“Whom neither kings nor mobs can cow”

Many must have quoted the stately tag from Virgil which says, “Happy were he who could know the causes of things,” without remembering in what context it comes.  Many have probably quoted it because the others have quoted it.  Many, if left in ignorance to guess whence it comes, would probably guess wrong.  Everybody knows that Virgil, like Homer, ventured to describe boldly enough the most secret councils of the gods. Everybody knows that Virgil, like Dante, took his hero into Tartarus and the labyrinth of the last and lowest foundations of the universe. Every one knows that he dealt with the fall of Troy and the rise of Rome, with the laws of an empire fitted to rule all the children of men, with the ideals that should stand like stars before men committed to that awful stewardship.  Yet it is in none of these connections, in none of these passages, that he makes the curious remark about human happiness consisting in a knowledge of causes.  He says it, I fancy, in a pleasantly didactic poem about the rules for keeping bees. Anyhow, it is part of a series of elegant essays on country pursuits, in one sense, indeed, trivial, but in another sense almost technical. It is in the midst of these quiet and yet busy things that the great poet suddenly breaks out into the great passage, about the happy man whom neither kings nor mobs can cow; who, having beheld the root and reason of all things, can even hear under his feet, unshaken, the roar of the river of hell.

– The Outline of Sanity (1926).

“Larger than the old cosmos”

We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos; that it was larger than the old cosmos.  In that sense Christendom is larger than creation; as creation had been before Christ.  It included things that had not been there; it also included the things that had been there.  The point happens to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese piety, but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs. Nobody can doubt that a reasonable respect for parents is part of a gospel in which God himself was subject in childhood to earthly parents. But the other sense in which the parents were subject to him does introduce an idea that is not Confucian.  The infant Christ is not like the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal  infancy.  I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino had it come to life in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis.  But this is true in relation to all the other religions and philosophies; it is the challenge of the Church.  The Church contains what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of life. That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma.  Where is the Holy child amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honour of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahminism, he who set forth all the science and rationality and even rationalism of Christianity?  Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something added.  Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas.  Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn.  How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School?  Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian.  How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars.  It is the same with all the modern attempts at Syncretism.  They are never able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out.  I do not mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy’s tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for pantheists.  They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon.  It was the refusal of the Christians that was the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting.  It was an awful and an appalling escape.  Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

Rhapsody on a Pig

A dream of my pure and aspiring boyhood has been realised in the following paragraph, which I quote exactly as it stands –

A complaint by the Epping Rural District Council against a spinster keeping a pig in her house has evoked the following reply: “I received your letter, and felt very much cut up, as I am laying in the pig’s room.  I have not been able to stand up or get on my legs; when I can, I will get him in his own room, that was built for him.  As to getting him off the premises, I shall do no such thing, as he is no nuisance to anyone.  We have had to be in the pig’s room now for three years.  I am not going to get rid of my pet.  We must all live together.  I will move him as soon as God gives me strength to do so.”

The Rev. T.C. Spurgin observed: “The lady will require a good deal of strength to move her pet, which weighs forty stone.”

