This web site doesn't display advertising. Please consider making a donation.

Free texts and images.

God and Goods

It is often noted, and generally truly enough, that Bolshevism is necessarily connected with atheism. It is not so much realised, perhaps, that atheism is now under an increasing necessity of connecting itself with Bolshevism. For Bolshevism is at least partly positive, even if it is largely destructive. And the history of the purely negative notion, of an abstract attack on religion, has been in this respect a rather curious history. Taken as a whole, indeed it is at once melancholy and comic. Those who in modern times have tried to destroy popular religion, or a traditional faith, have always felt the necessity of offering something solid as a substitute. The queer part of it is that they have offered about a dozen totally different things; some of them entirely contradictory things; that the promises perpetually varied, and only the negative threat remained the same.

Just before the French Revolution, among the first eighteenth-century philosophers, it was generally assumed that Liberty was not merely a good thing, but the one and only origin of all good things. The man living according to Nature, the Natural Man or the Noble Savage, would find himself immediately free and happy so long as he never went to church, and was careful to cut the parish priest in the street. These philosophers soon discovered, what the parish priest could have told them at the start, that it is rather more difficult to be a happy animal, than to be a happy man. Indeed, a man cannot be an animal for the same reason that he cannot be an angel; because be is a man. But for some time the philosophers who did not believe in God, whom they regarded as a myth, managed to believe in Nature without realising that she is a metaphor. And they assured those whom they waved on to the burning down of churches, that after that they would be eternally happy in their fields and gardens.

Then after the political revolution came the industrial revolution; and with it an enormous new importance attached to science. The amiable atheists went back to the people, smiled at them, coughed slightly, and explained that it was still necessary to burn down churches, but that a slight error had been made about the substitute for churches. The second atheist philosophy was founded, not on the fact that Nature is kind, but on the fact that Nature is cruel; not that fields are free and beautiful, but that scientific men and industrialists are so energetic, that they will soon cover all the fields with factories and warehouses. Now there was a new substitute for God; which was gas and coal and iron and the privilege of turning wheels in order to work these substances. It was now positively stated that economic liberty, the freedom to buy and sell and hire and exploit, would make people so blissfully happy that they would forget all their dreams of the fields of heaven; or for that matter of the fields of earth. And somehow that also has been a little disappointing.

Two Earthly Paradises had collapsed. The first was the natural paradise of Rousseau; the second the economic paradise of Ricardo. Men did not become perfect through being free to live and love; men did not become perfect through being free to buy and sell. It was obviously time for the atheists to find a third inevitable and immediate ideal. They have found it in Communism. And it does not trouble them that it is quite different from their first ideal and quite contrary to their second. All they want is some supposed betterment of humanity which will be a bribe for depriving humanity of divinity. Read between the lines of half a hundred new books--outlines of popular science and educational publications on history and philosophy-- and you will see that the only fundamental feeling in them is the hatred of religion. The only positive thing is negative. But they are forced more and more to idealise Bolshevism, simply because it is the only thing left that is still new enough to be offered as a hope, when every one of the revolutionary hopes they have themselves offered has in its turn become hopeless.

From Meredith to Rupert Brooke

The title of the Age of Reason has been given to the eighteenth century, though the typical eighteenth-century man who invented it probably meant it as a prophetic and optimistic description of the nineteenth century or the twentieth century. Certainly if Thomas Paine had foreseen the actual nineteenth century, he would have called it the Age of Romanticism. If he had foreseen the actual twentieth century, he would have called it the Age of Nonsense, the Age of Unreason, especially in the departments originally identified with rationalism, such as the department of science. To him Einstein would have been merely a contradiction in terms and Epstein a disease afflicting bronze and marble. It is therefore not altogether misleading to measure modern developments, for good or evil, as from a sort of datum line of simple or self-evident rationality to be found in the eighteenth century. Whatever else is false, it is false to say that the world has increased in clarity and intelligibility and logical completeness. Whatever else is true, it is true to say that the world has grown more bewildering, especially in the scientific spheres supposed to be ruled by law or explained by reason. The simplification of the older rationalists may have been, and indeed was, an over-simplification. But it did simplify and it did satisfy; above all, it satisfied them. It would not be altogether unfair to say that it filled them not only with satisfaction but with self-satisfaction. And, as historical divisions are never clean-cut, this rationalistic self-satisfaction descended in part to their children; in many ways it may be found pervading the nineteenth century, and, in the case of some rather old-fashioned persons, even our own century.

Nevertheless, the nineteenth century was very different; and the Victorian Age was vividly different. And it was different from the eighteenth century chiefly in this: that the old clarity of rationalism and humanitarianism was more and more coloured and clouded by certain waves of specially modern imagination or hypothesis or taste and fancy. These new notions had been unknown in the Age of Reason and even in the Age of Revolution. These sentiments had never disturbed the generalisations of Jefferson and the Jacobins any more than they had disturbed the doctrines of Johnson and the Jacobites. These sentiments colour everything in the Victorian Age, and they must be understood before attempting any survey of it.

It is generally difficult to illustrate this truth without being involved in a discussion about religion. But there is, as it happens, another outstanding example, which does not directly involve any interest in religion. I mean the enormous interest in race. That would alone be enough to stamp the nineteenth century as something sharply different from the eighteenth century. That would alone be enough to mark off the Victorian from the older Georgian frame of mind. In the eighteenth century, both the reactionaries and the revolutionaries inherited the ancient religious and philosophic habit of legislating for mankind. A man like Johnson thought of men everywhere as under certain religious conditions, though he thought them happier under conditions of subordination. A man like Jefferson thought of men everywhere as under certain moral conditions, though he thought them happiest in a condition of equality. A man like Gibbon might doubt both the moral systems of Johnson and Jefferson. But it never occurred to Gibbon to explain the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by exalting the Teuton as such against the Latin as such, or vice versa. Gibbon had religious prejudices, or, if you will, irreligious prejudices. But the notion of having racial prejudices in a quarrel between some brutal Vandal or Visigoth and some petty Byzantine official would have seemed to him as nonsensical as taking sides among Chinese tongs or Zulu tribes. Similarly, the eighteenth-century Tories were traditional but not tribal. Even a man as late as Metternich, while he might be on the watch against French atheism or even Russian orthodoxy disturbing the Austrian Empire, would have troubled his head very little over the fact that the Austrian Empire contained a mixture of Teutons and Slavs. The rise of this romance of race, or, as some would say, of this science of race, was one of the distinct and decisive revolutions of the nineteenth century, and especially of the Victorian Age.

It will be well to mark in what way these colossal clouds of historical imagination or theory actually coloured or discoloured the dead daylight, which an earlier rationalism thought to have dawned upon the world. In the case of Victorian literature, perhaps it is best tested by noting how it affected even the Victorians who might have been expected to escape its effect. Carlyle was not merely affected by it we might almost say that he was made by it. Anyhow, he was inspired and intoxicated by it; he was at once overwhelmed and made overwhelming. All his history and philosophy was full of this one idea: that all that is good in our civilisation comes, not from the older civilisation, but from a yet older thing that might be called a benevolent barbarism. All light as well as fire, all law as well as liberty, was supposed to be derived from a sort of ethnic energy originally called Germanic, afterwards more prudently called Teutonic; and now, with almost an excess of caution, called Nordic. The merits of this racial theory, as against the old Roman theory, of European culture, are difficult to discuss without trenching on controversial themes. Personally I should say that when certain European provinces broke with the Roman tradition, they set up certain Puritan theologies of their own, which could not last, or at any rate have not lasted. Anyhow, it is curious that in each of these provinces the place of both the new and the old religion has really been taken by a stark and rather narrow national pride. The Prussian is more proud of being a Prussian than of being a Protestant, in the sense of a Lutheran. The Orangeman is more proud of being what he calls an Ulsterman than of being a Calvinist, in the sense of studying the strict Calvinist theology. And even in England, where the atmosphere was more mild and the elements more mixed, the same type of intense insular self-consciousness has in some degree developed; and it has been not untruly said that patriotism is the religion of the English. In any case, to take the same test, an Englishman is normally more proud of being an Englishman than of being an Anglican. It was therefore not unnatural that when these lands, that were the extinct volcanoes of the great Puritan fire, sought for a more modern and general bond of association, they should seek it in that sort of pride in the race, which is the extension of the pride in the tribe. It is right to say that there is much in the idea of race that stirs the imagination and lends itself to the production of literature. The ideal of race, like the ideal of religion, has its own symbols, prophecies, oracles and holy places. If it is less mystical, it is equally mysterious. The riddle of heredity, the bond of blood, the doom which in a hundred human legends attends certain houses or families, are things quite sufficiently native to our nature to lend a sincerity to the sense of national or even international kinship. Many may quite honestly have felt that race was as religious as religion. But one thing it certainly was not. It was not as rational as religion. It was not as universal or philosophical as religion. At its best it involved a sort of noble prejudice; and its romanticism clouded the old general judgments upon men as men, whether dogmatic or democratic. Carlyle was the most romantic of all these romantic Victorian writers, and largely owed to this his predominance in the romantic Victorian age. But his popular champions, like Froude and Kingsley, were even more romantic; though in the case of Kingsley the romancing was really honest romancing, while in the case of Froude (I cannot but think) the word romancing is something of a euphemism.

Only, as I have said, the way in which this racial romance penetrated the Victorian culture can best be seen, not in an obvious case like Carlyle, but in much more remote cases like Matthew Arnold or Meredith. To take the latter case first: George Meredith was in one sense an entirely international intellectual; a Liberal humanist; a true child of the French Revolution, which he celebrated in sumptuous odes. But he illustrates the indirect effect of the racial craze, which is that the other side often accepted the distinction. Not only did the Teutonist talk about being a Teuton, but the Celt talked about being a Celt. A great mass of Meredith's social judgment is modified, and, to my taste, a little falsified, by his insistence on setting the Saxon against the Celt, when he has to set the Englishman against the Irishman or the Welshman. He often satirised in the Englishman exactly what the Teutonist praised in the Englishman; and it was often something that the Englishman does not happen to possess. So in the other case: Matthew Arnold made himself specially and supremely the apostle of a cosmopolitan culture; he did a vast amount of real good by insisting on the truism that England is a part of Europe. He was at his best in a contempt for the contempt that was felt for Frenchmen or Irishmen or Italians. But he could not bring himself to treat them simply as Frenchmen or Irishmen or Italians. He was affected by the universal fashion of ethnology and worried by the racial generalisations. When he talked what was relatively excellent sense about the senseless treatment of Ireland, he thought of such things too much as Celtic Studies and too little as Irish Studies. He also tried to explain the English faults as part of "the German paste in us", and wasted on anthropology what was meant for the study of mankind. We might take a third example. William Morris was on one side a Communist and almost bound to be an internationalist; he was on the other side a medievalist, appealing to that ancient beauty that belonged to all Europeans alike. But he was encumbered with a clumsy desire to be Saxon, to treat English as if it were merely the rudimentary language of the Angles; and moved his admirer, Stevenson, to an intense irritation by writing "whereas" when he only meant "where".

