believe greatly, to feel mystically, to pray perpetually. They study their attitudes, as they kneel in some correctly restored church, hearing or intoning some revived early chant, and wondering why they should not choose a divine lady in heaven to be their love and their advocate, as did the troubadours, or why they should not have recumbent effigies of themselves carved on their tombs, with their legs crossed, like the crusaders. "Things" cried the rapturous young priest who showed me the beautiful chapel of Pusey House, "what we need is Things!"

22

LEAVING CHURCH

Protestant faith does not vanish into the sunlight as Catholic faith does, but leaves a shadowy ghost haunting the night of the soul. Faith, in the two cases, was not faith in the same sense; for the Catholic it was belief in a report or an argument; for the Protestant it was confidence in an allegiance. When Catholics leave the church they do so by the south door, into the glare of the market-place, where their eye is at once attracted by the wares displayed in the booths, by the flower-stalls with their bright awnings, by the fountain with its baroque Tritons blowing the spray into the air, and the children laughing and playing round it, by the concourse of townspeople and strangers, and by the soldiers, perhaps, marching past; and if they cast a look back at the church at all, it is only to admire its antique architecture, that crumbling filigree of stone so poetically surviving in its incongruous setting. It is astonishing sometimes with what contempt, with what a complete absence of understanding, unbelievers in Catholic countries look back on their religion. For one cultivated mind that sees in that religion a monument to his racial genius, a heritage of poetry and aft almost as precious as the classical heritage, which indeed it incorporated in a hybrid form, there are twenty ignorant radicals who pass it by apologetically, as they might the broken toys or dusty schoolbooks of childhood. Their political animosity, legitimate in itself, blinds their imagination, and renders them even politically foolish; because in their injustice to human nature and to their national history they discredit their own cause, and provoke reaction.

Protestants, on the contrary, leave the church by the north door, into the damp solitude of a green churchyard, amid yews and weeping willows and overgrown mounds and fallen illegible gravestones. They feel a terrible chill; the few weedy flowers that may struggle through that long grass do not console them; it was far brighter and warmer and more decent inside. The church—boring as the platitudes and insincerities were which you listened to there for hours—was an edifice, something protective, social, and human; whereas here, in this vague unhomely wilderness, nothing seems to await you but discouragement and melancholy. Better the church than the madhouse. And yet the Protestant can hardly go back, as the Catholic does easily on occasion, out of habit, or fatigue, or disappointment in life, or metaphysical delusion, or the emotional weakness of the death-bed. No, the Protestant is more in earnest, he carries his problem and his religion within him. In his very desolation he will find God. This has often been a cause of wonder to me: the Protestant pious economy is so repressive and morose and the Catholic so charitable and pagan, that I should have expected the Catholic sometimes to sigh a little for his Virgin and his saints, and the Protestant to shout for joy at having got rid of his God. But the trouble is that the poor Protestant can't get rid of his God; for his idea of God is a vague symbol that stands not essentially, as with the Catholic, for a particular legendary or theological personage, but rather for that unfathomable influence which, if it does not make for righteousness, at least has so far made for existence and has imposed it upon us; so that go through what doors you will and discard what dogmas you choose, God will confront you still whichever way you may turn. In this sense the enlightened Catholic, too, in leaving the church, has merely rediscovered God, finding him now not in the church alone, but in the church only as an expression of human fancy, and in human life itself only as in one out of a myriad forms of natural existence. But the Protestant is less dear in his gropings, the atmosphere of his inner man is more charged with vapours, and it takes longer for the light dubiously to break through; and often in his wintry day the sun sets without shining.

[23]

DEATHBED MANNERS

In all Protestant countries I have noticed a certain hush about death, an uncomfortable secrecy, and a fear as if of blasphemy whenever the subject threatens to come up. Is it that hell is still felt to lie, for the vast majority, immediately behind the curtain? Or is it that people have encouraged themselves to live and love as if they were immortal, and to this lifelong bluff of theirs death brings a contradiction which they have not the courage to face? Or is it simply that death is too painful, too sacred, or too unseemly for polite ears? That a desire to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to Brighton. "Oh yes, our two sons went down in the Black Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them, of course; but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quite instantly, so that we don't mind half so much as if they had had any of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn't have liked it at all being crippled, you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it is. Just blown to atoms! It is such a blessing!"

Of course, the poor parents feel their hearts sink within them in private; but their affectation of cheerfulness has its logic. Death is a fact; and we had better accept it as such as we do the weather; perhaps, if we pretend not to care, we really shan't care so much. The men in the trenches and hospitals have often been bitterly unreconciled and rebellious, and haunted by the cruel futility of their sufferings: but the nursing everywhere has been devoted and heroic: and my impression of the mourning at home is, that it has been philosophical.

English manners are sensible and conducive to comfort even at a death-bed. No summoning of priests, no great concourse of friends and relations, no loud grief, no passionate embraces and poignant farewells; no endless confabulations in the antechamber, no gossip about the symptoms, the remedies, or the doctors' quarrels and blunders; no breathless enumeration of distinguished visitors, letters, and telegrams; no tearful reconciliation of old family feuds nor whisperings about the division of the property. Instead, either silence and closed doors, if there is real sorrow, or more commonly only a little physical weariness in the mourners, a little sigh or glance at one another, as if to say: We are simply waiting for events; the doctors and nurses, are attending to everything, and no doubt, when the end comes, it will be for the best. In the departing soul, too, probably dulness and indifference. No repentance, no anxiety, no definite hopes or desires either for this life or for the next. Perhaps old memories returning, old loves automatically reviving; possibly a vision, by anticipation, of some reunion in the other world: but how pale, how ghostly, how impotent this death-dream is! I seem to overhear the last words, the last thoughts of a mother: "Dear children, you know I love you. Provision has been made. I should be of little use to you any longer. How pleasant to look out of that window into the park! Be sure they don't forget to give Pup some meat with his dog-biscuit." It is all very simple, very much repressed, the pattering echo of daily words. Death, it is felt, is not important. What matters is the part we have played in the world, or may still play there by our influence. We are not going to a melodramatic Last Judgement. We are shrinking into ourselves, into the seed we came from, into a long winter's sleep. Perhaps in another springtime we may revive and come again to the light somewhere, among those sweet flowers, those dear ones we have lost. That is God's secret. We have tried to do right here. If there is any Beyond, we shall try to do right there also.

[24]

WAR SHRINES

In many an English village there is nowadays a calvary. The novel object merges with wonderful ease into the landscape, and one would almost think it had always been there. The protecting wooden eaves have already lost their rigidity and their varnish; the crucifix no longer reminds one of the shop-window from which it came; it does not suggest popish aggression nor the affectations of ritualism. Flecks of sunlight play upon it familiarly, as upon the wayside stones, and it casts its shadow across the common like any natural tree. The flowers in the pots before it have withered, they droop half hidden in the ivy that has overgrown them. Even the scroll of names has modified its official ghastliness—all those newly dead obscure souls starkly ticketed and numbered; the tragic page has got somewhat weather-stained and illegible, and is curling up at the edges; it has become a dead leaf. Decidedly the war-shrine is at home in the scene. It is a portion of that unspoken truth which every one carries about with him, and the people seem again to breathe freely under the shadow of the cross.

What does the cross signify? We are told that Christ died to save us, and various analogies, legal, sentimental, or chivalrous, are put forward to make that notion acceptable. I respect the sentiments of duty and devotion which this doctrine of legal redemption can inspire; they express readiness to do well, and in a certain moral sense, as Hamlet says, the readiness is all; yet it is a conception of religion borrowed from ancient lawyers and rhetoricians, a sort of celestial diplomacy. The cross can mean something else; it can symbolize poetically a general truth about existence and experience. This truth is the same which the Indians express more philosophically by saying that life is an illusion—an expression which is itself figurative and poetical. It is certainly not an illusion that I have now the experience of being alive and of finding myself surrounded, at least in appearance, by a tolerably tractable world, material and social. It is not an illusion that this experience is now filling me with mixed and trooping feelings. In calling existence an illusion, the Indian sages meant that it is fugitive and treacherous: the images and persons that diversify it are unsubstantial, and myself the most shifting and unsubstantial of all. The substance and fine mechanism which I do not doubt underlie this changing apparition are out of scale with my imagined units, and (beyond a certain point) out of sympathy with my interests. Life is an illusion if we trust it, but it is a truth if we do not trust it; and this discovery is perhaps better symbolized by the cross than by the Indian doctrine of illusion. I will not say that not to exist would not be better; existence may be condemned by the very respectable criterion of excellence or "reality" which demands in all things permanence and safety; but so long as we exist, however precariously or "unreally," I think it the part of wisdom to find a way of living well, rather than merely to deprecate living. The cross is certainly a most violent image, putting suffering and death before us with a rude emphasis; and I can understand the preference of many for the serene Buddha, lifting the finger of meditation and profound counsel, and freeing the soul by the sheer force of knowledge and of sweet reason. Nevertheless, I am not sorry to have been born a Christian: for the soul cannot be really freed except by ceasing to live; and it is whilst we still exist, not after we are dead to existence, that we need counsel It is therefore the crucified spirit, not the liberated spirit, that is our true master.

Certainly the spirit is crucified, first by being incarcerated in the flesh at all, and then again, after it has identified itself with the will of the flesh, by being compelled to renounce it. Yet both this painful incarnation and this painful redemption have something marvellously sweet about them. The world which torments us is truly beautiful; indeed, that is one of its ways of tormenting us; and we are not wrong in loving, but only in appropriating it. The surrender of this untenable claim to exist and to possess the beautiful, is in its turn beautiful and good. Christ loved the world, in an erotic sense in which Buddha did not love it: and the world has loved the cross as it can never love the Bo-tree. So that out of the very entanglements of the spirit come marvellous compensations to the spirit, which in its liberation leave it still human and friendly to all that it gives up. I do not at all accept the morality of the Indians in so far as it denies the values of illusion; the only evil in illusion is that it deceives; there is beauty in its being. True insight, true mercy, is tender and sensitive to the infinite pulsations of ignorance and passion: it is not deceived by the prattle of the child, but is not offended by it. The knowledge that existence can manifest but cannot retain the good reconciles us at once to living and to dying. That, I think, is the wisdom of the cross.

There is a folly of the cross also, when the knowledge or half-knowledge that life must be suffering, until it is cleared of the love of life, erects suffering into an end in itself, which is insane and monstrous. I suspect, however, that in asceticism as actually preached and practised there is less of this idolatry of suffering than the outsider imagines, who lying amid his cushions severely reproves those who indulge in a penance. There is an asceticism which may be loved for its simplicity, its clean poverty and cold water, hygienic like mountain air; but flagellations and blood and night-long wailings are not an end in themselves; no saint expects to carry them with him into heaven; at best they are a homoeopathic cure for the lusts of the flesh. Their purpose, if not their effect, is freedom and peace. I wish Protestants, who find their ascetic discipline in hard work, were equally clear about its object. From the worship of instrumentalities, whether penitential or worldly, the cross redeems us: in draining the cup of suffering it transcends suffering, and in being raised above the earth it lifts us out of it. My instinct is to go and stand under the cross, with the monks and the crusaders, far away from these Jews and Protestants who adore the world and who govern it.

