THE
CRITIC
The greatest of Shakespeare's
comedies is also, from a certain point of view, the greatest of his plays. No
one would maintain that it occupied this position in the matter of
psychological study if by psychological study we mean the study of individual
characters in a play. No one would maintain that Puck was a character in the
sense that Falstaff is a character, or that the critic stood awed before the
psychology of Peaseblossom. But there is a sense in which the play is perhaps a
greater triumph of psychology than <Hamlet> itself. It may well be
questioned whether in any other literary work in the world is so vividly
rendered a social and spiritual atmosphere. There is an atmosphere in
<Hamlet>, for instance, a somewhat murky and even melodramatic one, but
it is subordinate to the great character, and morally inferior to him; the
darkness is only a background for the isolated star of intellect. But <A
Midsummer Night's Dream> is a psychological study, not of a solitary man,
but of a spirit that unites mankind. The six men may sit talking in an inn;
they may not know each other's names or see each other's faces before or after,
but 'night or wine or great stories, or some rich and branching discussion may
make them all at one, if not absolutely with each other, at least with that
invisible seventh man who is the harmony of all of them. That seventh man is
the hero of <A Midsummer Night's Dream>.
A study of the play from a
literary or philosophical point of view must therefore be founded upon some
serious realisation of what this atmosphere is. In a lecture upon <As You
Like It>, Mr. Bernard Shaw made a suggestion which is an admirable example
of his amazing ingenuity and of his one most interesting limitation. In maintaining
that the light sentiment and optimism of the comedy were regarded by
Shakespeare merely as the characteristics of a more or less cynical pot-boiler,
he actually suggested that the title "As You Like It" was a taunting
address to the public in disparagement of their taste and the dramatist's own
work. If Mr. Bernard Shaw had conceived of Shakespeare as insisting that Ben
Jonson should wear Jaeger underclothing or join the Blue Ribbon Army, or
distribute little pamphlets for the non-payment of rates, he could scarcely
have conceived anything more violently opposed to the whole spirit of
Elizabethan comedy than the spiteful and priggish modernism of such a taunt.
Shakespeare might make the fastidious and cultivated Hamlet, moving in his own
melancholy and purely mental world, warn players against an over-indulgence
towards the rabble. But the very soul and meaning of the great comedies is that
of an uproarious communion between the public and the play, a communion so
chaotic that whole scenes of silliness and violence lead us almost to think
that some of the "rowdies" from the pit have climbed over the
footlights. The title "As you Like It", is, of course, an expression
of utter carelessness, but it is not the bitter carelessness which Mr. Bernard
Shaw fantastically reads into it; it is the god-like and inexhaustible
carelessness of a happy man.. And the simple proof of this is that there are
scores of these genially taunting titles scattered through the whole of
Elizabethan comedy. Is "As You Like It" a title demanding a dark and
ironic explanation in a school of comedy which called its plays "What You
Will", "A Mad World, My Masters", "If It Be Not Good, the
Devil Is In It", "The Devil is an Ass", "An Humorous Day's
Mirth", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? Every one of these
titles is flung at the head of the public as a drunken lord might fling a purse
at his footman. Would Mr. Shaw maintain that "If It Be Not Good, the Devil
Is In It", was the opposite of "As You Like It", and was a
solemn invocation of the supernatural powers to testify to the care and
perfection of the literary workmanship? The one explanation is as Elizabethan
as the other.
Now in the reason for this modern
and pedantic error lies the whole secret and difficulty of such plays as <A
Midsummer Night's Dream>. The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be
summed up at all, can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of
happiness. That is to say, it is the conception that as man lives upon a
borderland he may find himself in the spiritual or supernatural atmosphere, not
only through being profoundly sad or meditative, but by being extravagantly
happy. The soul might be rapt out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a
trance of ecstasy; but it might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of
laughter. Sorrow we know can go beyond itself; so, according to Shakespeare,
can pleasure go beyond itself and become something dangerous and unknown. And
the reason that the logical and destructive modern school, of which Mr. Bernard
Shaw is an example, does not grasp this purely exuberant nature of the comedies
is simply 'that their logical and destructive attitude have rendered impossible
the very experience of this preternatural exuberance. We cannot realise <As
You Like It> if we are always considering it as we understand it. We cannot
have <A Midsummer's Night Dream> if our one object in life is to keep
ourselves awake with the black coffee of criticism. The whole question which is
balanced, and balanced nobly and fairly, in <[t]A Midsummer Night's
Dream>, is whether the life of waking, or the life of the vision, is the
real life, the <sine quâ non> of man. But it is difficult to see what
superiority for the purpose of judging is possessed by people whose pride it is
not to live the life of vision at all. At least it is questionable whether the
Elizabethan did not know more about both worlds than the modern intellectual it
is not altogether improbably that Shakespeare would not only have had a clearer
vision of the fairies, but would have shot very much straighter at a deer and
netted much more money for his performances than a member of the Stage Society.
In pure poetry and the
intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this
play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of <A Midsummer
Night's Dream> is a merit of
design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that
design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common
world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young
friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles
and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They
lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their
words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic,
like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck. Then the
dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken
together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning.
Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in
hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing
out with a reverent and sympathetic scepticism that all these fairies and
spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man
himself. The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is
a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things ripples
one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good saying
seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his
wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house
of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream
remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of
any other triumphant evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It
began on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole
midsummer night's dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius. But
of this comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and
one touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with
a crashing finale, full of humour and wisdom and things set right, and silence
falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a
moment, as it were, the' elves look into the house, asking which is the
reality. "Suppose we are the realities and they the shadows." If that
ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he
had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane.
It is a trite matter, of course,
though in a general criticism a more or less indispensable one to comment upon
another point of artistic perfection, the extraordinarily human and accurate
manner in which the play catches the atmosphere of a dream. The chase and
tangle and frustration of the incidents and personalities are well known to
every one who has dreamt of perpetually falling over precipices or perpetually
missing trains. While following out clearly and legally the necessary narrative
of the drama, the author contrives to include every one of the main
peculiarities of the exasperating dream. Here is the pursuit of the man we
cannot catch, the flight from the man we cannot see; here is the perpetual
returning to the same place, here is the crazy alteration in the very objects
of our desire, the substitution of one face for another face, the putting of
the wrong souls in the wrong bodies, the fantastic disloyalties of the night,
all this is as obvious as it is important. It is perhaps somewhat more -worth
remarking that there is about this confusion of comedy yet another essential
characteristic of dreams. A dream can commonly be described as possessing an
utter discordance of incident combined with a curious unity of mood; everything
changes but the dreamer. It may begin with anything and end with anything, but
if the dreamer is sad at the end he will be sad as if by prescience at the
beginning; if he is cheerful at the beginning he will be cheerful if the stars
fall. <A Midsummer Night's Dream> has in a most singular degree effected
this difficult, this almost desperate subtlety. The events in the wandering
wood are in themselves, and regarded as in broad daylight, not merely
melancholy but bitterly cruel and ignominious. But yet by the spreading of an
atmosphere as magic as the fog of Puck, Shakespeare contrives to make the whole
matter mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic, and mysteriously
charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives somehow to rob tragedy
and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a toothache or a deadly danger
from a tiger, or a precipice, is robbed of its sharpness in a pleasant dream.