I have mentioned this particular Victorian fashion, the racial theory of history, as a primary and prominent thing, because it is not generally mentioned at all. We are so accustomed, in reading modern records of recent or ancient things, to gain an impression of an ever-expanding world, called in the only too typical Victorian expression, "the thoughts of men being widened by the process of the suns", that we often forget the many periods when the world contracted into a new narrowness or exclusiveness, or the thoughts of men visibly shrank and shrivelled under some fresh influence of isolation or distinction. This was certainly true of the tribalism and imperialism that the nineteenth century developed, out of a romance of races, as compared with the first revolutionary generalisations about the human race. The fact is plain, for instance, in the story of the first revolutionary experiment-- the American Republic. In the time of Jefferson, many of those who held slaves disapproved of slavery; many of those who approved of slavery did not specially approve of it as negro slavery. The notion of the negro as something peculiarly perilous or pestilent is not an ancient prejudice but a very recent and largely anthropological fashion. It is akin to all that dates from Darwin; and the popularisation by Huxley of an almost pessimistic type of evolution. Modern Southerners are much more hostile to negroes than they were when they owned slaves. As there rose recently in America the anthropological theory that the negro is only an ape, so there rose recently in Europe the anthropological notion that the Pole is only a Slav, or that the Irishman is only a Celt. People were so proud of discovering these larger groups that they failed to notice that they are really looser groups. They belonged to what the eminent Victorian truly called the fairy-tales of science. They had neither the precision that belongs to doctrinal definition nor the practicality that belongs to daily experience. In religion and morals we all really know what we mean by a man, and in the stress of real life we all really know what we mean by an Irishman. It is by no means certain that we all know what we mean by a Celt. Hence something large and imaginative, but formless and partly imaginary, began to spread over popular sentiment with the spread of popular science. It was darker and more dubious than either the humanitarianism of the eighteenth century or the nationalism of the nineteenth. It was not so clean-cut; indeed I will venture to say that it was not so clean. It was mixed with the mud and mist, the chaotic clay and cloud, of primitive and even bestial beginnings; it had only vague visions of barbaric migrations and massacres and enslavements. It started all our recent preference for the prehistoric to the historic. All this must be remembered as an influence overshadowing the second half of the nineteenth century, because it eventually took a more pointed and controversial form which involved not only materialism but pessimism. The earlier rationalists may or may not have been materialists; but they certainly were not pessimists. They were, I admit, rather exaggerated and excessive optimists. It is none the less curious that the general revolutionary tradition, of revolt and criticism of conditions, which began with the philosophy of Rousseau, should have ended with the philosophy of Thomas Hardy.

So much for one side of this later Victorian change. But the mere mention of Hardy and the realistic rebels will remind us that it had another side, which was a very good side. Probably speaking, it consisted in turning the attention from purely political wrongs to fundamental economic wrongs. In this also Carlyle, who belongs to the earlier period, continues to colour and even control the destinies of the later. In the matter of dates Carlyle and Macaulay covered the same period. In the matter of destinies they lived in two different centuries. Macaulay was, for good and evil, entirely a man of the eighteenth century. He was a Whig as Fox had been a Whig; a patriot as Pitt had been a patriot; a Protestant as any Erastian latitudinarian Georgian parson had been a Protestant; a logician as Dr. Johnson was a logician; a historian as Gibbon was a historian. Carlyle, who had brought into history the doubtful romance of blood, also brought into politics the very real tragedy of bread. He stands at the beginning of all the best efforts of the later Victorians to face the problems of labour and hunger that had developed in the depths of the new industrial civilisation. With the great exception of Cobbett, who had stood apart and alone, misunderstood and abused by all parties, it is fair to say that Carlyle started much of the merely social unrest of conscience which has modified the evils of the later nineteenth century. It is needless here to weigh the evil against the good; or to discuss how much of a certain disinterested dignity, in the old Republicans, was lost in his practical and impatient clamour for captains and for kings. It is only necessary to insist on the reality of the contrast and the change. Grattan, a great and typical orator of the eighteenth-century ideal, had said that the Irishman might go in rags, but he must not go in chains. Ruskin and the social reformers reversed the principle, until some of the extreme Socialists, like the Marxian Communists, are now inclined to say that a man must go in chains so that he may not go in rags.

Ruskin was the heir and representative of Carlyle in this later and better Victorian development. It is unnecessary to react against romanticism to such an extent as a recent critic, who summed up Ruskin in a book on the Victorians by saying that at least his economics were all scientifically sound though he could not write for toffee. He certainly could not write in that stately modern style in which toffee figures as the prize of writing. When the critic suggests that he could not write, it merely means that the critic does not like that particular sort of writing, which proves rather the limitations of the critic than the incapacities of the writer. Ruskin certainly wrote poetical prose, which may not for the moment be fashionable in an age of prosaic poetry. But to say that it is not good poetical prose is simply to be ignorant of the varied possibilities of good writing. It is also true that what he did he overdid, which is largely true of the whole of this highly coloured and romantic final development of Victorianism. Even those few who deliberately tried to correct it by understatement managed somehow to overstate their understatement. Matthew Arnold deliberately endeavoured to introduce a French classical balance and critical detachment into English letters. The consequence was that he was called a prig, which was unjust but not unthinkable; whereas no Frenchman reading Saint-Beuve ever thought of thinking that he was a prig. Walter Pater wished to create an art criticism more detached than that of Ruskin; but he did in fact manage to create the impression of being artificial as well as artistic. It was very difficult to be classic in the later Victorian atmosphere. There was a romantic unrest about it, so that even the umpires were competitive and combative. The loss of a natural repose, in Latin logic or French clarity, was one of the penalties of parting with the spirit of the eighteenth century. Another mark of it was the growth of an intellectual individualism which expressed itself, not only in being outré, but actually in being obscure. Browning and Meredith were among the very greatest of Victorians; and over both of them brooded that cloud I have described as coming up to over-shadow the epoch; and though it was coloured gorgeously like a cloud of sunset, it none the less came between many people and the sun.

George Meredith largely stood alone; but he stood as it were representing many others who had also a taste for standing alone. All this last phase is full of men whom it is interesting to remember and yet very easy to forget. It was because of the individualistic isolation of their talents and even their topics. An example is Richard Jefferies, who was "The Gamekeeper At Home"; or T. E. Brown, who made a niche for himself that is somehow at once obscure and popular: or William de Morgan, who with English eccentricity took up literature as a hobby for old age. The danger of all grouping is that we may miss too many of these men who did not fit into groups. Nevertheless, there are two or three groups which may be said to bulk biggest in the period--the period after the triumph of Tennyson and Browning in poetry, or Dickens and Thackeray in fiction. First there appears, primarily through the influence of Ruskin, what was called the Pre-Raphaelite Group; which began with a Ruskinian version of Christian medievalism and shaded off into later forms of aestheticism, not to say Paganism. The leader, who was also the link, was Rossetti, who accepted with delight the medieval pattern, but blazoned it with bolder and warmer colours than some of the literal Pre-Raphaelites would have approved. With him went his sister Christina, who was medieval in the more orthodox sense; and, in a manner very much his own, William Morris, who made the medieval form the expression of modern discontents and social ideals, instead of Christina Rossetti's religious ideals. The queer transition of the Pre-Raphaelites from a revival of Christianity to a revival of Paganism is complete in the poet Swinburne, who belonged to the set, yet had little in common with the sect. That it had Ruskin at one end and Swinburne at the other illustrates how loose a thing a group is, especially in English literature. Swinburne had three phases; one in which he wrote the best poetry in the worst spirits, or mood or frame of mind for his beautiful boyish singing is not merely in praise of Paganism, but definitely of Pessimism. There is a second period when his spirits are a little better and his poetry a little worse; the period of his political enthusiasm for United Italy and Victor Hugo and the resounding qualities of the word Republic. There is, unfortunately, a third period, in which he imitated himself and did it badly. But the point to seize is that, in his great hour, Swinburne was a spell; he held people like a magic flute, till they forgot that there was any other melody in the world. It is thoroughly typical of such glamours that there has been a violent and very unreasonable reaction against his unreasonable power. With him and Walter Pater the movement ends in its last pagan phase; save perhaps for the queer aestheticism that later became a decadent dandyism in Oscar Wilde.

But already new groups were making this one look old. One was what may be called the Picaresque or Adventurous Group, but may be more recognisable as the group of Stevenson and Henley. Both for good and evil, they reacted into a robust blood-and-thunder literature, which, in the case of Stevenson, who was not only the greater but much the more amiable and balanced of the two, was as blameless as it was bloody. There was, however, a dangerous double use of the very word "blood". And, quaintly enough, the more dubious element is to be found rather in blood than in bloodshed. The blood that spatters the pages of Treasure Island can only promote a respect for the real virtues of courage or loyalty. The blood that is not shed at all, but remains in the human body, was used to encourage a respect for the real vices and weaknesses of pride and racial contempt. For one important point about this group is this: that through them, or some of them, there came into full power and possession that curious religion of Race, which I have described as developing from Teutonic sources a little time before. It is not to be confused with patriotism or the unselfish love of one's country. It is a mere pride in being oneself of a certain real or imaginary race or stock. The Frenchman loves France as if she were a woman; the Nordic Man merely loves himself for being a Nordic Man. This weakness did to some extent spoil the spirited attempt of Henley and his school of masculine critics; I mean their very just attempt to show that letters should be red-blooded, as against the green-blooded pessimism of the decadents. But whatever their weaknesses, they did fill the age with a new change and stir, and gave to the pessimists something which if not a cure, was at least an antidote and a counter-irritant. The earliest and best work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling came to them like a new breath of prophecy and promise; Sir Henry Newbolt supported the chorus with two or three of the very finest modern English lyrics. There was a general fashion of patriotic poetry, as well as of Jingo journalism--in verse or otherwise. It was the only point on which that strongest and most virile of the pessimists, the Shropshire Lad, could be moved for a moment to a slightly blasphemous cheerfulness. John Davidson, a dark Scot in a dark and even dim state of revolt against everything, also was ready to follow the flag and revolt against everything except the Empire. The point of all this is not that patriotism revived, for the older poets and critics took patriotism for granted: but that the special type of tribal imperialism sprang out of that rather barbaric root of Race, already noted as a romance of science, which reacted against the rationalism of the Revolution.

Fortunately, from the same Stevenson and Henley stock of ideas, came another idea that also filled the age. It came from Stevenson alone, as distinct from Newbolt, Henley, Kipling and the rest, and may be called the cult of the child, but especially of the boy. It would be putting it too harshly, perhaps, to say that Stevenson wanted to go on playing at robbers; whereas Henley and the Imperialists wanted to be robbers. Anyhow, Stevenson saw the fun of what he was doing when be made the child say that he was the captain of a tidy little ship; whereas it is, I believe, the inscrutable fact that Henley did not see any fun in what he was doing when he adjured John Bull to "Storm along, John", and assured that public character that the whole world would soon be his own. Through Stevenson's truly magic lantern, which he described in The Lantern-Bearers, there shone a true reillumination of the mystical melodrama of childhood. And in that light many followed to the same sort of fairyland; notably Sir James Barrie, who introduced a sort of irony into fairyland. He continued what may be called the Stevensonian stereoscopic view; the looking at the same object in a double fashion, with the eye of the adult and of the child. But it was mostly through a string of accidental friendships that this fantastic element was connected with the more realistic of the robust school, though of course there were many brilliant individuals who could only be placed with or near that group. Thus Joseph Conrad, though a Pole, was connected with it by his record of hard or violent adventure at sea; and Mr. John Masefield, though he wrote later and longer poems of rural sport or religion, began with rousing sea songs of the buccaneers.