It appears to me that the Rev. T.C. Spurgin ought, as a matter of chivalry, to assist the lady to move the pig, if it is indeed too heavy for her strength; no gentleman should permit a lady, who is already very much cut up, to lift forty stone of still animated and recalcitrant pork; he should himself escort the animal downstairs.  It is an unusual situation, I admit.  In the normal life of humanity the gentleman gives his arm to the lady, and not to the pig; and it is the pig who is very much cut up.  But the situation seems to be exceptional in every way.  It is all very well for the lady to say that the pig is no nuisance to anyone: as it seems that she has established herself in the pig’s private suite of apartments, the question rather is whether she is a nuisance to the pig.  But indeed I do not think that this poor woman’s fad is an inch more fantastic than many such oddities indulged in by rich and reputable people; and, as I say, I have from my boyhood entertained the dream.  I never could imagine why pigs should not be kept as pets.  To begin with, pigs are very beautiful animals.  Those who think otherwise are those who do not look at anything with their own eyes, but only through other people’s eyeglasses.  The actual lines of a pig (I mean of a really fat pig) are among the loveliest and most luxuriant in nature; the pig has the same great curves, swift and yet heavy, which we see in the rushing water or in rolling cloud.  Compared to him, the horse, for instance, is a bony, angular, and abrupt animal.  I remember that Mr. H.G. Wells, in arguing for the relativity of things (a subject over which even the Greek philosophers went to sleep until Christianity woke them up), pointed out that, while a horse is commonly beautiful if seen in profile, he is excessively ugly if seen from the top of a dog-cart, having a long, lean neck, and a body like a fiddle.  Now, there is no point of view from which a really corpulent pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves.  You can look down on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dog-cart; and I suppose a dog-cart has as much to do with pigs as it has with dogs.  You can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the Monument, from a balloon, or an air-ship; and as long as he is visible he will be beautiful.  In short, he has that fuller, subtler, and more universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking (gazing at pigs and distinguished journalists) mistake for a mere absence of shape.  For fatness really is a valuable quality.  While it creates admiration in the onlookers, it creates modesty in the possessor.  If there is anything on which I differ from the monastic institutions of the past, it is that they sometimes sought to achieve humility by means of emaciation.  It may be that the thin monks were holy, but I am sure it was the fat monks who were humble.  Falstaff said that to be fat is not to be hated; but it certainly is to be laughed at, and that is a more wholesome experience for the soul of man.

I do not urge that it is effective upon the soul of a pig, who, indeed, seems somewhat indifferent to public opinion on this point.  Nor do I mean that mere fatness is the only beauty of the pig.  The beauty of the best pigs lies in a certain sleepy perfection of contour which links them especially to the smooth strength of our south English land in which they live.  There are two other things in which one can see this perfect and piggish quality: one is in the silent and smooth swell of the Sussex downs, so enormous and yet so innocent.  The other is in the sleek, strong limbs of those beech-trees that grow so thick in their valleys.  These three holy symbols, the pig, the beech-tree, and the chalk down, stand forever as expressing the one thing that England as England has to say — that power is not inconsistent with kindness.  Tears of regret come into my eyes when I remember that three lions or leopards, or whatever they are, sprawl in a fantastic and foreign way across the arms of England.  We ought to have three pigs passant, gardiant, or on gules.  It breaks my heart to think that four commonplace lions are couched around the base of the Nelson Column.  There ought to be four colossal Hampshire hogs to keep watch over so national a spot.  Perhaps some of our sculptors will attack the conception; perhaps the lady’s pig, which weighs forty stone and seems to be something of a domestic problem, might begin to earn its living as an artist’s model.

Again, we do not know what fascinating variations might happen in the pig if once the pig were a pet.  The dog has been domesticated — that is, destroyed.  Nobody now in London can form the faintest idea of what a dog would look like.  You know a Daschund in the street; you know a St. Bernard in the street.  But if you saw a Dog in the street you would run from him screaming.  For hundreds, if not thousands, of years no one has looked at the horrible hairy original thing called Dog.  Why, then, should we be hopeless about the substantial and satisfying thing called Pig?  Types of Pig may also be differentiated; delicate shades of Pig may also be produced.  A monstrous pig as big as a pony may perambulate the streets like a St. Bernard without attracting attention.  An elegant and unnaturally attenuated pig may have all the appearance of a greyhound.  There may be little, little pathetic pigs like King Charles spaniels.  Artificial breeding might reproduce the awful original pig, tusks and all, the terror of the forests — something bigger, more mysterious, and more bloody than the bloodhound.  Those interested in hairdressing might amuse themselves by arranging the bristles like those of a poodle.  Those fascinated by the Celtic mystery of the Western Highlands might see if they could train the bristles to be a veil or curtain for the eye, like those of a Skye terrier; that sensitive and invisible Celtic spirit.  With elaborate training one might have a sheep-pig instead of a sheep-dog, a lap-pig instead of a lap-dog.