There is a mystical folly also among the Indians, when they assign a positive bliss to pure Being; this, too, is substance-worship. Identity with substance is deemed blessed because beneath the vicissitudes of illusion, substance remains always solid, safe, and real. Certainly substance, if there is such a thing, must be safe, real, and solid; for we understand by substance whatever is constant in change. Hence the desire to escape from illusion and from suffering hails a return to the indistinction of substance as a positive salvation; remember that you are dust, return to the infinite from which you came, and nothing ominous can threaten you any more, the dust and the infinite are safe. But changeless substance, being unconscious, cannot be blissful; the attribution of divine bliss to it is an illusion of contrast, and, like so much philosophy, mere rhetoric turned into a revelation. What verbal mirage is this, to see happiness in fixity? Substance may be conceived logically, and then it means pure Being; or it may be conceived psychologically, and then it means absorption in the sense of pure Being; or it may be conceived physically as matter, a name for the constant quantities in things that are traceably transformed into one another. Pure Being and the contemplation of pure Being seem at first sight very different from matter; but they may be a dramatic impersonation of matter, viewed from the inside, and felt as blind intensity and solidified ignorance. No one calls matter blessed when viewed externally, although it is then that its best qualities, its fertility and order, come into view: yet half mankind have fallen to worshipping matter in envy of its internal condition, and to trying to fall back into it, because it is the negation (and yet the cause!) of all their troubles. The idea of an intense nothing hypnotizes them, it is the sovereign anaesthetic; and they forget that this intense nothing, by its fruitfulness in the realm of illusion, has generated all their desires, including this desperate desire to be nothing, which turns that nothingness, by a last illusion, into a good.

If to be saved were merely to cease, we should all be saved by a little waiting: and I say this advisedly, without forgetting that the Indians threaten us with reincarnation. It is a myth to which I have no objection, because only selfishness persuades me that if I am safe, all is well. What difference does it make in reality whether the suffering and ignominy of life fall to what I call myself or to what I call another man? The only trouble is that the moral redemption which is proposed to us as a means of safety instead of death, touches the individual only, just as death does. Christ and Buddha are called saviours of the world; I think it must be in irony, for the world is just as much in need of salvation as ever. Death and insight and salvation are personal. The world springs up unregenerate every morning in spite of all the Tabors and Calvaries of yesterday. What can save the world, without destroying it, is self-knowledge on the part of the world, not of course reflective self-knowledge (for the world is not an animal that can think) but such a regimen and such a philosophy established in society as shall recognize truly what the world is, and what happiness is possible in it. The force that has launched me into this dream of life does not care what turns my dream takes nor how long it troubles me. Nature denies at every moment, not indeed that I am troubled and dreaming, but that there are any natural units like my visions, or anything anomalous in what I hate, or final in what I love. Under these circumstances, what is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detached from the world without hostility to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are; and not to lay up treasures, except in heaven.

How charming is divine philosophy, when it is really divine, when it descends to earth from a higher sphere, and loves the things of earth without needing or collecting them I What the gay Aristippus said of his mistress: I possess, I am not possessed, every spirit should say of an experience that ruffles it like a breeze playing on the summer sea. A thousand ships sail over it in vain, and the worst of tempests is in a teapot. This once acknowledged and inwardly digested, life and happiness can honestly begin. Nature is innocently fond of puffing herself out, spreading her peacock feathers, and saying, What a fine bird am I! And so she is; to rave against this vanity would be to imitate it. On the contrary, the secret of a merry carnival is that Lent is at hand. Having virtually renounced our follies, we are for the first time able to enjoy them with a free heart in their ephemeral purity. When laughter is humble, when it is not based on self-esteem, it is wiser than tears. Conformity is wiser than hot denials, tolerance wiser than priggishness and puritanism. It is not what earnest people renounce that makes me pity them, it is what they work for. No possible reform will make existence adorable or fundamentally just. Modern England has worked too hard and cared too much; so much tension is hysterical and degrading; nothing is ever gained by it worth half what it spoils. Wealth is dismal and poverty cruel unless both are festive. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The easier attitudes which seem more frivolous are at bottom infinitely more spiritual and profound than the tense attitudes; they are nearer to understanding and to renunciation; they are nearer to the cross. Perhaps if England had remained Catholic it might have remained merry; it might still dare, as Shakespeare dared, to be utterly tragic and also frankly and humbly gay. The world has been too much with it; Hebraic religion and German philosophy have confirmed it in a deliberate and agonized worldliness. They have sanctioned, in the hard-working and reforming part of the middle classes, an unqualified respect for prosperity and success; life is judged with all the blindness of life itself. There is no moral freedom. In so far as minds are absorbed in business or in science they all inevitably circle about the same objects, and take part in the same events, combining their thoughts and efforts in the same "worlds work." The world, therefore, invades and dominates them; they lose their independence and almost their distinction from one another. Their philosophy accordingly only exaggerates a little when it maintains that their individual souls are all manifestation of a single spirit, the Earth-spirit. They hardly have any souls they can call their own, that may be saved out of the world, or that may see and judge the world from above.

Death is the background of life much as empty space is that of the stars; it is a deeper thing always lying behind, like the black sky behind the blue. In the realm of existence death is indeed nothing; only a word for something negative and merely notional—the fact that each life has limits in time and is absent beyond them. But in the realm of truth, as things are eternally, life is a little luminous meteor in an infinite abyss of nothingness, a rocket fired on a dark night; and to see life, and to value it, from the point of view of death is to see and to value it truly. The foot of the cross—I dare not say the cross itself—is a good station from which to survey existence. In the greatest griefs there is a tragic calm; the fury of the will is exhausted, and our thoughts rise to another level; as the shrill delights and the black sorrows of childhood are impossible in old age. People sometimes make crosses of flowers or of gold; and I like to see the enamelled crucifix richly surrounded with scrolls, and encrusted with jewels; without a touch of this pagan instinct the religion of the cross would not be healthy nor just. In the skirts of Mount Calvary lies the garden of the resurrection: I do not refer to any melodramatic resurrection, such as is pictured in Jewish and Christian legend, but to one which actually followed quietly, sweetly, in the light of a purer day, in the cloister, in the home, in the regenerate mind. After renouncing the world, the soul may find the world more amiable, and may live in it with a smile and a mystic doubt and one foot in eternity. Vanity is innocent when recognized to be vain, and is no longer a disgrace to the spirit. The happiness of wisdom may at first seem autumnal, and the shadow of the cross the shadow of death; but it is healing slow; and presently, in the hollow where the cross was set, the scent of violets surprises us, and the crocuses peep out amongst the thorns. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity. Far be it from me to suggest that existence is the better because non-existence precedes and follows it; certainly, if man was immortal his experience could not include tradition, parentage, childhood, love, nor old age; nevertheless, from the point of view of both bodily and intellectual instincts immortality would be far better. But since, as a matter of fact, birth and death actually occur, and our brief career is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in the light of the tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny it, and build everything on a fundamental lie. Death does not say to life that life is nothing, or does not exist, or is an illusion; that would be wild talk, and would show that the inspiration we had drawn from death was as little capable of doing justice to life, as life itself is when mindless, of discovering death, or learning anything from it. What the environing presence of death teaches is merely that life has such and such limits and such and such a course, whether it reflects on its course or not, whether it recognizes its limits or ignores them. Death can do nothing to our lives except to frame them in, to show them off with a broad margin of darkness and silence; so that to live in the shadow of death and of the cross is to spread a large nimbus of peace around our littleness.

[25]

TIPPERARY

What a strange pleasure there is sometimes in seeing what we expected, or hearing what we knew was a fact! The dream then seems really to hold together and truth to be positively true. The bells that announced the Armistice brought me no news; a week sooner or a week later they had to ring. Certainly if the purpose of the war had been conquest or victory, nobody had achieved it; but the purposes of things, and especially of wars, are imputed to them rhetorically, the impulses at work being too complicated and changeful to be easily surveyed; and in this case, for the French and the English, the moving impulse had been defence; they had been sustained through incredible trials by the awful necessity of not yielding. That strain had now been relaxed; and as the conduct of men is determined by present forces and not by future advantages, they could have no heart to fight on. It seemed enough to them that the wanton blow had been parried, that the bully had begged for mercy. It was amusing to hear him now. He said that further bloodshed this time would be horrible; his tender soul longed to get home safely, to call it quits, and to take a long breath and plan a new combination before the next bout. His collapse had been evident for days and months; yet these bells that confirmed the fact were pleasant to hear. Those mean little flags, hung out here and there by private initiative in the streets of Oxford, had almost put on a look of triumph; the very sunlight and brisk autumnal air seemed to have heard the tidings, and to invite the world to begin to live again at ease. Certainly many a sad figure and many a broken soul must slink henceforth on crutches, a mere survival; but they, too, will die off gradually. The grass soon grows over a grave.

So musing, I suddenly heard a once familiar strain, now long despised and out of favour, the old tune of Tipperary. In a coffee-house frequented at that hour some wounded officers from the hospital at Somerville were singing it, standing near the bar; they were breaking all rules, both of surgeons and of epicures, and were having champagne in the morning. And good reason they had for it. They were reprieved, they should never have to go back to the front, their friends—such as were left—would all come home alive. Instinctively the old grumbling, good-natured, sentimental song, which they used to sing when they first joined, came again into their minds. It had been indeed a long, long way to Tipperary. But they had trudged on and had come round full circle; they were in Tipperary at last.

I wonder what they think Tipperary means—for this is a mystical song. Probably they are willing to leave it vague, as they do their notions of honour or happiness or heaven. Their soldiering is over; they remember, with a strange proud grief, their comrades who died to make this day possible, hardly believing that it ever would come; they are overjoyed, yet half ashamed, to be safe themselves; they forget their wounds; they see a green vista before them, a jolly, busy, sporting, loving life in the old familiar places. Everything will go on, they fancy, as if nothing had happened.

Good honest unguided creatures! They are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace. If experience could teach mankind anything, how different our morals and our politics would be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady I If we knew ourselves, our conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect all our passions, if we knew the world. As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in the dark; each generation breaks its egg-shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions, and rushes down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or become wise too late and to no purpose. These young men are no rustics, they are no fools; and yet they have passed through the most terrible ordeal, they have seen the mad heart of this world riven and unmasked, they have had long vigils before battle, long nights tossing with pain, in which to meditate on the spectacle; and yet they have learned nothing. The young barbarians want to be again at play. If it were to be only cricket or boating, it would be innocent enough; but they are going to gamble away their lives and their country, taking their chances in the lottery of love and of business and of politics, with a sporting chance thrown in, perhaps, of heaven. They are going to shut out from view everything except their topmost instincts and easy habits, and to trust to luck. Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war—perhaps the last of all wars—is over!

Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war. Not that non-existence deserves to be called peace; it is only by an illusion of contrast and a pathetic fallacy that we are tempted to call it so. The church has a poetical and melancholy prayer, that the souls of the faithful departed may rest in peace. If in that sigh there lingers any fear that, when a tomb is disturbed, the unhappy ghost is doomed to walk more often abroad, the fear is mad; and if it merely expresses the hope that dead men's troubles are over, the wish is superfluous; but perhaps we may gloss the old superstition, and read into it the rational aspiration that all souls in other spheres, or in the world to come upon earth, might learn to live at peace with God and with things. That would be something worth praying for, but I am afraid it is asking too much. God—I mean the sum of all possible good—is immutable; to make our peace with him it is we, not he, that must change. We should need to discover, and to pursue singly, the happiness proper to our nature, including the accidents of race and sex and the very real advantages of growing old and of not living for ever; and we should need to respect without envying all other forms of the good. As to the world of existence, it is certainly fluid, and by judicious pressure we may coax some parts of it into greater conformity with our wills; yet it is so vast, and crawls through such ponderous, insidious revolutions, all so blind and so inimical to one another, that in order to live at peace with things we should need to acquire a marvellous plasticity, or a splendid indifference. We should have to make peace with the fact of war. It is the stupid obstinacy of our self-love that produces tragedy, and makes us angry with the world. Free life has the spirit of comedy. It rejoices in the seasonable beauty of each new thing, and laughs at its decay, covets no possessions, demands no agreement, and strives to sustain nothing in being except a gallant spirit of courage and truth, as each fresh adventure may renew it.

