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A Sermon on Cheapness

It is really time that the absurd pretence of the vices to be romantic were given up. Ever since the time of Byron there has been vague and foolish conception clinging to all men's minds that there is some connection between lawlessness and poetry, between orderly images and disorderly acts. A thousand instances might be given to show the shallowness of this idea. For instance, blasphemy has been regarded as something bold and splendid, as if the very essence of blasphemy were not the commonplace. It is the very definition of profanity that it thinks and speaks of certain things prosaically, which other men think and speak of poetically. It is thus a defeat of the imagination, and a volume full of the wildest pictures and most impious jests remains in its essential character a piece of poor literalism, a humdrum affair. The same general truth might be pursued through all the Ten Commandments. Murder, for instance, is quite overrated, aesthetically. I am assured by persons on whose judgment I rely, and whose experience has, presumably, been wide, that the feelings of a murderer are of a quite futile character. What could be stupider than kicking to pieces, like a child, a machine you know nothing about, the variety and ingenuity of which should keep any imaginative person watching it delightedly day and night? Say we are acquainted with such a human machine; let us say, a rich uncle. A human engine is inexhaustible in its possibilities; however long and unrewarding has been our knowledge of the avuncular machine, we never know that the very moment that we lift the assassin's knife the machine is not about to grind forth some exquisite epigram which it would make life worth living to hear, or even, by some spasm of internal clockwork, produce a cheque. To kill him is clearly prosaic. Alive, he is a miracle; dead, he is merely a debris, a debris of unpleasant gore and quite inappropriate and old-fashioned clothes. Objection is sometimes brought against the absolute legal and medical doctrine that life should under all circumstances and at all costs be kept burning. It may or may not be moral and humane but there can be no doubt of its impressiveness as a purely poetical ideal. It is the desire, so natural in an imaginative man of science, to preserve the only thing that can really be of any interest to anyone.

I have taken these two instances, as the first that come to hand, of the general fact of the mean and matter-of-fact character of the vices, the wild and thrilling character of the virtues. Many other examples might be taken of the raptures and roses of virtue, the lilies and languors of vice. But an example, stranger both in its truth and in its unfamiliarity than any other, chiefly occupies my mind. Of all the conventional virtues there is none that is so completely despised by the aesthetic and Bohemian philosophers as economy. It is represented as the very meanest of human standards, a merit for cowards and greasy burgesses, a thing that is even base when it is a virtue and dull when it is a vice. But in truth there is no quality so truly romantic as economy.

Economy is essentially imaginative because it is a realisation of the value of everything. The real objection to murder, aesthetically speaking, is that it is uneconomical. It is a failure in efficiency (I want to write that word down and look at it) to waste a whole man in order to procure a momentary emotion which is often disappointing. And the real objection to waste is that all waste is a kind of murder, a merely negative and destructive thing, the obliteration of something which we can neither value nor understand. We slay an uncle because we do not realise the strange dumb poetry of an uncle; we fling away a penny because we cannot realise the gorgeous possibilities of a penny. I have murdered many pennies, many trusting halfcrowns, in my life. For let it be clearly understood that I do not maintain for a moment that this poetry of economy is an easy thing for any of us to keep up. We tend to forget the poetry of pennies just as we tend to forget the poetry of skies and woods and great buildings, because we see them so often. In practice it is most difficult to be the Economic Man. We have all heard of the clergyman who spoke in defence of teetotalism, saying that for twenty years he had tried to teach drunkards to drink moderately, and had never once succeeded. The reporters, with unintentional kindness, described him as having said that for twenty years he had tried to drink moderately and had never once succeeded. So it is with this great question of economy.

For a long period the writer of the present article has tried to be economical and has never once succeeded. But I impute this entirely to a lack of true poetry in myself. I do not for a moment dream of shielding myself behind so transparent and canting a plea as the notion that there is anything artistic or romantic in being extravagant. The man who does not look at his change is no true poet. To give away a penny deliberately is indeed one of the highest triumphs of imagination: it means that the giver can realise the meaning of the existence of some ragged family herded in the lairs of East London. But to throw away a penny is sheer lack of imagination; it means that the giver cannot realise even the meaning of a penny. It means that he forgets the first and most thrilling of all the lessons of the universe, the lessons of every seed and germ, the lesson of the infinite and terrible power that may be found in small things. The French, the most poetical of all peoples, are also the most economical. The English working man, with his sterling, solid common sense, throws away every rag and bone that does not appear to him useful at the first glance; the French cottager turns those rags and bones into exquisite and civilised dishes. Economy is only another name for universalism; the true poet regards every earthly object as having some value and secret utility-- with the possible exception of a dust-cart. The old romance of life was held to consist in expense--in the jewels and perfumes of the `Arabian Nights', in the cushion and cigars of Ouida. The newer and truer romance will be the romance of cheapness. It will address itself to the truly imaginative task of realising what is the real worth (a worth running into millions) of the penny cup of coffee to the tired pedestrian at midnight or the pennyworth of tobacco, to the poor man in his half-hour holiday. It will celebrate the cheapness of ecstasy.

My bosom friend the Pessimist and I were standing outside a small toy shop, glueing our noses to the glass, when the long silence was broken by my remarking on the beauty of a solid stick of blue chalk, which was offered for sale (in some tempest of generosity) for a halfpenny. `Have you considered,' I asked, `all that this stick of blue chalk means? For a halfpenny I am possessed of it. I go home at night under the stars, between dark walls and through mazy streets. I shall be free to write upon those walls beautiful or stern sentiments, arraigning the powers of the earth, and write them in the very colour of heaven. At home I may beguile the evening in a thousand innocent sports, designing barbaric patterns upon the new table-cloth, drawing dreamy and ideal landscapes upon the note-paper, decorating my own person in the manner of our British predecessors, sketching strange and ideal adventures for strange and ideal characters. And all this blue river of dreams is loosened by a halfpenny.'

The Pessimist replied, in his sad, stern way, `Drivel. It is only the blue chalk you buy for a halfpenny. You do not buy the stars for a halfpenny; you do not buy the streets for a halfpenny; you do not buy your dreams or your love of drawing or your tastes and imaginations for a halfpenny.'

`True,' I replied. `The stars and the dreams and myself are cheaper than chalk: for I bought them for nothing.'

He burst into tears and became immediately convinced of the basis of true religion. For our very word for God means Economy: is not improvidence the opposite of Providence?

On Manners

One of the greatest difficulties in any philosophical discussion of manners is the fact that the presence of bad manners and the absence of any manners are treated as identical. We say indifferently of a man of a more or less repulsive social ineptitude either that he has no manners or that he has bad manners. How entirely different these two things are may be tested by the fact that in no other affairs do we treat these phrases as synonymous. There is all the difference in the world between saying that a man has no wine and saying that he has bad wine. There is all the difference in the world between the comparatively trifling biographical statement, `He has no sons,' and the really disquieting one, `He has bad sons'. If, when we were about to breakfast with a friend, a common acquaintance were to approach us and whisper impressively, 'You will eat no eggs,' the expression would amount to little more than an interesting detail; if he were to whisper, 'You will eat bad eggs,' an element of tragedy would at once appear. But the difference between no manners and bad manners is quite as definite and important as the difference between no eggs and bad eggs.

The absence of manners is an unconscious and chaotic thing, the product of vagueness, of monomania, of absence of mind, of ignorance of the world. But the presence of bad manners is a perfectly solemn, deliberate, and artificial thing, the result of pride and vainglory, hypocrisy and blindness and hardness of heart. A great mass of human society may thus be simply and satisfactorily divided into two definite sections. But the actual nature of the bad manners which constitute the chief characteristic of good society is worthy, it may be, of somewhat more profound examination and definition. For the manners which we see in the centres of social life such as the House of Commons are really bad, not in the sense that they are insufficient or ignorant, but in the sense that they violate what is the whole object and meaning of manners.

Courtesy is a mystical thing; it may be defined as a spontoneous worship. Politeness is, indeed, even more fantastically reverential than religion itself, for it treats a landlady's parlour as the religionist treats a temple. To him all houses are holy, and whenever or wherever it be found, the covered place demands the uncovered head. Politeness is thus a thing mysterious and elemental, going down to the foundations of the world. Since no man can express how surprising and terrifying and beautiful is every object upon which we gaze, on the day when we all become truly primitive we shall all become extravagantly polite; we shall take off our hats to the sparrows, and apologise for treading on the daisies. Politeness of this kind is simply imagination. That is the inevitable result of realising that things are there. Here, as in so many other cases, we see the singular dullness of all those sections of society who call themselves unconventional. They imagine that unconventionality is a mark of being artistic or imaginative. It is, of course, a mark of being especially prosaic and limited. For the great conventions are, as their name grammatically implies, simply the great agreements, and agreement is essential to all art, and to all ceremony, and, indeed, to everything, except mere rowdy competition and free fights. If a man is ceremonious he is conventional, and if he is poetical he is ceremonious.