What is it that makes you look so incredulous?  Why do you still feel slightly superior to the poor lady who would not be parted from her pig?  Why do you not at once take the hog to your heart?  Reason suggests his evident beauty.  Evolution suggests his probable improvement.  Is it, perhaps, some instinct, some tradition. . .?  Well, apply that to women, children, and animals, and we will argue again.

– The Illustrated London News, 8 May 1909.

“They had struck a rock”

The life of the great civilisation went on with dreary industry and even with dreary festivity.  It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end.  A convenient compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that each group should worship freely and merely live a sort of official flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his official title of Divus.  Naturally there was no difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time before the world realised that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty anywhere. The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough.  They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seem quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse.  It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what they said. However mildly, there was a ring like iron.  Men used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance to the touch.  Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock.

With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were palpably present.  They were important enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the centre of a great space like lepers.  The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought good news.  That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“Truth in politics”

We have sometimes been asked why we do not admire advertisers quite so much as they admire themselves.  One answer is that it is of their very nature to admire themselves.  And it is of the very nature of our task that people must be taught to criticize themselves; or rather (preferably) to kick themselves.  They talk about Truth in Advertising; but there cannot be any such thing in the sharp sense in which we need truth in politics.  It is impossible to put in the cheery terms of “publicity” either the truth about how bad things are, or the truth about how hard it will be to cure them. No advertiser is so truthful as to say, “Do your best with our rotten old typewriter; we can’t get anything better just now.” But we have really got to say, “Do your best with your rotten old machine of production; don’t let it fall to pieces too suddenly.” We seldom see a gay and conspicuous hoarding inscribed, “You are in for a rough time if you use our new kitchen-range.” But we have really got to say to our friends, “You are in for a rough time if you start new farms on your own; but it is the right thing.” We cannot pretend to be offering merely comforts and conveniences. Whatever our ultimate view of labour-saving machinery, we cannot offer our ideal as a labour-saving machine.  There is no more question of comfort than there is for a man in a fire, a battle, or a shipwreck. There is no way out of the danger except the dangerous way.

– The Outline of Sanity (1926).

“The tendency to increase the dose”

There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose.  Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal.  They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“Instructed out of his senses”

Mr. Charles Marson, that very interesting person [*], once declared that if you wanted to get old English songs out of a yokel, you must proceed along a certain line.  You must sit up all night with him, supply him unremittingly with cider, and let him work backwards through all the songs he has ever heard.  He will begin with this year’s music-hall songs.  He will go on to last year’s.  He will recapitulate all the vulgarities of his maturity and early manhood; he will give you the whole of “Villikins and his Dinah” and “Pop Goes the Weasel”.  Then when he is almost bankrupt, but still brave and unbroken, he will fall back on his childhood, and you will hear some of the old music of Merry England before it went into captivity.  However this may be, it presents a remarkable analogy to the condition of the mind on other matters.  Ask an ordinary Englishman his view on Imperialism, and he will tell you first what he has read in the Daily Mail that morning.  Mention a few truths about that newspaper and he will drop all defence of it, and tell you what some positive person in the public-house says.  Put it to him that man, even in the public-house, is liable to err, and he will tell you that that is just what his wife always says, and he will begin to consider the whole matter quite fairly from a new standpoint.  Press him a little further, and he will positively admit that he had a mother, and even that he learned something from her.  And if you dig into him for another hour or so, it is quite likely that you may even discover his own opinion: the genuine personal opinion of the ordinary Englishman.  And when you do discover it, it is almost always right.