This gallant spirit of courage and truth, you young men had it in those early days when you first sang Tipperary; have you it still, I wonder, when you repeat the song? Some of you, no doubt. I have seen in some of you the smile that makes light of pain, the sturdy humility that accepts mutilation and faces disability without repining or shame; armless and legless men are still God's creatures, and even if you cannot see the sun you can bask in it, and there is joy on earth—perhaps the deepest and most primitive joy—even in that. But others of you, though you were driven to the war by contagious example, or by force, are natural cowards; you are perhaps superior persons, intellectual snobs, and are indignant at having been interrupted in your important studies and made to do useless work. You are disgusted at the stupidity of all the generals, and whatever the Government does is an outrage to your moral sense. You were made sick at the thought of the war before you went to it, and you are sicker of it now. You are pacifists, and you suspect that the Germans, who were not pacifists, were right after all. I notice you are not singing Tipperary this morning; you are too angry to be glad, and you wish it to be understood that you can't endure such a vulgar air. You are willing, however, to sip your champagne with the rest; in hospital you seem to have come forward a little socially; but you find the wine too dry or too sweet, and you are making a wry face at it.

Ah, my delicate friends, if the soul of a philosopher may venture to address you, let me whisper this counsel in your ears: Reserve a part of your wrath; you have not seen the worst yet. You suppose that this war has been a criminal blunder and an exceptional horror; you imagine that before long reason will prevail, and all these inferior people that govern the world will be swept aside, and your own party will reform everything and remain always in office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first taste of reality. It should teach you to dismiss all your philosophies of progress or of a governing reason as the babble of dreamers who walk through one world mentally beholding another. I don't mean that you or they are fools; heaven forbid. You have too much mind. It is easy to behave very much like other people and yet be possessed inwardly by a narcotic dream. I am sure the flowers—and you resemble flowers yourselves, though a bit wilted—if they speculate at all, construct idealisms which, like your own, express their inner sensibility and their experience of the weather, without much resemblance to the world at large. Their thoughts, like yours, are all positings and deductions and asseverations of what ought to be, whilst the calm truth is marching on unheeded outside. No great harm ensues, because the flowers are rooted in their places and adjusted to the prevailing climate. It doesn't matter what they think. You, too, in your lodgings in Chelsea, quite as in Lhassa or in Mount Athos, may live and die happy in your painted cells. It is the primitive and the ultimate office of the mind to supply such a sanctuary. But if you are ever driven again into the open, if the course of events should be so rapid, that you could catch the drift of it in your short life (since you despise tradition), then you must prepare for a ruder shock. There is eternal war in nature, a war in which every cause is ultimately lost and every nation destroyed. War is but resisted change; and change must needs be resisted so long as the organism it would destroy retains any vitality. Peace itself means discipline at home and invulnerability abroad—two forms of permanent virtual war; peace requires so vigorous an internal regimen that every germ of dissolution or infection shall be repelled before it reaches the public soul. This war has been a short one, and its ravages slight in comparison with what remains standing: a severe war is one in which the entire manhood of a nation is destroyed, its cities razed, and its women and children driven into slavery. In this instance the slaughter has been greater, perhaps, only because modern populations are so enormous; the disturbance has been acute only because the modern industrial system is so dangerously complex and unstable; and the expense seems prodigious because we were so extravagantly rich. Our society was a sleepy glutton who thought himself immortal and squealed inexpressibly, like a stuck pig, at the first prick of the sword. An ancient city would have thought this war, or one relatively as costly, only a normal incident; and certainly the Germans will not regard it otherwise.

Existence, being a perpetual generation, involves aspiration, and its aspiration envelops it in an atmosphere of light, the joy and the beauty of being, which is the living heaven; but for the same reason existence, in its texture, involves a perpetual and a living hell—the conflict and mutual hatred of its parts, each endeavouring to devour its neighbour's substance in the vain effort to live for ever. Now, the greater part of most men's souls dwells in this hell, and ends there. One of their chief torments is the desire to live without dying—continual death being a part of the only possible and happy life. We wish to exist materially, and yet resent the plastic stress, the very force of material being, which is daily creating and destroying us. Certainly war is hell, as you, my fair friends, are fond of repeating; but so is rebellion against war. To live well you must be victorious. It is with war as with the passion of love, which is a war of another kind: war at first against the beloved for favour and possession; war afterwards against the rest of the world for the beloved's sake. Often love, too, is a torment and shameful; but it has its laughing triumphs, and the attempt to eliminate it is a worse torture, and more degrading. When was a coward at peace? Homer, who was a poet of war, did not disguise its horrors nor its havoc, but he knew it was the shield of such happiness as is possible on earth. If Hector had not scoured the plain in his chariot, Paris could not have piped upon the slopes of Ida, nor sported with his sheep and his goddesses upon the green. The merchants of Crete or Phoenicia could not have drawn up their black keels upon the beach, if the high walls of Ilium had not cast their protecting shadow on their bales of merchandise, their bags of coin, and their noisy bargaining. When Hector was no more and the walls were a heap of dust, all the uses of peace vanished also: ruin and utter meanness came to inhabit that land, and still inhabit it. Nor is war, which makes peace possible, without occasions in which a free spirit, not too much attached to existence, may come into its own. Homer shows us how his heroes could gather even from battle a certain harvest of tenderness and nobility, and how above their heads, half seen through the clouds of dust and of pain, flew the winged chariots of the gods, and music mingled with their banquet.

Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness, since the good which the world brings forth is so fugitive and bought at so great a price; but be brave. If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending. Nothing you can lose By dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility; life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship with nature which that readiness brings. The things we know and love on earth are, and should be, transitory; they are, as were the things celebrated by Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity, not in the end only but continually, as a phrase passes into its meaning; and since they are part of us and we of them, we should accompany them with a good grace: it would be desolation to survive. The eternal is always present, as the flux of time in one sense never is, since it is all either past or future; but this elusive existence in passing sets before the spirit essences in which spirit rests, and which can never vary; as a dramatic poet creates a character which many an actor afterwards on many a night may try to enact. Of course the flux of matter carries the poets away too; they become old-fashioned, and nobody wishes any longer to play their characters; but each age has its own gods. Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be. Our good mother Psyche, who is a convolution of this material flux, breeds us accordingly to mindlessness and anxiety, out of which it is hard for our youthful intellect to wean itself to peace, by escaping into the essential eternity of everything it sees and loves. So long as the world goes round we shall see Tipperary only, as it were, out of the window of our troop-train. Your heart and mine may remain there, but it's a long, long way that the world has to go.

[26]

SKYLARKS

There is a poet in every nice Englishman; there is a little fund of free vitality deep down in him which the exigencies of his life do not tap and which no art at his command can render articulate. He is able to draw upon it, and to drink in the refreshment and joy of inner freedom, only in silent or religious moments. He feels he is never so much himself as when he has shed for the time being all his ordinary preoccupations. That is why his religion is so thin or (as he might say) so pure: it has no relevance to any particular passions or events; a featureless background, distant and restful, like a pale clear sky. That is why he loves nature, and country life, and hates towns and vulgar people; those he likes he conceives emasculated, sentimentalized, and robed in white. The silent poet within him is only a lyric poet. When he returns from those draughts of rare and abstract happiness, he would find it hard to reconcile himself to the world, or to himself, did he not view both through a veil of convention and make-believe; he could not be honest about himself and retain his self-respect; he could not be clear about other people and remain kind. Yet to be kind to all, and true to his inner man, is his profound desire; because even if life, in its unvarnished truth, is a gross medley and a cruel business, it is redeemed for him, nevertheless, by the perfect beauty of soul that here and there may shine through it. Hamlet is the classic version of this imprisoned spirit; the skylark seems a symbol of what it would be in its freedom.

Poor larks! Is the proportion of dull matter in their bodies, I wonder, really less than in ours? Must they not find food and rear their young? Must they not in their measure work, watch, and tremble? Cold, hunger, and disease probably beset them more often and more bitterly than they do most of us. But we think of them selfishly, as of actors on the stage, only in the character they wear when they attract our attention. As we walk through the fields we stop to watch and to listen to them performing in the sky, and never think of their home troubles; which they, too, seem for the moment to have eluded; at least they have energy and time enough left over from those troubles for all this luxury of song. It is this glorious if temporary emancipation, this absolute defiant emphasis laid with so much sweetness on the inner life that the poet in every nice Englishman loves in the lark; it seems to reveal a brother-spirit more fortunate than oneself, almost a master and a guide.

Larks made even Shelley envious, although no man ever had less reason to envy them for their gift, either in its rapture or in its abstraction. Even the outer circumstances of Shelley's life were very favourable to inspiration and left him free to warble as much and as ardently as he chose; but perhaps he was somewhat deceived by the pathos of distance and fancied that in Nephelococcygia bad birds and wicked traditions were less tyrannous than in parliamentary England. He seems to have thought that human nature was not really made for puddings and port wine and hunting and elections, nor even for rollicking at universities and reading Greek, but only for innocent lyrical ecstasies and fiery convictions that nevertheless should somehow not render people covetous or jealous or cruelly disposed, nor constrain them to prevent any one from doing anything that any one might choose to do. Perhaps in truth the cloisters of Oxford and the streets of London are quite as propitious to the flights of which human nature is really capable as English fields are to the flights of larks; there is food in them for thought. But Shelley was impatient of human nature; he was horrified to find that society is a web of merciless ambitions and jealousies, mitigated by a quite subsidiary kindness; he forgot that human life is precarious and that its only weapon against circumstances, and against rival men, is intelligent action, intelligent war. The case is not otherwise with larks, on the fundamental earthly side of their existence; yet because their flight is bodily, because it is a festive outpouring of animal vitality, not of art or reflection, it suggests to us a total freedom of the inner man, a freedom which is impossible.

In the flight of larks, however, by a rare favour of fortune, all seems to be spontaneity, courage, and trust, even within this material sphere; nothing seems to be adjustment or observation. Their life in the air is a sort of intoxication of innocence and happiness in the blind pulses of existence. They are voices of the morning, young hearts seeking experience and not remembering it; when they seem to sob they are only catching their breath. They spring from the ground as impetuously as a rocket or the jet of a fountain, that bursts into a shower of sparks or of dew-drops; they circle as they rise, soaring through veil after veil of luminous air, or dropping from level to level. Their song is like the gurgling of little rills of water, perpetual through its delicate variations, and throbbing with a changed volume at every change in the breeze. Their rapture seems to us seraphic, not merely because it descends to us invisibly from a luminous height, straining our eyes and necks—in itself a cheap sublimity-v but rather because the lark sings so absolutely for the mad sake of singing. He is evidently making high holiday, spending his whole strength on something ultimate and utterly useless, a momentary entrancing pleasure which (being useless and ultimate) is very like an act of worship or of sacrifice. Sheer life in him has become pure. That is what we envy; that is what causes us, as we listen, to draw a deeper breath, and perhaps something like tears to come to our eyes. He seems so triumphantly to attain what all our labours end by missing, yet what alone would justify them: happiness, selflessness, a moment of life lived in the spirit. And we may be tempted to say to ourselves: Ah, if I could only forget, if I could cease to look before and after, if the pale cast of thought did not make a slave of me, as well as a coward!

Vital raptures such as the lark's are indeed not unknown even to man, and the suggestion of them powerfully allures the Englishman, being as he is a youth morally, still impelled to sport, still confident of carrying his whole self forward into some sort of heaven, whether in love, in politics, or in religion, without resigning to nature the things that are nature's nor hiding in God the things that are God's. Alas, a sad lesson awaits him, if he ever grows old enough to learn it. Vital raptures, unless long training or a miracle of adaptation has antecedently harmonized them with the whole orchestration of nature, necessarily come to a bad end. Dancing and singing and love and sport and religious enthusiasm are mighty ferments: happy he who vents them in their season. But if ever they are turned into duties, pumped up by force, or made the basis of anything serious, like morals or science, they become vicious. The wild breath of inspiration is gone which hurried them across the soul like a bright cloud. Inspiration, as we may read in Plato between the lines, inspiration is animal. It comes from the depths, from that hearth of Hestia, the Earth-Mother, which conservative pagans could not help venerating as divine. Only art and reason, however, are divine in a moral sense, not because they are less natural than inspiration (for the Earth-Mother with her seeds and vapours is the root of everything) but because they mount towards the ultimate heaven of order, beauty, intellectual light, and the achievement of eternal dignities. In that dimension of being even featherless bipeds can soar and sing with a good grace. But space is not their element; airmen, now that we have them, are only a new sort of sailor. They fly for the sake of danger and of high wages; it is a boyish art, with its romantic glamour soon tarnished, and only a material reward left for all its skill and hardships. The only sublimity possible to man is intellectual; when he would be sublime in any other dimension he is merely fatuous and bombastic. By intelligence, so far as he possesses it, a man sees things as they are, transcends his senses and his passions, uproots himself from his casual station in space and time, sees all things future as if they were past, and all things past as for ever present, at once condemns and forgives himself, renounces the world and loves it. Having this inner avenue open to divinity, he would be a fool to emulate the larks in their kind of ecstasy.

