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Title: Twelve Types

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #12491]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWELVE TYPES
***

TWELVE TYPES

BY G.K. CHESTERTON
LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
1902

NOTE
These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted with the
kind permission of the Editors of The Daily News and The Speaker.
G.K.C.
KENSINGTON.

CONTENTS
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
FRANCIS
ROSTAND
CHARLES II
STEVENSON
THOMAS CARLYLE
TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY
SAVONAROLA
THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals so
much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The real
objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a man the
precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and insists on
exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself is wholly
unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of his ancestry,
the place of his present location. These are things which do not, properly
speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do not occur to a man's
mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that they do not occur in a
man's life. A man no more thinks about himself as the inhabitant of the third
house in a row of Brixton villas than he thinks about himself as a strange
animal with two legs. What a man's name was, what his income was, whom
he married, where he lived, these are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.
A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. The Brontë is in the
position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities form an
endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild and
bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of literature,
like Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of collecting all
the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights and sticks and
straws which will go to make a Brontë museum. They are the most
personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the limelight of biography
has left few darkened corners in the dark old Yorkshire house. And yet the
whole of this biographical investigation, though natural and picturesque, is
not wholly suitable to the Brontës. For the Brontë genius was above all
things deputed to assert the supreme unimportance of externals. Up to that
point truth had always been conceived as existing more or less in the novel
of manners. Charlotte Brontë electrified the world by showing that an
infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in
which no person, good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents
the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a

disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masqué.' She
showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a
manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of
merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte
Brontë, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her
genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the artificial
gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural gold and
diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt that the whole
of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole of the interior might be
made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in the ugliest of centuries,
and revealed within them all the hells and heavens of Dante.
It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of the
Brontës' life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter less than
the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting to know whether
Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the officers and women of
fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces. It is interesting to
know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or been inside a
workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is conveyed, not
always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them. But the whole
aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontës is that the most
futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story as 'Jane Eyre' is in
itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be excluded from a book of fairy
tales. The characters do not do what they ought to do, nor what they would
do, nor, it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even
what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and
superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely
exaggerated it. 'Then, resuming his usual manner, he threw his boots at my
head and withdrew,' does perhaps reach to something resembling caricature.
The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it
which is really not to be found in any other branch of art, except in the end
of the pantomime, where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, despite
this vast nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world,
'Jane Eyre' is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential
truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true to
manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always
false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the

irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not matter a single
straw if a Brontë story were a hundred times more moonstruck and
improbable than 'Jane Eyre,' or a hundred times more moonstruck and
improbable than 'Wuthering Heights.' It would not matter if George Read
stood on his head, and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, if Fairfax Rochester had
four eyes and St John Rivers three legs, the story would still remain the
truest story in the world. The typical Brontë character is, indeed, a kind of
monster. Everything in him except the essential is dislocated. His hands are
on his legs and his feet on his arms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart
is in the right place.
The great and abiding truth for which the Brontë cycle of fiction stands is a
certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth, the truth of
the near kinship between terror and joy. The Brontë heroine, dingily
dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating inexperience, a kind of
ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her solitude and her gaucherie,
full of the greatest delight that is possible to a human being, the delight of
expectation, the delight of an ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves
to show how futile it is of humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained
chiefly by putting on evening dress every evening, and having a box at the
theatre every first night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is
not the man of the world who appreciates the world. The man who has
learnt to do all conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to
do them prosaically. It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not
fit him, whose gloves will not go on, whose compliments will not come off,
who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He is frightened enough
of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that element of fear which
is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is the central spirit of the
Brontë novel. It is the epic of the exhilaration of the shy man. As such it is
of incalculable value in our time, of which the curse is that it does not take
joy reverently because it does not take it fearfully. The shabby and
inconspicuous governess of Charlotte Brontë, with the small outlook and
the small creed, had more commerce with the awful and elemental forces
which drive the world than a legion of lawless minor poets. She approached
the universe with real simplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and
delight. She was, so to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in
this she had possessed herself of the only force which can prevent

enjoyment being as black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is
the first and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the
Lord is the beginning of pleasure.
Upon the whole, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that the dark
wild youth of the Brontës in their dark wild Yorkshire home has been
somewhat exaggerated as a necessary factor in their work and their
conception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions,
emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the springtide
terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some midnight dream of
nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which there was, under
whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and panic of 'Wuthering
Heights.' Every one of us has had a day-dream of our own potential destiny
not one atom more reasonable than 'Jane Eyre.' And the truth which the
Brontës came to tell us is the truth that many waters cannot quench love,
and that suburban respectability cannot touch or damp a secret enthusiasm.
Clapham, like every other earthly city, is built upon a volcano. Thousands
of people go to and fro in the wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean
wages, professing a mean religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of
women who have never found any expression for their exaltation or their
tragedy but to go on working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic
employments, at scolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all these
silent ones one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony,
and her name was Charlotte Brontë. Spreading around us upon every side
to-day like a huge and radiating geometrical figure are the endless branches
of the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as well
we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the frantic
arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of ours is in truth
nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of
men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium
dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and
supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of
the world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not
seemed to some one at some time the heart of all things and the end of
travel.

WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL

It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris should
approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many men of
genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have been none so
representative. He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty
which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy
life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding
beauty in common necessities of workmanship which gives it a stronger and
more bony structure. The time has passed when William Morris was
conceived to be irrelevant to be described as a designer of wall-papers. If
Morris had been a hatter instead of a decorator, we should have become
gradually and painfully conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had
been a tailor, we should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the
ground with the grandeur of mediæval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker,
we should have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually
approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have
invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an
ironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern, fit to be the nails
of the Cross. The limitations of William Morris, whatever they were, were
not the limitations of common decoration. It is true that all his work, even
his literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in some degree the
qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, his stories, his religious
and political views, had, in the most emphatic sense, length and breadth
without thickness. He seemed really to believe that men could enjoy a
perfectly flat felicity. He made no account of the unexplored and explosive
possibilities of human nature, of the unnameable terrors, and the yet more
unnameable hopes. So long as a man was graceful in every circumstance, so
long as he had the inspiring consciousness that the chestnut colour of his
hair was relieved against the blue forest a mile behind, he would be
serenely happy. So he would be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a
decorative existence; if he were a piece of exquisitely coloured cardboard.

But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of human
nature—took little account, so to speak, of human figures in the round, it is
altogether unfair to represent him as a mere æsthete. He perceived a great
public necessity and fulfilled it heroically. The difficulty with which he
grappled was one so immense that we shall have to be separated from it by
many centuries before we can really judge of it. It was the problem of the
elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most self-conscious of centuries.
Morris at least saw the absurdity of the thing. He felt that it was monstrous
that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the
strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery
aureole of the ascetic, and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should
himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a
chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be
an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white
artist. It is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness
which blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries.
In all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly as a
pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and
thickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the most repulsive of
colours—a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of blood or fire, like
the scarlet of dead men's sins. Yet there is no reason whatever why such
hideousness should possess an object full of civic dignity, the treasure-
house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand souls. If the old
Greeks had had such an institution, we may be sure that it would have been
surmounted by the severe, but graceful, figure of the god of letter-writing. If
the mediæval Christians had possessed it, it would have had a niche filled
with the golden aureole of St Rowland of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there
it stands at all our street-corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of
ideas under one of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that
the miracles of science have not been such an incentive to art and
imagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth century
had been told that the lightning had been driven for leagues underground,
and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing human beings, and
if they had then been told that the people alluded to this pulverising portent
chirpily as 'The Twopenny Tube,' they would have called down the fire of
Heaven on us as a race of half-witted atheists. Probably they would have
been quite right.

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anæsthetic element
in the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the work of a great reformer: it
requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evil that surrounds us on
every side. The manner in which Morris carried out his crusade may,
considering the circumstances, be called triumphant. Our carpets began to
bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring, and our hitherto prosaic
stools and sofas seemed growing legs and arms at their own wild will. An
element of freedom and rugged dignity came in with plain and strong
ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate and universal has been the
revolution in domestic art that almost every family in England has had its
taste cunningly and treacherously improved, and if we look back at the
early Victorian drawing-rooms it is only to realise the strange but essential
truth that art, or human decoration, has, nine times out of ten in history,
made things uglier than they were before, from the 'coiffure' of a Papuan
savage to the wall-paper of a British merchant in 1830.
But great and beneficent as was the æsthetic revolution of Morris, there was
a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that his revolution
was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial explanation of his partial
failure. When he was denouncing the dresses of modern ladies, 'upholstered
like arm-chairs instead of being draped like women,' as he forcibly
expressed it, he would hold up for practical imitation the costumes and
handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than this retrogressive and imitative
movement he never seemed to go. Now, the men of the time of Chaucer had
many evil qualities, but there was at least one exhibition of moral weakness
they did not give. They would have laughed at the idea of dressing
themselves in the manner of the bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting
themselves an æsthetic blue, after the custom of the ancient Britons. They
would not have called that a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in
their dress or manners sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led
and preferred to lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real
advance in the beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally
out of the life we lead and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without
hints and hopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and
athletic costumes. But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or
satisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress ball. But
the limitation of Morris's work lay deeper than this. We may best suggest it