The creation of a brooding sentiment like this, a sentiment not merely
independent of but actually opposed to the events, is a much greater triumph of
art than the creation of the character of Othello.
It is difficult to approach
critically so great a figure as that of Bottom the Weaver. He is greater and
more mysterious than Hamlet, because the interest of such men as Bottom
consists of a rich subconsciousness, and that of Hamlet in the comparatively
superficial matter of a rich consciousness. And it is especially difficult in
the present age which has become hag-ridden with the mere intellect. We are the
victims of a curious confusion whereby being great is supposed to have
something to do with being clever, as if there were the smallest reason to
suppose that Achilles was clever, as if there were not on the contrary a great
deal of internal evidence to indicate that he was next door to a fool.
Greatness is a certain indescribable but perfectly familiar and palpable
quality of size in the personality, of steadfastness, of strong flavour, of
easy and natural self-expression. Such a man is as firm as a tree and as unique
as a rhinoceros, and he might quite easily be as stupid as either of them. Fully
as much as the great poet towers above the small poet the great fool towers
above the small fool. We have all of us known rustics like Bottom the Weaver,
men whose faces would be blank with idiocy if we tried for -ten days to explain
the meaning of the National Debt, but who are yet great men, akin to Sigurd and
Hercules, heroes of the morning of the earth, because their words were their
own words, their memories their own memories, and their vanity as large and
simple as a great hill. We have all of us known friends in our own circle, men
whom the intellectuals might justly describe as brainless, but whose presence
in a room was like a fire roaring in the grate changing everything, lights and
shadows and the air, whose entrances and exits were in some strange fashion
events, whose point of view once expressed haunts and persuades the mind and
almost intimidates it, whose manifest absurdity clings to the fancy like the
beauty of first-love, and whose follies are recounted like the legends of a
paladin. These ate great men, there are millions of them in the world, though
very few perhaps in the House of Commons. It is not in the cold halls of
cleverness where celebrities seem to be important that we should look for the
great. An intellectual salon is merely a training-ground for one faculty, and
is akin to a fencing class or a rifle corps. It is in our own homes and
environments, from Croydon to St. John's Wood, in old nurses, and gentlemen
with hobbies, and talkative spinisters and vast incomparable butlers, that we
may feel the presence of that blood of the gods. And this creature so hard to
describe, so easy to remember, the august and memorable fool, has never been so
sumptuously painted as in the Bottom of <A Midsummer Night's Dream>.
Bottom has the supreme mark of
this real greatness in that like the true saint or the true hero he only
differs from humanity in being as it were more human than humanity. It is not
true, as the idle materialists of today suggest, that compared to the majority
of men the hero appears cold and dehumanised; it is the majority who appear
cold and dehumanised in the presence of greatness. Bottom, like Don Quixote and
Uncle Toby and Mr. Richard Swiveller and the rest of the Titans, has a huge and
unfathomable weakness, his silliness is on a great scale, and when he blows his
own trumpet it is like the trumpet of the Resurrection. The other rustics in
the play accept his leadership not merely naturally but exuberantly; they have
to the full that primary and savage unselfishness, that uproarious abnegation
which makes simple men take pleasure in falling short of a hero, that
unquestionable element of basic human nature which has never been expressed,
outside this play, so perfectly as in the incomparable chapter at the beginning
of <Evan Harrington> in which the praises of The Great Mel are sung with
a lyric energy by the tradesmen whom he has cheated. Twopenny sceptics write of
the egoism of primal human nature; it is reserved for great men like
Shakespeare and Meredith to detect and make vivid this rude and subconscious
unselfishness which is older than self. They alone with their insatiable
tolerance can perceive all the spiritual devotion in the soul of a snob.
And it is this natural play
between the rich simplicity of Bottom and the simple simplicity of his comrades
which constitutes the unapproachable excellence of the farcical scenes in this
play. Bottom's sensibility to literature is perfectly fiery and genuine, a
great deal more genuine than that of a great many cultivated critics of
literature - "the raging rocks, and shivering shocks shall break the locks
of prison gates, and Phibbus' car shall shine from far, and make and mar the
foolish fates", is exceedingly good poetical diction with a real throb and
swell in it, and if it is slightly and almost imperceptibly deficient in the
matter of sense, it is certainly every bit as sensible as a good many other
rhetorical speeches in Shakespeare put into the mouths of kings and lovers and
even the spirits of the dead. If Bottom liked cant for its own sake the fact
only constitutes another point of sympathy between him and his literary
creator. But the style of the thing, though deliberately bombastic and
ludicrous, is quite literary, the alliteration falls like wave upon wave, and
the whole verse, like a billow mounts higher and higher before it crashes.
There is nothing mean about this folly; nor is there in the whole realm of
literature a figure so free from vulgarity. The man vitally base and foolish
sings "The Honeysuckle and the Bee"; he does not rant about
"raging rocks" and "the car of Phibbus". Dickens, who more
perhaps than any modern man had the mental hospitality and the thoughtless
wisdom of Shakespeare, perceived and expressed admirably the same truth. He
perceived, that is to say, that quite indefensible idiots have very often a
real sense of, and enthusiasm for letters. Mr. Micawber loved eloquence and
poetry with his whole immortal soul; words and visionary pictures kept him
alive in the absence of food and money, as they might have kept a saint fasting
in a desert. Dick Swiveller did not make his inimitable quotations from Moore
and Byron merely as flippant digressions. He made them because he loved a great
school of poetry. The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness
or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of
character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person
may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in
picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a
woman. And the triumph of Bottom is that he loves rhetoric and his own taste in
the arts, and this is all that can be achieved by Theseus, or for the matter of
that by Cosimo di Medici. It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in
the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned
with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous
readiness, "Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete."
"Odours, odours," says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is
accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element
of meaning in a poetical passage. But "Thisby, the flowers of odious
savours sweete", Bottom's version, is an immeasurably finer and more
resonant line. The "i" which he inserts is an inspiration of
metricism.