His wings are his intelligence; not that they bring ultimate success to his animal will, which must end in failure, but that they lift his failure itself into an atmosphere of laughter and light, where is his proper happiness. He cannot take his fine flight, like the lark, in the morning, in mad youth, in some irresponsible burst of vitality, because life is impatient to begin: that sort of thing is the fluttering of a caged bird, a rebellion against circumstance and against commonness which is a sign of spirit, but not spirit in its self-possession, not happiness nor a school of happiness. The thought which crowns life at its summit can accompany it throughout its course, and can reconcile us to its issue. Intelligence is Homeric in its pervasive light. It traces all the business of nature, eluding but not disturbing it, rendering it in fact more amiable than it is, and rescuing it from vanity.

Sense is like a lively child always at our elbow, saying, Look, look, what is that? Will is like an orator, indignantly demanding something different. History and fiction and religion are like poets, continually recomposing the facts into some tragic unity which is not in them. All these forms of mind are spiritual, and therefore materially superfluous and free; but their spirit is pious, it is attentive to its sources, and therefore seems to be care-laden and not so gloriously emancipated as the music of larks, or even of human musicians; yet thought is pure music in its essence, and only in its subject-matter retrospective and troubled about the facts. It must indeed be troubled about them, because in man spirit is not a mere truant, as it seems to be in the lark, but is a faithful chronicler of labour and wisdom. Man is hard-pressed; long truancies would be fatal to him. He is tempted to indulge in them—witness his languages and pyramids and mythologies; yet his margin of safety is comparatively narrow, and he cannot afford to spend such relatively prodigious amounts of energy in mere play as the lark does with a light heart and in the grand manner. There are words to man's music; he gives names to things; he tries to catch the rhythm of his own story, or to imagine it richer and more sublime than it is. His festivals are heavy with pathos; they mark the events on which his existence turns—harvests, funerals, redemptions, wooings, and wars. When he disregards all these tiresome things, he becomes a fop or a fanatic. There is no worthy transport for him except sane philosophy—a commentary, not a dream. His intelligence is most intense and triumphant when there is least waste in his life; for if hard thinking sometimes makes the head ache, it is because it comes hard, not because it is thinking; our fuddled brain grates and repeats itself in that it can't think. But if your business is in order, it requires no further pains to understand it. Intelligence is the flower of war and the flower of love. Both, in the end, are comprehension. How miraculously in our happy moments we understand, how far we jump, what masses of facts we dominate at a glance! There is no labour then, no friction or groping, no anxious jostling against what we do not know, but only joy in this intricate outspread humorous world, intoxication as ethereal as the lark's, but more descriptive. If his song is raised above the world for a moment by its wantonness and idle rapture, ours is raised above it essentially by its scope. To look before and after is human; it would not be sincere nor manly in us not to take thought for the morrow and not to pine for what is not. We must start on that basis, with our human vitality (which is art) substituted for the vegetative prayerfulness of the lily, and our human scope (which is knowledge of the world) substituted for the outpourings of larks.

On this other plane we could easily be as happy as the larks, if we were as liberal. Men when they are civilized and at ease are liberal enough in their sports, and willing to desipere in loco, like kittens, but it is strange how barbarous and illiberal, at least in modern times, they have remained about thought. They wish to harness thought like a waterfall, or like the blind Samson, to work for them night and day, in the treadmill of their interests or of their orthodoxy. Fie upon their stupidity and upon their slavishness! They do not see that when nature, with much travail, brings something living to birth, inevitable thought is there already, and gratis, and cannot possibly be there before. The seething of the brain is indeed as pragmatic as the habit of singing and flying, which in its inception doubtless helped the larks to survive, as even the whiteness of the lily may have done through the ministry of insects which it attracted; but even material organs are bound to utility by a very loose tie. Nature does not shake off her baroque ornaments and her vices until they prove fatal, and she never thinks of the most obvious invention or pressing reform, until some complication brings her, she knows not how, to try the experiment. Nature, having no ulterior purpose, has no need of parsimony or haste or simplicity. Much less need she be niggardly of spirit, which lays no tax upon her, and consumes no energy, but laughs aloud, a marvel and a mystery to her, in her very heart. All animal functions, whether helpful or wasteful, have this fourth dimension in the realm of spirit—the joy, or the pain, or the beauty that may be found in them. Spirit loads with a lyric intensity the flying moment in which it lives. It actually paints the lily and casts a perfume on the violet; it turns into vivid presences a thousand forms which, until its flame lighted them up, were merged in the passive order and truth of things, like the charms of Lucy by the springs of Dove, before Wordsworth discovered them. The smile of nature is not ponderable; and the changing harmonies of nature, out of which spirit springs, are like the conjunctions or eclipses of planets, facts obvious enough to sense in their specious simplicity, yet materially only momentary positions of transit for wayfarers bound each on his own errand. The songs of larks are like shooting stars that drop downwards and vanish; human intelligence is a part of the steadier music of the spheres.

[27]

AT HEAVEN'S GATE

Skylarks, if they exist elsewhere, must be homesick for England. They need these kindly mists to hide and to sustain them. Their flexible throats would soon be parched, far from these vaporous meadows and hedgerows rich in berries and loam. How should they live in arid tablelands, or at merciless altitudes, where there is nothing but scorching heat or a freezing blizzard? What space could they find for solitude and freedom in the tangle of tropical forests, amongst the monkeys and parrots? What reserve, what tenderness, what inward springs of happiness could they treasure amid those gross harlot-like flowers? No, they are the hermits of this mild atmosphere, fled to its wilderness of gentle light. Well may they leave it to eagles to rush against the naked sun, as if its round eye challenged them to single combat: not theirs the stupid ferocity of passion against fact, anger against light, swiftness against poise, beak and talons against intangible fire. Larks may not be very clever, but they are not so foolish as to be proud, or to scream hoarsely against the nature of things. Having wings and voluble throats they play with them for pure pleasure; they are little artists and little gentlemen; they disdain to employ their faculties for their mere utility, or only in order to pounce down to the earth, whenever they spy a dainty morsel, or to return to sulk shivering on some solitary crag, their voracity but half appeased, like eagles dreaming of their next victim. Of course, even the most playful songster must eat, and skylarks no doubt keep an eye open for worms, and their nest calls them back to terrene affections; but they are as forgetful of earth as they can be, and insatiable craving does not stamp itself on their bent necks, as if they were vultures, nor strain their feathers of iron. No more are they inspired by sentimental pangs and love-sick like the nightingale; they do not hide in the labyrinthine shade of ilex or cypress, from there to wail in the melancholy moonlight, as it were a seductive serenade addressed to mortal lovers. No, the trilling of larks is not for mankind. Like English poets they sing to themselves of nature, inarticulately happy in a bath of light and freedom, sporting for the sake of sport, turning what doubts they may have into sweetness, not asking to see or to know anything ulterior. They must needs drink the dew amongst these English fields, peeping into the dark little hearts and flushed petals of these daisies, like the heart and cheeks of an English child, or into these buttercups, yellow like his Saxon hair. They could hardly have built their nests far from this maze of little streams, or from these narrow dykes and ditches, arched with the scented tracery of limes and willows. They needed this long, dull, chilly winter in which to gather their unsuspected fund of yearning and readiness for joy; so that when high summer comes at last they may mount with virgin confidence and ardour through these sunlit spaces, to pour their souls out at heaven's gate.

At heaven's gate, but not in heaven. The sky, as these larks rise higher and higher, grows colder and thinner; if they could rise high enough, it would be a black void. All this fluid and dazzling atmosphere is but the drapery of earth; this cerulean vault is only a film round the oceans. As these choristers pass beyond the nether veils of air, the sun becomes fierce and comfortless; they freeze and are dazzled; they must hurry home again to earth if they would live. They must put fuel in their little engines: after all it was flesh and blood in them that were praising the Lord. And accordingly, down they drop to their nests and peck about, anxious and silent; but their song never comes down. Up there they leave it, in the glittering desert it once ravished, in what we call the past. They bore their glad offering to the gate and returned empty; but the gladness of it, which in their palpitation and hurry they only half guessed, passed in and is a part of heaven. In the home of all good, from which their frail souls fetched it for a moment, it is still audible for any ear that ever again can attune itself to that measure. All that was loved or beautiful at any time, or that shall be so hereafter, all that never was but that ought to have been, lives in that paradise, in the brilliant treasure-house of the gods.

How many an English spirit, too modest to be heard here, has now committed its secret to that same heaven! Caught by the impulse of the hour, they rose like larks in the morning, cheerily, rashly, to meet the unforeseen, fatal, congenial adventure, the goal not seen, the air not measured, but the firm heart steady through the fog or blinding fire, making the best of what came, trembling but ready for what might come, with a simple courage which was half joy in living and half willingness to die. Their first flight was often their last. What fell to earth was only a poor dead body, one of a million; what remained above perhaps nothing to speak of, some boyish sally or wistful fancy, less than the song of a lark for God to treasure up in his omniscience and eternity. Yet these common brave fools knew as well as the lark the thing that they could do, and did it; and of other gifts and other adventures they were not envious. Boys and free men are always a little inclined to flout what is not the goal of their present desires, or is beyond their present scope; spontaneity in them has its ebb-flow in mockery. Their tight little selves are too vigorous and too clearly determined to brood much upon distant things; but they are true to their own nature, they know and love the sources of their own strength. Like the larks, those English boys had drunk here the quintessence of many a sunlit morning; they had rambled through these same fields, fringed with hedges and peeping copse and downs purple with heather; these paths and streams had enticed them often; they had been vaguely happy in these quiet, habitable places. It was enough for them to live, as for nature to revolve; and fate, in draining in one draught the modest cup of their spirit, spared them the weary dilution and waste of it in the world. The length of things is vanity, only their height is joy.

Of myself also I would keep nothing but what God may keep of me—some lovely essence, mine for a moment in that I beheld it, some object of devout love enshrined where all other hearts that have a like intelligence of love in their day may worship it; but my loves themselves and my reasonings are but a flutter of feathers weaker than a lark's, a prattle idler than his warblings, happy enough if they too may fly with him and die with him at the gate of heaven.

[LATER SOLILOQUIES]

1918-1921

[28]

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

O solitudo, sola beatitudo, Saint Bernard said; but might he not have said just as well, O societas, sola felicitas? Just as truly, I think; because when a man says that the only happiness is this or that, he is like a lover saying that Mary Jane is the one woman in the world. She may be truly the one woman for him, though even that is not probable; but he cannot mean to assert that she is the only woman living, nor to deny that each of the others might be the one woman for somebody. Now, when a Hegelian philosopher, contradicting Saint Bernard, says that society is his be-all and end-all, that he himself is nothing but an invisible point at which relations cross, and that if you removed from him his connection with Hegel, with his university, his church, his wife, and his publishers, there would be nothing left, or at best a name and a peg to hang a gown on, far be it from me to revise his own analysis of his nature; society may be the only felicity and the only reality for him. But that cannot annul the judgement of Saint Bernard. He had a great mind and a great heart, and he knew society well; at least, he accepted the verdict which antiquity had passed on society, after a very long, brilliant, and hearty experience of it; and he knew the religious life and solitude as well; and I can't help thinking that he, too, must have been right in his self-knowledge, and that solitude must have been the only happiness for him.