by a method after his own heart. Of all the various works he performed,
none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly valuable as his great protest
for the fables and superstitions of mankind. He has the supreme credit of
showing that the fairy-tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real
record of men's feeling for things. Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack
may not have climbed up so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is
not such things that make a story false; it is a far different class of things
that makes every modern book of history as false as the father of lies;
ingenuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It appears to us that
of all the fairy-tales none contains so vital a moral truth as the old story,
existing in many forms, of Beauty and the Beast. There is written, with all
the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and essential truth that until
we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot make it beautiful. This was the
weak point in William Morris as a reformer: that he sought to reform
modern life, and that he hated modern life instead of loving it. Modern
London is indeed a beast, big enough and black enough to be the beast in
Apocalypse, blazing with a million eyes, and roaring with a million voices.
But unless the poet can love this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with
some generous excitement his massive and mysterious 'joie-de-vivre,' the
vast scale of his iron anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he
cannot and will not change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris's
disadvantage was that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century:
he could not understand its fascination, and consequently he could not
really develop it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal
influence in the æsthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and
Crafts Exhibitions, which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in that
of a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these æsthetic shows,
we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the decorative
school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for giving the right touch
of beauty to common and necessary things, but the things that are so
touched are the ancient things, the things that always to some extent
commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There are beautiful gates,
beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs, beautiful reading-desks.
But there are no modern things made beautiful. There are no beautiful
lamp-posts, beautiful letter-boxes, beautiful engines, beautiful bicycles. The
spirit of William Morris has not seized hold of the century and made its
humblest necessities beautiful. And this was because, with all his

healthiness and energy, he had not the supreme courage to face the ugliness
of things; Beauty shrank from the Beast and the fairy-tale had a different
ending.
But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest claim to the name of a great
reformer: that he left his work incomplete. There is, perhaps, no better proof
that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than that his work
is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to needs he cannot
supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer and more daring Arts
and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the armour of the twelfth
century but the machinery of the twentieth. A lamp-post shall be wrought
nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the sanctity of fire. A pillar-box shall be
carved with figures emblematical of the secrets of comradeship and the
silence and honour of the State. Railway signals, of all earthly things the
most poetical, the coloured stars of life and death, shall be lamps of green
and crimson worthy of their terrible and faithful service. But if ever this
gradual and genuine movement of our time towards beauty—not
backwards, but forwards—does truly come about, Morris will be the first
prophet of it. Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new
honesties of art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded
enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assumed
flamboyant colours and proved that this painful greenish grey of the
æsthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not
of the greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.

THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of Byron. The
age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when we wake in the
morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the world of Byron
seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world, where men were
romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and the very word
has the sound of a piece of stage scenery. Roses and nightingales recur in
their poetry with the monotonous elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The
whole is like a revel of dead men, a revel with splendid vesture and half-
witted faces.
But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less
ready shall we be to make use of the word "artificial." Nothing in the world
has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art
are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity and self-
consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love
and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in
the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or
evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.
The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present
position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is remote
and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not savage or
terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of this: a fair one is
the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see some of the monstrous
and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial woods, we do not feel
that they are conflagrations of nature; silent explosions of her frightful
energy. We simply find it hard to believe that they are not wax flowers
grown under a glass case. When we see some of the tropic birds, with their
tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of
the fierce humour of Creation. We almost believe that they are toys out of a
child's play-box, artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with
the great convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano

is not an extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the
remains not of a natural but of an artificial fire.
But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than
anything that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and
meaning are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron
lies in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself as
such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron without
knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himself that ever
fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real character of what is known as
Byron's pessimism is better worth study than any real pessimism could ever
be.
It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost
everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably extolled to
the disadvantage of everything else.
One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has
been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books, love,
business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion, money,
simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life close to
Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintained by
somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise
indefensible world. Thus while the world is almost always condemned in
summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after detail.
Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The
work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously among
them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House of God, to
sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle, as steward,
undertakes the working department and eulogises a life of labour in the
fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar and swears that it is the
only room in the house. Even the blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his
art. At the precise moment that he has written some shameless and terrible
indictment of Creation, his one pang of joy in the achievement joins the
universal chorus of gratitude, with the scent of the wild flower and the song
of the bird.

Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far as
words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored by
an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despised the
majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little more
deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this popularity of the
pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated pessimism is an oddity;
it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would no more receive the news
of the failure of existence or of the harmonious hostility of the stars with
ardour or popular rejoicing than they would light bonfires for the arrival of
cholera or dance a breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged.
When the pessimist is popular it must always be not because he shows all
things to be bad, but because he shows some things to be good. Men can
only join in a chorus of praise even if it is the praise of denunciation. The
man who is popular must be optimistic about something even if he is only
optimistic about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron
and the Byronists. Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that
they blamed everything, but upon the fact that they praised something. They
heaped curses upon man, but they used man merely as a foil. The things
they wished to praise by comparison were the energies of Nature. Man was
to them what talk and fashion were to Carlyle, what philosophical and
religious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical
happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in order
that somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of the fact
that one cannot write in white chalk except on a blackboard.
Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the desolate
and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and depression.
When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in winter by the
side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in storms and stricken
peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older earth, we may deduce with
the certainty of logic that he is very young and very happy. There is a
certain darkness which we see in wine when seen in shadow; we see it
again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. The wine seems
black, and yet at the same time powerfully and almost impossibly red; the
sky seems black, and yet at the same time to be only too dense a blend of
purple and green. Such was the darkness which lay around the Byronic
school. Darkness with them was only too dense a purple. They would prefer

the sullen hostility of the earth because amid all the cold and darkness their
own hearts were flaming like their own firesides.
Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and
lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr
Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a
pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the
cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial life.
Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the
restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new pessimism is
a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an affectation of
sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal,
has positively an affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and
their frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; in
their lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair. It
was so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were his
frivolous moments. He went on year after year calling down fire upon
mankind, summoning the deluge and the destructive sea and all the ultimate
energies of nature to sweep away the cities of the spawn of man. But
through all this his sub-conscious mind was not that of a despairer; on the
contrary, there is something of a kind of lawless faith in thus parleying with
such immense and immemorial brutalities. It was not until the time in which
he wrote 'Don Juan' that he really lost this inward warmth and geniality, and
a sudden shout of hilarious laughter announced to the world that Lord
Byron had really become a pessimist.
One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre.
He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in
his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of horror and
emptiness, his metre is a bounding 'pas de quatre.' He may arraign existence
on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the most desolating
verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk in a spring morning
when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood alive in the body, the lips
may be caught repeating:

'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes
away,

When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull
decay;
'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be
past.'
That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.
The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the
unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most
uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their
nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the
whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,
and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional
artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,
political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the time that
he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of that buried
and sub-conscious happiness which is in all of us, and which may emerge
suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears of the enemy.

POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
The general critical theory common in this and the last century is that it was
very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The classical
couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes, one may
justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easier really to have
wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense, to have
imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have imagination
than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a sham rhapsody,
because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be unintelligible. But a man
cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is the ruin of a joke to be
unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet: he can no more pretend to
be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits out of a hat without having
learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it may be submitted, there was a certain
discipline in the old antithetical couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did
not permit of the great liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great
geniuses, neither did it permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by
the majority of small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days,
perhaps, but at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of
example, such a line as Pope's

'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,'

the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written such a
line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.
Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with such an
idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:

'A being darkly wise and rudely great.'

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than that old
antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would really be any
wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The one thing that
he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing

'A being darkly wise and rudely great,'

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses, would
produce something like the following:—

'A creature
Of feature
More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,
Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:
Darkly wise as a formless fate
And if he be great
If he be great, then rudely great,
Rudely great as a plough that plies,
And darkly wise, and darkly wise.'

Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to
spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet
might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.
There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of the typical
line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have occasion more than once
to point out that nothing in the world has ever been artificial. But certainly
antithesis is not artificial. An element of paradox runs through the whole of
existence itself. It begins in the realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics,
in the two facts that we cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we
cannot imagine a space that is finite. It runs through the inmost
complications of divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the
wilderness was truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It
runs, in the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that
we cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or
magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to
meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural irrationality,
they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses were fully in
harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction in terms.
Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet of civilisation.
Immediately after the fall of him and his school come Burns and Byron, and
the reaction towards the savage and the elemental. But to Pope civilisation

was still an exciting experiment. Its perruques and ruffles were to him what
feathers and bangles are to a South Sea Islander—the real romance of
civilisation. And in all the forms of art which peculiarly belong to
civilisation, he was supreme. In one especially he was supreme—the great
and civilised art of satire. And in this we have fallen away utterly.
We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence and hostility.
Mr Henley and his young men have an infinite number of furious epithets
with which to overwhelm any one who differs from them. It is not a placid
or untroubled position to be Mr Henley's enemy, though we know that it is
certainly safer than to be his friend. And yet, despite all this, these people
produce no satire. Political and social satire is a lost art, like pottery and
stained glass. It may be worth while to make some attempt to point out a
reason for this.
It may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generous enough
to write great satire. This, however, is approximately a very accurate way of
describing the case. To write great satire, to attack a man so that he feels the
attack and half acknowledges its justice, it is necessary to have a certain
intellectual magnanimity which realises the merits of the opponent as well
as his defects. This is, indeed, only another way of putting the simple truth
that in order to attack an army we must know not only its weak points, but
also its strong points. England in the present season and spirit fails in satire
for the same simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In
matters of battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the
idea (an idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on
a people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance of
trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the enemy;
whereas when the enemy is strong every honest scout ought to praise the
enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a full account
of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man without having a full
account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in politics to describe a
political opponent as utterly inhumane, as utterly careless of his country, as
utterly cynical, which no man ever was since the beginning of the world.
This kind of invective may often have a great superficial success: it may hit
the mood of the moment; it may raise excitement and applause; it may
impress millions. But there is one man among all those millions whom it
does not impress, whom it hardly even touches; that is the man against

whom it is directed. The one person for whom the whole satire has been
written in vain is the man whom it is the whole object of the institution of
satire to reach. He knows that such a description of him is not true. He
knows that he is not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly
barbarous and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he
can count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many
hours of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But
behind all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:
behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven
silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly visions of
revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to touch the man at
whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and salute a whole army
of virtues.
If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough but firm grasp of
the size and strength, the value and the best points of their adversary.
Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a splendid and spirited
account of the insane valour and inspired cunning of the

'daring pilot in extremity,'

who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and

'Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit.'