Already, however, a new voice had been heard, and a new influence balanced or rebuked an influence like that of Kipling; and it was a voice from a more remote elfland than the elfland of Peter Pan. Stevenson himself said that he had twice in poetry heard a new note or a unique and arresting voice: once when he read Love In A Valley by George Meredith; and once again when he read some verses called The Lake Island of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats. Yet it is worth remarking that there still remained this curious persistence of the romance of race, even in what was so naturally hostile to the popular romance of the Anglo-Saxon race. The appearance of a new cultural nucleus in Dublin, while it derived something from the Pre-Raphaelites, and therefore something from the Victorians, was so far Victorian in this special respect, that it managed to get entangled like all the rest with an ethnological term: the term "Celtic". It did not even substitute the old Irish term "Gaelic". It is true that Mr. Yeats himself, the founder of the school and one of the first poets of recent times, did not really base his own case on anthropology, but rather on history and (very rightly) even more on legend. But it marks the racial influence already described that the word "Celtic" stuck to the movement, which was really a revival of remote legend and a gentle heathenism of the hills. It also explains why there was some reaction against it even in its own home. There are many who came not to care very much about the Celtic Twilight, who have lived to see the Irish Dawn.

About this time, or a little later, in England, there appeared a group formally called Minor Poets; though one of them was certainly a Major Poet. He was classed at the time with John Davidson and Sir William Watson, both of them very genuine poets in their own style; and there is some charming lyricism in their contemporaries, Norman Gale and Richard le Gallienne. Two other writers of fine verse really belong to this period: Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. But I think it fair to say that Francis Thompson, thus classed as one of them, was of another and altogether higher class. He owed something to Coventry Patmore, one of the most really original Victorians, and something to Alice Meynell, a woman who was a poet (not a poetess) of the sort that women were least supposed to be; an intrinsically intellectual poet. But even of these friends he was free; with all the freedom of a creative and supremely productive or fertile genius. His imagery was so imaginative as to be almost crowded; and, in a different sense from the more analytical Victorians, dark with excess of light. Because he was Catholic many would expect him to be Gothic; but there was something in his exuberance that resembled rather the very best of the Baroque.

The necessity of marking the period by moods has led us here to mark it too exclusively by poets, who are the only permanent record of moods. It need not be said that work of another and what some think a more solid sort had been going forward in those last years; some of it very solid indeed, certainly in the best and perhaps also in the more questionable sense. Fiction, for instance, had followed other guides besides romance. The immense influence of Thomas Hardy was there; with his strong sense of the truth of the earth, as also of the tragedy of the dust. It had set many able men working in a mine of realism. The two ablest and most typical in this tradition were Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. If I do not speak here at length of men of genius like H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, it is because they are in a sense the opening of another world, and are most vividly lit up by the glare of the Great War and the existing social perils; and these things really mark the close of the period. For an appalling apocalypse came upon all life, and therefore upon all literature; and the most fitting emblems of such splendour and terror, and the arts of peace torn across, and youth going to its death singing, remain with the last few poems of Rupert Brooke.

The Dangers of Necromancy

We often lament that the world is divided into sects, all with different narrow ideas. The real trouble is that they all have different broad ideas. It is when it comes to being broadminded that they are most narrow, or at any rate most different. It is their generalisations that cut across each other. The Buddhist believes he is broadminded when he says that all efforts at personal achievement and finality, east or west, Christian or Buddhist, are equally vain and hopeless. But I think that is a narrow negation, sprung from special spiritual conditions in Upper India. A modern agnostic thinks he is broadminded when he says that all religions or revelations, Catholic or Protestant, savage or civilised, are alike mere myths and guesses at what man can never know. But I think that is a narrow negation, sprung from special spiritual conditions in Upper Tooting. My idea of broadmindedness is to sympathise with so many of these separate spiritual atmospheres as possible; to respect or love the Buddhists of Tibet or the agnostics of Tooting for their many real virtues and capacities, but to have a philosophy which explains each of them in turn and does not merely generalise from one of them. This I have found in the Catholic philosophy; but that is not the question here, except in so far as there is, I think, just this difference: that the largeness of the other schemes is an unreal largeness of generalisation, whereas the largeness of our scheme is a real largeness of experience. Anybody can say that all Africans are black, but it is not the same as having a wide experience of Africa.

This difference about the obvious in generalisation struck me sharply, and with some amusement, in a debate on Spiritualism in the Daily News. A well-known secularist said that it is all very well to say that scientific men and intelligent people accept Spiritualism; but (he added, as with a sort of hiss) remember that wise men for ages actually accepted Witchcraft. He returned more than once to this biting and blasting word; and the argument obviously was, "Modern spirit-rapping by men like Lodge may look very plausible and scientific; but a ghastly fate awaits you; you will be the derision of history; you will be compared to the brutal, brainless, bestially ignorant people who believed in Witchcraft. Ha, ha, how will you like that?"

Now all this makes me smile in a sad but broad-minded manner. Because it seems to me to be quite the other way. I am not by any means certain, one way or the other, that there is really such a thing as Spirit-rapping. I am absolutely certain that there is such a thing as Witchcraft. I impute a belief in it to common sense, to experience and the records of experience, and to a broad view of humanity as a whole. I impute disbelief in it to inexperience, to provincial ignorance, to local limitations, and all the vices that balance the virtues of Tooting. Common sense will show that the habit of invoking evil spirits, often because they were evil, has existed in far too vast a variety of different cultures, classes and social conditions to be a chance piece of childish credulity. Experience will show that it is not true that it disappears everywhere before the advance of education; on the contrary, some of its most evil ministers have been the most highly educated. Record will show that it is not true that it marks barbarism rather than civilisation; there was more devil-worship in the cities of Hannibal and Montezuma than among the Esquimaux or the Australian bushmen. And any real knowledge of modern cities will show that it is going on in London and Paris today.

The truth is that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had their little local limitations, which are already breaking down. Wishing to expel the superhuman and exalt the human, they grossly simplified the human. The great Huxley (on whose name be praise) said in the innocence of his heart, "It may be doubted if any man ever really said, 'Evil, be thou my good.'" He could not believe that any scepticism could touch common morality, by which he really meant Christian morality. But such innocence is also ignorance. Nothing is more certain than that certain highly lucid, cultivated and deliberate men have said, "Evil, be thou my good"; men like Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade. Please God they repented in the end, but the point is that they did pursue evil; not pleasure, or excess of pleasure, or sex or sensuality, but evil. And it is quite certain that some pursued it beyond the bounds of this world; and called evil forces from beyond. There is very good evidence that some of them got what they asked for.

Now a Catholic starts with all this realistic experience of humanity and history. A Spiritualist generally starts with the recent nineteenth-century optimism, in which his creed was born, which vaguely assumes that if there is anything spiritual, it is happier, higher, lovelier and loftier than anything we yet know; and so opens all the doors and windows for the spiritual world to flow in. But we think this is just as simple an ignorance as if an eighteenth-century sentimentalist, reading into Rousseau a notion that savage man is like Adam in Eden, had gone to live in the Cannibal Islands to be surrounded with happiness and virtue. He would be surrounded, perhaps, but in a more bodily and unpleasant sense. One sentimental fashion may assume there are no cannibals; another optimistic fashion that there are no devil-worshippers-- or no devils. But there are. That is the fact of experience that is the key to many mysteries, including the mysterious policy of the Roman Catholic Church.

Giotto and St. Francis

St. Francis of Assisi has been for ages a popular saint; in our own age he has for the first time been in some danger of being a fashionable saint. That sort of distinction of the drawing-rooms, which is said to have been a temptation rejected by many saints in their lifetime, which is certainly a peril besetting most popular preachers all their lives, has come at last to this popular preacher six hundred years after his death. It is natural that artists should be interested in the poet who was practically the founder of medieval and therefore of modern art. And it is only too true that, wherever we admit the artist, it is very difficult to exclude the aesthete. This sort of light literary fuss, though often sincere as a sentiment and even valuable as a tribute, is the very opposite of that sort of solid and traditional popularity which St. Francis had among countless generations of peasants. There is something about peasant traditions, and even about peasant legends, which knows how to keep close to the earth. It is a mark of true folklore that even the tale that is evidently wild is eminently sane. We see this in the most extravagant stories of the saints, if we compare them with the extravagant theories of the sophists and the sentimentalists. Take, for instance, that most beautiful attribute for which St. Francis is rightly loved throughout the modern world: his tenderness towards the lower animals. It is illustrated in medieval folklore by fancies but not by fads. It is impossible to imagine any fable more fabulous, in the sense of fantastic and frankly incredible, than the story of St. Francis making a business bargain with a very large and dangerous wolf; drawing up a legal document with carefully numbered promises and concessions from the party of the first part and the party of the second part; the wild beast solemnly lodging a legal affidavit by the number of times he nodded his head. And yet there is in that fairy-tale a rustic and realistic sagacity that comes from real relations with animals, and is therefore perhaps called by the picturesque name of horse-sense. It was not written by the modern monomaniac animal-worshipper. It is a pleasant story because the saint is considering the peasants as well as the wolf. St. Francis was not the sort of man to agree with the hypothetical Hindoo who would be slowly devoured by a Bengal tiger, and remain in a state of philosophical absent-mindedness, because tigers are quite as cosmic as Hindoos. The Christian common sense of St. Francis, even in this wild fable, seized on the vital fact; that men must be saved from wolves as well as wolves from hunger, or even more so, and that this could only be done by some sort of definite arrangement. And it does put its finger upon the difficulty; in the absence of communication and therefore of contract between men and beasts. It realises that a moral obligation must be a mutual obligation. St. Francis contemplating the mountain wolf, hits on the same point as Job contemplating the monstrous Leviathan: "Will he make a pact with thee?" That is a sort of solid popular instinct, which was never lost by the really popular saint, in spite of anything which strangers might stare at as his antics or his agonies. Men remembered that he had been a good friend to them as well as to birds and beasts; and the fact is still apparent in the most remote and extravagant rumours of him. It is in this that he differs from some of the rather unbalanced and unnatural humanitarians of modern times. As a matter of fact, St. Francis does not by any means stand alone among medieval or other saints in this protest and protection of animals against men; though he probably does stand alone in his poetical and imaginative power of stamping the memory of it in picturesque images on the popular mind. Some of the greatest medieval priests long before St. Francis, St. Anselm, for instance, were famous for demanding kindness to the brute creation; many of them, St. Hugh of Lincoln, for instance, had an even more eccentric taste in pets; for St. Hugh, instead of preaching to the birds, seems to have allowed a large bird to accompany him everywhere like a curate. But what is notable about this medieval theory of mercy is something ultimately mild and reasonable, however freakish was its expression; a comprehension of the common needs of common people, and a humanitarianism that did not exclude humanity. In that sense, it is the modern age that is the age of fanatics.

This fact of St. Francis becoming a modern fashion, after having been for so long a medieval tradition, might well arouse in his real admirers a fear of his cult becoming merely artistic in the sense of merely artificial. And yet, in spite of one or two incongruous interventions, this has not really taken place. It is perhaps the highest tribute to the truth and sincerity of St. Francis that even now he can keep his simplicity in the face of fashionable admiration; as the Franciscan in the story kept the fashionable crowd at a distance by playing antics on a seesaw. And this remarkable escape from the suffocation of sophistication is nowhere better expressed than in what still remains, even to the eye of the traveller--the naked nobility of his native town.