Nevertheless, the matter is not limited to this confronting of divers honest judgements, or confessions of moral experience. The natures expressed in these judgements have a long history, and are on different levels; the one may be derived from the other. Thus it is evident that the beatific solitude of Saint Bernard was filled with a kind of society; he devoted it to communion with the Trinity, or to composing fervent compliments to the Virgin Mary. It was only the society to be found in inns and hovels, in castles, sacristies, and refectories, that he thought it happiness to avoid. That the wilderness to which hermits flee must be peopled by their fancy, could have been foreseen by any observer of human nature. Tormenting demons or ministering angels must needs appear, because man is rooted in society and his instincts are addressed to it; for the first nine months, or even years, of his existence he is a parasite; and scarcely are these parental bonds a little relaxed, when he instinctively forms other ties, that turn him into a husband and father, and keep him such all his days. If ever he finds happiness in solitude, it can only be by lavishing on objects of his imagination the attentions which his social functions require that he should lavish on something. Without exercising these faculties somehow his nature would be paralysed; there would be no fuel to feed a spiritual flame. All Saint Bernard could mean, then, is that happiness lies in this substitution of an ideal for a natural society, in converse with thoughts rather than with things. Such a substitution is normal, and a mark of moral vigour; we must not be misled into comparing it with a love of dolls or of lap-dogs. Dolls are not impersonal, and lap-dogs are not ideas: they are only less rebellious specimens of the genus thing; they are more portable idols. To substitute the society of ideas for that of things is simply to live in the mind; it is to survey the world of existences in its truth and beauty rather than in its personal perspectives, or with practical urgency. It is the sole path to happiness for the intellectual man, because the intellectual man cannot be satisfied with a world of perpetual change, defeat, and imperfection. It is the path trodden by ancient philosophers and modern saints or poets; not, of course, by modern writers on philosophy (except Spinoza), because these have not been philosophers in the vital sense; they have practised no spiritual discipline, suffered no change of heart, but lived on exactly like other professors, and exerted themselves to prove the existence of a God favourable to their own desires, instead of searching for the God that happens to exist. Certainly this path, in its beginnings, is arduous, and leaves the natural man somewhat spare and haggard; he seems to himself to have fasted for forty days and forty nights, and the world regards his way of living afterwards as rather ghostly and poor. But he usually congratulates himself upon it in the end; and of those who persevere some become saints and some poets and some philosophers.

Yet why, we may ask, should happiness be found exclusively in this ideal society where none intrudes? If the intellectual man cannot lay up his treasures in a world of change, the natural man can perfectly well satisfy his instincts within it; and why shouldn't the two live amicably together in a house of two stories?

I can see no essential reason; but historically natural society long ago proved a moral failure. It could not harmonize nor decently satisfy even the instincts on which it rests. Hence the philosophers have felt bound not only to build themselves a superstructure but to quit the ground floor—materially, if possible, by leading a monastic fife, religiously in any case by not expecting to find much except weeping and wailing in this vale of tears. We may tax this despair with being premature, and call such a flight into an imaginary world a desperate expedient; at any time the attempts of the natural man to live his comic life happily may be renewed, and may succeed. Solitude peopled with ideas might still remain to employ the mind; but it would not be the only beatitude.

Yet the insecurity of natural society runs deeper, for natural society itself is an expedient and a sort of refuge of despair. It, too, in its inception, seemed a sacrifice and a constraint. The primitive soul hates order and the happiness founded on order. The barbarous soul hates justice and peace. The belly is always rebelling against the members. The belly was once all in all; it was a single cell floating deliciously in a warm liquid; it had no outer organs; it thought it didn't need them. It vegetated in peace; no noises, no alarms, no lusts, no nonsense. Ah, veritably solitude was blessedness then! But it was a specious solitude and a precarious blessedness, resting on ignorance. The warm liquid might cool, or might dry up; it might breed all sorts of enemies; presently heaven might crack and the cell be cleft in two. Happy the hooded microbe that put forth feelers in time, and awoke to its social or unsocial environment! I am not sure that, beneath the love of ideal society, there was not in Saint Bernard a lingering love of primeval peace, of seminal slumber; that he did not yearn for the cell bio-logical as well as for the cell monastic. Life, mere living, is a profound ideal, pregnant with the memory of a possible happiness, the happiness of protoplasm; and the advocate of moral society must not reckon without his host. He has a rebellious material in hand; his every atom is instinct with a life of its own which it may reassert, upsetting his calculations and destroying his organic systems. Only the physical failure of solitude drove the spirit at first into society, as the moral failure of society may drive it later into solitude again. If any one said, then, that happiness lies only in society, his maxim would be no less sincere and solid than Saint Bernard's, but it would not be so profound. For beneath natural society, in the heart of each of its members, there is always an intense and jealous solitude, the sleep of elemental life which can never be wholly broken; and above natural society there is always another solitude—a placid ethereal wilderness, the heaven of ideas—beckoning the mind.

[29]

IMAGINATION

Men are ruled by imagination: imagination makes them into men, capable of madness and of immense labours. We work dreaming. Consider what dreams must have dominated the builders of the Pyramids—dreams geometrical, dreams funereal, dreams of resurrection, dreams of outdoing the pyramid of some other Pharaoh! What dreams occupy that fat man in the street, toddling by under his shabby hat and bedraggled rain-coat? Perhaps he is in love; perhaps he is a Catholic, and imagines that early this morning he has partaken of the body and blood of Christ; perhaps he is a revolutionist, with the millennium in his heart and a bomb in his pocket. The spirit bloweth where it listeth; the wind of inspiration carries our dreams before it and constantly refashions them like clouds. Nothing could be madder, more irresponsible, more dangerous than this guidance of men by dreams. What saves us is the fact that our imaginations, groundless and chimerical as they may seem, are secretly suggested and controlled by shrewd old instincts of our animal nature, and by continual contact with things. The shock of sense, breaking in upon us with a fresh irresistible image, checks wayward imagination and sends it rebounding in a new direction, perhaps more relevant to what is happening in the world outside.

When I speak of being governed by imagination, of course I am indulging in a figure of speech, in an ellipsis; in reality we are governed by that perpetual latent process within us by which imagination itself is created. Actual imaginings—the cloud-like thoughts drifting by—are not masters over themselves nor over anything else. They are like the sound of chimes in the night; they know nothing of whence they came, how they will fall out, or how long they will ring. There is a mechanism in the church tower; there was a theme in the composer's head; there is a beadle who has been winding the thing up. The sound wafted to us, muffled by distance and a thousand obstacles, is but the last lost emanation of this magical bell-ringing. Yet in our dream it is all in all; it is what first entertains and absorbs the mind. Imagination, when it chimes within us, apparently of itself, is no less elaborately grounded; it is a last symptom, a rolling echo, by which we detect and name the obscure operation that occasions it; and not this echo in its aesthetic impotence, but the whole operation whose last witness it is, receives in science the name of imagination, and may be truly said to rule the human world.

This extension of names is inevitable although unfortunate, because language and perception are poetical before they become scientific, if they ever do; as Aristotle observes that the word anger is used indifferently for two different things: dialectically, or as I call it, imaginatively, for the desire for revenge, but physically for a boiling of the humours. And utterly different as these two things are in quality, no great inconvenience results from giving them the same name, because historically they are parts of the same event. Nature has many dimensions at once, and whenever we see anything happen, much else is happening there which we cannot see. Whilst dreams entertain us, the balance of our character is shifting beneath: we are growing while we sleep. The young think in one way, the drunken in another, and the dead not at all; and I imagine—for I have imagination myself—that they do not die because they stop thinking, but they stop thinking because they die. How much veering and luffing before they make that port I The brain of man, William James used to say, has a hair-trigger organization. His life is terribly experimental. He is perilously dependent on the oscillations of a living needle, imagination, that never points to the true north.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books. The reciprocal interference of magnetic fields (which I understand is the latest conception of matter) may compose a marvellous moving pattern; but the chief interest to us of matter lies in its fertility in producing minds and presenting recognizable phenomena to the senses; and the chief interest of any scientific notion of its intrinsic nature lies in the fact that, if not literally true, it may liberate us from more misleading conceptions. Did we have nothing but electrical physics to think of, the nightmare would soon become intolerable. But a hint of that kind, like a hasty glance into the crater of a volcano, sends a wholesome shudder through our nerves; we realize how thin is the crust we build on, how mythical and remote from the minute and gigantic scale of nature are the bright images we seem to move among, all cut out and fitted to our human stature. Yet these bright images are our natural companions, and if we do not worship them idolatrously nor petrify them into substances, forgetting the nimble use of them in mental discourse, which is where they belong, they need not be more misleading to us, even for scientific purposes, than are words or any other symbols.

It is fortunate that the material world, whatever may be its intrinsic structure or substance, falls to our apprehension into such charming units. There is the blue vault of heaven, there are the twinkling constellations, there are the mountains, trees, and rivers, and above all those fascinating unstable unities which we call animals and persons; magnetic fields I am quite ready to believe them, for such in a vast vague way I feel them to be, but individual bodies they will remain to my sensuous imagination, and dramatic personages to my moral sense. They, too, are animate: they, too, compose a running commentary on things and on one another, adding their salacious footnotes to the dull black letter of the world. Many of them are hardly aware of their own wit; knowing they are but commentators, they are intent on fidelity and unconscious of invention. Yet against their will they gloss everything, willy-nilly we are all scholiasts together. Heaven forbid that I should depreciate this prodigious tome of nature, or question in one jot or tittle the absolute authority of its Author; but it is like an encyclopaedia in an infinite number of volumes, or a directory with the addresses of everybody that ever lived. We may dip into it on occasion in search of some pertinent fact, but it is not a book to read; its wealth is infinite, but so is its monotony; it is not composed in our style nor in our language, we could not have written one line of it. Yet the briefest text invites reflection, and we may spin a little homily out of it in the vernacular for our own edification.

In the Mahabharata, a learned friend tells me, a young champion armed for the combat and about to rush forward between the two armies drawn up in battle array, stops for a moment to receive a word of counsel from his spiritual adviser—and that word occupies the next eighteen books of the epic; after which the battle is allowed to proceed. These Indian poets had spiritual minds, they measured things by their importance to the spirit, not to the eye. They despised verisimilitude and aesthetic proportion; they despised existence, the beauties of which they felt exquisitely nevertheless, and to which their imagination made such stupendous additions. I honour their courage in bidding the sun stand still, not that they might thoroughly vanquish an earthly enemy, but that they might wholly clarify their own soul. For this better purpose the sun need not stand still materially. For the spirit, time is an elastic thing. Fancy is quick and brings the widest vistas to a focus in a single instant. After the longest interval of oblivion and death, it can light up the same image in all the greenness of youth; and if cut short, as it were at Pompeii, in the midst of a word, it can, ages after, without feeling the break, add the last syllable. Imagination changes the scale of everything, and makes a thousand patterns of the woof of nature, without disturbing a single thread. Or rather—since it is nature itself that imagines—it turns to music what was only strain; as if the universal vibration, suddenly ashamed of having been so long silent and useless, had burst into tears and laughter at its own folly, and in so doing had become wise.

[30]

THE WORLD'S A STAGE

Nature, like a theatre, offers a double object to the mind. There is in the first place the play presented, the overt spectacle, which is something specious and ideal; and then there is something material and profound lying behind and only symbolically revealed, namely, the stage, the actors, and the author. The playful spectacular sort of reality we can pretty well dominate and exhaust, if we are attentive; indeed the prospect, in its sensuous and poetic essence, is plastic to attention, and alters its character according to the spectator's station and faculty; a poetic theme develops as interest in it is aroused, and offers different beauties and different morals to every new critic. The instrumentalities, on the contrary, which bring this spectacle before us, whether they be material or personal, are unfathomable. They are events, not ideas. Even putting together all that carpenters and chemists, biographers and psychologists, might learn about these events, we could never probe them to the bottom.