The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the great
Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and picturesque
account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very pointedly the
difference between our modern attempts at satire and the ancient
achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill, both Liberal
and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly, as one of those
great wits to madness near allied. They represented him as a mere puppy, a
silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied the lack of policy and
character. Churchill had grave and even gross faults, a certain coarseness, a
certain hard boyish assertiveness, a certain lack of magnanimity, a certain
peculiar patrician vulgarity. But he was a much larger man than satire
depicted him, and therefore the satire could not and did not overwhelm him.

And here we have the cause of the failure of contemporary satire, that it has
no magnanimity, that is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that
its opponent has his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain could not endure
to be told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothing
except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly stupid—
that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If we take any
prominent politician of the day—such, for example, as Sir William
Harcourt—we shall find that this is the point in which all party invective
fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William Harcourt is always
desperately endeavouring to represent that he is inept, that he makes a fool
of himself, that he is disagreeable and disgraceful and untrustworthy. The
defect of all this is that we all know that it is untrue. Everyone knows that
Sir William Harcourt is not inept, but is almost the ablest Parliamentarian
now alive. Everyone knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a
gentleman of the old school who is on excellent social terms with his
antagonists. Everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy, but a man of
unimpeachable honour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself,
and is therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if
we were accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving of
stolen goods. We might be angry at the libel, but not at the satire; for a man
is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
Mr Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire: if they
wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they need only turn
to the opening of Pope's superb attack upon Addison. The Henleyite's idea
of satirising a man is to express a violent contempt for him, and by the heat
of this to persuade others and himself that the man is contemptible. I
remember reading a satiric attack on Mr Gladstone by one of the young
anarchic Tories, which began by asserting that Mr Gladstone was a bad
public speaker. If these people would, as I have said, go quietly and read
Pope's 'Atticus,' they would see how a great satirist approaches a great
enemy:

'Peace to all such! But were there one whose fires
True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,
Blest with each talent, and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease.
Should such a man—'

And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not such a
fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that Addison
was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in Pope's
case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, so pure, that it
illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. He said what was really
wrong with Addison; and in calm and clear and everlasting colours he
painted the picture of the evil of the literary temperament:

'Bear like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise.

Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause.
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise.'

This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which it aims. It is
penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it is addressed directly
to a man. This is no mock-tournament to gain the applause of the crowd. It
is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore.
In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption that,
without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can benefit a
man practically. Without understanding his case and his merits, we cannot
even hurt him.

FRANCIS

Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days to
misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation of the
great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the one joy,
the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined to religious
asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts that truth is alone
satisfying: there is æsthetic asceticism which asserts that art is alone
satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which asserts that love is alone
satisfying. There is even epicurean asceticism, which asserts that beer and
skittles are alone satisfying. Wherever the manner of praising anything
involves the statement that the speaker could live with that thing alone,
there lies the germ and essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for
example, says that 'love is enough,' it is obvious that he asserts in those
words that art, science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages,
concerts, gloves, walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals
and any other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When
Omar Khayyam says:

'A book of verse beneath the bough
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou
Sitting beside me in the wilderness
O wilderness were Paradise enow.'

It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does æsthetically.
He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more. The same thing
was done by a mediæval monk. Examples might, of course, be multiplied a
hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our younger poets says,
as the one thing certain, that

'From quiet home and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends—
There's nothing worth the wear of winning

But laughter and the love of friends.'
Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true joy
expresses itself in terms of asceticism.
But if in any case it should happen that a class or a generation lose the sense
of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they immediately
begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and self-destroying. The most
formidable liberal philosophers have called the monks melancholy because
they denied themselves the pleasures of liberty and marriage. They might as
well call the trippers on a Bank Holiday melancholy because they deny
themselves, as a rule, the pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and
stronger example is, however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the
system of English athletics should vanish from the public schools and the
universities, if science should supply some new and non-competitive
manner of perfecting the physique, if public ethics swung round to an
attitude of absolute contempt and indifference towards the feeling called
sport, then it is easy to see what would happen. Future historians would
simply state that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford
and Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They
were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco
during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal fights
and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours and running
violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their health in these
dens of superstition, many died there. All this is perfectly true and
irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism, as much as the
monastic rules. Men have over-strained themselves and killed themselves
through English athleticism. There is one difference and one only: we do
feel the love of sport; we do not feel the love of religious offices. We see
only the price in the one case and only the purchase in the other.
The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian
ascetics of which their ascetism was merely the purchasing price. The mere
possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in which we
miss the main points of human history. We are looking at humanity too
close, and see only the details and not the vast and dominant features. We
look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it as a rise of self-abnegation
and almost of pessimism. It does not occur to us that the mere assertion that

this raging and confounding universe is governed by justice and mercy is a
piece of staggering optimism fit to set all men capering. The detail over
which these monks went mad with joy was the universe itself; the only
thing really worthy of enjoyment. The white daylight shone over all the
world, the endless forests stood up in their order. The lightning awoke and
the tree fell and the sea gathered into mountains and the ship went down,
and all these disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part
of one dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of
mercy. That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is
perfectly tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We
insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that the
ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and ten for
an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition of an eternity
of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times more optimistic than
ten thousand pagan saturnalias.
Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this out;
nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather the tone of a
devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing, but we do not
look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason that we do not look
in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman, because men in such
conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to their idol, but all virtues in
equal quantities. There is no outline, because the artist cannot bear to put in
a black line. This blaze of benediction, this conflict between lights, has its
place in poetry, not in biography. The successful examples of it may be
found, for instance, in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is
sometimes almost indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.
It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley should see Francis primarily as the
founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one, perhaps a
minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of the minor
things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast practical work
of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this amazingly unworldly and
almost maddeningly simple—minded infant was one of the most
consistently successful men that ever fought with this bitter world. It is the
custom to say that the secret of such men is their profound belief in
themselves, and this is true, but not all the truth. Workhouses and lunatic
asylums are thronged with men who believe in themselves. Of Francis it is

far truer to say that the secret of his success was his profound belief in other
people, and it is the lack of this that has commonly been the curse of these
obscure Napoleons. Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as
anxious about their common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a
visit to the Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of 'his little sisters the
larks.' He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their
misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It was an
innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often 'got round him,' as the
phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had 'got
round' them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret nobility.
Conceiving of St Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan Order,
Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the history of
Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in the book. He
distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichæan ideal that underlies
so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of self-discipline which
never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But he does not throw any
light on what must be for the outsider the absorbing problem of this
Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason that not being an outsider he
does not find it a problem at all.
To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position
of St Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly
thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his
monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird
as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger: he was,
perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded
his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious
necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied
to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it
that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most
congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved
where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why
was he a monk, and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to
be answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have
been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should
suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was
answered also. So it was with the monks. The two great parties in human

affairs are only the party which sees life black against white, and the party
which sees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackens
itself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of an
universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and lights
itself with bridal torches because it stands against a black curtain of
incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are young. It was
the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we who are its
misers.
Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Adderley's book, the clear and tranquil
life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the genius of
Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his literary instinct is
shown in his naming the fire 'brother,' and the water 'sister,' in the quaint
demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the sermon to the fishes 'that they
alone were saved in the Flood.' In the amazingly minute and graphic
dramatisation of the life, disappointments and excuses of any shrub or beast
that he happened to be addressing, his genius has a curious resemblance to
that of Burns. But if he avoided the weakness of Burns' verses to animals,
the occasional morbidity, bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is
surely due to a cleaner and more transparent life.
The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a kind
of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in 'Alice in
Wonderland'—'Why not?' impresses us as his general motto. He could not
see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The pomp of war
and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all its fellows begin
to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of that innocent stare.
His questions were blasting and devastating, like the questions of a child.
He would not have been afraid even of the nightmares of cosmogony, for he
had no fear in him. To him the world was small, not because he had any
views as to its size, but for the reason that gossiping ladies find it small,
because so many relatives were to be found in it. If you had taken him to
the loneliest star that the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would
have only beheld in it the features of a new friend.