In so far, therefore, as the artistic classes believe in a lounging and Bohemian existence, they are fighting against the very nature of art, and also against the very nature of a vivid realisation of things. If once we realised things vividly, and saw how valuable they are, we should become more elaborately urbane than any dandy of the old school. What was wrong with the dandies of the old school was not the fact that their politeness was extravagant, but the fact that they did not really believe in it. The Brummell type was wrong, not because it bowed repeatedly over a lady's hand, but because it did not respect her either in act or conversation. The bowing was entirely right; if we saw things for one moment as they are we should stand bowing for several minutes over the hand of the news-boy or the crossing-sweeper, thus creating some sensation in the neighbourhood.

Now if it be once granted that politeness is reverence, an expression of reverence for our environment, it does not particularly matter by what actual physical pantomime it is expressed. It may be expressed, as in the case of the Christian and Jewish religions, by taking off your hat, or by putting it on. In many Oriental countries it is expressed by taking off one's boots, and in some of the great Republics of the Antipodes it may, for all I know, be expressed by taking off your collar or your waistcoat. Certain savages rub each other's noses when they meet, and I have no doubt that they rub them reverentially. The form matters nothing, so long as the spirit which it is meant to convey is a spirit of chivalry and of a poetic humility. But the great central and remarkable thing about society manners in this decade is that they are not intended to express the idea of courtesy, the idea, that is to say, that we are impressed with our surroundings, but, on the contrary, specially and elaborately intended to express the idea that we do not care a brass farthing for anyone for a mile round. The old-fashioned bowing and scraping may have been ludicrous and hypocritical, when taken in conjunction with the materialistic or immoral practices which went along with it, but at least the form itself, the actual bow and scrape, did express deference and self-subordination. But the modern manners of the richer class are actually framed, like a careful artistic work, to express indifference to everything and everybody.

The modern gentleman is not the man who knows how to be polite; he is the man who knows how to be rude in an entirely gentlemanly manner. His only scruple is that he must not be rude in the same way that an omnibus conductor is rude--that is to say, in an amusing way. It is the object of modern urbanity not to cultivate the hypocritical subservience of the old bucks and beaux, but to cultivate a way of bowing to a lady which is a great deal more personally offensive than hitting her in the face. It is not, in short, courtesy at all; it is not an awkward and clownish attempt to indicate that we care for our surroundings; it is a perfectly polished, deliberate and successful attempt to indicate that we care for nothing in earth or Heaven. Uneducated people, that is to say, have no manners, educated people have bad manners.

Nobody can visit the House of Commons without coming away with the general impression that the art cultivated by the young country gentleman is the art of doing his worst elegantly; and to do one's worst, however elegantly, remains what it is, the one and solitary supreme insult. If a man throws his worst or his tenth best to anything, it matters nothing if the thing he throws be the Iliad or a casket of sapphires, it still remains an insult. And this insult to the ancient English Parliament is expressed in every line of the figures of the well-dressed Members of the House. A man with a million genuine and intellectual charms, is supposed to be a man with good manners. This simply means that he exhibits an unusual degree of physical grace in the act of putting his boots within a foot or two of the Mace of the King of England. It is a terrible thing that while true courtesy is a transcendental virtue and involves admiration, the most courteous man in modern politics is also the incarnation of indifference.

For Persons of the Name of Smith

Some time ago Mr C. F. G. Masterman led a vigorous attack upon my timid and humble optimism, and declared in effect that when I maintained a poetry in all things it was I who supplied it. I wish I could claim that I had ever supplied poetry to anything; it seems to me that I am at the very best a humdrum scientific student noting it down. The sentimentalists, the sons of a passionate delusion, are those who do not think everything poetical. For they are wholly under the influence of words, of the vague current phraseology, which thinks `castle' a poetical word and 'Post-office' an unpoetical word, which thinks `knight' a poetical word and `policeman' an unpoetical word, which thinks `eagle' a poetical ward and `pig' an unpoetical word. I do not say that there is not truth in this as a matter of literature; I do not say that in pure technical style there is not a difference between eagles and pigs. All I wish to point out is that the ordinary man in the street when he says that there is no poetry in a pig or a post-office is, in fact, merely intoxicated with literary style. He is not looking at the thing itself; if he did that he would see that it was not only poetical, but obviously and glaringly poetical. He thinks a railway-signal, let us say, must be prosaic, because the word sounds funny, and there is no rhyme in it. But if he looked straight and square at what a railway-signal is, he would realise that it was, to take a casual case, a red fire or light kindled to keep people from death, as poetical a thing as the spear of Britomart or the lamp of Aladdin. It is, in short, the man who thinks ordinary things common who is really the man living in an unreal world.

But of all the examples of this general fact that have recently been called to my notice, there is none more peculiar and interesting than that of the family name of Smith, in which we have a splendid example of the fact that the poetry of common things is a mere fact, while the commonplace character of common things is a mere delusion. For, if we look at the name Smith in a casual and impressionable way, remembering how we commonly hear it, what is commonly said about it, we think of it as something funny and trivial; we think of pictures in Punch, of jokes in comic songs, of all the cheapness and modernity which seem to centre round a Mr Smith. But, if we look at the plain word itself, we suddenly behold a poem. It is the name of a great rugged and primeval craft, a trade that is in the bones of every great epic of antiquity, a trade on which the `arma virumque' have everlastingly depended, and which they have repeatedly acclaimed. It is a craft so poetical that even the babies of village yokels stand and stare into the cavern of its creative violence, with a dim sense that the dancing sparks and the deafening blows are in some way wonderful, as the shops of the village cobbler and the village baker are not wonderful. The mystery of flame, the mystery of metals, the fight between the hardest of earthly things and the weirdest of earthly elements, the defeat of the unconquerable iron by its only conqueror, the brute calm of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the origin of a thousand sciences and arts, the ploughing of fields, the hewing of wood, the arraying of armies, and the whole beginning of arms, these things are written with brevity indeed, but with perfect clearness, on the visiting card of Mr Smith. The Smiths are a house of arrogant antiquity, of prehistoric simplicity. It would not be at all remarkable if a certain contemptuous carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, marked people whose name was Smith. Yet novelists, when they wish to describe a hero as strong and romantic, persistently call him Vernon Aylmer, which means nothing, or Bertrand Vallance, which means nothing; while all the time it is in their power to give him the sacred name of Smith, this name made of iron and fire. From the very beginnings of history and fable this clan has gone forth to battle; their trophies are in every hand, their name is everywhere; they are older than the nations, and their sign is the Hammer of Thor.

Anyone whose name is Smith may be connected with a Smith who was a lawyer in the reign of Henry VIII, or a Smith who was a Colonel in the British army at Blenheim, or a Smith who was a Cavalier, or a Smith who was a Puritan, or a Smith who was a Bishop, or a Smith who was hanged. All this kind of historic information exists in a very perfect form. But it must be remembered that the origin of a great family should be not merely historic, but also prehistoric. Every single practical and triumphant thing in this world has begun, not with an accuracy, but with a legend. These dim, gigantic fables are the origins of all practical things. And behind the dimmest and most gigantic Smith, we may see the more tremendous outlines of the formless and fabulous Smith who was the son of Vulcan and the first conqueror of iron. The shame which many people seem to feel about owning to such a patronymic or tracing its origin, is an extraordinary thing, but it is part of a very deep and general evil which has been going on for some time back. The interest in race, the interest in genealogy, which were professed by the ancient aristocratic world, were not bad things; they were in themselves good things. It is, at least, as reasonable to investigate the origin of a man as to investigate the origin of a cowslip, or a periwinkle, or a prairie dog; the herald with his tabard and trumpet holds his perfectly legitimate place beside the botanist and the conchologist and the natural history expert. What was wrong with the old heraldic speculations was not that they existed, but that they did not go far enough. They did not interest themselves in the blood of the yokel and the mystic paternity of the tinker. In other words, the evil was not that there was too much genealogy, but that there was not enough. And the real work to which democracy ought to address itself is that of extending this racial interest to the case of all ordinary men, of teaching the butcher to be proud of his grandfather, and the railway porter to remember his name with pride. For the single case of the name `Smith' is sufficient to indicate what profundities of origin and significance lie in all our names. The case of Smith is no mere accident; the case would be the same with any one of the common names which we account prosaic or absurd. `Jones' is more mean and preposterous even than Smith, and even those who bear the name of Jones do not probably remember that it is but a corruption of the name that Christ loved. There is not one of us that is not noble in origin, whatever we may be in essence.