There is another aspect of this
great play which ought to be kept familiarly in the mind. Extravagant as is the
masquerade of the story, it is a very perfect aesthetic harmony down to such
<coup-de-maître> as the name of Bottom, or the flower called Love in
Idleness. In the whole matter it may be said that there is one accidental
discord; that is in the name of Theseus, and the whole city of Athens in which
the events take place. Shakespeare's description of Athens in <A Midsummer
Night's Dream> is the best description of England that he or any one else
ever wrote. Theseus is quite obviously only an English squire, fond of hunting,
kindly to his tenants, hospitable with a certain flamboyant vanity. The
mechanics are English mechanics, talking to each other with the queer formality
of the poor. Above all, the fairies are English; to compare them with the
beautiful patrician spirits of Irish legend, for instance, is suddenly to
discover that we have, after all, a folk-lore and a mythology, or had it at
least in Shakespeare's day. Robin Goodfellow, upsetting the old women's ale, or
pulling the stool from under them, has nothing of the poignant Celtic beauty;
his is the horse-play of the invisible world. Perhaps it is some debased
inheritance of English life which makes American ghosts so fond of quite
undignified practical jokes. But this union of mystery with farce is a note of
the medieval English. The play is the last glimpse of Merrie England, that
distant but shining and quite indubitable country. It would be difficult indeed
to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase "merrie
England", though some conception of it is quite necessary to the
comprehension of <A Midsummer Night's Dream>. In some cases at least, it
may be said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, unlike the England of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry
supernaturalism. Amid all the great work of Puritanism the damning indictment
of it consists in one fact, that there was one only of the fables of
Christendom that it retained and renewed, and that was the belief in
witchcraft. It cast away the generous and wholesome superstition, it approved
only of the morbid and the dangerous. In their treatment of the great national
fairy-tale of good and evil, the Puritans killed St. George but carefully
preserved the Dragon, And this seventeenth-century tradition of dealing with
the psychic life still lies like a great shadow over England and America, so
that if we glance at a novel about occultism we may be perfectly certain that
it deals with sad or evil destiny. Whatever else we expect we certainly should
never expect to find in it spirits such as those in <Aylwin> as inspirers
of a tale of tomfoolery like the <Wrong Box> or <The Londoners>.
That impossibility is the disappearance of "merrie England" and Robin
Goodfellow. It was a land to us incredible, the land of a jolly occultism where
the peasant cracked jokes with his patron saint, and only cursed the fairies
good-humouredly, as he might curse a lazy servant. Shakespeare is English in
everything, above all in his weaknesses. just as London, one of the greatest
cities in the world, shows more slums and hides more beauties than any other,
so Shakespeare alone among the four giants of poetry is a careless writer, and
lets us come upon his splendours by accident, as we come upon an old City
church in the twist of a city street. He is English in nothing so much as in
that noble cosmopolitan unconsciousness which makes him look eastward with the
eyes of a child towards Athens or Verona. He loved to talk of the glory of
foreign lands, but he talked of them with the tongue and unquenchable spirit of
England. It is too much the custom of a later patriotism to reverse this method
and talk of England from morning till night, but to talk of her in a manner
totally un-English. Casualness, incongruities, and a certain fine absence of
mind are in the temper of England; the unconscious man with the ass's head is
no bad type of the people. Materialistic philosophers and mechanical
politicians have certainly succeeded in some cases in giving him a greater
unity. The only question is, to which animal has he been thus successfully
conformed ?
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Certain magazines have symposiums
(I will call them 'symposia' if I am allowed to call the two separate South
Kensington collections 'musea') in which persons are asked to name 'Books that
have Influenced Me', on the lines of 'Hymns that have Helped Me'. It is not a
very realistic process as a rule, for our minds are mostly a vast uncatalogued
library; and for a man to be photographed with one of the books in his hand
generally means at best that he has chosen at random, and at worst that he is
posing for effect. But in a certain rather special sense I for one can really
testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which
helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things
which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has
substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I have read,
including even all the novels of the same novelist, it remains the most real,
the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is
called <The Princess and the Goblin>, and is by George MacDonald, the man
who is the subject of this book.
When I say it is like life, what I
mean is this. It describes a little princess living in a castle in the
mountains which is perpetually undermined, so to speak, by subterranean demons
who sometimes come up through the cellars. She climbs up the castle stairways
to the nursery or the other rooms; but now and again the stairs do not lead to
the usual landings, but to a new room she has never seen before, and cannot
generally find again. Here a good great-grandmother, who is a sort of fairy
godmother, is perpetually spinning and speaking words of understanding and
encouragement. When I read it as a child, I felt that the whole thing was happening
inside a real human house, not essentially unlike the house I was living in,
which also had staircases and rooms and cellars. This is where the fairy-tale
differed from many other fairy-tales; above all, this is where the philosophy
differed from many other philosophies. I have always felt a certain
insufficiency about the ideal of Progress, even of the best sort which is a
Pilgrim's Progress. It hardly suggests how near both the best and the worst
things are to us from the first; even perhaps especially at the first. And
though like every other sane person I value and revere the ordinary fairy-tale
of the miller's third son who set out to seek his fortune (a form which
MacDonald himself followed in the sequel called <The Princess and
Curdie>), the very suggestion of travelling to a far-off fairyland, which is
the soul of it, prevents it from achieving this particular purpose of making
all the ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things.
Dr. Greville MacDonald, in his
intensely interesting memoir of his father which follows, has I think mentioned
somewhere his sense of the strange symbolism of stairs. Another recurrent image
in his romances was a great white horse; the father of the princess had one,
and there was another in <The Back of the North Wind>. To this day I can
never see a big white horse in the street without a sudden sense of
indescribable things. But for the moment I am speaking of what may emphatically
be called the presence of household gods - and household goblins. And the
picture of life in this parable is not only truer than the image of a journey
like that of the Pilgrim's Progress, it is even truer than the mere image of a
siege like that of The Holy War. There is - something not only imaginative but
intimately true about the idea of the goblins being below the house and capable
of besieging it from the cellars When the evil things besieging us do appear,
they do not appear outside but inside. Anyhow, that simple image of a house
that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home, but of which we hardly
know the best or the worst, and must always wait for the one and watch against
the other, has always remained in my mind as something singularly solid and
unanswerable; and was more corroborated than corrected when I came to give a
more definite name to the lady watching over us from the turret, and perhaps to
take a more practical view of the goblins under the floor. Since I first read
that story some five alternative philosophies of the universe have come to our
colleges out of Germany, blowing through the world like the east wind. But for
me that castle is still standing in the mountains and the light in its tower is
not put out.
All George MacDonald's other
stories, interesting and suggestive in their several ways, seem to be
illustrations and even disguises of that one I say disguises, for this is the
very important difference between his sort of mystery and mere allegory. The
commonplace allegory takes what it regards as the commonplaces or conventions
necessary to ordinary men and women, and tries to make them pleasant or
picturesque by dressing them up as princesses or goblins or good fairies. But
George MacDonald did really believe that people were princesses and goblins and
good fairies, and he dressed them up as ordinary men and women. The fairy-tale
was the inside of the ordinary story and not the outside. One result of this is
that all the inanimate objects that are the stage properties of the story
retain that nameless glamour which they have in a literal fairy-tale. The
staircase in <Robert Falconer> is as much of a magic ladder as the
staircase in the <Princess and the Goblin>; and when the boys are making
the boat and the girl is reciting verses to them, in <Alec Forbes>, and
some old gentleman says playfully that it will rise to song like a magic
Scandinavian ship, it always seemed to me as if he were describing the reality,
apart from the appearance, of the incident. The novels as novels are uneven,
but as fairy-tales they are extraordinarily consistent. He never for a moment
loses his own inner thread that runs through the patchwork, and it is the
thread that the fairy great-grandmother put into the hands of Curdie to guide
him out of the mazes of the goblins.