In the beginning, as for a child at his first pantomime, the play's the thing; and a human audience can never quite outgrow this initial illusion, since this world is a theatre nobody can visit twice. If we could become habitués, old theatre-goers amongst the worlds, we might grow more discriminating; on the whole we might enjoy the performances just as much or even more, perhaps; yet less breathlessly. We should see more and believe less. The pleasure of seeing is one, and the pleasure of believing is quite another; the first liberates our senses and fills the present with light; the second directs our conduct and relieves our anxiety or doubts about the past and future. When the spectator bethinks himself of destiny as well as of beauty, his sensibility becomes tragic, it becomes intelligence. Every picture is then regarded as a sign for the whole situation which has generated it or which it forebodes. The given image, for intelligence, expresses a problematic fact; and intelligence invents various grammatical forms and logical categories by which to describe its hidden enemy or fascinating prey. So spontaneous and dogmatic is the intellect in this interpretation of the scene that the conceived object (however abstractly sketched) is unhesitatingly judged to be, as we say, the real thing: it alone works and acts, whilst the given image is either disregarded altogether or despised as a mere word or phantasm of sense, such as only fools would stop to gaze at. And it is very true, whatever desperate efforts empiricism may make to deny it, that every figure crossing the stage of apprehension is a symbol, or may become a symbol; they all have some occasion and arise out of some deeper commotion in the material world. The womb of nature is full of crowding events, to us invisible; the ballet has machinery behind its vistas and its music; the dancers possess a character and fate in the daylight quite foreign to these fays and shepherds before the footlights; what to us is a pirouette to them is a twitch or a shilling. Shame to the impious egotism that would deny it, and, in order to spare itself the tension of faith and the labour of understanding, would pretend to find in experience nothing but a shadowy tapestry, a landscape without a substance. To its invisible substance the spectacle owes not only its existence but its meaning, since our interest in the scene is rooted in a hidden life within us, quite as much as the shifts and colours of the scenery are rooted in tricks of the stage. Nevertheless the roots of things are properly and decently hidden under ground, and it is as childish to be always pulling them up, to make sure that they exist, as it is to deny their existence. The flowers are what chiefly interests a man of taste; the spectacle is what liberal-minded people have come to see. Every image has its specific aspect and aesthetic essence, more or less charming in itself; the sensualist, the poet, the chronicler of his passing visions must take them at their face value, and be content with that. Fair masks, like flowers, like sunsets, like melodies wrung out of troubled brains and strung wire, cover for us appropriately the anatomical face of nature; and words and dogmas are other masks, behind which we, too, can venture upon the stage; for it is life to give expression to life, transmuting diffused movements into dear images. How blind is the zeal of the iconoclasts, and how profoundly hostile to religious impulse! They pour scorn upon eyes that see not and a mouth that cannot speak; they despise a work of art or of thought for being finished and motionless; as if the images of the retina were less idols than those of the sculptor, and as if words, of all things, were not conventional signs, grotesque counterfeits, dead messengers, like fallen leaves, from the dumb soul. Why should one art be contemptuous of the figurative language of another? Jehovah, who would suffer no statues, was himself a metaphor.

[31]

MASKS

When we are children we love putting on masks to astonish our elders; there is a lordly pleasure in puzzling those harmless giants who are not in the secret. We ourselves, of course, know that it is only a disguise; and when presently we pull it off, their surprise at recognizing us is something deliciously comic. Yet, at bottom, this compulsory return to nature is a little sad; our young empiricism would like to take appearances more seriously. To an unsophisticated mind every transformation seems as credible as it is interesting; there is always danger and hope of anything. Why should people hesitate to believe something intrinsically so plausible as that Johnny should have acquired a bull's head, or that little Alice should suddenly develop a red nose and furious mustachios? That is just the sort of thing that would happen if this stupid world were only more natural; but the trouble with old people is that their minds have become stagnant, dominated as they are by precedent and prejudice; it is too much of an exertion for them to imagine anything but what they have always seen. Even when they tell us about religion, which is so full of exciting and lovely things that we know must be true, they seem to be trying to remember something they have read or heard of, and quite spoil the story; they don't seem to understand at all, as we do, why it all happens. They are terrible believers in substance, and can hardly lend themselves to the wayward game of experience. This after all wouldn't matter so much; it is not worth while playing with people who don't relish games. The subtlest part of the pleasure is being blindfolded on purpose and feeling lost when you know you are not lost. Empiricism would be agony if any one was so silly as really to forget his material status and to become the sport of his passing ideas. But masks are great fun in themselves, and when you are fundamentally sane it is pleasant to play the madman and to yield to the eloquence of an imagined life; and it is intolerable to have the game spoiled by some heavy-footed person who constantly reminds you of the discovered facts and will not lend himself to the spirit of your fiction, which is the deepest part of your own spirit. No one would be angry with a man for unintentionally making a mistake about a matter of fact; but if he perversely insists on spoiling your story in the telling of it, you want to kick him; and this is the reason why every philosopher and theologian is justly vexed with every other. When we are children the accident and fatality of having been born human are recent and only half welcome; we still feel a little hurt at being so arbitrarily confined to one miserable career and forced to remain always consistent; we still see the equal antecedent propriety of being anybody or anything else. Masks afford us the pleasing excitement of revising our so accidental birth-certificate and of changing places in spirit with some other changeling.

Nevertheless the game soon tires. Although children are no believers in substance, they are substances themselves without knowing it. The mask refuses to grow on to their flesh: it thwarts their rising impulses. Play-acting is seldom worth the commitments it involves; your part, after a few enthusiastic rehearsals, turns out not really to suit you. It seemed at first to open up splendid adventures and give you a chance to display your unsuspected passions and powers; but now you begin to think your speeches ridiculous and your costume unbecoming. You must pull off the mask to see clearly and to breathe freely; you are overheard indulging in asides that are out of character, and swearing in the unvarnished vernacular; and when the performance at last is over, what a relief to fling away your wig and your false beard, and relapse into your honest self! There is no place like home, although there may be better places; and there is no face like one's own, for comfort to the wearer.

The Englishman likes to be comfortable, and he hates masks. It is pleasant to be straightforward, as it is to be clean. Mere façades offend him so much that he actually manages to build houses without them; they have creepers, they have chimneys, they have bow-windows, they have several doors, but they have no front. His Empire, too, for all its extent and complexity, presents no imposing façade to the world; it seems to elude observation and to be everywhere apologizing for its existence. Its enemies, on the contrary, both at home and abroad, are blatancy itself, always parading their heroisms and their ambitions; and one wonders how a power so hated, so hesitant, and so involuntary can last at all. But it has a certain plastic invulnerability; you pommel it and trample on it here, and its strength turns out to have lain in quite another quarter. It is like the sort of man who serves it, a pale languid youth, sprawling on cushions, and lisping a little when he cares to take his pipe out of his mouth at all; but what is your surprise when, something having happened, he gets up and knocks you down. Nothing had prepared you for that; no philosophical eloquence or resounding coup d'état: he is perhaps a little surprised himself at his energy. He blushes if by chance any warm gesture or expression has escaped him; he feels that it misrepresents his average sentiment; the echo of it sounds hollow in his ear, and just because it was so spontaneous he detests it as if it had been a lie. The passing grimaces of passion, the masks of life, are odious to him; yet he is quite happy to be deceived and to be masked by a thick atmosphere of convention, if only this atmosphere is temperate and sustained. He will be loyal to any nonsense that seems to justify his instincts and that has got a domestic stamp; but elaborate original lies are not in his nature; he has no histrionic gift. Intrigue requires a dear perception of the facts, an insight into other people's motives, and a power of sustained simulation; he is not clever at any of these things. Masks, wigs, cowls, and stays are too troublesome; if you are not always on the watch, the beastly things will fall off. He prefers to dress his personage more constitutionally; the dyes he uses must be all indelible, such as religion and education can supply. These, with the habit of his set or profession, are his lifelong make-up and his second nature; his only mask is the unperturbed expression which time and temperance have chiselled in his face.

[32]

THE TRAGIC MASK

Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer wilfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is vital, and to denounce the explicit phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile. We might as justly despise the seed for being merely instrumental, and glorify the full-blown flower, or the conventions of art, as the highest achievement and fruition of life. Substance is fluid, and, since it cannot exist without some form, is always ready to exchange one form for another; but sometimes it falls into a settled rhythm or recognizable vortex, which we call a nature, and which sustains an interesting form for a season. These sustained forms are enshrined in memory and worshipped in moral philosophy, which often assigns to them a power to create and to reassert themselves which their precarious status is very far from justifying. But they are all in all to the mind: art and happiness lie in pouring and repouring the molten metal of existence through some such tenable mould.

Masks are accordingly glorious things; we are instinctively as proud of designing and wearing them as we are of inventing and using words. The blackest tragedy is festive; the most pessimistic philosophy is an enthusiastic triumph of thought. The life which such expressions seem to arrest or to caricature would be incomplete without them; indeed, it would be blind and abortive. It is no interruption to experience to master experience, as tragedy aspires to do; nor is it an interruption to sink into its episodes and render them consummate, which is the trick of comedy. On the contrary, without such playful pauses and reflective interludes our round of motions and sensations would be deprived of that intellectual dignity which relieves it and renders it morally endurable—the dignity of knowing what we are doing, even if it be foolish in itself, and with what probable issue. Tragedy, the knowledge of death, raises us to that height. In fancy and for a moment it brings our mortal wills into harmony with our destiny, with the wages of existence, and with the silence beyond. These discoveries of reason have fixed the expression of the tragic mask, half horror and half sublimity. Such is the countenance of man when turned towards death and eternity and looking beyond all his endeavours at the Gorgon face of the truth. This is not to say that it is less human, or less legitimate, to look in other directions and to make other faces. But whether the visage we assume be a joyful or a sad one, in adopting and emphasizing it we define our sovereign temper. Henceforth, so long as we continue under the spell of this self-knowledge, we do not merely live but act; we compose and play our chosen character, we wear the buskin of deliberation, we defend and idealize our passions, we encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are, devoted or scornful or careless or austere; we soliloquize (before an imaginary audience) and we wrap ourselves gracefully in the mantle of our inalienable part. So draped, we solicit applause and expect to die amid a universal hush. We profess to live up to the fine sentiments we have uttered, as we try to believe in the religion we profess. The greater our difficulties the greater our zeal. Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams. The portrait we paint in this way and exhibit as our true person may well be in the grand manner, with column and curtain and distant landscape and finger pointing to the terrestrial globe or to the Yorick-skull of philosophy; but if this style is native to us and our art is vital, the more it transmutes its model the deeper and truer art it will be. The severe bust of an archaic sculpture, scarcely humanizing the block, will express a spirit far more justly than the man's dull morning looks or casual grimaces. Every one who is sure of his mind, or proud of his office, or anxious about his duty assumes a tragic mask. He deputes it to be himself and transfers to it almost all his vanity. While still alive and subject, like all existing things, to the undermining flux of his own substance, he has crystallized his soul into an idea, and more in pride than in sorrow he has offered up his life on the altar of the Muses. Self-knowledge, like any art or science, renders its subject-matter in a new medium, the medium of ideas, in which it loses its old dimensions and its old pace. Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become "persons" or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.

That life should be able to reach such expression in the realm of eternal form is a sublime and wonderful privilege, but it is tragic, and for that reason distasteful to the animal in man. A mask is not responsive; you must not speak to it as to a living person, you must not kiss it. If you do, you will find the cold thing repulsive and ghastly. It is only a husk, empty, eyeless, brittle, and glazed. The more comic its expression the more horrible it will prove, being that of a corpse. The animal in man responds to things according to their substance, edible, helpful, or plastic; his only joy is to push his way victoriously through the material world, till a death stops him which he never thought of and, in a sense, never experiences. He is not in the least interested in picturing what he is or what he will have been; he is intent only on what is happening to him now or may happen to him next. But when the passions see themselves in the mirror of reflection, what they behold is a tragic mask. This is the escutcheon of human nature, in which its experience is emblazoned. In so far as men are men at all, or men of honour, they militate under this standard and are true to their colours. Whatever refuses to be idealized in this way, they are obliged to disown and commit to instant oblivion. It will never do for a mind merely to live through its passions or its perceptions; it must discern recognizable objects, in which to centre its experience and its desires; it must choose names and signs for them, and these names and symbols, if they are to perform their function in memory and intercourse, must be tightly conventional. What could be more unseemly than a fault in grammar, or in many a case more laughable and disconcerting? Yet any solecism, if it were once stereotyped and made definitely significant, would become an idiom: it would become a good verbal mask. What is not covered in this way by some abiding symbol can never be recovered; the dark flood of existence carries it down bodily. Only in some word or conventional image can the secret of one moment be flashed to another moment; and even when there is no one ready to receive the message, or able to decipher it, at least the poet in his soliloquy has uttered his mind and raised his monument in his own eyes; and in expressing his life he has found it.