The True Vanity of Vanities

It will not, I imagine, be disputed that the one black and inexcusable kind of pride is the pride of the man who has something to be proud of. It is true that you often do hear people saying, as they say other idle and unmeaning things while they are really watching a bird fly or expecting the dinnerbell, that such and such a person is vain, but has some right to be. But you do not find these people actually regarded with anything short of the most delightful loathing; whereas the nice old donkeys who are vain without any earthly ground for vanity at all, are not only universally and rightly beloved, but are made Cabinet Ministers and Bishops, and covered with a continual admiration. And this popular feeling is right. The universal objection to the people who are proud of genuine calibre is not any mere jealousy of them; it is not a paltry or panic-stricken resentment of their admitted superiority. It is, like a great many other things which ordinary people feel in a flash and could not possibly defend, entirely philosophical. The instinct of the human soul perceives that a fool may be permitted to praise himself, but that a wise man ought to praise God. A man who really has a head with brains in it ought to know that this head has been gratuitously clapped on top of him like a new hat. A man who by genius can make masterpieces ought to know that he cannot make genius. A man whose thoughts are as high as the stars ought to know that they roll almost as regardless of his power. A man who possesses great powers ought to know that he does not really possess them.

So it certainly does in practice come about that the more right a man has to vanity the less the sensible human race permits him to be vain. The most really ennobling, the most really health-giving orders of conceit are those that concern something of which a man has no obvious right at all to be conceited, the things over which he exercises no control, which he did not create and which he could not terminate. If we want what we should all regard as the very kindliest and most harmless kind of pride a man could have, the kind of pride that does not in effect make him offensive and unbrotherly, we should all mention something like the love of country or the dim pride of some very ancient race. The people who, profess these are mostly dear old buffers, because they are proud of something they have not procured. Far more brutal than these are the people who have in some sort of way deserved their position--the capitalists, the parvenus, the children of the modern mercantile ferocity. Yet they, too, in their way have a silvery thread of graciousness, because they are stupid, and have been, like the aristocrats, the acceptors of some beautiful accident.

The sin of pride blackens into an unbearable infamy when we came to the artistic and literary people who are proud of their intellects. They are worse than the scientific people, because the scientific people have far less reason to be proud than the artistic and literary people. The scientists to a great extent inherit, like the aristocrats, and are thus kept tolerable; the literary people--such, for instance, as the present writer--create, and are too disgusting for words. The literary arrogance is very nearly the worst, but is not the worst. Those who swagger because they have intellects suppose that intellect is the most important thing on earth, and theirs would be an easy existence only that it happens that it is not. Those who pride themselves on intelligence are priding themselves on a quite subordinate and suburban sort of excellence. The highest thing in the world is goodness. It is so high that, fortunately, the great majority of people who have it are horribly frightened of it, and keep their own virtue as they would keep some sort of wild horse or griffin. But every now and then there do appear people who are good and who know they are good, and who are proud of being good. And if there be any reality burning through the written phrase, if there be any passion which strains at the strings of language, if there be any emotion which, through translations and re-translations and versions and diversions, is still alive, these were the people whom Jesus Christ could hardly forbear to scourge.

This is, I suppose, the whole subtlety of the sin of pride; all other sins attack men when they are weak and weary; but this attacks when men are happy and valuable and nearer to all the virtues. And when it attacks most easily the results are vilest. The whole difference betwen the religion of Christianity and such a religion, for instance, as that of Brahminism, is merely this. The castes of Christian Europe are insolent, abominable, unendurable things, which have been endured, as a matter of fact, for centuries; but they have one great virtue, they are irreligious. But in Brahminism the castes are religious things; it is a virtue to be aristocratic. And against any people who claim to rule me by spiritual superiority, I will everlastingly and happily rebel, conscious of that image of deity which equalises us all.

Written in the Sand

In the mid-way of this our mortal life, I find myself (as in one of the changes of a dream) at a watering-place on the East Coast. I find among other things that it is raining and that my fellow creatures, or at least my fellow visitors, are in a state of irrational indignation over that circumstance. `How paradoxical it is in you,' I say to them with astonishment, `to come to a watering-place and exhibit distress when it waters you.' I explain to them how unjust, how fundamentally unpoetic is the current prejudice against rain.

I point out to them how singular an example this prejudice affords of the perverse and artificial nature of our modern English patriotism... All Englishmen join in reviling that lovable and admirable English thing, the English climate. Everybody blasphemously rails against those mutable and magnificent skies which are a perpetual transformation scene. Everybody vilifies this land of violent and benignant clouds, the only land that could have produced the stormy summers of Constable or the red apocalypse of Turner. Of these mysterious phases rain is only one, and not the least beautiful. When I point this out to my fellow Englishmen their spirit takes on something of the turbid transformations of the English sky. `How colossal, how cosmic a vision,' I say to them, `is the rain upon the sea. Worms, you are permitted to gaze upon a reversal of the fifth day of creation. The waters below the firmament were divided from the waters that were above the firmament. And lo! they are wedded again.' This kind of conversation naturally makes me popular.

I am particularly beloved by those who are frustrated in their desire for sea-bathing. `What,' I exclaim, `your whole heart is set on wetting yourself in that silly pool of salt. Give me,' I cry ecstatically, `the Baths of Heaven!' After thus discussing the matter with various groups of people, I find myself thrown back on a gentle solitude. I wander along the lean sands by the bright, bleak sea. The weather is clearing, and sky and sea shine like pale steel, as if they had been washed and rubbed by the rain. Along the empty sands two small boys are trailing their feet disconsolately. They do not know what to do; they do not know where to go. Only a dim and blind gregarious instinct, a brotherhood as deep as the brutes, leads them to do nothing together and to go nowhere together. They do not speak, they are too weary even to quarrel, though they have made no exertion; they are sunk in that strange and sudden and very occasional boredom which belongs to boyhood, and which is like all boyhood's experiences, like its love and its fear, pure and intense, the undiluted essence of ennui.

At last, after what seems like leagues of drifting, something happens. Either the sun paints one strip of silver on the leaden sea, or, more likely, the soul itself, with its mysterious silences and activities, rebels and flashes; but one of the boys bounds suddenly into an excavation in the sand, the remains of some other boy's fortress, and begins to bank it up again furiously, as if he were walling the wild sea out of the flats of England. The other stares a little while with a stupid curiosity, as at a trifle; then on him also comes the primeval will to action which drives metaphysicians to madness, and he also leaps, like Remus, over the wall and begins to build the city. Three minutes afterwards they are talking; six minutes afterwards, still happier sign, they are fighting.

I will not go so far as to say that these two boys were some dark and dreadful cherubim sent to act before my eyes a spiritual mystery, however fine a background for it would have been the grey edge of the sea and that strange blank light so white and wet which grows in the clearing sky. But it is certainly true that the episode of the two little boys depicts as in a small miracle play one of the least of the truths that lie behind our modern civilisation, and constitute the answer to that question which is asked in large letters all over the newspapers, `What is Wrong?'

The thing that is wrong is a certain fallacy with which we English have comforted ourselves for same decades, which may be called the fallacy of unity, or in another and slighter form, the fallacy of sociability. What I mean is this, that we have fallen into a habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is full of quarrelling as a sign that it is weak. And we have fallen into the more dangerous habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is not full of quarrelling as a sign that it is strong or energetic. The reason that the Irish fight each other, and even hate each other, is not that they are Celts. It is not even that they are Irish. It is simply that they have something to do. The reason that the French groups split and fight is not that they are Latins; it is not even that they are French. It is simply that they have something to do. And the reason that English politicians work together in unity is certainly not that they are English. It is that they have nothing to do; when, for instance, they had James II to dethrone, or when they had Walpole to howl against, or when they had Napoleon to fight, they behaved exactly as the French and the Irish do; parties were broken by secessions; heads were broken by sticks.

We are like the two little boys walking along the sands. We go together easily enough as long as we are going nowhere. We can do as others do cheerfully enough, as long as we are doing nothing. But the moment we agree to do anything we begin to disagree about it.