The originality of George
MacDonald has also a historical significance, which perhaps can best be
estimated by comparing him with his great countryman Carlyle. It is a measure
of the very real power and even popularity of Puritanism in Scotland that
Carlyle never lost the Puritan mood even when he lost the whole of the Puritan
theology. If an escape from the bias of environment be the test of originality,
Carlyle never completely escaped, and George MacDonald did. He evolved out of
his own mystical meditations a complete alternative theology leading to a completely
contrary mood. And in those mystical meditations he learned secrets far beyond
the mere extension of Puritan indignation to ethics and politics. For in the
real genius of Carlyle there was a touch of the bully, and wherever there is an
element of bullying there is an element of platitude, of reiteration and
repeated orders. Carlyle could never have said anything so subtle and simple as
MacDonald's saying that God is easy to please and hard to satisfy. Carlyle was
too obviously occupied with insisting that God was hard to satisfy; just as
some optimists are doubtless too much occupied with insisting that He is easy
to please. In other words, MacDonald had made for himself a sort of spiritual
environment, a space and transparency of mystical light, which was quite
exceptional in his national and denominational environment. He said things that
were like the Cavalier mystics, like the Catholic saints, sometimes perhaps
like the Platonists or the Swedenborgians, but not in the least like the
Calvinists, even as Calvinism remained in a man like Carlyle. And when he comes
to be more carefully studied as a mystic, as I think he will be when people
discover the possibility of collecting jewels scattered in a rather irregular
setting, it will be found, I fancy, that he stands for a rather important
turning-point in the history of Christendom, as representing the particular
Christian nation of the Scots. As Protestants speak of the morning stars of the
Reformation, we may be allowed to note such names here and there as morning
stars of the Reunion.
The spiritual colour of Scotland,
like the local colour of so many Scottish moors, is a purple that in some
lights can look like grey. The national character is in reality intensely
romantic and passionate indeed, excessively and dangerously romantic and
passionate. Its emotional torrent has only too often been turned towards
revenge, or lust, or cruelty, or witchcraft. There is no drunkenness like
Scotch drunkenness; it has in it the ancient shriek and the wild shrillness of
the Maenads on the mountains. And of course it is equally true on the good
side, as in the great literature of the nation. Stopford Brooke and other
critics have truly pointed out that a vivid sense of colour appears in the
medieval Scottish poets before it really appears in any English poets. And it
is absurd to be talking of the hard and shrewd sobriety of a national type that
has made itself best known throughout the modern world by the prosaic
literalism of <Treasure Island> and the humdrum realism of <Peter
Pan>. Nevertheless, by a queer historical accident this vivid and coloured
people have been forced to 'wear their blacks' in a sort of endless funeral on
an eternal Sabbath. In most plays and pictures, however, in which they are
represented as wearing their blacks, some instinct makes the actor or the
artist see that they fit very badly. And so they do.
The passionate and poetical Scots
ought obviously, like the passionate and poetical Italians to have had a
religion which competed with the beauty and vividness of the passions, which
did not let the devil have all the bright colours, which fought glory with
glory and flame with flame. It should have balanced Leonardo with St. Francis;
no young and lively person really thinks he can be balanced with John Knox. The
consequence was that this power in Scottish letters, especially in the day (or
night) of complete Calvinistic orthodoxy, was weakened and wasted in a hundred
ways. In Burns it was driven out of its due course like a madness; in Scott it
was only tolerated as a memory. Scott could only be a medievalist by becoming
what he would call an antiquary, or what we should call an aesthete. He had to
pretend his love was dead, that he might be allowed to love her. As Nicodemus
came to Jesus by night, [See John 3:1] the aesthete only comes to church by
moonlight.
Now, among the many men of genius
Scotland produced in the nineteenth century, there was only one so original as
to go back to this origin. There was only one who really represented what Scottish
religion should have been, if it had continued the colour of the
Scottish medieval poetry. In his
particular type of literary work he did indeed realize the apparent paradox of
a St. Francis of Aberdeen, seeing the same sort of halo round every flower and
bird. It is not the same thing as any poet's appreciation of the beauty of the
flower or bird. A heathen can feel that and remain heathen, or in other words
remain sad. It is a certain special sense of significance, which the tradition
that most values it calls sacramental. To have got back to it, or forward to
it, at one bound of boyhood, out of the black Sabbath of a Calvinist town, was
a miracle of imagination.
In noting that he may well have
this place in history in the sense of religious and of national history, I make
no attempt here to fix his place in literature. He is in any case one of the
kind that it is most difficult to fix. He wrote nothing empty; but he wrote
much that is rather too full, and of which the appreciation depends rather on a
sympathy with the substance than on the first sight of the form. As a matter of
fact, the mystics have not often been men of letters in the finished and almost
professional sense. A thoughtful man will now find more to think about in
Vaughan or Crashaw than in Milton, but he will also find more to criticize; and
nobody need deny that in the ordinary sense a casual reader may wish there was
less of Blake and more of Keats. But even this allowance must not be
exaggerated; and it is in exactly the same sense in which we pity a man who has
missed the whole of Keats or Milton, that we can feel compassion for the critic
who has not walked in the forest of Phantastes or made the acquaintance of Mr.
Cupples in the adventures of Alec Forbes.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
The time has certainly come when
this extraordinary man, Oscar Wilde, may be considered merely as a man of
letters. He sometimes pretended that art was more important than morality, but
that was mere play-acting. Morality or immorality was more important than art
to him and everyone else. But the very cloud of tragedy that rested on
his career makes it easier to
treat him as a mere artist now. His was a complete life, in that awful sense in
which your life and mine are incomplete; since we have not yet paid for our
sins. In that sense one might call it a perfect life, as one speaks of a perfect
equation; it cancels out. On the one hand we have the healthy horror of the
evil; on the other the healthy horror of the punishment. We have it all the
more because both sin and punishment were highly civilized; that is, nameless
and secret. Some have said that Wilde was sacrificed; let it be enough for us
to insist on the literal meaning of the word. Any ox that is really sacrificed
is made sacred.
But the very fact that monstrous
wrong and monstrous revenge cancel each other, actually does leave this individual
artist in that very airy detachment which he professed to desire. We can really
consider him solely as a man of letters.
About Oscar Wilde, as about other
wits, Disraeli or Bernard Shaw, men wage a war of words, some calling him a
great artist and others a mere charlatan. But this controversy misses the
really extraordinary thing about Wilde: the thing that appears rather in the
plays than the poems. He was a great artist. He also was really a charlatan. I
mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he
employs. A vulgar demagogue is not a charlatan; he is as coarse as his crowd.