A traveller at all experienced in the ways of travellers, not to say of trippers, will approach the steep city of Assisi with some feelings of doubt and even of fear. He will know that the modern discovery of the medieval saint may yet be followed by disasters, more subtle than those which superstition has traced in the modern disinterment of the Egyptian king. He will know that there are things to which guide-books are not the best guides; which are seen better by solitary pilgrims than by sociable tourists; and, without any sort of superiority let alone misanthropy, he will have had experience already of places which crowds of visitors have made less worth visiting. He will know that quarrels not untouched by quackeries have insulted the great silence of Glastonbury; he will know that there is some truth in the report that a bustle of sight-seeing and a bawling for baksheesh has spoiled for many the spiritual adventure of Jerusalem. Knowing how many aimless aesthetes, how many irresponsible intellectuals, how many mere sheep of show and fashion follow this track through Italy, he may well fear to find obliterated the ancient simplicity of Assisi. But when he sees it, if I may answer for at least one among many such travellers, he will receive what I can only describe as a cool shock of consolation.

The city is founded upon a rock; the city is a rock; and it is too simple for anybody to spoil. It has proved practically impossible to paint or gild or pad or upholster or even to scratch that rock. In the main lines of it an austerity alone remains in the memory; and even the beauty of the milder landscape is itself austere. There may be, indeed there is, the usual accumulation in corners of the popular trinkets or traditional toys of devotion, which some people are so unfortunately fastidious as to resent; but that is not the sort of peril of which I am thinking, even from the point of view of those who would admit it to be in other ways perilous. It is not a question of any abuses among the ignorant or the innocent who look up to the saint; it is a question of the condescending culture that looks down to him; not a matter of importing idolatry into the institution of a patron saint; but a matter of patronising the patron. And though multitudes in this rather snobbish state of mind must have passed through so established a station of the Italian pilgrimage, they have not in fact left any trail behind them, as they have in so many similar places; the hills have forgotten them and their personalities have passed away with the smell of their petrol. St. Francis is still left alone with his own friars and mostly with his own friends; and especially with that great first friend who was his interpreter to the expanding civilisation that came after him; the friend who could express in images what Francis himself had always felt as imagery, or what we call imagination; the painter who translated the poet--Giotto.

The advance of art criticism is a continual retreat; it would seem in some strange manner destined to march perpetually backwards into older and older periods. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the critics had finally accepted the normality of the Ancient Greeks. By the end of the nineteenth century the critics were already inaugurating the novelty of the Ancient Egyptians. We must all, by this time, be familiar with expressions of admiration for the art of the Caveman, scrawled in rock and red ochre with an unmistakable spirit and even distinction of draughtsmanship; the cult of the prehistoric which has given a new meaning to the cult of the Primitives. It will soon seem perfectly natural to be talking about the modernised and decadent sophistication of the Second Stone Age as compared with the rich but well-balanced civilisation of the First Stone Age. The further we go back to explore, the more we find that is really worth exploring; and the nearer we are to the real primitive man, the further we are from the ape or even the savage. This being true even of the tremendous scope of the whole history of the human tribe, it is not to be wondered at that men have made the same discovery about the high and complex culture of Christendom. The spotlight of artistic interest and concentration has been steadily travelling backwards ever since I was a child. I can remember faintly that in my first years it was still felt as something of a paradox to maintain that the quaintness of Botticelli could be taken as seriously as the solid finish of Guido Reni; that Ruskin was still a revolutionist for preferring the dayspring of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century to the dregs of the Renaissance in the eighteenth. Even as late as that, for most people, Giotto was still not so much a Primitive as a primitive man. He was a sort of savage who had done some service by discovering that it was possible to scratch something resembling a rudimentary human figure on the walls of his cave. For most people all serious art still lay between Raphael and Reynolds. As I grew up, the Ruskinian revolution prevailed, and most men came to realise that Giotto was a great painter; but even those men generally regarded him as the first great painter. But now, in yet more recent times, the artists are yet more like archaeologists, in the sense of going back to what is yet more archaic. The change that has passed over the most recent phase of art criticism can be sufficiently suggested by this one case of Giotto. I referred somewhere, in the Ruskinian manner, to Giotto as the figure who stands at the beginning of Christian art. One of the most creative of modern sculptors, whom many would call a medievalist, wrote to assure me that Giotto stands at the end of Christian art; with something like a broad hint that Giotto brought it to an end.

The spotlight has moved further back, and is now illuminating what even Ruskin and the romantic medievalists would have regarded as a desert of dead and barbaric formalism; the true Dark Ages. Our Progressives are now bound with golden chains to the decline of Byzantium, rather than to the rise of Florence. It is quaint to think how little harm a blundering nickname need do in the long run. All the admirers of Gothic call it Gothic, though it was originally meant to stamp it as barbaric. And all the admirers of Byzantine call it Byzantine; though the very adjective is already in use as a symbol of stiff degradation and decline. The new theories about rhythm and design have done justice to the old pictures which the romantics regarded merely as diagrams or patterns. The change from Cimabue to Giotto is at least not so certainly an unmixed improvement as it appeared to the Victorian medievalists. There is, as it were, a new school of Pre-Raphaelites, who are not only pre-Raphael, but pre-Giotto. The shining figure of the shepherd no longer stands against a background of black and barbarous darkness; but in a sort of double light, in itself involving some of these subtler problems of balance and recurrence; having on his right hand the wide white daybreak of Rome and Assisi and Paris and all the West, and on his left the long and gorgeous golden sunset of the great city of Constantine.

But in truth this double light may make for a better enlightenment, both about Giotto and his master St. Francis. The two artistic movements, coming one after the other, have between them done some justice to two halves of medieval history, and an earlier and a later period of Christendom, both of which had been underrated and misunderstood. There is a sort of mathematical beauty in the harshness of Byzantine art which is only beginning to be understood; but there is none the less another and livelier kind of beauty in the more humanised art of the later Middle Ages; something suggestive of a moment when a dead design comes to life, or a pattern begins to move, or even to dance. Some humorist wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangle", and a mystical theologian might find in it a profound significance touching the loves of the Trinity. In other words, the old abstract expression of divine beauty was the expression of a truth, but the other truth of its expression in the concrete was none the less true. Now what is true of the early abstract art and the humanistic revolution of Giotto, is equally true of the abstract theology and the humanistic revolution of Francis. Some modern writers on the first Franciscans talk as if Francis was the first to invent the idea of the Love of God and the God of Love; or at least was the first to go back and find it in the Gospels. The truth is that anybody could find it in any of the creeds and doctrinal definitions of any period between the Gospels and the Franciscan movement. But he would find it in the theological dogmas as he would find it in the Byzantine pictures, drawn out in stark and simple lines like a mathematical diagram, asserted with a sort of dark clarity for those who can appreciate the idea of logical content and balance. In the sermons of St. Francis, as in the pictures of Giotto, it is made popular by pantomime. Men are beginning to act it as in a theatre, instead of representing it as in a picture or a pattern. Thus we find that St. Francis was in many ways the actual founder of the medieval miracle play; and there is all this suggestion of a stiff thing coming to life in the tale of his contact with the Bambino, illustrated in one of Giotto's designs. And thus we find in Giotto himself a quality unique and hardly to be repeated in history. It is a sense, not only of movement, but of the first movement. There is still something in his figures that suggests that they are like the pillars of a church moved by the spiritual earthquake of a divine visitation, but even so moved slowly and with a sort of reluctant grandeur. The figures are still partly architectural while the faces are alive with portraiture. This first moment of motion has much to do with that sense of morning and youth which so many admirers of medievalism have felt, and which I shall continue to feel, with all respect to the medievalist sculptor. Nothing is nearer to the nerve of primal wonder, which is the soul of all the arts, than that strange saying of the blind man in the Gospels, that when he was half awakened to sight, he saw "men as trees walking." There is something about the figures of Giotto that suggests men as trees walking. The Byzantine School will not permit me to say that before his eyes were thus opened, the artist had been wholly blind. But I will still maintain that there was something like a miracle, in the transition from treating trees as tracery and men as trees, to the realisation of the new shock of liberation; and how, at the word of God, they could arise and walk.

And here again we strike the parallel between the artist and the saint. The followers of St. Francis were, above all things, men who could walk. Many of them even walked with that sort of dazed unfamiliarity and doubtful balance, being suddenly robbed by a whirlwind of all the props of property. But they walked, because a new spirit of walking, and even of wandering, had entered into the static scheme of medieval Christianity; just as a new spirit of gesture and drama had entered into the static scheme of decorative art. The difference between the Friars and the Monks was, after all, that the Friars now walked like men where the Monks had once stood like statues. I mean nothing but admiration for the Benedictine monks, as for the Byzantine mosaics: or, for that matter, the grand and almost grim rationality of the great abstract dogmas. But there had come upon these flat and spacious things, carved in stone or ordered like statues, a new depth or dimension; a new quality of drama and motion. The popular propaganda of St. Francis, throwing thousands of wandering friars out into roads of the world, was the beginning of what we call the modern spirit; the spirit of romance and experiment and earthly adventure. For once a modern phrase which is much misused, may be rightly used. The Benedictines were, in the exact sense, an Order; as the plan of a cathedral is an Order. The Franciscans were, in the exact sense, a movement. Historically, perhaps, the most interesting of the great pictures by Giotto which are displayed in the Upper Church of Assisi, is that which commemorates the famous dream of the great Pope Innocent the Third; in which he saw the strange beggar, from whom he had almost turned away in the street, upholding the whole toppling load of St. John Lateran, and indeed, in a larger symbolism, the whole load of St. Peter and the Church founded on a rock. More than one historian has suggested that, humanly speaking, it was St. Francis who prevented all Christendom from coming to an end under the double destructive drive and drag of Islam without and the pessimist heresies within. This particular picture is also worth noting, as a perfect example of that solidity which marked the simplicity of the medieval mind. Modern writers have referred often enough to medieval dreams and dark clouds and dim mystical fancies. But in fact the medievals never dealt in these things, even where they would have been justified in dealing in them. There is scarcely any modern of any school, who could deliberately draw a picture of a vision in the watches of the night, especially a vision so very visionary, so transcendental and so tremendously symbolic, as that of an unknown saint upholding a universal church, without bringing into the picture some shadow of unreality, or remoteness, of a lurid halo of the preternatural; at least of mystery and the tints of twilight. But the medieval dream is more solid than the modern reality. The medieval artist has dealt with it with a directness which belongs to the vigorous realism of innocence and of childhood; the sort of actuality which has been wholly untouched by the many sorts of scepticism which masquerade as mysticism. The dream is full of something very extraordinary, something which did indeed, for those who can understand it, shine on the evil and the good throughout the epoch that we call the Dark Ages: broad daylight.