A Case of Comrades

There was once a lady of a very beautiful character (delicate, yet decisive, for that is the definition of a lady) who asked me whether I did not believe in the possibility of a simple comradeship between the sexes. Being somewhat in a corner, I replied that, as I understood the word comradeship, I did not.

I gave some of my reasons. I did not give my first and firmest and most unhesitating reason, which was this: that I knew quite well that if I had treated the lady herself for four consecutive minutes as a comrade she would have ordered me out of the house. But I gave some other reasons. I remarked that comradeship was a quite special thing; that it was quite different from friendship. I said (and this, oddly enough, I believe to be profoundly true) that a man can be the friend of a woman, but not her comrade. For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.

In the Greek grammar, which I learnt with difficulty and forgot with ease, there was one thing, I remember, which would by itself prove that the Greeks were a great people. I mean the fact that there is in Greek a dual as well as a plural. Two is quite different from any other number, just as one is quite different from any other number: that truth is the basis of marriage. When I knew there was a Greek dual I could easily realise that the Greeks gave philosophy to the world.

My concern here is that comradeship is essentially plural. Now, women are not plural. The very word `women' has about it, I think, a sort of bad taste: it smacks of polygamous Turks or tired and cynical men-about-town. There are no such things as women. There is only the woman you are at this particular moment afraid of or in love with, or inclined to reverence or inclined to assassinate. I think a real crowd of women would be like fifty suns or half a hundred moons--it would be weaker for its numbers. The sun would not have room to shine.

In any case, what I had to say about comradeship to this particular lady was tolerably clear. I merely pointed out that comradeship is a particular sort of human association; and the essential paradox of it is this; that it is at once violent and cool. People talking in twos talk gently, because they feel emphatically: people talking in tens or twenties talk emphatically because they do not care a dump about anything. Friendship becomes comradeship when you have forgotten the presence of your friend. You are addressing the abstract thing, the club, which, when two or three are gathered together (of the male sort at least) is always in the midst of them. Men's debating clubs have a pedantic phrase which exactly expresses this truth: they talk of `speaking to the motion'. It is true; men do speak to a motion, not about it; they talk to a topic. Women talk to each other; that is why their conversations are frightfully fascinating, but too terrible for us to listen to for long without running away.

Do you remember how Thackeray cries out, `O les laches que les hommes!' when George Warrington and Lord Castlewood rush from the room merely because the young American girl has begun a sweet satiric conversation with old Beatrix Esmond? It is almost the truest thing in Thackeray. Our sex is not strong or bold enough to endure that agony of directly personal conversation in which women are supreme. We must have a topic-- an impersonal one. And as I told my admirable lady friend, a male friend becomes a comrade when one has forgotten him. To forget a male friend is only to behave like a comrade. But to forget a woman friend is only to behave like a cad. She is herself; he is the club.

But if either that lady or any other lady really wants to know whether she and her sex should share masculine camaraderie; whether they would really be stronger and happier by doing so; whether, in short, we are in such a matter keeping them out of something they would naturally enjoy, I am just now in a position to enlighten them, by giving them an instance, realistically exact and universally typical, of what our masculine comradeship really is.

If any lady wants to know what she is letting herself in for if she goes in for Comradeship, what really happens when comrades meet together, this is what happens. It happened yesterday morning. I was breakfasting with a mob of undergraduates of one of our great Universities, and the whole company was broken up into groups of two or three extravagantly engaged in some argument. I myself was engaged in two arguments. I was trying to prove to an Agnostic on my right that there was such a place as Heaven, and to an Imperialist on my left that there was such a place as England: when suddenly all our minor clamours were cloven with a monstrous and crashing noise from the other end of the table. Ten men were talking at once, three were beating on the table in pure passion, one was screaming above the din, and then (as is common in such crises) there was, for an instant, an unmeaning silence, and then the voice of one of the best orators of the Union rose, piercing and pathetic, throbbing to the echoes of the roof, alone:

`I do not say that the corridor ran the whole length of the train. What I say, what I say emphatically and with the full responsibility of my intellect, is that it ran on the left-hand side of our carriage. And I know that I speak the truth.'

We all rushed to the spot. I dropped England with one hand and Heaven with the other. I craned my neck to find out what it was all about. It was about this very profound and urgent question: whether when three persons present travelled to Scotland about two years ago in a luncheon car, the shape of that car had been such that there was a corridor down the left-hand side or a kind of passage down the middle. Only three persons present had ever seen the car, and they could not agree; but we soon took it out of their puny hands. We argued it in the abstract. We discussed whether in the nature of things the passage would have been in the middle. I founded a sect of my own, midway between the Orthodox Passagist position and the Extreme Corridorians' position. Some held that the nature of the luncheon should be taken into account in all evidence of the shape of the luncheon-car. We made maps of the car with forks and spoons on the table, and little lumps of sugar to show where the people sat. The whole discussion took nearly two hours.

But, indeed, temporal measurements cannot express the length, for we talked as if we were the immortal Gods and had all eternity before us: for to be outside time is one of the strange elements of fraternity. We were only interrupted by some academic custom which required that the Union officials should be photographed. And even then one of them moved. He kept on quivering and stirring until the photographer broke into pathetic complaint. Then he, in return, broke out, `I never denied that there was a case for the corridor at the side. What I said--' But we crushed him, reluctantly. All this is, to the best of my recollection, quite true.

I fancy that I do not see any very approving expression on the faces of my lady friends. They are not moved by this Homeric war. They feel, perhaps, that the question of whether one luncheon-car two years ago was of a particular shape was not an urgent question. They feel that when argued by eighteen youths for two hours it might even have become a tiring question. O mightiest of all things, O mothers of the gods, they are only little things that you do not understand, only a few sports and follies of the stags of the herd. Be you content as you are secure: you understand everything except comradeship.

Something

It is customary for cultivated people from century to century to set up some artistic fashion and pretend to be more old-world or natural than they are. Thus the French noblesse played at being old Greek shepherds and shepherdesses; for the rich are always craving for barbarism while the poor are always pushing (rather blindly) for more civilisation. Within our own memory drawing-rooms have been full of dismal people in dingy garments who were supposed (I hardly know why) to recall the gay colours and coarse virtues of the Middle Ages. If ever I adopted one of these barbaric affectations it would be one which has been, I think, undeservedly neglected. In the British Museum, while others are admiring the bleak busts of Caesars or the placid horrors of Assyria, I always stray to a kindlier and more homely department. I am found worshipping the hairy and goggle-eyed images from the Sandwich Islands; idols to which I really feel a man might bow down. For the beautiful Gods of Greece are cruel; but one always feels that an ugly god might be kind. If therefore I ever arrange my house on one artistic plan (which God forbid) it shall be on a rugged Polynesion plan; it shall be on a goggle-eyed and hairy sort of plan. Everything I hear about these savages attracts me to them more and more. It is vain to tell me that under such a regime the man will be lazy and fond of pleasure while the woman is hard-working and practical; for that is already the case in the house which I inhabit at present. I do not mind painting myself; in fact, I never can paint anything else without doing so. If I colour so much as a cardboard figure for a toy theatre, I emerge painted like the leaves of autumn, painted like the sky of morning, as it says in Hiawatha.

I cannot imagine how the strange notion arose that ignorance is the origin of superstitions. It is true indeed, if we mean ignorance in the same sense that Plato and Bacon were ignorant; the common ignorance of all men about the meaning of their monstrous destiny. But if this be intended, the phrase that ignorance is the origin of all superstitions is a coarse and misleading way of stating the case. It would be much truer to say that agnosticism is the origin of all religions. That is true; the agnostic is at the beginning not the end of human progress. But those who speak of superstitions born of ignorance generally mean that myths and mystical assertions have arisen from mere accidental or animal incapacity to realise all the circumstances of the case. The old Victorian scientific theory was that men invented fairy tales because they had not yet grasped facts. They thought the moon was a woman because they had not the sense enough to see it was a moon. They thought the sea was a god because no kind scientist had ever passed by and pointed out that it was really the sea. They worshipped a stone as a fetish because their lack of geological knowledge prevented them from noting that it was a stone. They were so dull, inexperienced and narrowly materialistic that they could see no difference between a crackle in the clouds and a ringing hammer hurled by a red-headed giant; between a spat of yellow fire in the sky and a young god driving horses.