He may be lying in every word, but he is sincere in his style. Style (as Wilde
might have said) is only another name for spirit. Again, a man like Mr. Bernard
Shaw is not a charlatan. I can understand people thinking his remarks hurried
or shallow or senselessly perverse, or blasphemous, or merely narrow. But I
cannot understand anyone failing to feel that Mr. Shaw is being as suggestive
as he can, is giving his brightest and boldest speculations to the rabble, is
offering something which he honestly thinks valuable. Now Wilde often uttered
remarks which he must have known to be literally valueless. Shaw may be high or
low, but he never talks down to the audience. Wilde did talk down, sometimes
very far down.
Wilde and his school professed to
stand as solitary artistic souls apart from the public. They professed to scorn
the middle class, and declared that the artist must not work for the bourgeois.
The truth is that no artist so really great ever worked so much for the
bourgeois as Oscar Wilde. No man, so capable of thinking about truth and
beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own effect on the middle classes.
He studied them with exquisite attention, and knew exactly how to shock and how
to please them. Mr. Shaw often gets above them in seraphic indignation, and
often below them in sterile and materialistic explanations. He disgusts them
with new truths or he bores them with old truths; but they are always living
truths to Bernard Shaw. Wilde knew how to say the precise thing which, whether
true or false, is irresistible. As, for example, " I can resist everything
but temptation."
But he sometimes sank lower. One
might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil
marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his
own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very
tamest part of our tame civilization. This is what I mean by saying that he was
strictly a charlatan - among other things. He descended below himself to be on
top of others. He became purposely stupider than Oscar Wilde that he might seem
cleverer than the nearest curate. He lowered himself to superiority; he stooped
to conquer.
One might easily take examples of
the phrase meant to lightly touch the truth and the phrase meant only to bluff
the bourgeoisie. For instance, in " A Woman of No Importance," he
makes his chief philosopher say that all thought is immoral, being essentially
destructive; " Nothing survives being thought of." That is nonsense,
but nonsense of the nobler sort; there is an idea in it. It is, like most
professedly modern ideas, a death-dealing idea not a life-giving one; but it is
an idea. There is truly a sense in which all definition is deletion. Turn a few
pages of the same play and you will find somebody asking, " What is an
immoral woman ? " The philosopher answers, " The kind of woman a man
never gets tired of." Now that is not nonsense, but rather rubbish. It is
without value of any sort or kind. It is not symbolically true; it is not
fantastically true; it is not true at all.
Anyone with the mildest knowledge
of the world knows that nobody can be such a consuming bore as a certain kind
of immoral woman. That vice never tires men, might be a tenable and
entertaining lie; that the individual instrument of vice never tires them is
not, even as a lie, tenable enough to be entertaining. Here the great wit was
playing the cheap dandy to the incredibly innocent; as much as if he had put on
paper cuffs and collars. He is simply shocking a tame curate; and he must be
rather a specially tame curate even to be shocked. This irritating duplication
of real brilliancy with snobbish bluff runs through all his three comedies.
"Life is much too important to be taken seriously"; [And here I
thought that GKC said this!] that is the true humorist. "A well-tied tie
is the first serious step in life"; that is the charlatan. "Man can
believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable"; that is
said by a fine philosopher. "Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the
keeping of promises, unless it be telling the truth"; that is said by a
tired quack. "A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not
love her"; that is wild truth. "Good intentions are invariably
ungrammatical"; that is tame trash.
But while he had a strain of
humbug in him, which there is not in the demagogues of wit like Bernard Shaw,
he had, in his own strange way, a much deeper and more spiritual nature than
they. Queerly enough, it was the very multitude of his falsities that prevented
him from being entirely false. Like a many-coloured humming top, he was at once
a bewilderment and a balance. He was so fond of being many-sided that among his
sides he even admitted the right side. He loved so much to multiply his souls
that he had among them one soul at least that was saved. He desired all
beautiful things - even God.
His frightful fallacy was that he
would not see that there is reason in everything, even in religion and
morality. Universality is a contradiction in terms. You cannot be everything if
you are anything. If you wish to be white all over, you must austerely resist
the temptation to have green spots or yellow stripes. If you wish to be good
all over, you must resist the spots of sin or the stripes of servitude. It may
be great fun to be many-sided; but however many sides one has there cannot be
one of them which is complete and rounded innocence. A polygon can have an infinite
number of sides; but no one of its sides can be a circle.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
There are those who deny with
enthusiasm the existence of a God and are happy in a hobby which they call the
Mistakes of Moses. I have not studied their labours in detail, but it seems
that the chief mistake of Moses was that he neglected to write the Pentateuch.
The lesser errors, apparently, were not made by Moses, but by another person
equally unknown. These controversialists cover the very widest field, and their
attacks upon Scripture are varied to the point of wildness. They range from the
proposition that the unexpurgated Bible is almost as unfit for an American
girls' school as is an unexpurgated Shakespeare; they descend to the
proposition that kissing the Book is almost as hygienically dangerous as
kissing the babies of the poor. A superficial critic might well imagine that
there was not one single sentence left of the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures
which this school had not marked with some ingenious and uneducated comment.
But there is one passage at least upon which they have never pounced, at least
to my knowledge; and in pointing it out to them I feel that I am, or ought to
be, providing material for quite a multitude of Hyde Park orations. I mean that
singular arrangement in the mystical account of the Creation by which light is
created first and all the luminous bodies afterwards. One could not imagine a
process more open to the elephantine logic of the Biblesmasher than this: that
the sun should be created after the sunlight. The conception that lies at the
back of the phrase is indeed profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern
point of view. To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage
existed before the first leaf; it would sound like saying that childhood
existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most
modern thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern
thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the meaning of
the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real metaphysical
meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and stars. It is not
barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed before any of the machinery
which made manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need of judges,
and mercy existed before any man was oppressed.
However this may be in the matter
of religion and philosophy, it can be said with little exaggeration that this
truth is the very key of literature. The whole difference between construction
and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after
it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother
can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before
the book or before even the details or main features of the book; the author enjoys
it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture. He wishes to write a comic
story before he has thought of a single comic incident. He desires to write a
sad story before he has thought of anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before
he knows anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so
frivolous as to take humour seriously - a maxim that a man should not laugh at
his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own jokes; he laughs
at his own jokes before he has made them. In the case of a man really humorous
we can see humour in his eye before he has thought of any amusing words at all.