[33]

THE COMIC MASK

The down is the primitive comedian. Sometimes in the exuberance of animal life a spirit of riot and frolic comes over a man; he leaps, he dances, he tumbles head over heels, he grins, shouts, or leers, possibly he pretends to go to pieces suddenly, and blubbers like a child. A moment later he may look up wreathed in smiles, and hugely pleased about nothing. All this he does hysterically, without any reason, by a sort of mad inspiration and irresistible impulse. He may easily, however, turn his absolute histrionic impulse, his pure fooling, into mimicry of anything or anybody that at the moment happens to impress his senses; he will crow like a cock, simper like a young lady, or reel like a drunkard. Such mimicry is virtual mockery, because the actor is able to revert from those assumed attitudes to his natural self; whilst his models, as he thinks, have no natural self save that imitable attitude, and can never disown it; so that the clown feels himself immensely superior, in his rôle of universal satirist, to all actual men, and belabours and rails at them unmercifully. He sees everything in caricature, because he sees the surface only, with the lucid innocence of a child; and all these grotesque personages stimulate him, not to moral sympathy, nor to any consideration of their fate, but rather to boisterous sallies, as the rush of a crowd, or the hue and cry of a hunt, or the contortions of a jumping-jack might stimulate him. He is not at all amused intellectually; he is not rendered wiser or tenderer by knowing the predicaments into which people inevitably fall; he is merely excited, flushed, and challenged by an absurd spectacle. Of course this rush and suasion of mere existence must never fail on the stage, nor in any art; it is to the drama what the hypnotizing stone block is to the statue, or shouts and rhythmic breathing to the bard; but such primary magical influences may be qualified by reflection, and then rational and semi-tragic unities will supervene. When this happens the histrionic impulse creates the idyl or the tragic chorus; henceforth the muse of reflection follows in the train of Dionysus, and the revel or the rude farce passes into humane comedy.

Paganism was full of scruples and superstitions in matters of behaviour or of cultus, since the cultus too was regarded as a business or a magic craft; but in expression, in reflection, paganism was frank and even shameless; it felt itself inspired, and revered this inspiration. It saw nothing impious in inventing or recasting a myth about no matter how sacred a subject. Its inspiration, however, soon fell into classic moulds, because the primary impulses of nature, though intermittent, are monotonous and clearly defined, as are the gestures of love and of anger. A man who is unaffectedly himself turns out to be uncommonly like other people. Simple sincerity will continually rediscover the old right ways of thinking and speaking, and will be perfectly conventional without suspecting it. This classic iteration comes of nature, it is not the consequence of any revision or censorship imposed by reason. Reason, not being responsible for any of the facts or passions that enter into human life, has no interest in maintaining them as they are; any novelty, even the most revolutionary, would merely afford reason a fresh occasion for demanding a fresh harmony. But the Old Adam is conservative; he repeats himself mechanically in every child who cries and loves sweets and is imitative and jealous. Reason, with its tragic discoveries and restraints, is a far more precarious and personal possession than the trite animal experience and the ancestral grimaces on which it supervenes; and automatically even the philosopher continues to cut his old comic capers, as if no such thing as reason existed. The wiseacres too are comic, and their mask is one of the most harmlessly amusing in the human museum; for reason, taken psychologically, is an old inherited passion like any other, the passion for consistency and order; and it is just as prone as the other passions to overstep the modesty of nature and to regard its own aims as alone important. But this is ridiculous; because importance springs from the stress of nature, from the cry of life, not from reason and its pale prescriptions. Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals, and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness. What tragedy could there be, or what sublime harmonies rising out of tragedy, if there were no spontaneous passions to create the issue, no wild voices to be reduced to harmony? Moralists have habitually aimed at suppression, wisely perhaps at first, when they were preaching to men of spirit; but why continue to harp on propriety and unselfishness and labour, when we are little but labour-machines already, and have hardly any self or any passions left to indulge? Perhaps the time has come to suspend those exhortations, and to encourage us to be sometimes a little lively, and see if we can invent something worth saying or doing. We should then be living in the spirit of comedy, and the world would grow young. Every occasion would don its comic mask, and make its bold grimace at the world for a moment. We should be constantly original without effort and without shame, somewhat as we are in dreams, and consistent only in sincerity; and we should gloriously emphasize all the poses we fell into, without seeking to prolong them.

Objections to the comic mask—to the irresponsible, complete, extreme expression of each moment—cut at the roots of all expression. Pursue this path, and at once you do away with gesture: we must not point, we must not pout, we must not cry, we must not laugh aloud; we must not only avoid attracting attention, but our attention must not be obviously attracted; it is silly to gaze, says the nursery-governess, and rude to stare. Presently words, too, will be reduced to a telegraphic code. A man in his own country will talk like the laconic tourist abroad; his whole vocabulary will be Où? Combien? All right! Dear me! Conversation in the quiet home will dispense even with these phrases; nothing will be required but a few pragmatic grunts and signals for action. Where the spirit of comedy has departed, company becomes constraint, reserve eats up the spirit, and people fall into a penurious melancholy in their scruple to be always exact, sane, and reasonable, never to mourn, never to glow, never to betray a passion or a weakness, nor venture to utter a thought they might not wish to harbour for ever.

Yet irony pursues these enemies of comedy, and for fear of wearing a mask for a moment they are hypocrites all their lives. Their very reserve becomes a pose, a convention imposed externally, and their mincing speech turns to cant. Sometimes this evasion of impulsive sentiment fosters a poignant sentimentality beneath. The comedy goes on silently behind the scenes, until perhaps it gets the upper hand and becomes positive madness; or else it breaks out in some shy, indirect fashion, as among Americans with their perpetual joking. Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to sanity; and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is a long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one. What, on the contrary, could be more splendidly sincere than the impulse to play in real life, to rise on the rising wave of every feeling and let it burst, if it will, into the foam of exaggeration? Life is not a means, the mind is not a slave nor a photograph: it has a right to enact a pose, to assume a panache, and to create what prodigious allegories it will for the mere sport and glory of it. Nor is this art of innocent make-believe forbidden in the Decalogue, although Bible-reading Anglo-Saxondom might seem to think so. On the contrary, the Bible and the Decalogue are themselves instances of it. To embroider upon experience is not to bear false witness against one's neighbour, but to bear true witness to oneself. Fancy is playful and may be misleading to those who try to take it for literal fact; but literalness is impossible in any utterance of spirit, and if it were possible it would be deadly. Why should we quarrel with human nature, with metaphor, with myth, with impersonation? The foolishness of the simple is delightful; only the foolishness of the wise is exasperating.

[34]

CARNIVAL

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a fig-leaf. Art and discipline render seemly what would be unseemly without them, but hypocrisy hides it ostentatiously under something irrelevant, and the fig-leaf is only a more ignominious mask. For the moment it is certainly easier to suppress the wild impulses of our nature than to manifest them fitly, at the right times and with the proper fugitive emphasis; yet in the long run suppression does not solve the problem, and meantime those maimed expressions which are allowed are infected with a secret misery and falseness. It is the charm and safety of virtue that it is more natural than vice, but many moralists do their best to deprive it of this advantage. They seem to think it would lose its value if they lost their office. Their precepts, as distinguished from the spontaneous appreciations of men, are framed in the interests of utility, and are curiously out of sympathy with the soul. Precept divides the moral world materially into right and wrong things; but nothing concrete is right or wrong intrinsically, and every object or event has both good and bad effects in the context of nature. Every passion, like life as a whole, has its feet in one moral climate and its head in another. Existence itself is not a good, but only an opportunity. Christians thank God for their creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but life is the condition and source of all evil, and the Indians thank Brahma or Buddha for lifting them out of it. What metaphysical psychologists call Will is the great original sin, the unaccountable and irrational interest which the spirit takes, when it is incarnate, in one thing happening rather than another; yet this mad interest is the condition of generosity and of every virtue. Love is a red devil at one end of its spectrum and an ultra-violet angel at the other end.

Nor is this amphibious moral quality limited to the passions; all facts and objects in nature can take on opposite moral tints. When abstracted from our own presence and interests, everything that can be found or imagined is reduced to a mere essence, an ideal theme picked out of the infinite, something harmless, marvellous, and pure, like a musical rhythm or geometrical design. The whole world then becomes a labyrinth of forms and motions, a castle in the clouds built without labour and dissolved without tears. The moment the animal will reawakes, however, these same things acquire a new dimension; they become substantial, not to be created without effort nor rent without resistance; at the same time they become objects of desire and fear; we are so engrossed in existence that every phenomenon becomes questionable and ominous, and not so much a free gift and manifestation of its own nature as a piece of good or bad news. We are no longer surprised, as a free spirit would be, at the extraordinary interest we take in things turning out one way rather than another. We are caught in the meshes of time and place and care; and as the things we have set our heart on, whatever they may be, must pass away in the end, either suddenly or by a gentle transformation, we cannot take a long view without finding life sad, and all things tragic. This aspect of vanity and self-annihilation, which existence wears when we consider its destiny, is not to be denied or explained away, as is sometimes attempted in cowardly and mincing philosophies. It is a true aspect of existence in one relation and on a certain view; but to take this long view of existence, and look down the avenues of time from the station and with the emotions of some particular moment, is by no means inevitable, nor is it a fair and sympathetic way of viewing existence. Things when they are actual do not lie in that sort of sentimental perspective, but each is centred in itself; and in this intrinsic aspect existence is nothing tragic or sad, but rather something joyful, hearty, and merry. A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether. In youth anything is pleasant to see or to do, so long as it is spontaneous, and if the conjunction of these things is ridiculous, so much the better: to be ridiculous is part of the fun.