That is the materialistic theory of myths, and it is manifest nonsense. Nobody could ever have thought that the moon looked like a woman, even of the amplest contours. Nobody can ever have thought that the sun looked like a carriage and pair, because it doesn't. If they used these terms in connection with sun or moon, mountain or river, rock or tree, they were certainly not using them because they knew no better. On the contrary, they were using them because they knew something much better; because a woman is more beautiful than moonlight and a young man more splendid than the sun.

This is essentially admitted about such fables as those of Phoebus and Artemis; or even Balder and Thor; here it is vaguely conceded that `poets' and not mere ignorant savages, have had something to do with the matter. But what the folklorists of the Fraser type will not see is that the ruder savages also are poets; even if they are minor poets. All that they say about their totems, their taboos, their dances, and services to the dead must be understood with a certain poetic sympathy, as meant to be weird, glorious, shocking, or even impossible. They are the abrupt expressions of unique spiritual experiences, quiet and queerly coloured moods; dreams and glimpses that do really lie on the borderline between this existence and some other. If a savage says that a pepper-plant is his divine great-grandmother, he is not speaking from ignorance, for ignorance would leave him with the bare knowledge that it was a pepper-plant. Rather he is speaking from knowledge, fragmentary and perhaps dangerous knowledge. He may have seen something about a pepper-plant that it is better not to see.

There is one really tremendous question. The savage respecting the pepper-plant, the idolator adoring the stone, the sage choosing his star, the patriot dying for a boundary, all do unmistakably mean something--something far down in the abysses of the universe and the soul. Do they mean that everything is sacred? Or do they perhaps mean that something is sacred--something they have not found?

Asparagus

At about twenty-one minutes past two today I suddenly saw that asparagus is the secret of aristocracy. I was trying to put long limp stalks into my mouth, when the idea came into my head; and the stalk failed to do so. I do not refer to any merely metaphorical and superficial comparisons which could easily be made between them. We might say that most of the organism was left dead white; merely that a little button at the top might be bright green. We might draw the moral that average aristocrats are made out much stronger than they are; and illustrate it from average asparagi. They say that any stick is good enough to beat a dog with; but did anyone ever try to beat a dog with a stick of asparagus? We might draw the moral that aristocratic traditions are made out much more popular than they really were. 'Norman' gets mispronounced as English. In this way three French leopards were somehow turned into British lions. And in this way also the solemn word Asparagus, which means nothing so far as I know, was turned by the populace into `sparrowgrass', which means two of the most picturesque things in the world. Asparagus, which I presume to have been the name of a Roman pro-consul, Marcus Asparagus Esculens, or what not, never deserved such luck as to lose its origin in two things so true and common as the bold birds of the town or the green democracy of the fields. Or again, we might say of sticks of asparagus that they have often lost their heads, and we might say the same of aristocrats. Both heads have been bitten off by the guillotine before now. But to complete the parallel we must maintain that the head of the aristocrat was the best part of him; and this is often hard to maintain. But, indeed, I do not base the view upon any such fancies from phraseology. Far deeper in earth are the roots of asparagus.

The one essential of an aristocracy is to be in advance of its age. That is, there must be something new known to a few. There must be a password; and it must always be a new password. Moreover, it must be by its nature, an irrational password, for anything quite rational might rapidly be calculated even by the uninitiated. In the same way it is essential to any social observance that involves a social distinction, that the observance should be, in this sense at least, artificial. That is, you can only know the observance as the soldier knows the password, because he has been told.

The working instance best known to us of the middle classes is the old arbitrary distinction about how to eat asparagus. Now, excluding cannibalism and the habit of eating sand (about which I can offer no opinion) there is really nothing one can eat which is less fitted to be eaten with the fingers than asparagus. It is long; it is greasy; it is loose and liable to every sort of soft yet sudden catastrophe; it is always eaten with some sort of oily sauce; and its nice conduct would involve the powers of a professional juggler confirmed with some practice in climbing the greasy pole. Most things could easily be eaten with one's fingers. Cold beef could quite easily be eaten with one's fingers; or simply with one's teeth. I have seldom seen a noble cheese without an impulse merely to fix my fangs in it. New potatoes could be eaten with the fingers as cleanly as Easter eggs; and whitebait might as well be shovelled into our open mouths by a Whitebait Machine, for all the use we make of a knife and fork to dissect them. We could easily eat fish cakes as we eat seed cake. Cold Christmas pudding is a substance with all the majesty of coloured marble; far cleaner, stronger and more coherent than any ordinary bread or biscuit. Yet all these we are supposed to approach through the intervention of a little stunted sword or a stumpy trident. Only this one tiresome, toppling vegetable, I eat between my finger and thumb. I should be better off as a giraffe eating the top of a palm-tree: it doesn't want any holding up.

We will not exaggerate. Eating soup with the fingers the young student should not attempt; and sauces, custards and even curries are no field for the manual labourer. I would not eat stewed rhubarb with my fingers, or, indeed, with any instrument that science could devise. Even with things involving treacle, I have not a good touch. But, while strictly avoiding anything like exaggeration or frivolity, I still note that the point of asparagus is that it is not the food--among other foods, specially fitted for the fingers. In other words, the principle could not have been deduced from abstract reason, or have grown out of the general instincts of men. It could not have been custom: that is why it was etiquette.

The brotherhood of man is a fact which in the long run wears down all other facts. Therefore, a privileged class, if it would avoid sliding naturally back into the body of mankind must keep up an incessant excitement about new projects, new cultures and new prejudices, new skirts and stockings. It must tell a new tale every day or perish, like the lady of the Arabian Nights. Tennyson, who was too much touched with this aristocratic--or snobbish--Futurism, wrote, `Lest one good custom should corrupt the world', which really means lest everybody should learn the right way of eating asparagus. And so, out of luxury and waste and weariness, the fever they call Progress came into the world.

Do you tell me they don't eat asparagus with their fingers now? Do I not know that in some of the best houses they have little tongs for each person, which are charming? Have I not heard that asparagus is now lowered into the open mouth on a string, or shot into the mouth with a small gun, or eaten with the toes, or not eaten at all? No; I do not know, that is what I wish to point out. They have changed the password.

The English Spirit and the Flea

I met a man who was awaiting a letter from his family in the Eastern Counties. Before the letter came he learnt that the place where his family lived had been singled out specially as one of the places where the Germans have lately made hell in heaven with their colossal and destructive flying ships. He did not show much perturbation; but when the letter from his nearest relatives at last arrived, he naturally opened it with some interest.

It was all about a flea. I will not develop the topic, though Swift allegorised infinity under that image, and William Blake thought it worthwhile to paint a most careful portrait of the Ghost of a Flea. In the East Anglian household, anyhow, there had never before been the ghost of a flea. The solitary specimen was by the householder connected in some way with the imprudence of his relative in some slumming adventure: and it was held up before him, as it were, in derision and pursued with a wealth of detail. Its arrival, adventures, and personal eccentricities were scientifically set forth. Any entomologist writing on the habits and habitat of the East Anglian flea would find it a most careful compilation. It contained no reference to the war. There is another animal, not the East Anglian flea, on which the entomologist might gradually have gained a little light. I do not refer to the Zeppelin. Zeppelins did not occur in the letter. I refer to a little-known animal called the Englishman, whose habits, habitat, and other curious constituent elements the German entomologists might find it worthwhile to study, and of which this letter is a fragmentary but not quite valueless record.

I do not idolatrize this animal. I do not expect the German to fall dawn and worship the East Anglian inhabitant any more than the East Anglian flea--like an ancient Egyptian worshipping a beetle. The qualities he displays in such cases are characteristics rather than abstract virtues. No good ever came of merely flattering one's nation: a man flatters the land he fears, but not the land he loves. The Englishman does not neglect war merely because he is calm and wise and strong; there are many respects in which he can be wayward and foolish and weak. Like the other animal, he can be at his best an irritant and at his worst a parasite. The Englishman is not simply calm and wise and strong; but he is English. I do not set my country above human temptations, like an allegory on a ceiling; I do not say that enemies could not conceivably perturb the British Lion or fluster the British Bulldog. I do say that I am not, as a fact, perturbed, and specially not perturbed by people who say `The British Lion is drawing in his horns'--I perceive that they have no vivid mental picture of a lion. I am not flustered by people who say `The British Bulldog will soon have his wings clipped', because I know such curtailment to be both unnecessary and impossible. And the distinction is important. Our very weaknesses are strengths so long as they are undiscovered weaknesses. It is possible to remind my own countrymen very generally of whereabouts the strengths and weaknesses lie. I would not do even that if there were the smallest chance of a German understanding it.