So the creative writer laughs at his comedy before he creates it, and he has
tears for his tragedy before he knows what it is. When the symbols and the
fulfilling facts do come to him, they come generally in a manner very
fragmentary and inverted, mostly in irrational glimpses of crisis or
consummation. The last page comes before the first; before his romance has
begun, he knows that it has ended well. He sees the wedding before the wooing;
he sees the death before the duel. But most of all he sees the colour and
character of the whole story prior to any possible events in it. This is the
real argument for art and style, only that the artists and the stylists have
not the sense to use it. In one very real sense style is far more important
than either character or narrative. For a man knows what style of book he wants
to write when he knows nothing else about it.
<Pickwick> is in Dickens's
career the mere mass of light before the creation of sun or moon. It is the
splendid, shapeless substance of which all his stars were ultimately made. You
might split up Pickwick into innumerable novels as you could split up that
primeval light into innumerable solar systems. <The Pickwick Papers>
constitute first and foremost a kind of wild promise, a pre-natal vision of all
the children of Dickens. He had not yet settled down into the plain,
professional habit of picking out a plot and characters, of attending to one
thing at a time, of writing a separate, sensible novel and sending it off to
his publishers. He is still in the youthful whirl of the kind of world that he
would like to create. He has not yet really settled what story he will write,
but only what sort of story he will write. He tries to tell ten stories at
once; he pours into the pot all the chaotic fancies and crude experiences of
his boyhood; he sticks in irrelevant short stories shamelessly, as into a
scrap-book; he adopts designs and abandons them, begins episodes and leaves
them unfinished; but from the first page to the last there is a nameless and
elemental ecstasy - that of the man who is doing the kind of thing that he can
do. Dickens, like every other honest and effective writer, came at last to some
degree of care and self-restraint. He learned how to make his <dramatis
personae> assist his drama; he learned how to write stories which were full
of rambling and perversity, but which were stories. But before he wrote a
single real story, he had a kind of vision. It was a vision of the Dickens
world - a maze of white roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering
coaches, clamorous marketplaces, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering
figures. That vision was <Pickwick>.
It must be remembered that this is
true even in connection with the man's contemporaneous biography. Apart from
anything else about it, <Pickwick> was his first great chance. It was a
big commission given in some sense to an untried man, that he might show what
he could do. It was in a strict sense a sample. And just as a sample of leather
can be only a piece of leather, or a sample of coal a lump of coal, so this
book may most properly be regarded as simply a lump of Dickens. He was anxious
to show all that was in him. He was more concerned to prove that he could write
well than to prove that he could write this particular book well. And he did
prove this, at any rate. No one ever sent such a sample as the sample of
Dickens. His roll of leather blocked up the street; his lump of coal set the
Thames on fire.
The book originated in the
suggestion of a publisher; as many more good books have done than the arrogance
of the man of letters is commonly inclined to admit. Very much is said in our
time about Apollo and Admetus, and the impossibility of asking genius to work
within prescribed limits or assist an alien design. But after all, as a matter
of fact, some of the greatest geniuses have done it, from Shakespeare botching
up bad comedies and dramatising bad novels down to Dickens writing a
masterpiece as the mere framework for a Mr. Seymour's sketches. Nor is the true
explanation irrelevant to the spirit and power of Dickens. Very delicate,
slender, and <bizarre> talents are indeed incapable of being used for an
outside purpose, whether of public good or of private gain. But about very
great and rich talent there goes a certain disdainful generosity which can turn
its hand to anything. Minor poets cannot write to order; but very great poets
can write to order. The larger the man's mind, the wider his scope of vision,
the more likely it will be that anything suggested to him will seem significant
and promising; the more he has a grasp of everything the more ready he will be
to write anything. It is very hard (if that is the question) to throw a brick
at a man and ask him to write an epic; but the more he is a great man the more
able he will be to write about the brick. It is very unjust (if that is all) to
point to a hoarding of Colman's mustard and demand a flood of philosophical
eloquence; but the greater the man is the more likely he will be to give it to
you. So it was proved, not for the first time, in this great experiment of the
early employment of Dickens. Messrs. Chapman and Hall came to him with a scheme
for a string of sporting stories to serve as the context, and one might almost
say the excuse, for a string of sketches by Seymour, the sporting artist.
Dickens made some modifications in the plan, but he adopted its main feature;
and its main feature was Mr. Winkle. To think of what Mr. Winkle might have
been in the hands of a dullfarceur, and then to think of what he is, is to
experience the feeling that Dickens made a man out of rags and refuse. Dickens
was to work splendidly and successfully in many fields, and to send forth many
brilliant books and brave figures. He was destined to have the applause of
continents like a statesman, and to dictate to his publishers like a despot;
but perhaps he never worked again so supremely well as here, where he worked in
chains. It may well be questioned whether his one hack book is not his
masterpiece.
Of course it is true that as he
went on his independence increased, and he kicked quite free of the influences
that had suggested his story. So Shakespeare declared his independence of the
original chronicle of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, eliminating altogether (with
some wisdom) another uncle called Wiglerus. At the start the Nimrod Club of
Chapman and Hall may have even had equal chances with the Pickwick Club of
young Mr. Dickens; but the Pickwick Club became something much better than any
publisher had dared to dream of. Some of the old links were indeed severed by
accident or extraneous trouble; Seymour, for whose sake the whole had perhaps
been planned, blew his brains out before he had drawn ten pictures. But such
things were trifles compared to <Pickwick> itself. It mattered little now
whether Seymour blew his brains out, so long as Charles Dickens blew his brains
in. The work became systematically and progressively more powerful and
masterly. Many critics have commented on the somewhat discordant and inartistic
change between the earlier part of <Pickwick> and the later; they have
pointed out, not without good sense, that the character of Mr. Pickwick changes
from that of a silly buffoon to that of a solid merchant. But the case, if
these critics had noticed it, is much stronger in the minor characters of the
great company. Mr. Winkle, who has been an idiot (even, perhaps, as Mr.
Pickwick says, "an impostor"), suddenly becomes a romantic and even
reckless lover, scaling a forbidden wall and planning a bold elopement. Mr.
Snodgrass, who has behaved in a ridiculous manner in all serious positions,
suddenly finds himself in a ridiculous position - that of a gentleman surprised
in a secret love affair - and behaves in a manner perfectly manly, serious, and
honourable. Mr. Tupman alone has no serious emotional development, and for this
reason it is, presumably, that we hear less and less of Mr. Tupman towards the
end of the book. Dickens has by this time got into a thoroughly serious mood -
a mood expressed indeed by extravagant incidents, but none the less serious for
that; and into this Winkle and Snodgrass, in the character of romantic lovers,
could be made to fit. Mr. Tupman had to be left out of the love affairs;
therefore Mr. Tupman is left out of the book.
Much of the change was due to the
entrance of the greatest character in the story. It may seem strange at the
first glance to say that Sam Weller helped to make the story serious.
Nevertheless, this is strictly true. The introduction of Sam Weller had, to
begin with, some merely accidental and superficial effects. When Samuel Weller
had appeared, Samuel Pickwick was no longer the chief farcical character.
Weller became the joker and Pickwick in some sense the butt of his jokes. Thus
it was obvious that the more simple, solemn, and really respectable this butt
could be made the better. Mr. Pickwick had been the figure capering before the
footlights. But with the advent of Sam, Mr. Pickwick had become a sort of black
background and had to behave as such. But this explanation, though true as far
as it goes, is a mean and unsatisfactory one, leaving the great elements
unexplained. For a much deeper and more righteous reason Sam Weller introduces
the more serious tone of Pickwick. He introduces it because he introduces
something which it was the chief business of Dickens to preach throughout his
life - something which he never preached so well as when he preached it
unconsciously. Sam Weller introduces the English people.
Sam Weller is the great symbol in
English literature of the populace peculiar to England. His incessant stream of
sane nonsense is a wonderful achievement of Dickens: but it is no great
falsification of the incessant stream of sane nonsense as it really exists
among the English poor. The English poor live in an atmosphere of humour; they
think in humour. Irony is the very air that they breathe. A joke comes suddenly
from time to time into the head of a politician or a gentleman, and then as a
rule he makes the most of it; but when a serious word comes into the mind of a
coster it is almost as startling as a joke. The word "chaff" was, I
suppose, originally applied to badinage to express its barren and unsustaining
character; but to the English poor chaff is as sustaining as grain. The phrase
that leaps to their lips is the ironical phrase. I remember once being driven
in a hansom cab down a street that turned out to be a <cul de sac>, and
brought us bang up against a wall. The driver and I simultaneously said
something. But I said: "This'll never do!" and he said: "This is
all right!" Even in the act of pulling back his horse's nose from a brick
wall, that confirmed satirist thought in terms of his highlytrained and
traditional satire; while I, belonging to a duller and simpler class, expressed
my feelings in words as innocent and literal as those of a rustic or a child.
This eternal output of divine derision has never been so truly typified as by
the character of Sam; he is a grotesque fountain which gushes the living waters
for ever. Dickens is accused of exaggeration and he is often guilty of
exaggeration; but here he does not exaggerate: he merely symbolises and
sublimates like any other great artist. Sam Weller does not exaggerate the wit
of the London street arab one atom more than Colonel Newcome, let us say,
exaggerates the stateliness of an ordinary soldier and gentleman, or than Mr.
Collins exaggerates the fatuity of a certain kind of country clergyman. And
this breath from the boisterous brotherhood of the poor lent a special
seriousness and smell of reality to the whole story. The unconscious follies of
Winkle and Tupman are blown away like leaves before the solid and conscious
folly of Sam Weller. Moreover, the relations between Pickwick and his servant
Sam are in some ways new and valuable in literature. Many comic writers had
described the clever rascal and his ridiculous dupe; but here, in a fresh and
very human atmosphere, we have a clever servant who was not a rascal and a dupe
who was not ridiculous. Sam Weller stands in some ways for a cheerful knowledge
of the world; Mr. Pickwick stands for a still more cheerful ignorance of the
world. And Dickens responded to a profound human sentiment (the sentiment that
has made saints and the sanctity of children) when he made the gentler and
less-travelled type - the type which moderates and controls. Knowledge and
innocence are both excellent things, and they are both very funny. But it is
right that knowledge should be the servant and innocence the master.
The sincerity of this study of Sam
Weller has produced one particular effect in the book which I wonder that
critics of Dickens have never noticed or discussed. Because it has no Dickens
"pathos," certain parts of it are truly pathetic. Dickens, realising
rightly that the whole tone of the book was fun, felt that he ought to keep out
of it any great experiments in sadness and keep within limits those that he put
in. He used this restraint in order not to spoil the pathos. This is the one
book in which Dickens was, as it were, forced to trample down his tender
feelings; and for that very reason it is the one book where all the tenderness
there is is quite unquestionably true. An admirable example of what I mean may
be found in the scene in which Sam Weller goes down to see his bereaved father
after the death of his step-mother. The most loyal admirer of Dickens can
hardly prevent himself from giving a slight shudder when he thinks of what
Dickens might have made of that scene in some of his more expansive and maudlin
moments. For all I know old Mrs. Weller might have asked what the wild waves
were saying; and for all I know old Mr. Weller might have told her. As it is,
Dickens, being forced to keep the tale taut and humourous, gives a picture of
humble respect and decency which is manly, dignified, and really sad. There is
no attempt made by these simple and honest men, the father and son, to pretend
that the dead woman was anything greatly other than she was; their respect is
for death, and for the human weakness and mystery which it must finally cover.
Old Tony Weller does not tell his shrewish wife that she is already a
white-winged angel; he speaks to her with an admirable good nature and good
sense: 'Susan,' I says, 'you've been a wery good vife to me altogether: keep a
good heart, my dear, and you'll live to see me punch that 'ere Stiggins's'ead
yet.' She smiled at this, Samivel . . . but she died arter all."
That is perhaps the first and the
last time that Dickens ever touched the extreme dignity of pathos. He is
restraining his compassion, and afterwards he let it go. Now laughter is a
thing that can be let go; laughter has in it a quality of liberty. But sorrow
has in it by its very nature a quality of confinement; pathos by its very
nature fights with itself. Humour is expansive; it bursts outwards; the fact is
attested by the common expression, "holding one's sides." But sorrow
is not expansive; and it was afterwards the mistake of Dickens that he tried to
make it expansive. It is the one great weakness of Dickens as a great writer,
that he did try to make that sudden sadness, that abrupt pity, which we call
pathos, a thing quite obvious, infectious, public, as if it were journalism or
the measles. It is pleasant to think that in this supreme masterpiece, done in
the dawn of his career, there is not even this faint fleck upon the sun of his
just splendour. Pickwick will always be remembered as the great example of
everything that made Dickens great; of the solemn conviviality of great
friendships, of the erratic adventures of old English roads, of the hospitality
of old English inns, of the great fundamental kindliness and honour of old
English manners. First of all, however, it will always be remembered for its
laughter, or, if you will, for its folly. A good joke is the one ultimate and
sacred thing which cannot be criticised. Our relations with a good joke are
direct and even divine relations. We speak of "seeing" a joke just as
we speak of "seeing" a ghost or a vision. If we have seen it, it is
futile to argue with us; and we have seen the vision of <Pickwick>.
<Pickwick> may be the top of Dickens's humour; I think upon the whole it
is. But the broad humour of <Pickwick> he broadened over many wonderful
kingdoms; the narrow pathos of <Pickwick> he never found again.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
I am sometimes tempted to think
(like every other person who does think) that the people would always be right
if only they were not educated. But this is, of course, quite the wrong way of
putting it. The truth is that there is no such thing as education; there is
only this education and that education. We are all ready to die in order to
give the people this education, and (I hope sincerely) we are all ready to die
to prevent the people having that education. Dr. Strong, in <David
Copperfield>, educated little boys; but Mr. Fagin, in <Oliver Twist>,
also educated little boys; they were both what we now call
"educationalists".
But though the first mode of
statement is certainly erroneous, one is driven back upon it sometimes in
considering the case of the drama. I enjoy the drama far too much ever to be a
dramatic critic; and I think that in this I am at one with that real people
which never speaks. If anybody wants to know what political democracy is, the
answer is simple; it is a desperate and partly hopeless attempt to get at the
opinion of the best people - that is, of the people who do not trust
themselves. A man can rise to any rank in an oligarchy. But an oligarchy is
simply a prize for impudence. An oligarchy says that the victor may be any kind
of man, so long as he is not a humble man.
A man in an oligarchical state
(such as our own) may become famous by having money, or famous by having an eye
for colour, or famous for having social or financial or military success. But
he cannot become famous for having humility, like the great saints.
Consequently all the simple and
hesitating human people are kept entirely out of the running; and the cads
stand for the common people, although as a matter of fact the cads are a
minority of the common people. So it is quite especially with the drama. It is
utterly untrue that the people do not like Shakespeare. That part of the people
that does not like Shakespeare is simply that part of the people that is
depopularised. If a certain crowd of Cockneys is bored with <Hamlet>, the
Cockneys are not bored because they are too complex and ingenious for
<Hamlet>. They feel that the excitement of the saloon bar, of the betting
ring, of the halfpenny paper, of the topical music hall, is more complex and
ingenious than <Hamlet>; and so it is.
In the absolutely strict sense of
the word, the Cockneys are too aesthetic to enjoy <Hamlet>. They have
goaded and jaded their artistic feelings too much to enjoy anything simply
beautiful. They are aesthetes; and the definition of an aesthetic is a man who
is experienced enough to admire a good picture, but not inexperienced enough to
see it. But if you really took simple people, honourable peasants, kind old
servants, dreamy tramps, genial thieves, and brigands, to see <Hamlet>,
they would simply be sorry for Hamlet.That is to say, they would simply
appreciate the fact that it was a great tragedy.
Now I believe in the judgment of
all uncultured people; but it is my misfortune that I am the only quite
uncultured person in England who writes articles. My brethren are silent. They
will not back me up; they have something better to do. But a few days ago when
I saw Miss Julie Marlowe and Mr. Sothern give their very able representation of
<Hamlet>, certain things came into my mind about that play which I feel
sure that the other uncultured persons share with me. But they will not speak;
with a strange modesty they hide their lack of cultivation under a bushel.
There is a threadbare joke which
calls the gallery in a theatre "the gods". For my part I accept that
joke quite seriously. The people in the gallery are the gods. They are the
ultimate authority so far as anything human is the ultimate authority. I do not
see anything unreasonable in the actor calling upon them with the same gesture
with which he calls upon the mountain of Olympus. When the actor looks down,
brooding in despair or calling up black Erebus or the evil spirits, then, in
such moments, by all means let him bend his black brows and look down into the
stalls. But if there be in any acted play anything to make him lift up his heart
to heaven, then in God's name, when he looks up to heaven, let him see the
poor.
There is one little point, for
instance, upon which I think the public have mistaken Hamlet, not through
themselves but through the critics. There is one point on which the uneducated
would probably have gone right; only they have been perverted by the educated.
I mean this: that everybody in the modern world has talked of Hamlet as a
sceptic. The mere fact of seeing the play acted very finely and swiftly by Miss
Marlowe and Mr. Sothern has simply swept the last rags of this heresy out of my
head. The really interesting thing about Hamlet was that he was not a sceptic
at all. He did not doubt at all, except in the sense that every sane man
doubts, including popes and crusaders. The primary point is quite clear. If
Hamlet had been a sceptic at all there would have been no tragedy of Hamlet. If
he had had any scepticism to exercise, he could have exercised it at once upon
the highly improbable ghost of his father. He could have called that eloquent
person a hallucination, or some other unmeaning thing, have married Ophelia,
and gone on eating bread and butter. This is the first evident point.
The tragedy of Hamlet is not that
Hamlet is a sceptic. The tragedy of Hamlet is that he is very much too good a
philosopher to be a sceptic. His intellect is so clear that it sees at once the
rational possibility of ghosts. But the utter mistake of regarding Hamlet as a
sceptic has many other instances. The whole theory arose out of quoting stilted
passages out of their context, such as "To be or not to be", or (much
worse) the passage in which he says with an almost obvious gesture of fatigue,
"Why then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either bad or good, but
thinking makes it so". Hamlet says this because he is getting sick of the
society of two silly men; but if anyone wishes to see how entirely opposite is
Hamlet's attitude he can see it in the same conversation. If anyone wishes to
listen to the words of a man who in the most final sense is not a sceptic, here
are his words:
This goodly frame, the earth,
seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you,
this brave overhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden
fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in
action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of
dust?
Oddly enough I have heard this
passage quoted as a pessimistic passage. It is, perhaps, the most optimistic
passage in all human literature. It is the absolute expression of the ultimate
fact of the faith of Hamlet; his faith that, although he cannot see the world
is good, yet certainly it is good; his faith that, though he cannot see man as
the image of God, yet certainly he is the image of God. The modern, like the
modern conception of Hamlet, believes only in mood. But the real Hamlet, like
the Catholic Church, believes in reason. Many fine optimists have praised man
when they felt like praising him. Only Hamlet has praised man when he felt like
kicking him as a monkey of the mud. Many poets, like Shelley and Whitman, have
been optimistic when they felt optimistic. Only Shakespeare has been optimistic
when he felt pessimistic. This is the definition of a faith. A faith is that
which is able to survive a mood. And Hamlet had this from first to last. Early
he protests against a law that he recognises: "O that the Everlasting had
not fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter." Before the end he declares
that our clumsy management will be turned to something, "rough-hew it how
we will".
If Hamlet had been a sceptic he
would have had an easy life. He would not have known that his moods were moods.
He would have called them Pessimism or Materialism, or some silly name. But
Hamlet was a great soul, great enough to know that he was not theworld. He knew
that there was a truth beyond himself, therefore he believed readily in the
things most unlike himself, in Horatio and his ghost. All through his story we
can read his conviction that he is wrong. And that to a clear mind like his is
only another way of stating that there is something that is right. The real
sceptic never thinks he is wrong; for the real sceptic does not think that
there is any wrong. He sinks through floor after floor of a bottomless
universe. But Hamlet was the very reverse of a sceptic. He was a thinker.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
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 reestablish 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 bow much he
can accept, Tolstoy by seeing bow 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 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," [See Isaiah
45:15] 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. [See Mt. 11:15]
King Solomon brought merchant man~
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." [See Mt. 6:29] 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 be 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 o f
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; [See Mt. 5:39-40] civilisation is too
complicated, too vain-glorious, 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 midday. 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 banded 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 misstatements
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. [See John 8:6] 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.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Rafael Gil-Nogués
ragilno@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
HOME | E-TEXTS | TRANSLATIONS | OTHER ARTS | LINKS