Thus we may say that the whole case against democracy and for democracy is commonly stated wrong.  It is not that the conclusion of the common man is worthless; the serious conclusion of a sane man is very valuable — if you can get it.  The trouble is not that the ordinary sensible man is uninstructed.  The trouble is that he is instructed — instructed out of his senses.  The man calls himself Agnostic who would naturally have called himself ignorant; but ignorance is higher.  The average man, even the modern man, has a great deal to teach us.  But the nuisance is that he won’t teach it; he will only repeat what he has been taught.  We have almost to torture him till he says what we does think, just as men once tortured a heretic till he said what he didn’t think.  We have to dig up the modern man as if he were Palaeolithic man.

– Illustrated London News, 6 March 1909.

[*] Charles L. Marson (1858-1914), a folklorist and author of Folk Songs from Somerset (1904) and Glastonbury (1909).

“On a summer day in a meadow in Kent”

I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to realise a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of thought. My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in experience, having travelled beyond the tropics while they were meditating in the suburbs; though he had been charged with excess in telling travellers’ tales.  In spite of anything said against him, I preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through the wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburnt face and fierce tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan.  Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon began to mellow into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient orchards of the garden of England.  Then my companion said to me: ‘Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that?’ I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand way, ‘Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of antiquity.’ Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the Devil.  No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment I was in the mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous seemed to open about me like a dawn.  ‘Why, of course,’ I said after a moment’s reflection, ‘if it hadn’t been for phallic worship, they would have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex.’ I could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

Conscience

There is a certain kind of modern book which must, if possible, be destroyed.  It ought to be blown to pieces with the dynamite of some great satirist like Swift or Dickens.  As it is, it must be patiently hacked into pieces by some plodding person like myself.  I will do it, as George Washington said, with my little hatchet; though it might take a long time to do it properly.  The kind of book I mean is the pseudo-scientific book.  And by this I do not mean that the man who writes it is a conscious quack or that he knows nothing;  I mean that he proves nothing; he simply gives you all his cocksure, and yet shaky, modern opinions and calls it science.  Books are coming out with so-called scientific conclusions — books in which there is actually no scientific arguments at all.  They simply affirm all those notions that happen to be fashionable in loose “intellectual” clubs, and call them the conclusions of research.  But I am no more awed by the flying fashions among prigs than I am by the flying fashions among snobs.  Snobs say they have the right kind of hat; prigs say they have the right kind of head.  But in both cases I should like some evidence beyond their own habit of staring at themselves in glass.  Suppose I were to write about the current fashions in dress something like this: “Our ignorant and superstitious ancestors had straight hat-brims; but the advance of reason and equality has taught us to have curly hat-brims; in early times shirt-fronts are triangular, but science has shown that they ought to be round; barbaric people have loose trousers, but enlightened and humane people have tight trousers,” and so on, and so on.  You would naturally rebel at this simple style of argument.  You would say — “But, hang it all, give us some facts. Prove that the new fashions are more enlightened.  Prove that men think better in the new hats.  Prove that men run faster in the new trousers.”

I have just read a book which has been widely recommended, which is introduced to the public by Dr. Saleeby, and which is, I understand, written by a Swiss scientist of great distinction.  It is called “Sexual Ethics”, by Professor Forel.  I began to read the book, therefore, with respect.  I finished reading it with stupefaction.  The Swiss Professor is obviously an honest man, though too Puritanical to my taste, and I am told that he does really know an enormous lot about insects.  But as for the conception of proving a case, as for any notion that a “new” opinion needs proof, and that it is not enough, when you knock down great institutions, to say that you don’t like them — it is clear that no such conceptions have ever crossed his mind.  Science says that man has no conscience.  Science says that man and woman must have the same political powers.  Science says that sterile unions are morally free and without rule.  Science says that it is wrong to drink fermented liquor.  And all this with a splendid indifference to the two facts — first, that “Science” does not say these things at all, for numbers of great scientists say exactly the opposite; and second, that if Science did say these things, a person reading a book of rationalistic ethics might be permitted to ask why.  Professor Forel may have mountains of evidence which he has no space to exhibit.  We will give him the benefit of that doubt, and pass on to points where any thinking man is capable of judging him.