Some of the best things the English have done were the things they didn't do. For instance, in spite of a seething fuss of small leagues and committees, they cannot really be induced to 'do anything for Shakespeare'. Lord Melbourne (who was almost as English as Shakespeare) used to solve the most intense diplomatic crises by saying, `Can't we let it alone?' We can. We let Shakespeare alone. Just as we have an enormous negative monument to Shakespeare, so we have an enormous negative victory over Count Zeppelin. As a nation we receive his flaming visitations with something more insulting than defiance--absentmindedness. Such absence of mind can co-exist with considerable presence of mind at particular moments. It did in Hamlet, who always struck me as a particularly English character--which was, no doubt, the reason why he could not get on with the Danes, and had to be sent to England. His sudden lunge at the curtain was very like the sudden rush our mob sometimes makes at the alien. But, on the whole, it is the other attitude that is our ultimate strength. Not anything we have done against the Zeppelins, but all that we have not done against them, is our monument aere perennius. Let us continue not to notice Zeppelins. I do not mean this with a dull literalism; and I disclaim responsibility for anyone who should take it so. Notice them, of course-- but not so much as fleas.

There is one kindred characteristic of the English which is very subtle and easily expressed wrongly, but which plays a very great part in practical things of this kind. I know not what to call it, except perhaps, somewhere-elseness. It is a sort of distant optimism. It is a refusal to accept as final the facts immediately in front of us-- a strong belief in the other side of the world, or even the other side of the moon. It was rather pompously expressed by the phrase about the sun never setting on the British Empire. The same thought was much more sincerely expressed in the popular ejaculation, 'Somewhere the sun is shining!' This came, I think, from one of our noble comic songs, and used to be uttered by people when they broke valuable teapots, or put their feet into cucumber-frames. Its excess was well satirised by Mr John Burns when he summed up Imperialism under the text, `The eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth'. And it is true, as of every true national characteristic, that it has the defect of its quality, and often goes with an undue laxity about the rights of our own field or the laws of our own parish. But it goes also with more imaginative generosity about remote lands like Bulgaria or Japan than is common in more closely logical countries. And there really exists many a City clerk who is more concerned for bombs in Belgium than bombs in the City.

I repeat that I will have nothing to do with bragging about these good qualities as if they were the only good qualities. It is not a good quality, but a defect in us that we do not understand the French revanche; it only means that we have not long enough memories to make tyrants and enemies keep their promises. Our people are courageous, not because of pride and praise, but rather in spite of it. In spite of our education we are still intelligent; and it was often in spite of our athletics that we were strong. The Battle of Waterloo was not won on Eton playing fields. The Battle of Waterloo (as the same authority said, and he certainly knew something about it) was won by the scum of the earth. And today also we are largely saved by the people whom we have failed to educate, failed to rule, failed to provide with land or religion, and very nearly failed to save from starvation. It is these people who in the travail and agony of the hour, provide the note which is most needed and most unexpected; the note of frivolity. And it is they, even more than their social superiors, who have seen the heavens filled with fire; and thought it less than a flea-bite.

The Hobby and the Head Waiter

In the matter of property we may find an obvious but useful parable in the difference between living in a house and living in an hotel. There are some practical conveniences in the hotel; but there is first of all a sort of megalomaniac glamour of great spaces and gilded ceilings that is not practical at all. At best there is the romance of personal adventure and accident; but there is no corporate and communal life.

It is when we pass to the practical difference between a house and an hotel that we come to the creative nature of property. I have taken this figure of speech for convenience and clarity, because I do not think everybody understands what we mean by this creative quality. Now a man in an hotel is entirely receptive. He may receive as many things as an average man in an average house. He may receive more things than most modern men in most modern houses. But these things must all be of a certain recognised and conventional character. He cannot add anything to the hotel. If he were to attempt to improve the hotel in any sweeping and striking fashion, his adventures would be somewhat sensational. Rich people in a rich hotel are in one sense protected and too much protected; but though they have protection they have not property. The point, however, is this; that nobody can provide beforehand for the creative needs, as people can provide for the protective need. It is in the nature of any creation that it is in some sense original; and it is in the nature of anything original that it cannot be foreseen. There is no prophecy of poetry; there is not even any prophecy of prophecy. A Futurist cannot predict a song even if he can produce a song; which is not always the case. He cannot foresee a poem or foresee a picture; he cannot even foresee a practical joke. If he did, indeed, it might possibly not occur.

In some hotels of the American sort there used to be an instrument erected in the bedroom; it had rather the general appearance of a clock, with a finger pivoted so as to point at various inscriptions on the dial, and these were supposed to be a complete list of the needs of man, in his highest capacity of an American hotel-frequenter. Whenever he wanted a Prairie Oyster or a Horse's Neck, a secretary or a sandwich, or anything (for all I know) from a daily paper to a dentist, he had only to move the hand on the clock and a bell rang and the person or object was somehow produced from the interior mechanism of the hotel. Now it is quite true that even the real list was long and detailed, and that it could be extended and applied to almost any length along certain lines. It would no doubt include not only a dentist but a detective.

But we may here turn from the fancies about what a man might desire to the facts about what he does desire. The simplest course is for each man to take himself as an example; as a typical and not necessarily an egotistic example. I am not a person especially prone by nature to be a nuisance in an hotel; I am not a vegetarian; I am not an epicure; I can eat and drink and smoke the ordinary things provided in ordinary places. But if it came to living my life in an hotel, especially that part of my life that is creative in the sense of being personal, I think I should find the list of things on the bedroom clock a little insufficient. For instance, if I have a hobby or a potential hobby, it is probably a toy theatre. Hobbies imply holidays; and while it is very arguable that journalists do no real work; it is also true that they have no real holidays. But if I had no need to earn my bread and cheese, and no country and no conscience and none of all those nonsensical things, I should settle down with a serious aim in life, which would be working a toy theatre. It is to me almost as much a box of miracles today, as it was when I first saw it as a baby; and I feel as if I knew that mimic world before I knew the real one. The gilded figures of a prince and princess glow in my memory against black oblivion, almost before the memory of my father who had made them for me; which things may be an allegory. Now this example is an understatement. I am in no sense alone in this taste; Stevenson and my father and many others evidently shared it. But it is an excellent example of something which, without being exactly eccentric, is just sufficiently out of the ordinary way to make it most improbable that any practical organizer would see it; or provide it, or put it into any definite class of things. I do not think I could say carelessly to a waiter, over my shoulder, `Just get me a black coffee and Benedictine and a toy theatre, will you?' I cannot imagine the headwaiter roaring down the speaking tube, `Three Manhattan cocktails and a toy theatre'. I cannot imagine it was mentioned among the minor luxuries printed on the piece of clockwork in the bedroom. But even if it was, it would not meet the case. Even if the waiter returned laden with toy theatres, as he sometimes comes laden with cigar-boxes, it would not solve the problem. For a hobby implies work as well as play; a process as well as a result. It would be a little nearer the mark if the head waiter brought me trays of tinsel and cardboard and that glorious metallic paper as intoxicating as all his wines, a crimson richer even than his burgundy and a green better than the greenest Chartreuse. Even then it would only work if the head waiter would sit down on the floor with me and help to cut the things out; and of this one could never be absolutely certain.

As these reflections pass through my mind, my abstracted eye is riveted on an ordinary wooden chair such as they make at Wycombe from the woods of South Bucks. And I see, as in a vision, that if one were to saw off the back of the chair, knock its bars out and screw it like a frame on to the four feet, the whole would make an almost exact model of a toy theatre, the bars between the legs forming the slips for the wings. I cannot pause for the experiment just now, having something worse to do; but the fancy happens to be an exact example of the sort of thing I mean; a fancy that could not possibly be foreseen, yet which might quite possibly be fulfilled. No great organizing mind would say, `See that seven thousand chairs are ordered from High Wycombe in case somebody wishes to turn them into toy theatres.' It is a hundred to one that nobody ever thought of this nonsensical notion before, and that nobody will ever think of it again. I do not say the world would have lost anything, but I do say I should have lost something, and that something is my own. It is private property.