ROSTAND

When 'Cyrano de Bergerac' was published, it bore the subordinate title of a
heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which would
justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a poet who
called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the hero has his
place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is systematically
denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power of a man's spirit
might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy into a comedy is not
admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive legends of the world are
comedies, not only in the sense that they have a happy ending, but in the
sense that they are based upon a certain optimistic assumption that the hero
is destined to be the destroyer of the monster. Singularly enough, this
modern idea of the essential disastrous character of life, when seriously
considered, connects itself with a hyper-æsthetic view of tragedy and
comedy which is largely due to the influence of modern France, from which
the great heroic comedies of Monsieur Rostand have come. The French
genius has an instinct for remedying its own evil work, and France gives
always the best cure for 'Frenchiness.' The idea of comedy which is held in
England by the school which pays most attention to the technical niceties of
art is a view which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite
impossible. The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our
younger writers is that comedy is, 'par excellence,' a fragile thing. It is
conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and
gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's 'Happy
Hypocrite' are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter nonsense if
viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy, the comedy of
Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken seriously. There
is nothing to which a man must give himself up with more faith and self-
abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such comedies one laughs with
the heroes and not at them. The humour which steeps the stories of Falstaff
and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and philosophic humour, a geniality which goes
down to the depths. It is not superficial reading, it is not even, strictly

speaking, light reading. Our sympathies are as much committed to the
characters as if they were the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The
modern writer of comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his
characters. He seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces.
When John Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious
emotions, she named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work,
'A Sentimental Comedy.' The ground of this conception of the artificiality of
comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful
buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as a
grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly
speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over the eternal
waters of bitterness.
'Cyrano de Bergerac' came to us as the new decoration of an old truth, that
merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of its exotics.
The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the Rabelaisian puns and
digressions were seen to be once more what they had been in Rabelais, the
mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as old and solid as the
stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong and haughty as its will.
All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at his highest moment of
happiness. 'Il me faut des géants.' An essential aspect of this question of
heroic comedy is the question of drama in rhyme. There is nothing that
affords so easy a point of attack for the dramatic realist as the conduct of a
play in verse. According to his canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a
number of characters facing some terrible crisis in their lives by capping
rhymes like a party playing 'bouts rimés.' In his eyes it must appear
somewhat ridiculous that two enemies taunting each other with
insupportable insults should obligingly provide each other with metrical
spacing and neat and convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests
finally upon the fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is
meant by a poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays
which are now written in England by the most advanced students of the
drama follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme
for the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme
appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of heroic
comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not difficult to
imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far more conceivable

that men's speech should flower naturally into these harmonious forms,
when they are filled with the essential spirit of youth, than when they are
sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial destiny. The great error
consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We
should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we
do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not
song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken
and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual
extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our
language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole.
Rhymes answer each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer
each other. Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or
in love they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent the
speech one half so much, as the speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur
Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called 'Cyrano
de Bergerac' a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, it ends with
disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a spiritual breakdown
or decline, and in the great French play the spiritual sentiment mounts
unceasingly until the last line. It is not the facts themselves, but our feeling
about them, that makes tragedy and comedy, and death is more joyful in
Rostand than life in Maeterlinck. The same apparent contradiction holds
good in the case of the drama of 'L'Aiglon,' now being performed with so
much success. Although the hero is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end
a premature death and a personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme,
which might have been chosen for its depressing qualities, the
unconquerable pæan of the praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the
poet's song swells so high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak
voices of the characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great
men. A multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and
illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern life.
When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of the
wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux, les corbeaux,' the Duke, overwhelmed
with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, 'Où, où sont les aigles?'
That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the beginning of the
twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When an ex-General of
Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the Emperor, he replies,
'La fatigue,' and at that a veteran private of the Great Army rushes forward,

and crying passionately, 'Et nous?' pours out a terrible description of the life
lived by the common soldier. To-day when pessimism is almost as much a
symbol of wealth and fashion as jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs
of the ages can sum up life in few other words but 'la fatigue,' there might
surely come a cry from the vast mass of common humanity from the
beginning 'et nous?' It is this potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of
men that makes the function of comedy at once common and sublime.
Shakespeare's 'Much Ado about Nothing' is a great comedy, because behind
it is the whole pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world,
which is common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will
die bachelors and old maids. 'Love's Labour Lost' is filled with the same
energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our subject
since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically as naturally
as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love is to the
Shakespearian comedies, that other and more mysterious human passion,
the love of death, is to 'L'Aiglon.' Whether we shall ever have in England a
new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present to say, but we shall
assuredly never have it until we realise that comedy is built upon
everlasting foundations in the nature of things, that it is not a thing too light
to capture, but too deep to plumb. Monsieur Rostand, in his description of
the Battle of Wagram, does not shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears
the frightful voices of actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated
with blood, but when the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks
them for their final word, they all cry together 'Vive l'Empereur!' Monsieur
Rostand, perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that
field of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear
nothing but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is
right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of them should
be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life as they are in modern
art the only voices, they are the voices of men, but not the voice of man.
When questioned finally and seriously as to their conception of their
destiny, men have from the beginning of time answered in a thousand
philosophies and religions with a single voice and in a sense most sacred
and tremendous, 'Vive l'Empereur.'

CHARLES II

There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II., one of
the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other things Charles II.
represented one thing which is very rare and very satisfying; he was a real
and consistent sceptic. Scepticism both in its advantages and disadvantages
is greatly misunderstood in our time. There is a curious idea abroad that
scepticism has some connection with such theories as materialism and
atheism and secularism. This is of course a mistake; the true sceptic has
nothing to do with these theories simply because they are theories. The true
sceptic is as much a spiritualist as he is a materialist. He thinks that the
savage dancing round an African idol stands quite as good a chance of
being right as Darwin. He thinks that mysticism is every bit as rational as
rationalism. He has indeed the most profound doubts as to whether St
Matthew wrote his own gospel. But he has quite equally profound doubts as
to whether the tree he is looking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.
This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in
the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in the
life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between atheism and
Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and
formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of
all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment. For
it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man to say that there is no
God in the universe is like saying that there are no insects in any of the
stars.
Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic sceptic, Charles II. When
he took the Sacrament according to the forms of the Roman Church in his
last hour he was acting consistently as a philosopher. The wafer might not
be God; similarly it might not be a wafer. To the genuine and poetical
sceptic the whole world is incredible, with its bulbous mountains and its
fantastic trees. The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle

which could presume to violate it. Transubstantiation might be a dream, but
if it was, it was assuredly a dream within a dream. Charles II. sought to
guard himself against hell fire because he could not think hell itself more
fantastic than the world as it was revealed by science. The priest crept up
the staircase, the doors were closed, the few of the faithful who were
present hushed themselves respectfully, and so, with every circumstance of
secrecy and sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, was
consummated the last great act of logical unbelief.
The problem of Charles II. consists in this, that he has scarcely a moral
virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that some of the
virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the saints and sages,
and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in these wild and
unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and the real relation of
Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth somewhat more exhaustive study.
It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be understood
when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it is insufficiently
realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all the good work of
Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire of Puritanism, the
exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint, which passed away; that still
burns in the heart of England, only to be quenched by the final
overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that the Puritans were in
their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on
the logical necessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the
chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, through the damning fact that they
had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory
explanation can never satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the
logical French Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the
lesson that men's wants have always been right and their arguments always
wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head
rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of
violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his
head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the bodies of men was
comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively a
trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason over the
cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be
forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire;

hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because
they were fanatics, but because they were rationalists.
When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which
means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that
day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more
the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration.
The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a
revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that
are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic system of
life. This does not merely account for the revolt of the vices and of that
empty recklessness and horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than
any vice. It accounts also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that
also is a nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed
about it something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and
nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the type
of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of politeness.
There was some moral and social value in his perfection in little things. He
could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the ten thousand
commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts of duty or
sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those acts of
magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which lie on the
dim borderland between morality and art. 'Charles II.,' said Thackeray, with
unerring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a snob.' Unlike George IV. he was a
gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys strange statutes, not to be
found in any moral text-book, and practises strange virtues nameless from
the beginning of the world.
So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was the
revolt of something human, if only the débris of human nature. But more
cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a recoil and not
an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength. That the bow of
human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too far, that it
overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an almost horrible
idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration infinitely more excusable,
but it does not make it any the less a collapse. Nothing can efface the
essential distinction that Puritanism was one of the world's great efforts
after the discovery of the true order, whereas it was the essence of the

Restoration that it involved no effort at all. It is true that the Restoration
was not, as has been widely assumed, the most immoral epoch of our
history. Its vices cannot compare for a moment in this respect with the
monstrous tragedies and almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the
Court of James I. But the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia
of Charles II. seem at once more human and more detestable than the
passions and poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a
monkey appears inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger.
Compared with the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the
Restoration. Not only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too
indolent even for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even
for the pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game
of lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite as
arduous to write 'Paradise Lost' as to regain Paradise.
All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which,
though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, and
poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly
significant as the phrase 'killing time.' It is a tremendous and poetical
image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There is on the earth a race
of revellers who do, under all their exuberance, fundamentally regard time
as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. and the men of the Restoration.
Whatever may have been their merits, and as we have said we think that
they had merits, they can never have a place among the great
representatives of the joy of life, for they belonged to those lower
epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higher epicureans who make
time live.
Of a people in this temper Charles II. was the natural and rightful head. He
may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with all his
geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimless flaneur
that he has been represented. He was a patient and cunning politician, who
disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of folly that he not only
deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived almost all the historians
that have come after him. But if Charles was, as he emphatically was, the
only Stuart who really achieved despotism, it was greatly due to the temper
of the nation and the age. Despotism is the easiest of all governments, at
any rate for the governed.

It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave. Men in a
state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them, professionals to
dance for them, and a professional to rule them.
Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it were, like masks
put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unreality broods over the
period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries and problems, we can
afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than their laughter, our
restraints are larger than their liberty.