In another sense, however, the spirit illuminating these great medieval designs is not so much generally the spirit of daylight as in a rather curious and peculiar sense, the spirit of daybreak. Of that highly medieval design it is true to say something of what Keats said of the highly classical design of his Grecian Urn. It is a sort of immortal moment of morning, and that which is a mere transition in time fixed as an absolute for eternity. We are so accustomed, in modern times, to think in terms of what we call progress, that we seldom admit, except in a poetical parenthesis, that there is such a thing as a perfect moment which is better than what comes after, as well as better than what went before. Yet it might well be maintained that art in all its history had no better moment, either before or after, than this in which all that was good in the old framework and formalism still remained with the upstanding strength of a great building, but in which there had already entered that rush of life and growth, which had turned it into something like a forest, without having as yet turned it into anything like a jungle. The naturalistic spirit of the nineteenth century, when it first began to understand the genius of Giotto or St. Francis, as interpreted by the talent of Ruskin or of Renan, was bound to fasten especially on the fanciful and charming episode of the Sermon to the Birds. For that generation was less concerned about the preservation of churches and more about the preservation of birds, even if it were in the equivocal sense of the preservation of game. It would be easy to illustrate the whole development, we might even say, the whole ascent and descent, under the emblem or example of the bird. The birds of the primal and symbolic epoch were simplified and somewhat terrible: as in the Eagle of the Apocalypse or the Dove of the Holy Ghost. All other birds in the Byzantine scheme would have been as abstract and typical as the birds of an Egyptian hieroglyphic. The birds of the later realistic epoch, when the painters of the nineteenth century had brought to the last perfection, or the last satiety, the studies of optics or of physics begun in the sixteenth, might well have been a most detailed and even bewildering display of ornithology. But the birds to whom St. Francis preached, in the vision of the thirteenth-century art, were already birds that could fly and sing, but not yet birds that could be shot or stuffed; they had ceased to be merely heraldic without becoming merely scientific. And as, in all studies of St. Francis, we always return to that great comparison which he at once denied with all his humility and desired with all his heart, we may say that they were not wholly unlike those strange birds in the legend, which the Holy Child pinched into shape out of scraps of clay, and then started into life and swiftness with a clap of His little hands.

The New Groove

The Poet Tennyson, like a true Victorian, must have written a good many of his poems in the train; travelling by railroad being the chief invention and institution of his age. Indeed he confesses to have written the poem of Lady Godiva while waiting for the train; and to judge by the careful construction of the blank verse the train must have been very late. But there are other Tennysonian lines which Tennyson would seem to have written while he was asleep in the train. They have that peculiar mixture of jumble and jingle familiar to those who go to sleep in trains and only feel the metallic rhythm of the wheels mingling with the most shapeless and senseless dreams. It was at some such moment of profound slumber that Lord Tennyson composed the more progressive and prophetic portions of Locksley Hall; and this is clearly proved by the convincing, nay, damning, fact that one of the lines does really and truly run:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Psychologists will be interested in the curious displacement of words and disorder of ideas, which is characteristic of sentences invented in a dream. To the ordinary waking intelligence the words would appear to have no meaning. Grooves do not change; they do not necessarily ring; they do not even ring the changes. But, just as a sleeper in a railway-carriage will murmur, in the shock of awakening, some sentence betraying a secret he would probably have concealed if awake; as that he is travelling first-class with a third-class ticket, or that the corpse of a creditor is concealed under the seat-- so Tennyson, in this very extraordinary line of verse, did really betray the secret, and even the crime, of his own intellectual world and most of the world that has come after it.

For what is the matter with most of what calls itself the modern mind is simply grooves; and our habit of being content in the grooves, because we are told that they are grooves of change. And it is, as I say, a revealing fact that even when the modern poet wishes to describe change, even when he wishes to glorify change, he does still instinctively describe it as a groove. This is a mark that has been left on very much of the modern world, ever since the beginning of the mechanical and industrial epoch. But it had its first and clearest form in this fixed conception of travelling by rail. It may be specially noted that we speak of the modern mind being in a groove rather than in a rut. A rut was a term commonly used of a cart-track; in the simple times when we did not put the cart before the horse. When a living thing went before us there was something of doubt or adventure or hesitation in the tracks it made for itself, even if they became grooves for others. There were strange curves in his course who hitched his wagon even to a horse, and who had not yet given up horses for horsepower. There were sometimes very wild and fantastic tracks in his, who hitched his wagon to a star. But, apart from all such figures or fancies, the essential peculiarity of the groove is that there can be nothing new about it except that it may take us to new places, or possibly take us past new places, at an entirely new rate of speed. That is the essential of what I mean by the modern groovings; that its only form of progress is going quicker and quicker along one line in one direction. It has not the curiosity to stop, nor the adventurous courage to go backwards.

Let us take, for the sake of clarity, this familiar case of the railway-train. A history of the locomotive steam-engine has often been presented in all its stages of improvement; the evolution of the modern train from the first clumsy models of Puffing Billy. But the engine did not produce anything but faster and faster engines; and the vital point is that nobody ever expected that it would. Nobody, even in a flight of fancy, wondered whether it would develop in any other direction, except the direction of its own groove. For instance, nobody ever suggested that it might develop its own type of architecture, so that the building of cars or carriages should be like the building of temples or town-halls. Yet there might perfectly well have been four or five schools of architecture for the designing of trains, as there are for the designing of temples. It would be a pleasing fancy if the architectural style of the train varied according to the country it was crossing or visiting. The Pennsylvania Railway Station in New York is a noble and serious piece of architecture; and it is really a sort of salute to the great city of Philadelphia towards which its gates are set. It might quite well have fallen out that what was done for the station could be done for the steam-engine; and the very design and colour of the vehicle vary according to whether it was going to the old French cities or the Red Indian plains; to the snows of Alaska or the orange-groves of Florida. Indeed I think there would have been much poetic symbolism in a hundred forms, probably guarded by rituals and dedicated to gods or patron saints, if it had so happened that the steam-engine was discovered by ancient Greeks or medieval Christians, and not by the Philistines of the Victorian time. But the point is here that nobody ever thought of such things; and certainly nobody thought of testing the progress of the train by such tests. There was only one test of the train and that was the test of the groove; of the smoothness of the groove; of the straightness of the groove; of the swiftness with which it travelled along the groove. There was something, in the tone of the whole thing, that prevented even mere fancy from breaking away in any other direction; or wondering, even vainly, if it could ever carry a castle like an elephant or a figurehead like a ship.

Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolised by the train or the track or the groove. There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track. But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that. what is true of the train is equally true of the truth. We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly. We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer people have the courage to move against it. And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train going at eighty miles an hour. This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world. It is in the most exact sense of the term limited. It is all in one dimension. It is all in one direction. It is limited by its progress. It is limited by its speed.

I have said that it has not the curiosity to stop. If the train-dwellers were really travellers, exploring a strange country to make discoveries, they would always be stopping at little wayside stations. For instance, they would always be stopping to consider the curious nature of their own conventional terms; a thing which they never do, by any chance. Their catchwords are regarded solely as gadgets or appliances for getting them where they are going to; they never cast back a thought upon where the catchword comes from. Yet that is exactly what they would do if they were really thinking, in any thorough and all-round sense. Of course it will be understood, touching these intellectual fashions, that great masses, probably the mass of mankind, never travel on the train at all. They remain in their villages and are much happier and better; but they are not regarded as the intellectual leaders of the time. What I complain of is that the intellectual leaders can only lead along one narrow track; otherwise known as "the ringing groove of change". Take, in this matter of current phrases, the example of the controversy about advanced and futuristic art. I do not mean to consider the art but to consider the controversy; as illustrating what has been said about the advisability of stopping and the stupidity of the non-stop train.

Now although, of course, the actual masses are quite unconverted to Picasso or Epstein, yet the terms of controversy, the only tags of argument known to the newspapers, the only familiar and almost popular sophistries outside mere popular abuse, are on the side of the new schools. I mean that modern men are not familiar with the rational arguments for tradition; but they are familiar, and almost wearily familiar, with the rational arguments for change. Whichever side may be really right in the question of art (which obviously depends largely on the particular artists), the whole modern world is verbally prepared to regard the new artist as right and the old artist as wrong. It is prepared to do so by the whole progressive philosophy; which is often rather a phraseology than a philosophy. The language which comes most readily to everyone's mind is the language of innovation; but it is a language that is rather exercised than examined. For instance, it is probable that more people are even now acquainted with the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats than with the poems of Miss Edith Sitwell. But many, many more people understand what Miss Sitwell means, when she simply says that she is criticised in her day as Keats was criticised in his day, than could possibly understand what Mr. Yeats means, when he says that nothing quite new can be used in poetry; or that innocence is only born out of ceremony and custom. For the former argument is a familiar argument of all modern progressives and reformers; the latter sayings are very profound sayings of a man who really thinks for himself. I agree that in many other things, and especially in the best examples of her poetry, Miss Sitwell also can think for herself. I only say that this particular argument ("John the Baptist was laughed at and I am laughed at"; "Galileo was disbelieved and I am disbelieved")--this particular argument is part of the regular recognised bag of tricks of reformers and revolutionists; it is a part of the very old apparatus of the New Movement. Now if we apply this, for instance, to the quarrels about painting or sculpture we shall find the same situation: that, whichever side is right, the whole apparatus of modern talk favours the idea that the new thing is always right. There are a definite selection of phrases used, but not often examined. For instance, should any Philistine faintly protest against Helen of Troy being sculptured with a head of the exact shape of the Great Pyramid, or Titania with a figure following the grand simple lines of the hippopotamus at the zoo, or even perhaps his own favourite daughter presenting herself to the public in the appealing and even touching condition of having her nose and eyelids cut off-- whenever such a criticism is heard, whether it be right or wrong, it will be answered with the precision of clockwork, by a phrase to the effect that some people want art to be "pretty-pretty". Now the first act of any independent mind will be to criticise this criticism; and especially to feel a curiosity about the curious form of it. Why does everybody say, "pretty-pretty"? Why not say that some people do not like what is "ugly-ugly", or possibly what is "beastly-beastly"? What is the meaning of this weird repetition, like a recurring decimal? If you have the sort of independent curiosity that stops at wayside stations, if (in short) you are not merely in a hurry to get to the fashionable terminus, you may well pause upon a phrase like that, not without profit. You will perceive that the phrase is, in fact, a rather pathetic attempt to reproduce the wondering exclamation of a child. And that would be alone enough to destroy the argument. For a child has a very sound sense of wonder at what is really wonderful; and by no means merely a vulgar and varnished taste in what is conventionally beautiful. The thing that a genuine child might call "pretty-pretty" is not the soapy portrait of a débutante or an upholstered group of a royal family; it is much more likely to be a flash of red fire or the strong colours of a great garden flower or something that really is elemental and essential; something in its way quite as "stark" (as our dear friends would say) as the Great Pyramid or the great pachyderm. Children are not snobs in art any more than in morals. And if they often have also a pleasure in things that are really "pretty", in the sense of a graceful girl by Greuze or a cloud of pink blossom in spring, it is simply because there is a perfectly legitimate place in art for what is pretty; and it is not in the least disposed of by jabbering the same word twice over and calling it "pretty-pretty". Anyhow, the more supercilious moderns make a bad blunder in imputing childishness in defence of some things that could only be defended as being in the higher sense childish. It was Cezanne himself who said, "I am trying to recover the direct vision of a child."

It is the same with all the cant phrases already in circulation, for the purpose of defending any eccentricity, even before it exists. Thus everybody is familiar with the phrase that art is not photography, and that only photography is required to be realistic. Everybody is familiar with the phrase, and nobody is familiar with the holes or errors in the phrase. As a matter of fact nothing is less realistic than photography. At the very start it is cut away from all reality exactly as marble sculpture is cut away from reality, by being conventionally colourless; by divorcing the great optical union of colour and form. But it is not really realistic even about form. The thing it does reproduce more or less realistically is light and shade, and the light often falsifies the form and always falsifies the colour. If we want true form it must be drawn for us more or less abstractedly by a draughtsman; and when it is so drawn by Leonardo or Michelangelo, it cannot be dismissed as photographic, any more than as "pretty-pretty". The modern artist may have his own reasons for drawing legs as if they were bolsters or sausages; but that does not make the strong sweeping lines, of sloping bone or gripping muscle, in a great Florentine drawing, a dull mechanical reproduction, valuable only as the vulgar snapshot of a trivial fact. Those lines are strong and beautiful, as the lines of waterfall and whirlpool are beautiful. In fact, they are exactly like the beautiful abstract forms, which the modern artist would like to invent-- if he could.

I have taken only this one type, of the talk about new schools of art, to illustrate what I mean by saying that the world is in such a hurry to be new that it does not even pause upon the truths of the new school, let alone of the old. Of the million men and women who have heard those two phrases, how many have heard any phrases out of the opposite phraseology and philosophy? I mean any which offer a philosophical defence of the other philosophy? Of all those who have been told (somewhat needlessly) that Epstein does not profess to be pretty, how many have heard that case for civilisation, in which its very strength is shown in being able to rear and poise and protect prettiness? The very cyclopean massiveness of the foundations of the city is best proved in the fact that no earthquake can shake the ivory statuette upon the pedestal or the china shepherdess upon the shelf. How many have considered the more ancient argument, of a culture that is sufficiently athletic to be elegant? Or, to take another example, how many have understood the scientific and psychological arguments for antiquity itself? Of all those who can recall being told to admire a modern picture, merely because it is even more unlike life than a photograph, or being told to admire modern poetry, for no reason whatever except that it is more prosaic than slang-- of all those, how many even remember the sound remark made long ago by Oliver Wendell Holmes; that the grand Latin poets actually grow grander by being quoted again and again; that the words actually grow together with time, as do the sections of a seasoned violin? I am not saying that the truth is all on the side of tradition; I am only saying that the publicity is all on the side of innovation. Until the recent rise of the Humanist group in America, hardly anybody, even of the educated classes, possessed even the vocabulary for a defence of tradition. The very words in use, the very structure of the sentences, the ordinary tone of the whole public Press, prevented me from using the real and reasonable arguments against mere novelty. England, strangely enough, has even less of a working Humanist vocabulary than America. Here also working journalistic ethics have been too much cut down and simplified to a few crude ideas, of commercial activity or continuous reform. I shall be completely misunderstood if I am supposed to be calling for a return ticket to Athens or to Eden; because I do not want to go on by the cheap train to Utopia. I want to go where I like. I want to stop where I like. I want to know the width as well as the length of the world; and to wander off the railway-track in the ancient plains of liberty.

The Real Dr. Johnson

It is possible that there are still people in England who do not adore Dr. Johnson. These persons must be removed, if possible, by persuasion. A short and plain attempt to persuade them must take precedence of subtler questions in every discussion of the great man. Now this old and superficial misunderstanding of Johnson (now nearly extinct) expresses itself in two main popular notions-- that he was pedantic and that he was rude. He occasionally was rude; he never was pedantic. He was probably the most unpedantic man that ever lived; certainly you and I are much more pedantic than Dr. Johnson. For pedantry means the worship of dead words; and his words, whether long or short, were always alive. He played long words and short words against each other with impromptu but infallible art. I am far from books, and I quote from memory, but I think that a Scotchman, vexed at the ritual jeers of Johnson against his country, said: "Do you remember that God made Scotland?" Johnson replied promptly: "Sir, you are to remember that he made it for Scotchmen." Then, after a pause, he said in grave meditation: "Comparisons are odious; but God made hell." Now the vague popular opinion of Johnson would concentrate on long words like "comparisons" and "odious", and retain the impression that he was pedantic. It would be just as easy to concentrate on words like "hell" and give the impression that he was vulgar. The only true way of testing the matter is to look at the whole sentence and ask oneself if there is a single word, long or short, out of its place. Johnson was the reverse of pedantic, for he used long words only where they would be effective. Generally it came to this, that he spoke pompously when Boswell spoke flippantly and flippantly when Boswell spoke pompously--a very sound rule. When Boswell confronted him with the brute facts of a lonely tower and a baby, he answered, with distant dignity: "Sir, I should not much like my company." But when Boswell justified some morally backsliding bishop or vicar with that elaborate hash of sophistry and charity which is still used to excuse the rich, Johnson answered him with a few short words, so full of Christianity and common sense that I should not be allowed to print them.

The charge of rudeness is much more real; but about this also an impression still surviving requires a great deal of correction. Taken in conjunction with the charge of pedantry, it has created the image of a bullying schoolmaster, a superior person who thinks himself above good manners. Now Johnson was sometimes insolent, but he was never superior. He was not a despot, but exactly the reverse. It was his sense of the democracy of debate that made him loud and unscrupulous, like a mob. It was exactly because he thought the other men as clever as himself that he sought in desperate cases to bear them down by clamour. Everyone knows the brilliant description of him by one of his best friends: "If his pistol misses fire he knocks you down with the butt of it." But few realise that this is the act of a simple and heroic fellow fighting against a superior force. Johnson was a man of great animal impulsiveness and of irregular temper, but intellectually he was humble. He always went into every conflict with the idea that the other man was as good as he was, and that he might be defeated. His bellowings and bangings of the table were the expressions of a fundamental modesty. We can feel this element, I think, in everything he said, down to those last awful words upon his death-bed, when he spoke of Burke, the one man who had really excited and arrested him, "If I saw him now it would kill me." His fate in these respects has been strange. He has been called the pedant par excellence because he was the one thoroughly unpedantic person of a pedantic age. He has been called a conversational tyrant, because he was the one man of his mental rank who was ready to argue with his inferiors. On the one hand it is often said that he translated English into Johnsonese. But let it be remembered that he was the only man of his time who could translate Johnsonese back into English. Half a hundred critics in that age might have said of a play, "It does not possess sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction", but only Johnson could have said also, "It has not wit enough to keep it sweet." There were numerous great men in the eighteenth century who kept a club or court of dependents, where they had things entirely their own way. I need not prove the point; the greatest satirist of that age has made the image immortal.

Like Cato gave his little Senate laws, And sat attentive to his own applause.

But Johnson was the reverse of attentive to people who were applauding him. Johnson was furiously deaf to people who were contradicting him. So far from being a stately and condescending king like Atticus, Johnson was a kind of Irish member in his own Parliament. All these are but broken and incidental examples; everything about the man rang of reality and honour; he never thought he was right without being ready to give battle; he never thought he was wrong without being ready to ask pardon. We have all heard enough to fill a book about Dr. Johnson's incivilities. I wish they would compile another book consisting of Dr. Johnson's apologies. There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong; and Johnson behaved very well. He understood (what so many faultlessly polite people do not understand) that a stiff apology is a second insult. He understood that the injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt. Boswell once complained to him in private, explaining that he did not mind asperities while they were alone, but did not like to be torn to pieces in company. He added some idle figure of speech, some simile so trivial that I cannot even remember what it was. "Sir," said Johnson, "that is one of the happiest similes I have ever heard." He did not waste time in formally withdrawing this word with reservations and that word with explanations. Finding that he had given pain, he went out of his way to give pleasure. If he had not known what would irritate Boswell, he knew at least what would soothe him. It is this gigantic realism in Johnson's kindness, the directness of his emotionalism, when he is emotional, that gives him his hold upon generations of living men. There is nothing elaborate about his ethics; he wants to know whether a man, as a fact, is happy or unhappy, is lying or telling the truth. He may seem to be hammering at the brain through long nights of noise and thunder, but he can walk into the heart without knocking.

Rabelaisian Regrets

There has arisen in our time an extraordinary notion that there is something humane, open-hearted or generous about refusing to define one's creed. Obviously the very opposite is the truth. Refusing to define a creed is not only not generous, it is distinctly mean. It fails in frankness and fraternity towards the enemy. It is fighting without a flag or a declaration of war. It denies to the enemy the decent concessions of battle; the right to know the policy and to treat with the headquarters. Modern "broad-mindedness" has a quality that can only be called sneakish; it endeavours to win without giving itself away, even after it has won. It desires to be victorious without betraying even the name of the victor. For all sane men have intellectual doctrines and fighting theories; and if they will not put them on the table, it can only be because they wish to have the advantage of a fighting theory which cannot be fought.

In the things of conviction there is only one other thing besides a dogma, and that is a prejudice. If there is something in your life for which you will hold meetings and agitate and write letters to the newspaper, but for which you will not find the plain terms of a creed, then that thing is properly to be described as a prejudice, however new or noble or advanced it may seem to be. But indeed I think that when these ages are seen in proper perspective, men will say that the chief mark of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was the growth of vast and victorious prejudices. I give, in passing, some instances of what I mean. Thus, for instance, it is a brave and logical creed which declares, like Mahomet and some modern Puritans, that the drinking of fermented liquor is really wrong. But the modern world has not adopted this clear creed and never will. What it has done has been to spread everywhere a strong but vague prejudice against certain forms of drinking, particularly those adopted by the poor. We have not made it wicked to drink ale, but we have made it slightly disreputable to go into a public-house. In other words, we have made it slightly disreputable, if you drink ale, to be poor or to be sociable. What it comes to is this: that any one wishing to sneer at me can get a laugh by saying I am a beer-drinker, but he will not commit himself to the statement that the thing that he has sneered at is wrong. He may hit me, because he is appealing to a prejudice; but I may not hit him because he is not appealing to a creed. He will not set anything up for me to hit. He wants, somehow or other, to avoid calling liquor wrong and yet to call me wrong for touching liquor. This is not latitudinarianism; it is ordinary human cowardice.

There are a great many other instances which could be given. For instance, fashionable opinion does not actually declare (as do, I believe, certain Eastern religions) that ablutions and bodily cleanliness are primary things, above even ordinary morals; but it does create a loose popular impression that it has scored off a personality or a nation more by saying that it is dirty than by saying that it is avaricious or timid or unchaste. No new creed is preached about cleanliness, but a strong sentimental emphasis and partiality is attached to the thing, making it more important than other things. Of course cleanliness is only made so very important at present because it happens to be a thing quite easy for the rich and very difficult for the poor. My only concern here, however, is to point out the method by which it has been made important; never by explaining or defining its importance, as in a creed; always by assuming its importance, as in a prejudice. I have no space to go at length into other examples, but the reader can easily put the cases to himself; and he can employ this general test: that in the case of half the most typical movements of the last thirty years, nobody can say how or when they really began. In no barbaric twilight or tangled forest or confusion of the dark ages did huge forces ever come so silently or secretly into the world as they come to-day. No one knows or can name the real beginning of Imperialism or of the popularity of the Royal Family (a thing quite recent yet quite untraceable), or of the taking for granted, in so many minds, of the materialist philosophy or of the practical imposition of teetotalism as a discipline on the Nonconformist public ministry. These things come out of the night and are formless even when they are forming everything else.

But discussions on the subject of the Censor and other theatrical problems have brought before the public a supreme instance of what I mean. We have been asked for the hundredth time to find some solution of that problem of the combination in art of truth with sexual modesty; and the result of considering this has been that we find ourselves face to face with a profound and most important change in public opinion on this subject; a change that has been going on, perhaps, for the last twenty years, perhaps ever since the coming of the Puritans; but a change which is, at any rate, of the utmost import to the wholesomeness of ethics, and a change which has proceeded in the same powerful silence as the growth of a tree. It is this difference between new English and old English ethics in the matter of verbal delicacy of which I wish to speak here. The subject is difficult, it is even emotional and painful; and I think it will do no harm to begin with some of the general human principles of the problem, even if they are as old and obvious as the alphabet.

There is not really much difference of opinion among normal men about the first principles of decency in expression. All healthy men, ancient and. modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane. There are people, indeed, who maintain that they would talk of this topic as coldly or openly as of any other; there are people who maintain that they would walk naked down the street. But these people are not only insane people, they are in the most emphatic sense of the word stupid people. They do not think; they only point (as children do) and say "Why?" Even children only do it when they are tired; but exactly this tired quality is most of what passes in our time not only for thought but for bold and disturbing thought. To ask, "Why cannot we discuss sex coolly and rationally anywhere?" is a tired and unintelligent question. It is like asking, "Why does not a man walk on his hands as well as on his feet?" It is silly. If a man walked systematically on his hands, they would not be hands, but feet. And if love or lust were things that we could all discuss without any possible emotion they would not be love or lust, they would be something else--some mechanical function or abstract natural duty which may or may not exist in animals or in angels, but which has nothing at all to do with the sexuality we are talking about. All the ideas of grasp or gesture, which to us make up the meaning of the word "hand", depend upon the fact that hands are loose extremities used not for walking on but for waving about. And all that we mean when we speak of "sex" is involved in the fact that it is not an unconscious or innocent thing, but a special and violent emotional stimulation at once spiritual and physical. A man who asks us to have no emotion in sex is asking us to have no emotion in emotion. He has forgotten the subject-matter with which he deals. He has lost the topic of the conversation. It may be said of him, in the strict meaning of the words, that he does not know what he is talking about.

And if men have never doubted that there should be a decorum in such things, neither have they ever doubted that that decorum might be carried much too far; that courage and laughter and wholesome truth might be sacrificed to the proprieties. So far, I say, humanity is essentially unanimous. It is in the discussion as to which thing shall be suppressed and which permitted, in the selection of the more harmless from the more harmful types of candour, that we begin to find the difference between different civilisations and different religions among men. And it is exactly upon the point of such a difference as this that I wish to speak here. Among other societies and ages our own society and age has made a choice in this matter. We have said, substantially by a general feeling, that one kind of expression shall be allowed and another rendered impossible. We have chosen, and I think we have chosen wrong.

Before going deeper into this most difficult subject there is at least one general statement to be made. The evil of excess in this matter really consists of three quite separate evils. Verbal impropriety or excess can spring from three quite different motives, three quite different states of mind, which have really very little to do with each other. It is necessary to unpick these three strands before we go any further. Ordinary popular discussion of the problem always hopelessly mixes them up. Briefly, they may be stated thus: impropriety arises either from a really vicious spirit, or from the love of emphasis, or from the love of analysis.

The first can be dismissed with brevity and with relief. There is such a thing as pornography; as a system of deliberate erotic stimulants. That is not a thing to be argued about with one's intellect, but to be stamped on with one's heel. But the point about it to be noted for our purpose is that this form of excess is separated from the other two by the fact that the motive of it must be bad. If a man tries to excite a sex instinct which is too strong already, and that in its meanest form, he must be a scoundrel. He is either taking money to degrade his kind or else he is acting on that mystical itch of the evil man to make others evil, which is the strangest secret in hell.

But when we come to the two motives of emphasis and of analysis, it is essential to observe that in both cases the motive may be beautiful, even when the result is most disastrous. The motive for impropriety arising out of emphasis can be best illustrated by a comparison with the habit of swearing. Swearing is, of course, the strongest possible argument for the religious view of life. A man cannot satisfactorily affirm anything about this world except by getting out of this world. The things commonly called fables are so true that they alone can give final ratification even to the things commonly called facts. A man in Balham cannot even call his dog a good dog without summoning to his aid either the angels or the devils. The Balhamite, like the Roman, if he cannot bend the gods will move Acheron; but he never thinks of trying to move Balham. Religion is his only resort for purposes of real emphasis; and often, even when he is attacking religion, his instinctive way of attacking it is to say that it is a damned lie. The most natural way of talking is the supernatural way of talking. And indeed this may be considered a good working test for all modern fads and philosophies which pretend to be religions. The new faiths founded on evolution or an impersonal ethic are always claiming, that they also can produce holiness; and no Christian has any right in Christian charity to deny that possibility. But if the question really is whether the things in question are religions in the sense that Christianity or Mohammedanism are religions, then I should suggest a different test. I should not ask whether they can produce holiness, but whether they can produce profanity. Can any one swear by ethics? Can any one blaspheme evolution? Many men now hold that a mere adoration of abstract morality or goodness is the core and sole necessity of religion. I know many of them; I know that their lives are noble, and their intellects just. But (I say it with respect and even hesitation) would not their oaths be a little mild? I do not mean that they ought to swear, or that anybody ought to swear, I mean that if it comes to swearing one can see in such a competition the vast difference in actuality between the new sham religion which talks about the holiness within, and an old practical religion which worshipped a real holiness without. You can see the difference in the weakness of the oaths considered as literature. The man of the Christian Churches said (occasionally), "Oh, my God!" The man of the ethical societies says (presumably), "Oh, my goodness!"

It is generally true, I say, that the whole circle of this physical universe does not contain anything strong enough for the purposes of a man who really means what he says; even about a small dog. Yet there is one exception to this generalisation. There is one thing which belongs to this world, but which is yet so fierce and startling, so full of menace and ecstasy, that it seems at times to partake of the character of miracle. This thing is the thing called sex; and on this also from time to time the man with the small dog in Balham will call in his dire need. Men used to swear by their heads; they still in a manner swear by their bodies. Sex is actual enough to swear by. To take but one coarse democratic test, people scribble about it on walls as they do about religion. Nobody ever scribbled on a wall about ethics. Above all, the language of sex can be used as a kind of violent invocation; a reinforcement of common words by the strongest words. I will not pause here to ask the reason of this; whether saying "damn" and saying other things unprintable have something to do with the fact that sex is the great business of the body, and salvation the great business of the soul. It is enough to say that any one can read the thing I mean and any one can hear it. He can read the thing best perhaps in Aristophanes or in Rabelais. He can hear the thing best in the street outside.

But though he can find it in the street outside, he cannot find it in any of the books or newspapers sold in the street. There is no law against indecent ideas; but there is a quite efficient and practical law against indecent words. Slowly throughout the eighteenth century word after word was dropped until by the Victorian time it was insisted that no coarse phrases should be used even in defending coarseness. I am myself under the limitations of this very local prejudice. I am compelled to prove my case in many pages because I have to talk as one talks in a respectable magazine. I could prove my case in ten minutes if I could talk as two respectable married men really talk on the top of an omnibus. It is sufficient, however, to put the matter thus: When a navvy uses what is called obscene language it is almost always to express his righteous disgust at obscene conduct. And here the navvy is at one with all the most really masculine poets or romancers; he is at one with Rabelais, with Swift, and even with Browning. Browning uses a foul metaphor to express the foulness of those who profess sympathy with human sorrows merely out of their own morbidity. You can find the phrase in "At the Mermaid." Browning uses the same foul metaphor to express the foulness of those who cannot understand a man's prompt grasp of the presence of a good woman. You can find the phrase in the speech of Capponsacchi. In short, the emphatic use of sexual language has this great advantage that it is commonly used purely in the interests of virtue. The virtuous cabman may (and does) call a man a blank, in a state of furious and innocent horror at the idea of any one being a blank. But this is not true in the case of the third impulse to indecorum. The third impulse is that which I have called the analytical; the mere curiosity of the mind about how the relations of the sexes are to be considered and classified. This covers all that we now call the Problem Play, and all that we associate with the realistic and psychological novel, and all the millions of proposals for the rearrangement of marriage. The dialogue in The Little Eyolf horrified many people; but it did not contain a single coarse word. Mr. George Moore, Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, and the lady called "Victoria Cross" have in turn been accused of being needlessly daring; but not one of them dare use words straight out of Bunyan or the Bible. The analytic indecency is now more free than it ever was among free men. The emphatic indecency is more stifled than it ever was among free men; more stifled than it ever was among slaves.

I am not concerned here to deny that the modern fashion of analysing sex is in general a good thing. Certainly there is grossly too much hypocrisy about sex; not in the English people, but in the literature and journalism which the English people, for some incomprehensible reason, permit to speak for them. There is no hypocrisy on the top of an English omnibus; but I warmly agree that there is really too much hypocrisy in the front page of an English newspaper, or within the covers of an English book. Let us agree that Ibsen had a right to suggest that marriage is an unpleasant fact as well as a pleasant one; that as well as the more chivalrous side of sex which is exaggerated by the Victorian poets, there is also the realistic and scientific side of sex, which was exaggerated by the old monks. Let me concede altogether and at once the fact that the modern tendency to dissect sex and to subdivide it, to put it into pigeon-holes, is a just and necessary measure. I will not even say here that the tendency has gone too far. But I will say this: what will you do if it does go too far? Suppose you wake up some fine morning and find indecencies which are quite ludicrous being taken quite seriously. Suppose you find certain sins put in a pigeon-hole when they ought to be put in a dust-hole. Suppose that after twenty years of scientific study you find that you have all the dirty jokes back again, the only difference being that you must enjoy them without laughing at them. Suppose, in short, that you are confronted with the exasperating spectacle of people chewing sins, instead of spitting them out of their mouths like their fathers; what will you do then? How will you express your feelings if you are faced with that horrible fashion of taking sex seriously--of which the true name is Phallic Worship? I know what you will do: you will call upon the shades of Rabelais and Fielding to deliver you out of that foul idolatry; and perhaps the English people will answer you and speak. It is common enough to talk of the English people speaking; but if ever they do speak they will speak as Rabelais spoke, and as English cabmen speak now.

The Hound of Heaven

"The Hound of Heaven", the greatest religious poem of modern times and one of the greatest of all times, was produced under certain peculiar historical conditions, which accentuate its isolation. To begin with, the religious poem is a religious poem, not only in what we should call the real sense, but in what some would call the limited sense. The word "religion" is used in these days in an expansive or telescopic fashion, sometimes inevitable, sometimes nearly intolerable. It is used of various realms of emotion or spiritual speculation more or less lying on the borders of religion itself; it is applied to other things that have nothing to do with religion; it is applied to some things that are almost identical with irreligion. But the line between legitimate and illegitimate expansion of a word is so difficult to draw, that there is little to be gained by questioning it except that mere quarrel about a word that is called logomachy. There always are some confusions about a definition or exceptions to a rule. The great principle that Pigs is Pigs does not dispose entirely of the existence of pig-iron, or of cannibals calling a man a long pig. We all know the plain practical man, the sceptic in the crowd, the atheist on the soap-box, who boasts that he calls a spade a spade, and generally calls it a spyde. But even he may have to deal with the learned and sophisticated man, who will prove to him, that even in the case of the ace of spades which he planks down in playing poker, the spade is not really a spade; being derived from the Spanish espada, a sword. If once we begin to quibble and quarrel about what words ought to mean or can be made to mean we shall find ourselves in a mere world of words, most wearisome to those who are concerned with thoughts. For the latter it will be enough to realise that there certainly was and is a certain thing, to which our fathers found it more practical to attach and limit the name of religion; that they recognised that the thing had many forms, and that there were many religions; but that they were equally certain of what things were not religions, including much that modern moralists call a wider religious life. They recognised a Protestant religion and a Catholic religion, and probably thought one or other of them true; they recognised a Mohammedan religion, even if they thought it false; they recognised a Jewish religion, which had once been true and by a sort of treason had become false; and so on. But they did not recognise a religion of Humanity; or a "religion of the Life Force": or a religion of creative evolution; or a religion which has the object of ultimately producing a god who does not yet exist. And the distinction is better preserved by noting these examples than by an attempt to fix the elusive evasions of the verbal sophists of today.

What we mean when we say that "The Hound of Heaven" is a real religious poem is simply that it would make no sense if we supposed it to refer to any of these modern abstractions, or to anything but a personal Creator in relation to a personal creature. It may be, and indeed is, a generous and charitable mood to look out on all the multitudes of men with sympathy and social loyalty. But it was not the multitudes of men that were pursuing the hero of this poem "down the nights and down the days". It may be a good thing for men to look forward to mankind someday producing a superior being, thousands of years hence, who will be like a god compared with the common mass of men. But it was not some superior person born a thousand years hence, who drove the sinner in this story from refuge to refuge. He was not running away from the Life Force, from a mere summary of all natural vitality, which would be expressed equally in the pursued or the pursuer. For it requires quite as much Life Force to run away from anybody as to run after anybody. He was not swiftly escaping from a slow adaptive process called evolution, like a man pursued by a snail. He was not alarmed at a gradual biological transformation, by which a Hound of Heaven might be evolved out of a Hound of Hell. He was dealing with the direct individual relations of God and Man, and the story would be absolutely senseless to anybody who thought that the service of Man is a substitute for the service of God. This is where the practical habit of speech, among our religious ancestors of all religions, proves its validity and veracity. Francis Thompson was a Catholic, and a very Catholic Catholic. In some aspects of art, poetry and pomp, the Catholic is more akin to the pagan; in some aspects of philosophy and logic (though this is little understood), he has more sympathy with the sceptic or the agnostic. But in the solid central fact of the subject or subject-matter he is still something utterly separate from sceptics and even from pagans; and all Christians have their part in him. A perfectly simple and straightforward member of the Salvation Army knows what "The Hound of Heaven" is about, even if he knows it better without reading it, and would recognise its central theology as promptly as the Pope. But the mere humanist, the mere humanitarian, the universal aesthete, the patroniser of all religions, he will never know what it is about, for he has never been near enough to God to run away from Him.

Now the next point of interest is that this poem of purely personal religion, so directly devotional, so dogmatically orthodox, appeared at a time when it might least be expected, and at the end of an historical process that might have seemed to make it impossible. The nineteenth century had been, at least on the surface, one triumphal procession of progress, away from these theological relations, which were accounted narrow, towards ideals of brotherhood or natural living which seemed to be more and more broad. We might say that the poets had led the procession, for even at the beginning of the nineteenth century Shelley and Landor and Byron and Keats had moved in various ways towards a pantheistic paganism; and the tendency was continued by Victor Hugo in Europe and by Walt Whitman in America. There were, of course, continual cross-currents and confusions. Even an appeal to pantheism is something like an appeal to theism, and it was difficult to imitate the pagans without discovering, like St. Paul, that they were very religious. The contradiction came out quaintly in the case of Swinburne, who was always trying to prove that he was an atheist by invoking about ten different gods in a style exactly copied from the Old Testament.

Roughly speaking, however, I myself remember fairly well the curious cultural conditions in which the genius of Francis Thompson arose; for, though I was a boy at the time, a boy can sometimes absorb the atmosphere of a society, with the same subtle subconscious instinct with which a child can absorb the atmosphere of a house. I read all the minor poets; and it was specially an age of minor poets. The curious thing is that Francis Thompson was considered, criticised, appreciated or admired as one of the minor poets. I can remember Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, who is one of the survivors of that epoch, defending himself with spirit, but with a certain air of audacity, against the charge of fulsome exaggeration in saying that there was in the poems of this Mr. Thompson an Elizabethan richness and sometimes almost a Shakespearian splendour. Mr. Le Gallienne was quite right; but the main point is that his defence was a general defence of minor poets, and of this poet as a minor poet. It had hardly occurred to the world in general that Francis Thompson was a major poet; we might almost say a major prophet. There was in all that world of culture an atmosphere of paganism that had worn rather thin. But hardly anybody thought that the future of poetry could be anything but a future of paganism. It was then, in the slowly deepening silence, as in the poem of Coventry Patmore, that there was first heard, afar off, the baying of a hound.

That is the primary point about the work of Francis Thompson; even before its many-coloured pageant of images and words. The awakening of the domini canes, the Dogs of God, meant that the hunt was up once more; the hunt for the souls of men; and that religion of that realistic sort was anything but dead. In Patmore's poem the dog is "an old guard-hound"; and we may say, without irreverence, that the first impression or lesson was that there is life in the old dog yet. In any case, it was an event of history, as much as an event of literature, when personal religion returned suddenly with something of the power of Dante or the Dies Irae, after a century in which such religion had seemed to grow more weak and provincial, and more and more impersonal religions appeared to possess the future. And those who best understand the world know that the world is changed, and that the hunt will continue until the world turns to bay.

The Frivolous Man

By one of those queer associations that nobody can ever understand, a large number of people have come to think that frivolity has some kind of connection with enjoyment. As a matter of fact, nobody can really enjoy himself unless he is serious. Even those whom we commonly regard as belonging to the butterfly classes of society really enjoy themselves most at the crises of their lives which are potentially tragic. Men can only enjoy fundamental things. In order to enjoy the lightest and most flying joke a man must be rooted in some basic sense of the good of things; and the good of things means, of course, the seriousness of things. In order to enjoy even a pas de quatre at a subscription dance a man must feel for the moment that the stars are dancing to the same tune. In the old religions of the world, indeed, people did think that the stars were dancing to the tunes of their temples; and they danced as no man has danced since. But thorough enjoyment, enjoyment that has no hesitation, no incidental blight, no arrière pensée, is only possible to the serious man. Wine, says the Scripture, maketh glad the heart of man, but only of the man who has a heart. And so also the thing called good spirits is possible only to the spiritual.

The really frivolous man, the frivolous man of society, we all know, and any of us who know him truthfully know that if he has one characteristic more salient than another it is that be is a pessimist. The idea of the gay and thoughtless man of fashion, intoxicated with pagan delights, is a figment invented entirely by religious people who never met any such man in their lives. The man of pleasure is one of the fables of the pious. Puritans have given a great deal too much credit to the power which the world has to satisfy the soul; in admitting that the sinner is gay and careless they have given away the strongest part of their case. As a matter of fact, Puritanism commonly falls into the error of accusing the frivolous man of all the wrong vices. For instance, it says (and it is a favourite phrase) that the frivolous man is "careless". In truth the frivolous man is very careful. Not only does he spend hours over dressing and similar technical matters, but a great part of his life is passed in criticising and discussing similar technical matters. At any odd hour of the day we may find him talking about whether one man has the right kind of coat or another man the wrong kind of dinner-service; and about these matters he is far more solemn than a Pope or a General Council. His general air about them might be described as rather sad than serious, as rather hopeless than severe. Religion might approximately be defined as the power which makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity might, with a parallel propriety, be defined as the power which makes us sad about the things that do not matter.

Frivolity has nothing to do with happiness. It plays upon the surface of things, and the surface is almost always rough and uneven. The frivolous person is the person who cannot fully appreciate the weight and value of anything. In practice he does not appreciate even the weight and value of the things commonly counted frivolous. He does not enjoy his cigars as the gutter boy enjoys his cigarette; he does not enjoy his ballet as the child enjoys "Punch and Judy". But, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that he is not alone in being frivolous: other classes of men share the reproach. Thus, for instance, bishops are generally frivolous, moral teachers are generally frivolous, statesmen are generally frivolous, conscientious objectors are generally frivolous. Philosophers and poets are often frivolous; politicians are always frivolous. For if frivolity signifies this lack of grasp of the fullness and the value of things, it must have a great many forms besides that of mere levity and pleasure-seeking. A great many people have a fixed idea that irreverence, for instance, consists chiefly in making jokes. But it is quite possible to be irreverent with a diction devoid of the slightest touch of indecorum, and with a soul unpolluted by a tinge of humour. The splendid and everlasting definition of real irreverence is to be found in that misunderstood and neglected commandment which declares that the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain. This again is supposed vaguely to have some connection with buffoonery and jocularity and play upon words. But surely that is not the plain meaning of the phrase. To say a thing with a touch of humour is not to say it in vain. To say a thing with a touch of satire or individual criticism is not to say it in vain. To say a thing even fantastically, like some fragment from the scriptures of Elfland, is not to say it in vain. But to say a thing with a pompous and unmeaning gravity; to say a thing so that it shall be at once bigoted and vague; to say a thing so that it shall be indistinct at the same moment that it is literal; to say a thing so that the most decorous listener shall not at the end of it really know why in the name of all things you should have said it or he should have listened to it-- this is veritably and in the weighty sense of those ancient Mosaic words to take that thing in vain. The Name is taken in vain many times more often by preachers than it is by secularists. The blasphemer is, indeed, fundamentally natural and prosaic, for he speaks in a commonplace manner about that which he believes to be commonplace. But the ordinary preacher and religious orator speaks in a commonplace manner about that which he believes to be divine.

This is the breach of one of the Commandments; it is the sin against the name. Take, if you will, the name wildly, take it jestingly, take it brutally and angrily, take it childishly, take it wrongly; but do not take it in vain. Use a sanctity for some strange or new purpose and justify that use; use a sanctity for some doubtful and experimental purpose and stake your act on your success; use a sanctity for some base and hateful purpose and abide the end. But do not use a sanctity for no purpose at all; do not talk about Christ when you might as well talk about Mr. Perks; do not use patriotism and honour and the Communion of Saints as stopgaps in a halting speech. This is the sin of frivolity, and it is the chief characteristic of the great majority of the conventionally religious class.

Thus we come back to the conclusion that real seriousness is at a discount alike among the irreligious and the religious, alike in the worldly and in the unworldly world.

Two Stubborn Pieces of Iron

In discussing such a proposal as that of the co-education of the sexes it is very desirable first of all to realise clearly what it is that we want the thing to do. The thing might be upheld for quite opposite reasons. It might be supposed to increase delicacy or to decrease it. It might be valued because it was a sphere for sentiment or because it was a damper for sentiment. My sympathies would move me in a discussion entirely according to what difference its upholders thought it would make. For myself, I doubt whether it would make much difference at all. Everyone must agree with co-education for very young children; and I cannot believe that even for elder children it would do any great harm. But that is because I think the school is not so important as people think it nowadays. The home is the really important thing, and always will be. People talk about the poor neglecting their children; but a little boy in the street has more traces of having been brought up by his mother than of having been taught ethics and geography by a pupil teacher. And if we take this true parallel of the home we can see, I think, exactly what co-education can do and what it cannot do. The school will never make boys and girls ordinary comrades. The home does not make them that. The sexes can work together in a school-room just as they can breakfast together in a breakfast-room; but neither makes any difference to the fact that the boys go off to a boyish companionship which the girls would think disgusting, while the girls go off to a girl companionship which the boys would think literally insane. Co-educate as much as you like, there will always be a wall between the sexes until love or lust breaks it down. Your co-educative playground for pupils in their teens will not be a place of sexles