Now, when I am in my sumptuous and select suite of apartments at the Hotel Beelzebub, reclining on rugs of leopard and tiger skin under tapestries of cloth of gold, it is quite certain that I shall not be encouraged to rush at one of the hotel chairs and begin cutting it up with a chopper or a saw. My explanation that I am turning it into a toy theatre will be coldly received. It may even lead to my being removed from that cushioned apartment to a still more cushioned apartment, commonly called a padded cell. But the point here is that the two forms of human comfort and convenience run distinct and parallel; and no increase of the one comes an inch nearer to the other. The hotel might multiply its chairs by the million, it might vary its pattern of chairs by the thousand, but it would never come into the same world as that perverse and personal day-dream of turning a chair, first into a stool and then into a stage. In that world are all the wonders of the creative side of property; and though I have taken for convenience the lighter and more portable types of property, the same psychology applies to the larger business of production. A man wishes to own his field, primarily because its productiveness is the protection of his honour and independence; but partly also because he wishes to do things with his field which he cannot explain to anybody, and is only vaguely shaping for himself. He is considering a balance between particular necessities and particular luxuries which escapes classification; he is ready, so to speak, to live on turnips on a chance of growing tobacco. I mean he is ready to act on a calculation exactly like the turning of a wooden chair into a wooden stage; something at once fantastic and thrifty. Where that power is democratically distributed men are more than citizens, they are all artists.

With this note on the purely creative or spiritual side of property I conclude the sketch I have here attempted against communism. I need not repeat for the hundredth time that the case against communism is not a case for capitalism; indeed the case against communism is that it is much too like capitalism. It matters little whether our allegorical hotel is called by capitalists an hotel or by communists a hostel. The case against it is that it is not a home, and that the spirit of man will never feel at home in it. It can only be a home when it has a sense of something at once restful and capricious, which is the mood of all creative action. It is only by narrowing itself to locality and privacy that the soul can broaden itself with real imagination and novelty. To listen to all the modern talk about organization and trade and transport is like watching a man wandering about carrying an uprooted tree. The tree is intended for transplantation; it is involved in problems of transport; it enjoys all the educational improvements of travel. It is carried by cosmopolitan trains through various countries with marvellous speed; it is unpacked or carted about in colossal railway stations with marvellous organization. But there are only two things worth saying about it. One is that the tree may be already dead. The other is that there is only one possible way of seeing it again alive. Only when it is planted finally in one fixed place on the face of the earth, will it ever bear fruit or blossom or become a greenhouse of birds.

In Praise of Pie

We should like to utter our fervid and enthusiastic thanks to the clergyman who wrote to The Times the other day to protest against the neglect, both as a title and an Institution, of the glorious English possession known to our fathers as `Apple Pie'; and shamefully described by various degraded outcasts and aliens as Apple Tart. As he very acutely pointed out, nobody says that a room is in apple tart order. As he warmly affirmed, no practical joker ever made an apple tart bed. Whether in the arrangements of rooms or the disarrangement of bedrooms, the traditions of our fathers testify to the true form of the word. A hundred inspiring battle-hymns rise to inspire the march; as in that truly national anthem which says

'I'm not a glutton

But I do like pie.'

as well as those lyrics that form the foundation of all education and told us that A was an apple pie. `Pie' is a full and powerful word, like pig or pork; which fills the mouth with an appropriate and anticipatory fullness; it is impossible to say the words `I do like tart' and produce the desired effect of talking with your mouth full.

It is not a light or trivial matter. There are questions, seemingly accidental, that divide Society by a spiritual chasm far more real than the artificial frontiers of the factions. The armies of Piemen and Tarters confront each other across an abyss. The passionate consumers of Pie are divided from the frigid triflers with Tart by something far more essential than ever divided Whigs from Tories or Liberals from Conservatives. We could almost guess a man's religion, or at least the religion towards which he tends, by his ignorant instincts on this solemn and profound matter. It is not only that he who says Pie, and disdains to say Tart, is preserving the language of Shakespeare and the legend of the English and pure religion, breathing household laws. There are in it yet more subtleties of doctrine. He who says `Pie' is he who, being assured that a bodily thing is lawful is not ashamed merely because it is bodily; but finds far more of Christian humility in the frank confession of the body. But he, who shrinks from the old gross word, feeling in it a suggestion of greed or ignominy, is of the tribe that turn into Theosophists and Esoteric Buddhists and end as mere Manichees and haters of the creative word. They, who would insinuate that they are merely toying with a sort of light confectionery, when confronted with the solid duty of eating pie, are of the sort who complains of the coarseness of the Marriage Service or the clamour of church bells or the habit of singing carols at Christmas. We do not mean to blame those who, being in invincible ignorance, happen to say `tart' through habit and the teaching of ill-advised pastors and masters; but when the question is fairly faced, it would be found true that the obstinate and unrepentant are of this order. They are also of the kind that turn pale at a pun; or, what is worse, gravely discuss whether the example of Shakespeare makes it permissible. For the pleasure of annoying them, we utter in a loud voice this protest on behalf of the `Pie' as a symbol of Piety.

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Culture Versus Civilisation

An interesting distinction, which is almost a contradiction, has recently been drawn between Culture and Civilization. Two leading writers of the day, the one a Russian and the other a German, have accepted this difference, even if they use it rather differently. The German, being a freethinker and an agnostic, is, of course, rigidly bound by the iron rivets of the dogmas of materialism. The Russian, being a Greek Orthodox Christian and the relic of a ruined and persecuted Church, is a little more cheerful, and seems to think there is some such thing as human freedom and a chance for human liberty. But both agree, more or less, in a certain theory of the relation between Culture and Civilization; and it is roughly that Civilization is the end of Culture, even in the sense of the death of Culture.

Restating the matter roughly here, for my own purposes, the conception is that Culture is growth; the original sprouting of man's spiritual or artistic nature, as it appears in the native folklore or primitive architecture of a whole people. Civilization is rather the limit or compromise laid upon this by the discovery that there are other peoples or other methods of production. In following Culture, a man develops his arts; that is to say, his tastes. Consequently, true Culture, like true Charity, begins at home. With Civilization there appears something that is not only purely public, but a little homeless. Culture is growing such flowering trees as you prefer in your own front garden, and planting them where you like. Civilization is having a lawsuit with the next-door neighbour about whether your trees overshadow his garden, or calling in the policeman to throw him out if he becomes violent upon the question.

It is possible to recognise a certain rough truth in this distinction, without committing oneself to the fatalistic and rather pessimistic view which Spengler takes of his geological epochs with their human fossils. It is enough to say that we are not fossils; and that Isaiah and Pythagoras and Augustine are not fossils. Spengler tends to treat the coming of a complete Civilization as the coming of an Ice Age, freezing all human life as the ice freezes all animal life. Berdyaev, the Russian, is, as I have said, rather more free and easy, but especially more free. It is not my purpose here, however, to adjudicate on the theory or on the two theorists. I am only concerned with one particular angle or aspect of it, which affects the Civilization in which most of my countrymen actually have to live--the Civilization of London and the big industrial towns-- if you can call it a Civilization.

Here, for instance, is a doubt that troubles me. If there was one thing which we did suppose was done for us by Civilization, it was to make us civil. The very word politeness is really the Greek for civilization, just as the very word civilization is really the Latin for politeness. It is a pleasing thought that the word `policeman' and the word 'politeness' not only have the same meaning, but are almost the same word. But the Romans inheriting from the Greeks had no sooner established the idea of what is civic, or belonging to a citizen, than there became somewhat vaguely attached to it the idea of civility. Up to a point, Civilization, or even public life, probably does act in this way. Men begin to feel a new and strange restraint, making them feel a little shy and bashful about knocking off the hats or pulling the noses of total strangers to whom they have not been introduced. A new delicacy, a new sense of what is tactful and fitting, leads them to beat, bash and kick only their nearest and dearest and their most intimate friends. But there is another side to the story, and it is becoming rather a tragic story, in the light of that thesis about Civilization as the fossilization and final end of the truly creative life of a culture. I think we have reason for grave criticism and apprehension when there is a tendency for civic and public life to become more coarse and brutal than private and educational life. It is a dark and sinister omen when men begin to be ruder to strangers than they are to friends.

After all, the home, insofar as any ruins of it are left standing, is still the school of good manners. Many make very great efforts, and most make some sort of effort, to train their children at least in some standard of social behaviour. Little trivial gestures of impatience in which you or I may have indulged--the soup-tureen hurled across the table, the carving-knife brandished with motions mistaken by the superficial for those prefatory to murder--do not alter the fact that, even in the same household, babies are still instructed with some care about spreading the jam or spilling the milk. The old traditions of behaviour, so far as they still exist, are still largely traditions of a household; they concern opening the door to a lady or passing the mustard to a guest. Almost all that remains of the forms of courtesy are the forms of hospitality. Whether you call it behaving like a gentleman or behaving like a snob, it is still inside a human house that the man generally tries to live up to his highest standards, and to perform what are, in fact, the ancient rites and ceremonies of his Culture.