STEVENSON[A]

A recent incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as we
suspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed,
from the scorn of 'Ephemera Critica' and Mr George Moore, that Stevenson
had the first essential qualification of a great man: that of being
misunderstood by his opponents. But from the book which Messrs Chatto &
Windus have issued, in the same binding as Stevenson's works, 'Robert
Louis Stevenson,' by Mr H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he has the other
essential qualification, that of being misunderstood by his admirers. Mr
Baildon has many interesting things to tell us about Stevenson himself,
whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms by any means valueless.
That upon the plays, especially 'Beau Austin,' is remarkably thoughtful and
true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes far, as we say, to prove that
Stevenson had that unfathomable quality which belongs to the great, that
this admiring student of Stevenson can number and marshal all the master's
work and distribute praise and blame with decision and even severity,
without ever thinking for a moment of the principles of art and ethics which
would have struck us as the very things that Stevenson nearly killed himself
to express.
Mr Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his
'pessimism'; surely a strange charge against the man who has done more
than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But he
complains that, in 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,'
Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now if there was one point
that Stevenson more constantly and passionately emphasised than any other
it was that we must worship good for its own value and beauty, without any
reference whatever to victory or failure in space and time. 'Whatever we are
intended to do,' he said, 'we are not intended to succeed.' That the stars in
their courses fight against virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn
hope, this was the very spirit that through the whole of Stevenson's work
sounded a trumpet to all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark

enough, but could anyone stand beside the grave of that sodden
monomaniac and not respect him? It is strange that men should see sublime
inspiration in the ruins of an old church and see none in the ruins of a man.
The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson's tales of blood
and spoil; he appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had (we
use Mr Baildon's own phrase) a kind of 'homicidal mania.' 'He (Stevenson)
arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be better employed
than in taking life.' Mr Baildon might as well say that Dr Conan Doyle
delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr Clark Russell is a
notorious pirate, and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought that one could hardly
be better employed than in stealing moonstones and falsifying marriage
registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely alone in this error: few people have
understood properly the goriness of Stevenson. Stevenson was essentially
the robust schoolboy who draws skeletons and gibbets in his Latin
grammar. It was not that he took pleasure in death, but that he took pleasure
in life, in every muscular and emphatic action of life, even if it were an
action that took the life of another.
Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman and
pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there are in this
transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view. The point of
view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of view, and this
Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in such stories as 'The Master
of Ballantrae' and 'Weir of Hermiston.' But there is another view of the
matter—that in which the whole act is an abrupt and brilliant explosion of
bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a blow of a hammer, or just
clearing a five-barred gate. This is the standpoint of romance, and it is the
soul of 'Treasure Island' and 'The Wrecker.' It was not, indeed, that
Stevenson loved men less, but that he loved clubs and pistols more. He had,
in truth, in the devouring universalism of his soul, a positive love for
inanimate objects such as has not been known since St Francis called the
sun brother and the well sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the
wooden crutch that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that
Billy Bones left at the 'Admiral Benbow,' with the knife that Wicks drove
through his own hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain
clean-cut angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting
wood with an axe.

Stevenson's new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this
deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing
something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an
object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, 'The Destroying Angel,' in
'The Dynamiter,' that it is 'highly fantastic and putting a strain on our
credulity.' This is rather like describing the travels of Baron Munchausen as
'unconvincing.' The whole story of 'The Dynamiter' is a kind of humorous
nightmare, and even in that story 'The Destroying Angel' is supposed to be
an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the moment. It is a dream within a
dream, and to accuse it of improbability is like accusing the sky of being
blue. But Mr Baildon, whether from hasty reading or natural difference of
taste, cannot in the least comprehend the rich and romantic irony of
Stevenson's London stories. He actually says of that portentous monument
of humour, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, that, 'though evidently admired by
his creator, he is to me on the whole rather an irritating presence.' From this
we are almost driven to believe (though desperately and against our will)
that Mr Baildon thinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, as if he
were a man in real life. For ourselves, Prince Florizel is almost our
favourite character in fiction; but we willingly add the proviso that if we
met him in real life we should kill him.
The fact is, that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual and intellectual
virtues have been partly frustrated by one additional virtue—that of artistic
dexterity. If he had chalked up his great message on a wall, like Walt
Whitman, in large and straggling letters, it would have startled men like a
blasphemy. But he wrote his light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-
book hand that everyone supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He
suffered from his versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every
department well enough, but by doing every department too well. As child,
cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people
could not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can
play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he is
called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly well, he is
apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common fiddler, a
common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has happened in
the case of Stevenson. If 'Dr Jekyll,' 'The Master of Ballantrae,' 'The Child's
Garden of Verses,' and 'Across the Plains' had been each of them one shade

less perfectly done than they were, everyone would have seen that they
were all parts of the same message; but by succeeding in the proverbial
miracle of being in five places at once, he has naturally convinced others
that he was five different people. But the real message of Stevenson was as
simple as that of Mahomet, as moral as that of Dante, as confident as that of
Whitman, and as practical as that of James Watt.
The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that
romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more important
than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, the other the body,
and that the soul was the precious thing. The germ of all his stories lies in
the idea that every landscape or scrap of scenery has a soul: and that soul is
a story. Standing before a stunted orchard with a broken stone wall, we may
know as a mere fact that no one has been through it but an elderly female
cook. But everything exists in the human soul: that orchard grows in our
own brain, and there it is the shrine and theatre of some strange chance
between a girl and a ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for the
conception that ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are our
adventures. To think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one.
And this is the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he had to make
one story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: for
the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It is quite
inappropriate to judge 'The Teller of Tales' (as the Samoans called him) by
the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr George Moore by
'Esther Waters.' These novels were only the two or three of his soul's
adventures that he happened to tell. But he died with a thousand stories in
his heart.
[A]
'Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism.' By H.
Bellyse Baildon. Chatto & Windus.

THOMAS CARLYLE

There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: the first
is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the second is that he
should believe in the acceptability of his message. It was the whole tragedy
of Carlyle that he had the first and not the second.
The ordinary capital, however, which is made out of Carlyle's alleged
gloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and as a
writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his 'liver' is merely
pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a 'Sartor Resartus,' it would be a
vastly more tolerable thing than it is. Diseases do not turn into poems; even
the decadent really writes with the healthy part of his organism. If Carlyle's
private faults and literary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only
in the situation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficult to
say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personal predilections
begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage egotist cannot
arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp Carlyle's gospel. 'Ruskin,'
says a critic, 'did, all the same, verily believe in God; Carlyle believed only
in himself.' This is certainly a distinction between the author he has
understood and the author he has not understood. Carlyle believed in
himself, but he could not have believed in himself more than Ruskin did;
they both believed in God, because they felt that if everything else fell into
wrack and ruin, themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they
both failed was not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in
belief in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his
message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St Francis, Bunyan,
Wesley, Mr Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable variety, were
all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man as their equal, of
trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear and without
condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, not only in God, but in
the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.

But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's religious sentiment must absolutely
fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle's sense of the unity of
the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has the same expression
that it had in the Hebrew prophets—humour. A man must be very full of
faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan delicately suggesting a revival
of Dionysius, no vague, half-converted Theosophist groping towards a
recognition of Buddha, would ever think of cracking jokes on the matter.
But to the Hebrew prophets their religion was so solid a thing, like a
mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of its contact with trivial and
fleeting matters struck them like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His
supreme contribution, both to philosophy and literature, was his sense of the
sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had seen the hope or the terror of the
heavens, he alone saw the humour of them. Other writers had seen that
there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he
alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No
one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic
gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described
Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in the Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did fall
asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at
least will never, through unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more
... and we go on, if not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher
ones.'
The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was the
founder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modern
rationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value or
valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so
much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual system has
to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the
other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument
is the sword. A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most
people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon
wherewith to exterminate logicians.
But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears up the
position of logic in human affairs. Logic is a machine of the mind, and if it
is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion. When people
say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using words in a fair

sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by bad logic. Deep in
the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an extraordinary tendency
to use the name for an organ, when what is meant is the abuse or decay of
that organ. Thus we speak of a man suffering from 'nerves,' which is about
as sensible as talking about a man suffering from ten fingers. We speak of
'liver' and 'digestion' when we mean the failure of liver and the absence of
digestion. And in the same manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when
what we really mean is the danger of fallacy.
But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial overthrow of
logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhat different. The fault of
the great mass of logicians is not that they bring out a false result, or, in
other words, are not logicians at all. Their fault is that by an inevitable
psychological habit they tend to forget that there are two parts of a logical
process—the first the choosing of an assumption, and the second the
arguing upon it; and humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the
study of sound reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound
assumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational
and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as 'He did not prove the very
thing with which he started,' or 'The whole of his case rested upon a pure
assumption,' two peculiarities which may be found by the curious in the
works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how constantly one hears
rationalists arguing upon some deep topic, apparently without troubling
about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense, as it were, of
the real colour and character of a man's assumption. For instance, two men
will argue about whether patriotism is a good thing and never discover until
the end, if at all, that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the
idea that man should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and
no prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very start,
and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has feathers.

Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments but
assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of the
nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed directly to the
very different class of matters which they knew to be true. He induced men
to study less the truth of their reasoning, and more the truth of the
assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where his view was not the

highest truth, it was always a refreshing and beneficent heresy. He denied
every one of the postulates upon which the age of reason based itself. He
denied the theory of progress which assumed that we must be better off than
the people of the twelfth century. Whether we were better than the people of
the twelfth century according to him depended entirely upon whether we
chose or deserved to be.
He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which
threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but the
individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real ground
of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last era of purely
religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there has been no writer
in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.
Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him,
as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of common-
sense. Mysticism and common-sense alike consist in a sense of the
dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally
demonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common-sense are
alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have no
place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist in
breaking through formulas, old and new, to these old and silent and ironical
sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times over, he
maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and woman does
choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for the exultation of
humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness, it was a weakness bound
up with the very strength of the universe. About hero worship, indeed, few
critics have done the smallest justice to Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and
choleric passages in which he sometimes expressed a preference for mere
violence, passages which were a great deal more connected with his
temperament than with his philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion
that Carlyle's theory of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to
stern and arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane
about some questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His
view is not that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be
guided and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous
and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in
them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to

rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle's tone
invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with
admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity.
Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle's utterances, his hero
worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great
men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were
more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and
his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship of
valour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part of all
healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact that he,
more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of that modern
habit of what is vulgarly called 'Going the whole hog.' Often in matters of
passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog. This remarkable
modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion, politics, and temper all
of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for opportunities to assert and reassert
some favourite mental attitude, is a thing which existed comparatively little
in other centuries. Solomon and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were
pessimists when they were melancholy, and optimists when they were
happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and
unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the pessimist of to-day to
prove that sunshine and a good supper convulse him with inconsolable
anguish. Carlyle was strongly possessed with this mania for spiritual
consistency. He wished to take the same view of the wars of the angels and
of the paltriest riot at Donnybrook Fair. It was this species of insane logic
which led him into his chief errors, never his natural enthusiasms. Let us
take an example. Carlyle's defence of slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous
thing, weak alike in argument and in moral instinct. The truth is, that he
only took it up from the passion for applying everywhere his paradoxical
defence of aristocracy. He blundered, of course, because he did not see that
slavery has nothing in the world to do with aristocracy, that it is, indeed,
almost its opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its thoughtful
defenders have made for aristocracy was that a few persons could more
rapidly and firmly decide public affairs in the interests of the people. But
slavery is not even supposed to be a government for the good of the
governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the
governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak; slavery
uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as a

spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed he was, that he should be ruled
and guided for his own good like a child—for a child who is always ruled
and guided we regard as the very type of spiritual existence. But it is a
derogation and an absolute contradiction to that human spirituality in which
Carlyle believed that a man should be owned like a tool for someone else's
good, as if he had no personal destiny in the Cosmos. We draw attention to
this particular error of Carlyle's because we think that it is a curious
example of the waste and unclean places into which that remarkable animal,
'the whole hog,' more than once led him.
In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an unquestionably
bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic which conceives that
if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for once and all, that being
strong consists chiefly in being deliberately deaf and blind, owes a great
deal of its complete sway to his example. Out of him flows most of the
philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern times the supreme maniac of
this moonstruck consistency. Though Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality
profoundly different, Carlyle being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a
very fragile aristocrat, they were alike in this one quality of which we
speak, the strange and pitiful audacity with which they applied their single
ethical test to everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche,
indeed, embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges
himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with which
a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as a monk
struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient necessities of
honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it can hardly be
denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many at last.

TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY

The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not deliberately,
but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false innocence, like that of
the French aristocrats before the Revolution, who built an altar to Pan, and
who taxed the peasantry for the enormous expenditure which is needed in
order to live the simple life of peasants. The simplicity towards which the
world is driving is the necessary outcome of all our systems and
speculations and of our deep and continuous contemplation of things. For
the universe is like everything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and
habitually before we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the
hundredth time that we see it for the first time. The more consistently things
are contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to
simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always sensational.
Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as if we gazed long
at a design full of disconnected objects, and, suddenly, with a stunning
thrill, they came together into a huge and staring face.
Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are upon
this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more fundamental
than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to undermine the other. In art,
for example, the old conception of man, classic as the Apollo Belvedere,
has first been attacked by the realist, who asserts that man, as a fact of
natural history, is a creature with colourless hair and a freckled face. Then
comes the Impressionist, going yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical
eye, which alone is certain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey
face. Then comes the Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is
certain, man is a creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great
writers of our time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-
establish communication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more
roughly and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the
return to nature consists in drinking no wine; some think that it consists in
drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think that the return

to nature is achieved by beating swords into ploughshares; some think it is
achieved by turning ploughshares into very ineffectual British War Office
bayonets. It is natural, according to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people
with gunpowder and himself with gin. It is natural, according to the
humanitarian revolutionist, to kill other people with dynamite and himself
with vegetarianism. It would be too obviously Philistine a sentiment,
perhaps, to suggest that the claim of either of these persons to be obeying
the voice of nature is interesting when we consider that they require huge
volumes of paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of
the truth of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly
alike in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the
return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of fact,
Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to nature
by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he can
reject.
Now, this heroic desire to return to nature is, of course, in some respects,
rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own tail. A tail is a
simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and soothing in texture; but it
is certainly one of the minor but characteristic qualities of a tail that it
should hang behind. It is impossible to deny that it would in some degree
lose its character if attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is
like a tail in the sense that it is vitally important if it is to discharge its real
duty that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see nature,
especially our own nature, face to face is a folly; it is even a blasphemy. It
is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy-tale, who should set out on his
travels with the firm conviction that he would find his tail growing like a
tree in the meadows at the end of the world. And the actual effect of the
travels of the philosopher in search of nature when seen from the outside
looks very like the gyrations of the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much
enthusiasm but little dignity, much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of
nature is that she is omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us
most when we think that she is heeding us least. 'Thou art a God that hidest
Thyself,' said the Hebrew poet. It may be said with all reverence that it is
behind a man's back that the spirit of nature hides.
It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to all the
inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We feel that a

man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on complexity; we
feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot make himself simple
at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate
than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the pomp and sumptuousness of
the world's history was simple in the truest sense. It was born of an almost
babyish receptiveness; it was the work of men who had eyes to wonder and
men who had ears to hear.

'King Solomon brought merchant men
Because of his desire
With peacocks, apes and ivory,
From Tarshish unto Tyre.'

But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a part
of his folly—I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoy, we feel, would not
be content with hurling satire and denunciation at 'Solomon in all his glory.'
With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step further. He would
spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the shameless crimson
coronals off the lilies of the field.
The new collection of 'Tales from Tolstoy,' translated and edited by Mr R.
Nisbet Bain, is calculated to draw particular attention to this ethical and
ascetic side of Tolstoy's work. In one sense, and that the deepest sense, the
work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and noble appeal to simplicity. The
narrow notion that an artist may not teach is pretty well exploded by now.
But the truth of the matter is, that an artist teaches far more by his mere
background and properties, his landscape, his costume, his idiom and
technique—all the part of his work, in short, of which he is probably
entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which
he fondly imagines to be his opinions. The real distinction between the
ethics of high art and the ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the
simple fact that the bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral.
And the real moral of Tolstoy comes out constantly in these stories, the
great moral which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably
unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently
disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all the
tales, the folklore simplicity with which 'a man or a woman' are spoken of
without further identification, the love—one might almost say the lust—for

the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood, and the softness of
mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the
very cradle of the race of man—these influences are truly moral. When we
put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy,
screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up
human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and
children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of
contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we
scarcely know whither Tolstoy has vanished. We know not what to do with
this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one corner of a great and
good man.
It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with Tolstoy
the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a man who
draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of humanity
regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that dignity is
renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a man who has
painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending emptiness of the life of
the poor can really grudge them every one of their pitiful pleasures, from
courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to believe that a poet in prose who has so
powerfully exhibited the earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a
human being, with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a
virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land.
It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable
insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the
oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false
simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more natural than it is
natural to be. It would not only be more human, it would be more humble of
us to be content to be complex. The truest kinship with humanity would lie
in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike
relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the
fortunes of the land of our birth.
The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance. It represents
the re-assertion of a certain awful common-sense which characterised the
most extreme utterances of Christ. It is true that we cannot turn the cheek to
the smiter; it is true that we cannot give our cloak to the robber; civilisation
is too complicated, too vainglorious, too emotional. The robber would brag,

and we should blush; in other words, the robber and we are alike
sentimentalists. The command of Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it
is rather sanity preached to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was
suddenly stricken with a sense of humour it would find itself mechanically
fulfilling the Sermon on the Mount. It is not the plain facts of the world
which stand in the way of that consummation, but its passions of vanity and
self-advertisement and morbid sensibility. It is true that we cannot turn the
cheek to the smiter, and the sole and sufficient reason is that we have not
the pluck. Tolstoy and his followers have shown that they have the pluck,
and even if we think they are mistaken, by this sign they conquer. Their
theory has the strength of an utterly consistent thing. It represents that
doctrine of mildness and non-resistance which is the last and most
audacious of all the forms of resistance to every existing authority. It is the
great strike of the Quakers which is more formidable than many sanguinary
revolutions. If human beings could only succeed in achieving a real passive
resistance they would be strong with the appalling strength of inanimate
things, they would be calm with the maddening calm of oak or iron, which
conquer without vengeance and are conquered without humiliation. The
theory of Christian duty enunciated by them is that we should never
conquer by force, but always, if we can, conquer by persuasion. In their
mythology St George did not conquer the dragon: he tied a pink ribbon
round its neck and gave it a saucer of milk. According to them, a course of
consistent kindness to Nero would have turned him into something only
faintly represented by Alfred the Great. In fact, the policy recommended by
this school for dealing with the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this
world is accurately summed up in the celebrated verse of Mr Edward Lear:

'There was an old man who said, "How
Shall I flee from this terrible cow?
I will sit on a stile and continue to smile,
Till I soften the heart of this cow."'

