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.

“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).

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.

“Beginning with the indisputable thing”

This is the essential idea, that all good argument consists in beginning with the indisputable thing and then disputing everything else in the light of it.  It is of great working value in many modern discussions, if its general principle is understood.  First of all, of course, one must leave out the element of the supernatural or the element of the insane.  The element of the supernatural in practical affairs has always been regarded (even by those who most strongly believed in it) as exceptional.  If a miracle is not exceptional, it is not even miraculous.  Nobody was ever taught by any sane creed to count upon or expect anything but the natural.  To put the point briefly, we are commanded to put our faith in miracles, but not to put our trust in them.  The other alternative of mania or some mental breakdown must also be allowed for.  If we have been seriously assured that there are no snakes in Iceland and in spite of that we see snakes in Iceland, it is always reasonable to ask ourselves if our past life has pointed towards “D.T.”  But supposing that those two abnormalities, the mystery that is above humanity and the madness that is below it, are fairly and honestly out of the question, then the right line of argument certainly is that seeing is believing and that the things we have experienced are true in quite another and more pungent sense than the things into which we can merely be argued.  If I am sitting opposite my aunt in Croydon, a telegram may come from her in Highgate, a newspaper may announce that she is taking part in a Highgate Pageant, an expert may prove that it was impossible for her to have reached Croydon in the time, a statistician may say that he has counted all the aunts in Highgate, and there is not one missing; but all these facts are facts of a secondary degree of evidence.  They have the expert, but I have the aunt.  Unless my aunt is a devil, or I am a lunatic, I have possession of the primary fact in the discussion.

I have already said that this very plain principle of thought is useful in connection with many current problems.  Take, for example, the problem of the Unemployed.  It is very common to meet a prosperous gentleman who will point to a seedy and half-starved loafer in the street, and say: “This unemployment business is all bosh: I offered that man work the other day, and he wouldn’t take it.”  Now, this may possibly be true; but it is always used in order to disprove the idea that the man is miserable.  But to disprove that is simply to disprove the one thing that is proved.  You have only to look at the man to say that, for some reason, by somebody’s fault, or nobody’s fault, he has not eaten enough to be a man, or even to be an animal.  That he refused work is a curious circumstance, to be reconciled, if possible, with the palpable fact that he wants money.  He may have refused it because he is half-witted, or because fatigue has killed all power of choice, or because wrong has moved him to an irrational anger, or because he is a saint, or because he is a maniac, or because he is terrorised by a secret society, or because he has a peculiar religion which forbids him to work on Wednesday.  But whatever the explanation is, it is not that he is jolly and full of meat and drink; because you can see that he isn’t.  His impotence may have this cause or that cause, or the other; but his impotence is no defence of the existing system of wealth and poverty.  To use the modern cant, it does not destroy the problem of the unemployed; it only adds to the problem of the unemployable.  But our main point here is this: that people ought to begin by the thing that they can see.  It may take you twenty years to find whether a man is honest.  But it does not take you two seconds to find out that he is thin.  The ordinary rich man’s argument is that because the tramp is dishonest, he must somehow be secretly fat.  That is the great fallacy.  Believe me (I speak as an expert), it is impossible to be fat in secret.

– The Illustrated London News, 7 November 1908.

“Huge hieroglyphics”

One often wonders what the world of the future will really think of our present epoch.  It is all very well to say that they will find plenty of documents and an enormous amount of printed matter.  Our newspaper language is obvious because it is printed in large letters.  The names over our shops are obvious because they are printed in large letters. They are not obvious in any other sense. We think them simple because we know what they mean. But they are not by any means things of which one can say generally that it is easy to know what they mean. Take the first case that comes to hand.  Suppose the traveller from New Zealand saw over a big London building the words “Child’s Bank”, I suppose he would think it meant a child’s money-box.  We read it quite simply and swiftly and in another sense; but then, so did the ancient Egyptians read simply and swiftly the huge hieroglyphics that we can hardly decipher.  When they saw a moon, six suns, a human hand, a lotus, and five birds standing on one leg, they immediately burst out laughing, because it was a joke. But our descendants, even if they know our language, may well have almost as much trouble with us as we have with Egypt. The opportunities for a natural error are so infinite; as in the case of Child’s Bank.

I remember when I was a little boy (I was a poetical and unpleasant little boy) I always read the words “Job-Master” over some neighbouring door, as if the first word were the Job of the Old Testament.  I also remember that over a shop of hatters or hosiers in Kensington were written the words “Hope Brothers.”  I supposed this to be an inspiring address to mankind, urging them not to fall into an impotent pessimism.  I have since found that the thing has another and less invigorating meaning; and I am even able to appreciate the irony of the fact that over another establishment of an analogous kind is written “Hope, Limited”.  Try the experiment for yourself with almost any words on which your eye happens to fall.  At the moment when I am writing (with fevered brow) this article, the words on which my eye falls first are “Typewriting Office,” written backwards on a windowpane.  That reminds me of an example.  I once wrote a rather silly book about twelve historic figures whom I chose to consider symbolic — St. Francis of Assisi, Charles II, Tolstoy, and so on.  As a book must have a name I called it “Twelve Types”.  I afterwards discovered that it had some sale as a book about technical printing; I found it myself in a library for working printers.  I hope the poor brutes didn’t read it.

– The Illustrated London News, 12 September 1908.

“His extra limbs”

For there is nothing that is really cut off from man or really independent of him in the whole human world. All tools are, as it were, his extra limbs. The chair he sits on is only a system of wooden legs. When he lies on a bed he does not turn himself into a quadruped which (like the elephant) sleeps standing up. If any of these limbs or props of man were to fail him it would be a failure of man. When he invents the most fantastic monstrosities of mechanism, he is only turning himself, as it were, into a monstrosity, into a Briareus, or a centipede. The wooden railway signals are only the wild arms of man waving warnings to his children. The lamps of gas or electricity are only the innumerable eyes of man peering into every dark place and every corner of crime. His passionate pulse is throbbing in the pulse of every passionless machine; his nerves are tingling in the last faint filaments of thread or wire. All the mills of the world labour swiftly because the swiftest thing of all is the ancient desire of the heart. If ever man is to die, these things will die long before him. So long as man lives and has human faith and hope, these things will in innumerable forms continually go forth from him.

- The Illustrated London News, 4 August 1906.

“How splendid they all are!”

The whole of life becomes so very jolly and livable when once we have believed in original sin. If we believe (as some, I am told, do today) that every man is born innocent – then I can only say that to such a believer every man must appear a devil. The words of the wildest pessimist, of the wildest diabolist, seem hardly equal to expressing the vastness of that inventive villainy. By what abominable cleverness, by what hateful wit, did that sinless child contrive to twist himself into such a terror as an ordinary man? But if we realize all ordinary men to be at one ordinary disadvantage, how simple all their struggles become! The ordinary man can be considerate towards the ordinary man as one private soldier is towards another engaged against the same enemy. If once men are under original sin, how splendid they all are!

- The Illustrated London News, 27 January 2006.

“Explanations from the disputed”

I read the other day in some philosophical magazine or other that some Professor whose name I forget (why not say Posh?) was the most conscientious and thorough investigator of ethical origins; and that Posh had come to the conclusion that the old doctrine of a definite thing called the conscience could not be maintained.  If I were to say that I had swum to an island where I learnt that there was no such thing as swimming, you would think it a rather odd remark.  If I told you that I had read a book which conclusively proved to me that I could not read, your lips might murmur faintly the word “paradox”.  If I were to say that I had seen a diagram which distinctly proved me to be blind, it is barely possible that you would not believe me.  Yet I wonder how many mild but intelligent modern mortals would have read or have read that phrase in the philosophical magazine, and not seen anything absurd in the idea of a man conscientiously discovering that he has no conscience.

This is the most irritating of all the modern illogicalities.  I mean the habit of beginning with something of which we are doubtful and expounding (or even denying) in the light of it that of which we are certain.  Superficially and to start with, it is obvious that the world around us may be almost anything; it may be anarchy or Providence or inevitable progress, or mere natural routine; there is something to be said for its being Hell.  The thing of which we are certain is ourselves, and the existence or non-existence in us of such things as a moral sense or the art of swimming.  That is the first situation; the origin of all religion and all irreligion.  But these extraordinary Professors ask me to begin with evolution and all sorts of things that may never even have occurred; and in the light of them discuss whether my own experiences have occurred.  They light up the certain with explanations from the disputed.  Now I am not passionately anxious to be explained; and I resolutely refuse to be explained away.  Drive me away, if I sufficiently submissive.  Carry me away, if I am sufficiently portable.  But do not imagine that you can explain me away and that I shall accept the explanation in a gentlemanly spirit;  do not suppose that you can either browbeat or persuade me out of the mystic and primordial certainty that I am that I am.  The point is very obvious; and yet the missing of it is responsible for a forest of mistakes that are growing round us on every side and in every question.  Generalizations absorb and employ details, but they cannot abolish them.  General knowledge may prove that your experience is general, or it may prove that it is not general; but it cannot prove that it is not genuine.  And yet in almost every one of the practical points in dispute in our society, people are being worried and poisoned and misled by this quite infantile fallacy.

– The Illustrated London News, 20 February 1909.

The hangman and the soldier

We have so many questions in the modern world which are really difficult to answer; I wish the modern people would leave off asking questions which are quite easy to answer, or, rather, which are not even worth answering.  Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary in the only intelligent sense which that term can bear.  Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled.  Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.  And the worst symptom is this habit of our philosophers of asking nursery questions, questions that most of us in our babyhood either found answered or found unanswerable.  Sophistry has gone so far as to unlearn the alphabet and reverse the clock.  Many of the queries solemnly propounded in our most portentous books and magazines are queries which a schoolboy would answer with instantaneous and irritating smartness, and which a healthy child would not even admit to be queries at all.

I take such cases as come to hand.  I read two articles this morning in two very able and distinguished periodicals which were devoted to this general consideration: “How extraordinary it is that the hangman is regarded with horror, which the soldier and the judge are not regarded with horror.”  The schoolboy would burst his Eton collar in his eagerness to answer so obvious a difficulty.  He would say at once that a hangman is not so fine as a soldier, because he is not so brave.  A hangman is merely a destroyer; a soldier is not.  A soldier, at the best, is a martyr; at the worst, he is a good gambler.  If the public executioner were obliged to have a personal conflict on the scaffold with the criminal, upon the issue of which depended which of the two were hanged, then general public sentiment would admire the hangman, just as general public sentiment admires the soldier.

All this is a very tiresome truism; but that is my point.  I cannot understand anyone asking a question that has so obvious an answer.  The writer, if I remember correctly, goes on to attempt a solution by talking about clinging memories of barbaric creeds and the slow advance through history of the humanitarian sentiment.  But the thing has nothing to do with the advance of anything or the memory of anything.  There never was a time in recorded history when soldiers were not liked, while hangmen, jailers, and torturers were regarded with marked coldness.  There is no record of any civilization in which the hangman was a desirable parti for the daughters of the aristocracy.  There never was a Victoria Cross merely for killing people.  There never was a civic crown ob cives interfectos.

This does not appear particularly surprising to anyone whose heart is in the right place or whose head is screwed on correctly.  It is not hard to see that the human soul has always recognized three degrees of moral value in the matter of killing.  Highest is the martyr, who is killed without killing; second is the soldier, who is killed and kills; third is the executioner, who kills with no peril at all of being killed in return.  He is disliked.  It may be unjust, but I do not understand anyone thinking it unnatural.

– The Illustrated London News, 6 February 1909.

Birthdays and Mr. Shaw

Years ago, when Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote on drama in the Saturday Review, he was only prevented from saying of every play that it was the worst in the world by the desire to say that at any rate it was better than Shakespeare.  The high-water mark of his extraordinary hatred was reached, I remember, when somebody (with singular innocence) asked him to contribute to the celebration of a Shakespeare anniversary.  He said — “I no longer celebrate my own birthday, and I do not see why I should celebrate his.”  And I remember that when I read the words — years ago, when I was very young — I leapt up in my seat (since I was more agile in those days), and cried out — “Now I understand why he does not appreciate Shakespeare.  It is because he does not appreciate birthdays.”  [...] Shakespeare was very plausibly presented by Shaw as a mere sullen sentimentalist, weeping over his own weakness and hanging the world with black in anticipation of his own funeral.  It was all very ingenious, and you can quote a great deal in support of it.  But, all the same, I am pretty sure that Shakespeare celebrated his birthday — and celebrated it with the utmost regularity.  That is to say, I am sure there was strict punctuality about the time when the festival should begin, though there may, perhaps, have been some degree of vagueness or irregularity about the time when it should end.

There are some modern optimists who announce that the universe is magnificent or that life is worth living, as if they had just discovered some ingenious and unexpected circumstance which the world had never heard of before.  But, if people had not regarded this human life of ours as wonderful and worthy, they would never have celebrated their birthdays at all.  If you give Mr. Jones a box of cigars on his birthday the act cannot be consistent with the statement that you wish he had never been born.  If you give Mr. Smith a dozen of sherry it cannot mean in theory that you wish him dead, whatever effects it may have in practice.  Birthdays are a glorification of the idea of life, and it exactly hits the weak point in the Shaw type of optimism (or vitalism, which would be the better word) that it does not instinctively side with such religious celebrations of life.  Mr. Shaw is ready to praise the Life-force, but he is not willing to keep his birthday, which would be the best of all ways to praise it.  And the reason is that the modern people will do anything whatever for their religion except play the fool for it.  They will be martyred, but they will not be chaffed.  Mr. Shaw is quite clearly aware that it is a very good thing for him and for everyone else that he is alive.  But to be told so in the symbolic form of brown-paper parcels containing slippers or cigarettes makes him feel a fool; which is exactly what he ought to feel.  On many high occasions of life it is the only alternative to being one.  A birthday does not come merely to remind a man that he has been born.  It comes that he may be born again.  And if a man is born again he must be as clumsy and comic as a baby.

– The Illustrated London News, 28 November 1908.