Where this sort of scientific writer is seen in all his glory is in his first abstract arguments about the nature of morality.  He is immense; he is at once simple and monstrous, like a whale.  He always has one dim principle or prejudice: to prove that there is nothing separate or sacred about the moral sense.  Professor Forel holds his prejudice with all possible decorum and propriety.  He always trots out three arguments to prove it; like three old broken-kneed elephants.  Professor Forel duly trots them out.  They are supposed to show that there is no such thing positively existing as the conscience; and they might just as easily be used to show that there are no such things as wings or whiskers, or toes or teeth, or boots or books, or Swiss Professors.

The first argument is that man has no conscience because some men are quite mad, and therefore not particularly conscientious.  The second argument is that man has no conscience because some men are more conscientious than others.  And the third is that man has no conscience because conscientious men in different countries and quite different circumstances often do very different things.  Professor Forel applies these arguments eloquently to the question of human consciences; and I really cannot see why I should not apply them to the question of human noses.  Man has no nose because now and then a man has no nose — I believe that Sir William Davenant, the poet, had none.  Man has no nose because some noses are longer than others or can smell better than others.  Man has no nose because not only are noses of different shapes, but (oh, piercing sword of scepticism!) some men use their noses and find the smell of incense nice, while some use their noses and find it nasty.  Science therefore declares that man is normally noseless; and will take this for granted for the next four or five hundred pages, and will treat all the alleged noses of history as the quaint legends of a credulous age.

I do not mention these views because they are original, but exactly because they are not.  They are only dangerous in Professor Forel’s book because they can be found in a thousand books of our epoch.  This writer solemnly asserts that Kant’s idea of an ultimate conscience is a fable because Mahomedans think it wrong to drink wine, while English officers think it right.  Really he might just as well say that the instinct of self-preservation is a fable because some people avoid brandy in order to live long, and some people drink brandy in order to save their lives.  Does Professor Forel believe that Kant, or anybody else, thought that our conscience gave us direct commands about the details of diet or social etiquette?  Did Kant maintain that, when we had reached a certain stage of dinner, a supernatural voice whispered in our ear “Asparagus”; or that the marriage between almonds and raisins was a marriage that was made in heaven?  Surely it is plain enough that all these social duties are deduced from primary moral duties — and may be deduced wrong.  Conscience does not suggest “asparagus”, but it does suggest amiability, and it is thought by some to be an amiable act to accept asparagus when it is offered to you.  Conscience does not respect fish and sherry; but it does respect any innocent ritual that will make men feel alike.  Conscience does not tell you not to drink your hock after your port.  But it does tell you not to commit suicide; and your mere naturalistic reason tells you that the first act may easily approximate to the second.

Christians encourage wine as something which will benefit men.  Teetotallers discourage wine as something that will destroy men.  Their conscientious conclusions are different, but their consciences are just the same.  Teetotallers say that wine is bad because they think it moral to say what they think.  Christians will not say that wine is bad because they think it is immoral to say what they don’t think.  And a triangle is a three-sided figure.  And a dog is a four-legged creature.  And Queen Anne is dead.  We have, indeed, come back to alphabetical truths.  But Professor Forel has not yet even come to them.  He goes on laboriously repeating that there cannot be a fixed moral sense, because some people drink wine and some people don’t.  I cannot imagine how it was that he forgot to mention that France and England cannot have the same moral sense, because Frenchman drive cabs on the right side of the road and Englishmen on the left.

– The Illustrated London News, 12 December 1908.

“A difference about death and daylight”

A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss.  Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien and antagonistic, as the French feel about the Prussian or the Eastern Christians about the Turk.  If we say it is a difference of religion, people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and the day.  Men can think of this difference even at the point of death; for it is a difference about the meaning of life.

. . .There is a religious war when two worlds meet; that is when two visions of the world meet; or in more modern language when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the one man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk of giving a pestilence a place in the sun.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).