Their confidence in human nature is really honourable and magnificent; it
takes the form of refusing to believe the overwhelming majority of
mankind, even when they set out to explain their own motives. But
although most of us would in all probability tend at first sight to consider
this new sect of Christians as little less outrageous than some brawling and

absurd sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall into a singular error in
doing so. The Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come to consider it, one
of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our modern civilisation. It
represents a tribute to the Christian religion more sensational than the
breaking of seals or the falling of stars.
From the point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered almost
irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It turns the
scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially possible that the
key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty casket of some
discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider this phenomenon as it
really is.
The religion of Christ has, like many true things, been disproved an
extraordinary number of times. It was disproved by the Neo-Platonist
philosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth upon its
startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many of the
sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second and
supremely striking embodiment, the religion of Puritanism, was about to
triumph over many kings, and civilise many continents. We all agree that
these schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but we all
believe naturally and inevitably that the negation of our own day is really a
breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a Ragnorak, a
twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century, like a schoolboy of
sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression are symbols of the end of the
world. In our day the great irreligionists who did nothing but dethrone God
and drive angels before them have been outstripped, distanced, and made to
look orthodox and humdrum. A newer race of sceptics has found something
infinitely more exciting to do than nailing down the lids upon a million
coffins, and the body upon a single cross. They have disputed not only the
elementary creeds, but the elementary laws of mankind, property,
patriotism, civil obedience. They have arraigned civilisation as openly as
the materialists have arraigned theology; they have damned all the
philosophers even lower than they have damned the saints. Thousands of
modern men move quietly and conventionally among their fellows while
holding views of national limitation or landed property that would have
made Voltaire shudder like a nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and
wildest phase of this saturnalia of scepticism, the school that goes furthest

among thousands who go so far, the school that denies the moral validity of
those ideals of courage or obedience which are recognised even among
pirates, this school bases itself upon the literal words of Christ, like Dr
Watts or Messrs Moody and Sankey. Never in the whole history of the
world was such a tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of an ancient creed.
Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven
asunder, or the sun did stand still at mid-day. We are faced with the
phenomenon that a set of revolutionists whose contempt for all the ideals of
family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen, who can rid
themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the gentleman
which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot rid themselves of
the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt
Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it something stunning and
hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in its presence suddenly stricken
with a strange and ancient vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmogonies
of this age as dreams going the way of a thousand forgotten heresies, and
believes for a moment that the dark sayings handed down through eighteen
centuries may, indeed, contain in themselves the revolutions of which we
have only begun to dream.
This value which we have above suggested, unquestionably belongs to the
Tolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With their
strange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offer a
tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It cannot but be
remarkable to watch a revolution in which both the rulers and the rebels
march under the same symbol. But the actual theory of non-resistance itself,
with all its kindred theories, is not, I think, characterised by that intellectual
obviousness and necessity which its supporters claim for it. A pamphlet
before us shows us an extraordinary number of statements about the New
Testament, of which the accuracy is by no means so striking as the
confidence. To begin with, we must protest against a habit of quoting and
paraphrasing at the same time. When a man is discussing what Jesus meant,
let him state first of all what He said, not what the man thinks He would
have said if he had expressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of
question and answer:
Q. 'How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words?'

A. 'Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even as your Father; your Father in the
spirit world is merciful, is perfect.'
There is nothing in this, perhaps, which Christ might not have said except
the abominable metaphysical modernism of 'the spirit world'; but to say that
it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it is recorded that He
preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple and unadulterated untruth.
The author should know that these words have meant a thousand things to a
thousand people, and that if more ancient sects had paraphrased them as
cheerfully as he, he would never have had the text upon which he founds
his theory. In a pamphlet in which plain printed words cannot be left alone,
it is not surprising if there are mis-statements upon larger matters. Here is a
statement clearly and philosophically laid down which we can only content
ourselves with flatly denying: 'The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should
take special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign
countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have an
antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people, and
those who are in sympathy with us.' I should very much like to know where
in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent, unnatural,
and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of regard for
one person as for another. We are specifically told that there were certain
persons whom He specially loved. It is most improbable that He thought of
other nations as He thought of His own. The sight of His national city
moved Him to tears, and the highest compliment He paid was, 'Behold an
Israelite indeed.' The author has simply confused two entirely distinct
things. Christ commanded us to have love for all men, but even if we had
equal love for all men, to speak of having the same love for all men is
merely bewildering nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he
produces on us must be vitally different to the impression produced by
another man whom we love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for
both is about as sensible as asking a man whether he prefers
chrysanthemums or billiards. Christ did not love humanity; He never said
He loved humanity: He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love
humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede. And the reason that the
Tolstoians can even endure to think of an equally distributed affection is
that their love of humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are
coerced by their own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.

But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up the teaching of
the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and ingeniously misses the
most dominant characteristic of the teaching—its absolute spontaneity. The
abyss between Christ and all His modern interpreters is that we have no
record that He ever wrote a word, except with His finger in the sand. The
whole is the history of one continuous and sublime conversation.
Thousands of rules have been deduced from it before these Tolstoian rules
were made, and thousands will be deduced afterwards. It was not for any
pompous proclamation, it was not for any elaborate output of printed
volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle words that the cross was set up
on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the sun was darkened at noonday.

SAVONAROLA

Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we
know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall not
know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may
never understand Savonarola.
The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from
calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the
ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy:
the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers saved us
from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil compared with
which all these are flea-bites, the most desolating curse that can fall upon
men or nations, and it has no name, except we call it satisfaction.
Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order; not from
pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but from luxury. Men
like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous psychological fact at
the back of all our brains, but for which no name has ever been found, that
ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and civilisation potentially the end of
man.
For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his day
went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern rationalistic
admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards, dwell, truly
enough, upon the sound ethical justification of Savonarola's anger, upon the
hideous and extravagant character of the crimes which polluted the palaces
of the Renaissance. But they need not be so anxious to show that
Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely picked out the black specks of
wickedness with the priggish enlightenment of a member of an Ethical
Society. Probably he did hate the civilisation of his time, and not merely its
sins; and that is precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a
modern moralist. He saw that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that
stolen jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the

symptoms; that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and
wine and pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics
and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not always
mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist would call
harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred of what no
one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are sometimes
more advanced than the average man, as well as less.
Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making
war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless
quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all
creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the sign-manual of
youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that clean agility and
vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as to gain holiness, as
indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has truly pointed out that
Savonarola could not have been fundamentally anti-æsthetic, since he had
such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli, and Luca della Robbia. The fact
is that this purification and austerity are even more necessary for the
appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly
past unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones and weeds, to have the mind a
storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure, and an education in
gratitude.
The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a
civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to
endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with
confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The
monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of
imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of imagination.
It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as it is, that he invents
a centaur, only when he can no longer be surprised at an ox, that he
worships the devil. Diablerie is the stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the
dram-drinking of the artist. Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of
all earthly tasks, that of making men turn back and wonder at the
simplicities they had learnt to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular
of all doctrines is the doctrine which declares the common life divine.
Democracy, of which Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of
gospels; there is nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all

kings. Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical with democracy, is the
hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the
saying that they are all the sons of God.
Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered to
the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the
present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for mere
men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an
improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men as
these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear. We are
surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which awoke the
unquenchable wrath of Savonarola—a hedonism that is more sick of
happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks the
assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern works we
find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of the beauty of
blood, the poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depraved imagination does
not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a dead one. Along with
this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the falling back into the arms of
despotism, the hunger for the strong man which is unknown among strong
men. The masterful hero is worshipped as he is worshipped by the readers
of the 'Bow Bells Novelettes,' and for the same reason—a profound sense of
personal weakness. That tendency to devolve our duties descends on us,
which is the soul of slavery, alike whether for its menial tasks it employs
serfs or emperors. Against all this the great clerical republican stands in
everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival's success. The issue is
still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and
the licence of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of silence,
between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. The supporters of
Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men for whom even
nations and empires only exist to satisfy the moment, men to whom the last
hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintry spring. They have an
art, a literature, a political philosophy, which are all alike valued for their
immediate effect upon the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of
the spirit. Their statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while
'Macbeth' is in comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a
hint. Their campaigns and battles are always called triumphant, while Cæsar
and Cromwell wept for many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell

of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature
recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a
cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.
This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent his
whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course. Few men
understood his object; some called him a madman, some a charlatan, some
an enemy of human joy. They would not even have understood if he had
told them, if he had said that he was saving them from a calamity of
contentment which should be the end of joys and sorrows alike. But there
are those to-day who feel the same silent danger, and who bend themselves
to the same silent resistance. They also are supposed to be contending for
some trivial political scruple.
Mr M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works
of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much exaggerated. I
confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of incomparable masterpieces
if the sacrifice made that one real moment more real. Of one thing I am
sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael Angelo would have piled all his own
statues one on top of the other, and burnt them to ashes, if only he had been
certain that the glow transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and
wiser world.

THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own
high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now dwindling,
schools of severely technical and æsthetic criticism have been unfavourable
to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if there is one thing in
which artists have improved since his time, it is in consistency and equality.
It would perhaps be unkind to inquire whether the level of the modern man
of letters, as compared with Scott, is due to the absence of valleys or the
absence of mountains. But in any case, we have learnt in our day to arrange
our literary effects carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of
Scott is in the incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to
arrange.
It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter could
be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are
neglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it exists,
must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like the beard of
Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thing that in literature
alone a house should be despised because it is too large, or a host impugned
because he is too generous. If romance be really a pleasure, it is difficult to
understand the modern reader's consuming desire to get it over, and if it be
not a pleasure, it is difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere
size, it seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some
disproportion. If some of Scott's stories are dull and dilatory, it is not
because they are giants but because they are hunchbacks or cripples. Scott
was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I do not think that it can
be shown that the large and elaborate plan on which his stories are built was
by any means an imperfection. He arranged his endless prefaces and his
colossal introductions just as an architect plans great gates and long
approaches to a really large house. He did not share the latter-day desire to
get quickly through a story. He enjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not
wish to swallow a story like a pill that it should do him good afterwards. He

desired to taste it like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time.
The reader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air of
immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. We should not
be surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heart of
hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without either
beginning or close.
Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will never be
understood until Romance is understood, and that will be only when Time,
Man, and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott had more than any
other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these days, a
slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises from one
fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a plaything
with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside. No genuine
criticism of romance will ever arise until we have grasped the fact that
romance lies not upon the outside of life but absolutely in the centre of it.
The centre of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are
merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these
brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove
that they are the citadel. The boast of the realist (applying what the
reviewers call his scalpel) is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes
a very shallow incision if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities
and sins. Deeper than all these lies a man's vision of himself, as swaggering
and sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of candour unearths
innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called
romance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but it
does not perceive the deepest of sins—the sin of vanity—vanity which is
the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that is not shared
with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.
In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romance we
must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or adventure are
merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a plot or the
multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is, like tragedy or
farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and elemental reason
which we can never understand, this state of the soul is evoked in us by the
sight of certain places or the contemplation of certain human crises, by a
stream rushing under a heavy and covered wooden bridge, or by a man

plunging a knife or sword into tough timber. In the selection of these
situations which catch the spirit of romance as in a net, Scott has never been
equalled or even approached. His finest scenes affect us like fragments of a
hilarious dream. They have the same quality which is often possessed by
those nocturnal comedies—that of seeming more human than our waking
life—even while they are less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his
daughter and the old beggar crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls
and the tide closes around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of
practical situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only be
called boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible sunset. Rob
Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie, draws
no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the dazzling external acts
upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that plain and humorous
dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of romance which is an almost
equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhaps the most profoundly thrilling
of all Scott's situations is that in which the family of Colonel Mannering are
waiting for the carriage which may or may not arrive by night to bring an
unknown man into a princely possession. Yet almost the whole of that
thrilling scene consists of a ridiculous conversation about food, and
flirtation between a frivolous old lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say
nothing about what makes these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where
it listeth, and that here the wind blows strong.
It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousness that
Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of the contemporary
crop of romancers who have followed the leadership of Dumas. There has,
indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival of romance in our time, but it is
partly frustrated in almost every case by this rooted conception that
romance consists in the vast multiplication of incidents and the violent
acceleration of narrative. The heroes of Mr Stanley Weyman scarcely ever
have their swords out of their hands; the deeper presence of romance is far
better felt when the sword is at the hip ready for innumerable adventures
too terrible to be pictured. The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to
eat his supper except in the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other
hand is employed in lunging with a rapier. In Scott's heroes, on the other
hand, there is no characteristic so typical or so worthy of honour as their
disposition to linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk of

Copmanhurst or of Mr Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they are
described as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott's poetic touches. In
short, Mr Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction that the sole essence
of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from incident to incident. In
the truer romance of Scott there is more of the sentiment of 'Oh! still delay,
thou art so fair'; more of a certain patriarchal enjoyment of things as they
are—of the sword by the side and the wine-cup in the hand. Romance,
indeed, does not consist by any means so much in experiencing adventures
as in being ready for them. How little the actual boy cares for incidents in
comparison to tools and weapons may be tested by the fact that the most
popular story of adventure is concerned with a man who lived for years on a
desert island with two guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an
enemy.
Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought
against Scott, particularly in his own day—the charge of a fanciful and
monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The critic
in the 'Edinburgh Review' said indignantly that he could tolerate a
somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it came
to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and yeomen the
mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about that critic is
that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly imagined that Scott valued
the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion's sake. Not being himself
romantic, he could not understand that Scott valued the plume because it
was a plume, and the dagger because it was a dagger. Like a child, he loved
weapons with a manual materialistic love, as one loves the softness of fur or
the coolness of marble. One of the profound philosophical truths which are
almost confined to infants is this love of things, not for their use or origin,
but for their own inherent characteristics, the child's love of the toughness
of wood, the wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was
with Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were
perhaps the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not
the only characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had a
character and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in the
matter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the
animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a

menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably
fascinating—it was a two-handed sword.
There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which is
little appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost in recent
fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is compounded
of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and Scott are
certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature had failed, have
earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudal heroes in the
'Waverley Novels' retort upon each other with a passionate dignity, haughty
and yet singularly human, which can hardly be paralleled in political
eloquence except in 'Julius Cæsar.' With a certain fiery impartiality which
stirs the blood, Scott distributes his noble orations equally among saints and
villains. He may deny a villain every virtue or triumph, but he cannot
endure to deny him a telling word; he will ruin a man, but he will not
silence him. In truth, one of Scott's most splendid traits is his difficulty, or
rather incapacity, for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the
most revolting miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own
hero. Though his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a
king.
This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of the passing
hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of putting a bold
and brilliant tongue in every man's head, but even where the moment of the
story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems frozen in the tap.
Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the scene where the
young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then compare the stilted
sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing bore with the surging joy
of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself, or Athelstane's defiance of De
Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion upon which high words and great
phrases are the resplendent foam is just now at a low ebb. We have even
gone the length of congratulating ourselves because we can see the mud and
the monsters at the bottom. In politics there is not a single man whose
position is due to eloquence in the first degree; its place is taken by
repartees and rejoinders purely intellectual, like those of an omnibus
conductor. In discussing questions like the farm-burning in South Africa no
critic of the war uses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps
exaggeratively) would have used it—the speaker is content with facts and

expositions of facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that
great song in prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg
Merrilees hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: 'Ride your ways,
Laird of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram—this day have ye
quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour burns
the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar houses. Look if
your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may stable your stirks in the
sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare does not couch on the
hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram.'
The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott was
not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just as a man
will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object of all
eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls, to fall
just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have any chance
with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside it. It is quite right
to invent subtle analyses and detached criticisms, but it is unreasonable to
expect them to be punctuated with roars of popular applause. It is possible
to conceive of a mob shouting any central and simple sentiment, good or
bad, but it is impossible to think of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In
the matter of eloquence, the whole question is one of the immediate effect
of greatness, such as is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd to call it
merely superficial; here there is no question of superficiality; we might as
well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely superficial. The
very word 'superficial' is founded on a fundamental mistake about life, the
idea that second thoughts are best. The superficial impression of the world
is by far the deepest. What we really feel, naturally and casually, about the
look of skies and trees and the face of friends, that and that alone will
almost certainly remain our vital philosophy to our dying day.
Scott's bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who
approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child. We could
easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring melodramas and
adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admit that it was a slight
deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyond all question, it marks a lack of
literary instinct to be unable to simplify one's mind at the first signal of the
advance of romance. 'You do me wrong,' said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to
Rebecca. 'Many a law, many a commandment have I broken, but my word,

never.' 'Die,' cries Balfour of Burley to the villain in 'Old Mortality.' 'Die,
hoping nothing, believing nothing—' 'And fearing nothing,' replies the
other. This is the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised
by the great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes
along with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with
children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves, and
are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly effected.
Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction by this
quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of the modern
novelist (such as the work of Mr Henry James) is primarily concerned with
that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper and deeper like a
mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which mounts higher and
higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration. Perhaps the most
thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is Mr Bernard Shaw. In
his admirable play of 'Candida' it is clearly a part of the character of the
Socialist clergyman that he should be eloquent, but he is not eloquent,
because the whole 'G.B.S.' condition of mind renders impossible that poetic
simplicity which eloquence requires. Scott takes his heroes and villains
seriously, which is, after all, the way that heroes and villains take
themselves—especially villains. It is the custom to call these old romantic
poses artificial; but the word artificial is the last and silliest evasion of
criticism. There was never anything in the world that was really artificial. It
had some motive or ideal behind it, and generally a much better one than
we think.
Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak, for faults
are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet no adequate
valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We have compiled a
complete botanical classification of the weeds in the poetical garden, but
the flowers still flourish neglected and nameless. It is true, for example, that
Scott had an incomparably stiff and pedantic way of dealing with his
heroines: he made a lively girl of eighteen refuse an offer in the language of
Dr Johnson. To him, as to most men of his time, woman was not an
individual, but an institution—a toast that was drunk some time after that of
Church and King. But it is far better to consider the difference rather as a
special merit, in that he stood for all those clean and bracing shocks of
incident which are untouched by passion or weakness, for a certain breezy

bachelorhood, which is almost essential to the literature of adventure. With
all his faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for the great mass of natural
manliness which must be absorbed into art unless art is to be a mere luxury
and freak. An appreciation of Scott might be made almost a test of
decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one most reckless and defective
writer, it will be a proof to us that we have erected round ourselves a false
cosmos, a world of lying and horrible perfection, leaving outside of it
Walter Scott and that strange old world which is as confused and as
indefensible and as inspiring and as healthy as he.

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