Existence involves changes and happenings and is comic inherently, like a pun that begins with one meaning and ends with another. Incongruity is a consequence of change; and this incongruity becomes especially conspicuous when, as in the flux of nature, change is going on at different rates in different strands of being, so that not only does each thing surprise itself by what it becomes, but it is continually astonished and disconcerted by what other things have turned into without its leave. The mishaps, the expedients, the merry solutions of comedy, in which everybody acknowledges himself beaten and deceived, yet is the happier for the unexpected posture of affairs, belong to the very texture of temporal being; and if people repine at these mishaps, or rebel against these solutions, it is only because their souls are less plastic and volatile than the general flux of nature. The individual grows old and lags behind; he remembers his old pain and resents it when the world is already on a new tack. In the jumble of existence there must be many a knock and many a grief; people living at cross purposes cannot be free from malice, and they must needs be fooled by their pretentious passions. But there is no need of taking these evils tragically. At bottom they are gratuitous, and might have been avoided if people had not pledged their hearts to things beyond their control and had not entrenched themselves in their illusions. At a sufficient remove every drama seems pathological and makes much ado about what to other people is nothing. We are interested in those vicissitudes, which we might have undergone if placed under the given circumstances; but we are happy to have escaped them. Thus the universe changes its hues like the chameleon, not at random but in a fashion which moral optics can determine, as it appears in one perspective or another; for everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Existence is indeed distinguishable from the platonic essences that are embodied in it precisely by being a conjunction of things mutually irrelevant, a chapter of accidents, a medley improvised here and now for no reason, to the exclusion of the myriad other farces which, so far as their ideal structure is concerned, might have been performed just as well. This world is contingency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities masquerading momentarily as a fact. Custom blinds persons who are not naturally speculative to the egregious character of the actual, because custom assimilates their expectations to the march of existing things and deadens their power to imagine anything different. But wherever the routine of a barbaric life is broken by the least acquaintance with larger ways, the arbitrariness of the actual begins to be discovered. The traveller will first learn that his native language is not the only one, nor the best possible, nor itself constant; then, perhaps, he will understand that the same is true of his home religion and government. The naturalist will begin by marvelling at the forms and habits of the lower animals, while continuing to attribute his own to their obvious propriety; later the heavens and the earth, and all physical laws, will strike him as paradoxically arranged and unintelligible; and ultimately the very elements of existence—time, change, matter, habit, life cooped in bodies—will reveal themselves to him in their extreme oddity, so that, unless he has unusual humility and respect for fact, he will probably declare all these actual things to be impossible and therefore unreal. The most profound philosophers accordingly deny that any of those things exist which we find existing, and maintain that the only reality is changeless, infinite, and indistinguishable into parts; and I call them the most profound philosophers in spite of this obvious folly of theirs, because they are led into it by the force of intense reflection, which discloses to them that what exists is unintelligible and has no reason for existing; and since their moral and religious prejudices do not allow them to say that to be irrational and unintelligible is the character proper to existence, they are driven to the alternative of saying that existence is illusion and that the only reality is something beneath or above existence. That real existence should be radically comic never occurs to these solemn sages; they are without one ray of humour and are persuaded that the universe too must be without one. Yet there is a capital joke in their own systems, which prove that nothing exists so strenuously, that existence laughs aloud in their vociferations and drowns the argument. Their conviction is the very ghost which it rises to exorcise; yet the conviction and the exorcism remain impressive, because they bear witness to the essential strangeness of existence to the spirit. Like the Ghost in Hamlet this apparition, this unthinkable fact, is terribly disturbing and emphatic; it cries to us in a hollow voice, "Swear!" and when in an agony of concern and affection we endeavour to follow it, "Tis here! 'Tis here! Tis gone!" Certainly existence can bewitch us; it can compel us to cry as well as to laugh; it can hurt, and that is its chief claim to respect. Its cruelty, however, is as casual as its enchantments; it is not cruel on purpose but only rough, like thoughtless boys. Coarseness—and existence is hopelessly coarse—is not an evil unless we demand refinement. A giggling lass that peeps at us through her fingers is well enough in her sphere, but we should not have begun by calling her Dulcinea. Dulcinea is a pure essence, and dwells only in that realm. Existence should be met on its own terms; we may dance a round with it, and perhaps steal a kiss; but it tempts only to flout us, not being dedicated to any constant love. As if to acknowledge how groundless existence is, everything that arises instantly backs away, bowing its excuses, and saying, "My mistake!" It suffers from a sort of original sin or congenital tendency to cease from being. This is what Heraclitus called Δίκη, or just punishment; because, as Mephistopheles long afterwards added, alles was entsteht ist wert dass es zugrunde geht—whatsoever arises deserves to perish; not of course because what arises is not often a charming creation, but because it has no prerogative to exist not shared by every Cinderella-like essence that lies eternally neglected in that limbo to which all things intrinsically belong—the limbo of unheard melodies and uncreated worlds. For anything to emerge from that twilight region is inexplicable and comic, like the popping up of Jack-in-the-box; and the shock will amuse us, if our wits are as nimble as nature and as quick as time. We too exist; and existence is a joy to the sportive side of our nature, itself akin to a shower of sparks and a patter of irrevocable adventures. What indeed could be more exhilarating than such a rout, if only we are not too exacting, and do not demand of it irrelevant perfections? The art of life is to keep step with the celestial orchestra that beats the measure of our career, and gives the cue for our exits and our entrances. Why should we willingly miss anything, or precipitate anything, or be angry with folly, or in despair at any misadventure? In this world there should be none but gentle tears, and fluttering tip-toe loves. It is a great Carnival, and amongst these lights and shadows of comedy, these roses and vices of the playhouse, there is no abiding.

[35]

QUEEN MAB

Nature, which is far more resourceful than logic, has found a way out of the contradiction between the human need for expression and the British distaste for personal outbursts. This way is rambling fiction. When out of shyness, or because they have shocked each other, the inner man and the outer man are not on speaking terms, loud language and vehement gestures are incompatible with depth of feeling. What lies deep must in such a case remain unexpressed, and will seem inexpressible. A man's heart will be revealed, even to himself, only in long stretches of constant endeavour and faithful habit: towards the end of his life he may begin to discern his ruling motives. In the meantime, however, his fancy may have played at self-revelation; he may have indulged in day-dreams and romantic transformations of himself, as boys do; and without pledging his real person too much he may have made trial of candour, or, if need be, of extravagance, in imaginary substitutes for himself, thus trying the paces of his inner man without cheapening his secret feelings or publishing them in common and second-hand terms. Such a man will talk little about himself; his opinions and preferences will not be very explicit, but he will privily nurse and develop them by endless variations played upon them in fancy, as he reads or perhaps writes a book of fiction by his chimney corner. He will dream of what Queen Mab makes other people dream.

Romantic fiction is a bypath of expression; it meanders through fields of possible experience that stretch harmlessly between the highroads of actual lives, far from the precipices of private and public passions. The labyrinth is infinite, but the path chosen in it is always traceable by a sort of Ariadne's thread spun out of the poet's heart. He means to forget himself and to feign some charming monster in some picturesque landscape, the more exotic the better; but in doing so he obeys the dream-impulses of his own soul, and recasts or corrects the images supplied by his experience. His very extravagances and hectic concentration of fancy betray him; they manifest his impatience, his affections, his potentialities; for he paints what he can conceive and what fascinates him in conceiving it. That which he might have been, and was not, comforts him. Such a form of self-expression, indirect, bashful, and profoundly humorous, being play rather than art, is alone congenial to the British temperament; it is the soul of English literature. Like English politics and religion, it breathes tolerance, plasticity, waywardness, infinitude; it is tender and tentative, shapeless and guileless. Its straggling march forms a vast national soliloquy, rich in casual touches, in alternatives, in contrasts, in suspended themes; the plot grows out of the episodes, it is always being remodelled and always to be continued. The facts, though much talked of in detail, are never faced as a whole, nor is the soul ever gathered together to pronounce upon them; the whole procedure is a subterfuge, and may be easily disparaged by people with other gifts and aspirations. Intelligence certainly does not dominate it; its conclusions, when it reaches conclusions, are false, and its methods cumbrous; and foreigners who adopt them are catching only the vices of their model. But its virtues are transcendent; if the mind of England is wrapped in mists, it is touched with ethereal colours; and who shall measure the benign influences, the lights, the manliness, the comforts, the moral sanity that have spread from it through the world? Its very incapacities are full of promise; it closes no doors; it is the one fountain of kindly liberty on earth. The Englishman's prejudices are so obviously prejudices as to be almost innocent, and even amiable; his consecrated formulas (for of course he has them) are frankly inadequate and half humorous; he would not have you suppose he has said his all, nor his last word. He is jealous of preserving, far from public observation or censure, the free play of his potential sentiments; from thence he will occasionally fetch some scrap of a word, or let slip some hint of emotion; he will only murmur or suggest or smile his loves. Everybody dislikes a caricature of himself; and the Englishman feels (I think justly) that any figure a man can cut in other people's eyes is a caricature. Therefore, if there is anything in him, he fears to betray it; and if there is nothing in him, he fears to betray that; and in either case he is condemned to diffidence and shyness. He wishes you to let him alone; perhaps if you do he may presently tell you, about quite another imaginary person, some vivid and tender story.

This story may be a fairy tale or it may be a piece of realistic fiction, in which the experiences of sundry characters, as different as possible from oneself and from one another, are imagined and lived through. The author may fairly say that these creations are not masks for his own person; it is expressly not his own feelings that he is evoking and developing. He is fancying other feelings; and yet, as this fancy and the magic life it constitutes are necessarily his own, his mind is being secretly agitated and relieved by these fictions; and his sensibility, instead of being sublimated into some ultimate tragic passion, is diffused over a thousand picturesque figures and adventures with which he acknowledges no moral kinship, save such as is requisite for a lively interest in them and a minute portrayed. It is only by accident that any of his poetic offspring may resemble their parent. What cares he what curious eye may note their deformity? He need not blush for them. He may even be bent on unmasking and fiercely condemning them, as a scrupulous penitent is bent on ferreting out and denouncing his real or fancied sins. In the most searching truth of fiction there is accordingly no indiscretion; the author's inmost and least avowable feelings may be uttered through it without reserve. Like a modest showman behind the curtain of his booth, he manipulates his marionettes and speaks for them in a feigned voice, by a sort of ventriloquy. Here is no religious tragedy, no distilled philosophy, no overarching cosmic myth. The scale is pleasantly small and the tone familiar, though the sum of the parts may fade into the infinite. We do not find in this complicated dream any life greater than our own or less accidental. We do not need to outgrow ourselves in order to understand it; no one summons us to pause, to recant, to renounce any part of our being. On the contrary, we simply unwind our own reel; we play endlessly at living, and in this second visionary life we survive all catastrophes, and we exchange one character for another without carrying over any load of memory or habit or fate. We seem still to undergo the vicissitudes of a moral world, but without responsibility.

Queen Mab is a naughty sprite, full of idle curiosity and impartial laughter. When she flutters over the roofs of cities, she is no angel with a mission, coming to sow there some chosen passion or purpose of her own; nor does she gather from those snoring mortals any collective sentiment or aspiration, such as a classic muse might render articulate, or such as religion or war or some consecrated school of art might embody. She steals wilily like a stray moonbeam into every crack and dark old corner of the earth. Her deft touch, as she pretends, sets all men dreaming, each after his own heart; but like other magicians, she is a fraud. Those garden fancies about her fairy equipage are all a joke to amuse the children; her wings are, in reality, far finer than gossamer, and the Equivocation she rides on is nimbler than any grasshopper. All she professes to spy out or provoke is her own merry invention. Her wand really works no miracle and sets no sleeper dreaming; on the contrary, it is rather an electric spark from the lover's brain or the parson's nose, as she tickles it, that quickens her own fancy, and hatches there an interminable brood of exquisite oddities, each little goblin perfectly ridiculous, each quite serious and proud of its little self, each battling bravely for its little happiness. Queen Mab is the genius proper to the art of a nation whose sensibility is tender, but whose personal life is drab and pale. To report, however poetically, the events and feelings they have actually experienced would be dull, as dull as life; their imagination craves entertainment with something richer, more wayward, more exciting. Every one is weary of his own society; the lifelong company of so meagre and warped a creature has become insufferable. We see that the passions of Mercutio are potentially deep and vivid; but they have been crossed by fortune, and on fortune his kindly humour mockingly takes its revenge, by feigning no end of parodies and escapades for the ineffable bright mischiefs lurking in his bosom. Queen Mab is the frail mothlike emanation of such a generous but disappointed mind; her magic lies in the ironical visions which, like the dust of the poppy, she can call forth there. A Cinderella at home, she becomes a seer in her midnight travels. Hence Table Rounds and Ivanhoes; hence three-volume novels about Becky Sharps and David Copperfields. These imagined characters are often alive, not only because the scene in which they move may be well indicated, with romantic absorption in the picturesque aspects of human existence, but also because their minds are the author's mind dreaming; they skirt the truth of his inner man; in their fancifulness or their realism they retain a secret reference to the deepest impulses in himself.

English lovers, I believe, seldom practise what in Spain is called conjugating the verb; they do not spend hours ringing the changes on I love, you love, we love. This, in their opinion, would be to protest too much. They prefer the method of Paolo and Francesca: they will sit reading out of the same book, and when they come to the kissing, she will say, "How nice that is!" and he will reply, "Isn't it?" and the story will supply the vicarious eloquence of their love. Fiction and poetry, in some supposititious instance, report for the Englishman the bashful truth about himself; and what English life thereby misses in vivacity, English literature gains in wealth, in tenderness, in a rambling veracity, and in preciousness to the people's heart.

[36]

A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA