“Green fumes of depravity”

Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generally reduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him “brilliant”; which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression of contempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too much honour. I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from a shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges on imbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that everybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just been reading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a number of men for whom I have a high respect, and called “New Theology and Applied Religion.” And it is literally true that I have read through whole columns of the things without knowing what the people are talking about. Either they must be talking about some black and bestial religion in which they were brought up, and of which I have never even heard, or else they must be talking about some blazing and blinding vision of God which they have found, and which by its very splendour confuses their logic and confounds their speech. But the best instance I can quote of the thing is in connection with this matter of the business of physical science [. . .] The following words are written over the signature of a man whose intelligence I respect, and I cannot make head or tail or them –

When modern science declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of a historical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary, the story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite plain that the Pauline scheme — I mean the argumentative process of Paul’s scheme of salvation — had lost its very foundation; for was not that foundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from their first parents? . . . But now there was no Fall; there was no total depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the superstructure followed.

It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean something. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove that man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall? What traces did the author expect to find? Did he expect to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with everything we know from physical science. Humanity might have grown morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way contradict the principle of Evolution…

What can people mean when they say that science has disturbed their view of sin? What sort of view of sin can they have had before science disturbed it? Did they think that it was something to eat? When people say that science has disturbed their faith in immortality, what do they mean? Did they think that immortality was a gas?

Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new principle into the matter at all. A man can be a Christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an Atheist from the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover.

- The Illustrated London News, 28 September 1907.

“Not one in ten”

Some of the people who talk most about “change” and “progress” are the people who can least imagine, really, any alteration in the existing texts and methods of life. For instance, they make “reading and writing” a test for all ages and all civilizations. Reading and writing are in themselves simply accomplishments, very delightful and exciting accomplishments, like playing the mandolin or looping the loop. Some accomplishments are at one time fashionable, some at another. In our civilization nearly everybody can read. In the Saracen civilization nearly everybody could ride. But people persistently apply the three “R”s to all human history. People say, in a shocked sort of voice, “Do you know that in the Middle Ages you could not find one gentlemen in ten who could sign his name?” That is just as if a mediaeval gentlemen cried out in horror, “Do you know that among the gentlemen of the reign of Edward VII, not one in ten knows how to fly a falcon?” Or, to speak more strictly, it would be like a mediaeval gentlemen expressing astonishment that a modern gentleman could not blazon his coat-of-arms. The alphabet is one set of arbitrary symbols. The figures of heraldry are another set of arbitrary symbols. In the fourteenth century every gentlemen knew one: in the twentieth century every gentlemen knows the other…

We talk, with typical bigotry and narrowness, about the Alphabet. But there are in truth a great many alphabets besides the alphabet of letters. The letter alphabet was only slightly used in the Middle Ages: these other alphabets are only slightly used now. A certain number of soldiers learn to convey their meaning to each other by abruptly brandishing small flags. Others talk to each other in an intimate and chatty way by flashes of sunlight on a mirror. These alphabets are as peculiar and restricted an accomplishment as writing was in the Dark Ages. They may some day be as broad and universal a habit as writing is now.

- The Illustrated London News, 2 December 1905.

“Let us blow trumpets”

Ritualism will always attract much of healthy humanity, merely because ritualism is emphatically wearing your heart upon your sleeve; that excellent practice. It says in essence, “Wear your heart upon your sleeve; wear it blazoned in crimson and embroidered in gold. Break out into songs and colours as lovers do. Let others pretend to an inhuman delicacy and a quite sophisticated silence. Let us cry out as children do when they have really found something. Let us blow trumpets and light candles before the thing that we have, to show at least that we have it. And let them keep a decorous silence and a moderate behaviour, let them raise a wall of stone and draw a veil of mystery across something that they have not got at all.”

- The Illustrated London News, 28 July 1906.

Stage and Page

Why have we not a bold and brilliant school of adapters of plays whose business it is to turn them into novels? Am I really free to bring out in three volumes my fascinating psychological romance called “Othello; or, The Mystery of the Handkerchief”? Can I bring out a yellow-backed novel called “The Pound of Flesh; a Tale of Venetian Commerce”? In such a case I am not sure that the novels would be good novels, even if I wrote them. You would find that in a steady and careful prose narrative the reader would reject as coarse and incredible exactly those “properties” which on the stage are, indeed, quite proper: the necessary “business” of the ring, the dagger, the poisoned cup, the letter – in a word, the gross material symbol which is so constantly necessary to make things clear behind the footlights. Thus in a novel about Othello we should be irritated with the accidental importance of the handkerchief; it would remind us of an idiotic detective story. Thus in a novel founded on “The Merchant of Venice” the business of the pound of flesh would seem, not as it seems in the play, merely harsh and barbaric, but openly ludicrous and unthinkable.

- The Illustrated London News, 30 June 1906.

“It gains an everlasting youth”

If we can read a popular detective tale six times it is only because we can forget it six times. A stupid sixpenny story (no half-hearted or dubious stupidity, but a full, strong, rich, human stupidity), a stupid sixpenny story, I say, is thus of the nature of an immortal, inexhaustible possession. Its conclusion is so entirely fatuous and unreasonable that, however often we have heard it, it always comes abruptly, like an explosion, like a gun going off by accident. The thing is so carelessly written that it is not even consistent with itself: there is no unity to recall. The reader cannot be expected to remember the book when the author cannot remember the last chapter. We cannot guess the end when the writer does not seem to know it. Such a story slips easily on and off the mind; it has no projecting sticks or straws of intelligence to catch anywhere on the memory. Hence, as I say, it becomes a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It gains an everlasting youth… It is beautiful and comforting to think what a vast army of amazingly brilliant detectives I have forgotten all about.

- The Illustrated London News, 4 November 1905.

“A mother, a protectress, a goddess”

I opened a paper only ten minutes ago in which it was solemnly said, in the fine old style of such arguments, that there was a time when men regarded women as chattels. This is outside the serious possibilities of the human race. Men never could have regarded women as chattels. If a man tried to regard a woman as a chattel his life would not be worth living for twenty-four hours. You might as well say that there was a bad custom of using live tigers as arm-chairs; or that men had outgrown the habit of wearing dangerous snakes instead of watch-chains. It may or may not be the fact that men have sometimes found it necessary to define the non-political position of women by some legal form which called them chattels; just as they have thought it necessary in England to define the necessary authority of the State by the legal form of saying that the King could do no wrong. Whether this is so or not I do not know, and I do not care. But that any living man ever felt like that, that any living man ever felt as if a woman was a piece of furniture, with which he could do what he liked, is starkly incredible. And the whole tradition and the whole literature of mankind is solid against it. There is any amount of literature from the earliest time in praise of woman: calling her a mother, a protectress, a goddess. There is any amount of literature from the earliest time devoted to the abuse of woman, calling her a serpent, a snare, a devil, a consuming fire. But there is no ancient literature whatever, from the Ionians to the Ashantees, which denies her vitality and her power. The woman is always either the cause of a wicked war, like Helen, or she is the end of a great journey, like Penelope. In all the enormous love poetry of the world, it is practically impossible to find more than two or three poems written by a man to a woman which adopt that tone of de haut en bas, that tone as towards a pet animal, which we are now constantly assured has been the historic tone of men towards women. The poems are all on the other note; it is always “Why is the queen so cruel?” “Why is the goddess so cold?”

- The Illustrated London News, 6 April 1907.

“Put his head in a bag”

It is obviously a fundamental truth that you cannot be funny about a funny subject; if the subject is funny, you can only be pathetic. Thus, pathetic stories are told about clowns, but funny stories about bishops. Farce and religion are deeply akin: they are both based on human dignity. Sin and a piece of orange-peel both mean the Fall of Man. In the light of this eternal contrast we need not wonder that paragraphs in the newspapers which concern the churches and the sects should generally be the funniest reading. But I really think that the following beats anything -

“Some remarkable and lively scenes were witnessed on Saturday night at the adjourned meeting of the Easter Vestry held at St. Mark’s Church, Barnet Vale. Well-known Non-conformists, Passive Resisters, and Roman Catholics were present. For some time past there has been a heated controversy in the parish against what has been considered Ritualistic practices of the Vicar, the Reverend C. McLaughlin … but the Bishop has intimated that there is nothing in the ritual of St. Mark’s to which he takes exception. At the adjourned vestry meeting, Mr. Goddard had undertaken to substantiate the truth of six statements he had made against the Vicar. The first of these was that the Vicar had been urged to wear a ‘mitre’. The reading of the word ‘mitre’ created great amusement.”

I do not wonder at the amusement, but I think it was evoked less by the actual word ‘mitre’ (which is, after all, a word we can most of us pronounce without falling into convulsions) than by the whole nature of this remarkable charge, the charge which is, you will observe, put first and foremost at the very head and front of the Vicar’s infamy. Somebody else (presumably for fun) had urged him to wear a mitre. I do not know what the other five accusations were, but if they were of a corresponding force and logic, it might be possible to imagine them. The second charge was, perhaps, that somebody had said that he would look nice in knickerbockers; the third that Mr. Kensit had satirically suggested that he ought to wear a cardinal’s hat; the fourth that his first cousin had dreamed of him in a green turban; the fifth that his maiden aunt had always wished that he had been in the Life Guards. The list certainly suggests a number of startling images, but it is difficult to see how the unfortunate Vicar is himself responsible for them, just as it is not easy to see why it should be a charge against him that somebody else wanted him to wear a mitre. When a man displeases the little boys in the street, it is not unusual for them to advise him (in a bold metaphor) to put his head in a bag. Doubtless, if a priest of the Church of England did put his head in a bag it would be a startling innovation in the Anglican form of public worship; but it would scarcely be reasonable to accuse a Vicar of introducing this new Romish custom merely because some little gutter-boys had advised him to do it. And, moreover, if an ordinary Vicar put his head in a mitre, he could only be fulfilling the isolated wish of an individual humourist. Whereas, if he put his head in a bag he might, in some cases, be fulfilling a public and long-felt wish.

The final joke of the whole thing was that, as far as I can make out from the report, the priest in question was really an extremely moderate High Churchman and had not done anything odd at all. I feel myself in no great haste to burn idols. But if incense is an idol I should certainly burn it; the same principle applies to tobacco. The only moral of such things is that while there are fools enough on both sides of the question, there is a certain injustice in the fact that the fools on one side are allowed to pose as sturdy Englishmen of sound common-sense, while the fools on the other are regarded wholly as fanatics. It may be the truth that Ritualism is wrong, but if it is, it is a spiritual truth, a mystical truth; it is no more sensible than its opposite. The man who goes through the careful form of using incense may be a Ritualist, but so is the man who goes through the careful form of not using incense. The churchwarden who flies into a passion because somebody has suggested that the Vicar should wear a mitre is just as mad (or just as transcendental) as the Vicar who should actually wear one.”

- The Illustrated London News, 27 April 1907.

“We forget the philosopher”

There is something odd in the fact that when we reproduce the Middle Ages it is always some such rough and half-grotesque part of them that we reproduce. I do not wish to compare the Mysteries of Chester with the Mystery of a Hansom-Cab. Both are popular mysteries; but, as is commonly the case, the medieval is the more intellectual. But why is it that we mainly remember the Middle Ages by absurd things? We remember Henry I not by the First Charter, but by the dish of lampreys. We forget that Henry VIII was intellectual, but we remember that he was fat. I do not mean that the miracle plays are merely absurd: they sometimes were. But I mean that we neglect the rest. Few modern people know what a mass of illuminating philosophy, delicate metaphysics, clear and dignified social morality exists in the serious scholastic writers of mediaeval times. But we seem to have grasped somehow that the ruder and more clownish elements in the Middle Ages have a human and poetical interest. We are delighted to know about the ignorance of mediaevalism; we are contented to be ignorant about its knowledge. When we talk of something mediaeval, we mean something quaint. We remember that alchemy was mediaeval, or that heraldry was mediaeval. We forget that Parliaments are mediaeval, that all our Universities are mediaeval, that city corporations are mediaeval, that gun-powder and printing are mediaeval, that half the things by which we now live, and to which we look for progress, are mediaeval. We remember the Philosopher’s Stone, but we forget the philosopher.

- The Illustrated London News, 14 July 1906.

“Stuck all over with swords and daggers”

What can they mean when they say that we must not put militarism into boys? Can we by any possibility get militarism out of boys? You might burn it out with red-hot irons; you might eventually scourge it out as if it were a mediaeval devil; but except you employ the most poignant form of actual persecution, you certainly will not prevent little boys thinking about soldiers, talking about soldiers, and pretending that they are soldiers. You may mortify and macerate this feeling in them if you like, just as you may mortify and macerate their love of comrades, or their love of wandering…

A child’s instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting; a child always stands for the good militarism as against the bad. The child’s hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression. The child’s hero is never the man or boy who attempts by his mere personal force to extend his mere personal influence… To put the matter shortly, the boy feels an abysmal difference between conquest and victory. Conquest has the sound of something cold and heavy; the automatic operations of a powerful army. Victory has the sound of something sudden and valiant; victory is like a cry out of a living mouth. The child is excited with victory; he is bored with conquest. The child is not an Imperialist; the child is a Jingo – which is excellent. The child is not a militarist in the heavy, mechanical modern sense; the child is a fighter. Only very old and very wicked people can be militarists in the modern sense. Only very old and very wicked people can be peace-at-any-price men. The child’s instincts are quite clean and chivalrous, though perhaps a little exaggerated.

But really to talk of this small human creature, who never picks up an umbrella without trying to use it as a sword, who will hardly read a book in which there is no fighting, who out of the Bible itself generally remembers the ‘bluggy’ parts, who never walks down the garden without imagining himself to be stuck all over with swords and daggers – to take this human creature and talk about the wickedness of teaching him to be military, seems rather a wild piece of humour. He has already not only the tradition of fighting, but a far manlier and more genial tradition of fighting than our own. No; I am not in favour of the child being taught militarism. I am in favour of the child teaching it.

- The Illustrated London News, 20 October 1906.

“Nothing but an epic”

Sometimes I see small fragments of information in the newspapers which make my heart leap with an irrational patriotic sympathy. I have had the misfortune to be left comparatively cold by many of the enterprises and proclamations of my country in recent times. But the other day, I found in the Tribune the following paragraph, which I may be permitted to set down as an example of the kind of international outrage with which I have by far the most instinctive sympathy. There is something attractive, too, in the austere simplicity with which the affair is set forth –

 

Geneva, October 31

The English schoolboy Allen, who was arrested at Lausanne railway station on Saturday, for having painted red the statue of General Jomini of Payerne, was liberated yesterday, after paying a fine of £24. Allen has proceeded to Germany, where he will continue his studies. The people of Payerne are indignant, and clamoured for his detention in prison.

Now I have no doubt that ethics and social necessity require a contrary attitude, but I will freely confess that my first emotions on reading of this exploit were those of profound and elemental pleasure. There is something so large and simple about the operation of painting a whole stone General a bright red. Of course I can understand that the people of Payerne were indignant. They had passed to their homes at twilight through the streets of that beautiful city (or is it a province?), and they had seen against the silver ending of the sunset the grand grey figure of the hero of that land remaining to guard the town under the stars. It certainly must have come as a shock to come out in the broad white morning and find a large vermilion General staring under the staring sun. I do not blame them at all for clamouring for the schoolboy’s detention in prison; I daresay a little detention in prison would do him no harm. Still, I think the immense act has something about it human and excusable; and when I endeavour to analyse the reason of this feeling I find it to lie, not in the fact that the thing was big or bold or successful, but in the fact that the thing was perfectly useless to everybody, including the person who did it. The raid ends in itself; and so Master Allen is sucked back again, having accomplished nothing but an epic.

- The Illustrated London News, 24 November 1906.