But in public things have altered a good deal. There you have the sharp test and truth; that the man is generally not living up to the highest standards, even of his own family; but often abandoning them in despair, owing to the crush and crowding of modern street life. The man who would bow somebody else into a drawing room is content himself with barging into a tram. The man who would make room for his guest in a tiny villa will leave no room at all for his fellow-citizen in a great big Tube train. In other words, public life, the life that the Greeks called polite, the life that the Romans called civil, has become a great deal more barbarous than the solitary life or the life of the tribe.

We might tolerate the notion that civilization makes our culture more cold or official. But we cannot easily tolerate the notion that our civilization makes us more barbaric. Culture, in the connotation used by the writers I mention, is something interior and imaginative and almost sacred, which, when it takes form, we recognise as the characteristic work of a particular people; as we recognise certain art as the characteristic work of a certain artist. It is a growth of the English culture, for instance, that the poorest cottagers love to have a mass of flowers in their front gardens. It is even a growth of English culture, in a way, that English cottages and villages have a certain peculiar beauty, and are picturesque even when they are inconvenient. It would be with a certain sorrow, whatever our opinions, that we should yield to a more orderly civilization, which should make the village streets straight, or even the village buildings stately. But it does not do anything of the kind. Our civilization today does not make anything straight or anything stately. The romantic rubbish-heap of cottages and cottage gardens would not be replaced by ordered avenues or classical colonnades. They would be replaced by a patchwork of hoardings and a litter of bungalows. That is one aspect of the doom of civilization, over which these literary men lament. Civilization makes us more uncivil--like the man in the Tube.

The Winter Feast

These modern men, who are less anxious to be men than to be moderns, have one little habit that has not been spotted as it should be. They are very fond of first painting the lily, and then proving from the painted surface that it was always a paper flower. Nothing delights these intelligent little creatures more than gilding refined gold, and then scraping it furiously, on the plea of taking the gilt off the gingerbread. I mean that they will first take a natural thing, then daub it and disguise it and deface it with artificial things, and then complain that it is an unnatural thing and throw it away. At the beginning, such alteration must be accepted as an improvement. By the end, each improvement is used to show that the thing should be not so much altered as abolished.

Thus the seed of Democracy, the assembly of the village or the tribe, is as old as the world, and may perhaps go back to the similar assemblies of rooks or wolves. It still exists in many peasant communities, especially in the mountains, and when it is reasonably civilised, that is humanised, and above all when it is Christian, it is still about as just and decent and dignified a government as any, in a world whose governments are hardly its happiest products. Now we men of the modern and Western world took this ancient thing, and proceeded to improve it. We improved democracy by demagogy, that is by professional politicians; we improved election by electioneering, that is by organised lying; we improved announcement by advertisement; that is, we substituted for the horn blown to assemble men round the village tree the megaphone through which a statesman could speak like a salesman; facilitating every exchange in which the voters could sell their votes or the statesmen could sell his soul. We have been positively proud of it as a technical dexterity; that we could turn an act of representation into an art of misrepresentation. And then, when the whole idea has been improved out of recognition in this cynical fashion, we generally find that the cynics have become sceptics; and sceptics about the democratic idea itself. These men, with their wonderful progressive improvements, have themselves turned popular government into unpopular government. But since they also have probably become rather unpopular, they will now often turn round with a fine fastidious aristocratic pride, and express their contempt for popular opinion.

The same sort of ironic injustice is applied to any old popular festival like Christmas. Moving step by step, in the majestic march of Progress, we have first vulgarised Christmas and then denounced it as vulgar. Christmas has become too commercial; so many of these thinkers would destroy the Christmas that has been spoiled, and preserve the commercialism that has spoiled it. They will think me but a belated and bemused being, if I here am found roaming or drifting backwards to consider what Christmas is when it is defined, or what it was before it was spoiled. And it is not surprising that the same modern gentlemen, who have performed this peculiar feat of first pelting a thing with mud and then complaining that it is muddy, have also made a similar muddle about the actual history of the thing which they bury with insults, because they have killed it with improvements.

Thus, the first thing that such people will probably tell you today is that Christmas is really a Pagan festival; because many traditional features of it were taken from Pagans. What they do not seem to see is that, in so far as this is in any sense true, it only proves that the ancient Pagans were much more sensible than the modern Pagans. There are many psychological truths about such a human habit, which are hidden from those who talk day and night about psychology; but who do not really care about any psychology except what they call the psychology of salesmanship. The old Pagans knew that such a ritual must be old, that it must be religious, that it must be concerned fundamentally with simple elements like wood or water or fire, but that it must also be, in a queer way of its own, revolutionary: exalting the humble or putting down the mighty from their seat. That was expressed in a hundred ways, both among heathens and Christians. The Saturnalia was made for a society of slaves; but it gave one wild holiday to those slaves. The medieval Christmas had to exist in a feudal society; but all its carols and legends told again and again a story in which angels spoke to shepherds and a devil inspired a king. An ancient revolt is enshrined in an ancient ritual. Now the reason why Christianity found it quite easy to absorb these Pagan customs is that they were in this way almost Christian customs. The man who does not see that the Saturnalia was almost Christian is a man who has never read the Magnificat.

It is thoroughly bad history to suppose that it was the Paganism that absorbed the Christianity; when there are a thousand things to show that it was the Christianity that absorbed the Paganism. For instance, anything that the Early Church really regarded as horrible among the heathens did completely disappear. The butchery of human beings in amphitheatres, which had been the huge uproarious popular sport of all the vast populace of antiquity, completely disappeared. Doubtless, it disappeared partly because Christian martyrs had suffered there; partly because St Telemachus, the heroic hermit, had hurled himself into the arena to cry aloud to God and the human conscience, against human blood being poured out in festivity like wine. But anyhow, and for whatever reason, it did disappear. If various old Pagan popular customs, like the Winter Feast, did not disappear, it was quite certainly because they did not so insult the innocence and indignation of Christianity in its youth. When Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, that religion could have suppressed any heathen thing it really wanted to suppress. The interesting point to note is how very few heathen things it really did want to suppress. There is, for instance, the whole great glorious mass of the Pagan literature, in which there are hardly ten pages without something that a Christian might be excused for wanting to suppress. The mere fact that that mass of culture has come down to us at all, is to me much more remarkable than a few random examples of alleged suppression. For instance, the first generations of the saints might surely be excused for drawing the line at Sappho if she did really preach Sapphism. But in fact, there is hardly a rag of historical evidence either that she did preach it or that they did suppress her. To anybody with a general view of history, the really remarkable and interesting thing is the toleration of the last Pagans by the first Christians. The Church certainly never swept away all record of the ancient gods as Mahomet swept away the ancient idols. It never merely burned books as the Iconoclasts destroyed statues. The attitude of Augustine towards Plato, as of Aquinas towards Aristotle, is really much more respectful and understanding than the attitude of Hobbes or Hume towards Aquinas. In short, Christians have always committed countless crimes; but these Christians did not commit this one crime. They were not unhistorical. Christianity failed in practice in many ways; but this was one thing it did not fail to do; to preserve continuity. The Christians were often criminals; but they were not Vandals. Platonists like St Augustine, living in besieged cities, knew too much about Vandals.

It is, therefore, the greatest glory of the Christian tradition that it has incorporated so many Pagan traditions. But it is most glorious of all, to my mind, when they are popular traditions. And the best and most obvious example is the way in which Christianity did incorporate, in so far as it did incorporate, the old human and heathen conception of the Winter Feast. There are, indeed, two profound and mysterious truths to be balanced here. The first is that what was then heathen was still human; that is, it was both mystical and material; it expressed itself in sacred substances and sacramental acts; it understood the mystery of trees and waters and the holy flame. And the other, which will be a much more tactless and irritating assertion, is that while a thing is heathen it is not yet completely human. But the point here is that the Pagan element in Christmas came quite natural to Christians, because it was not in fact very far from Christianity.

Take, for example, the whole fundamental idea of a Winter Feast. There is a perfectly natural parallel between a religion that defies the world and a ritual that defies the weather. Heathenism in the sense of hedonism, the concentration of the mind on pure pleasure as such, would chiefly concentrate on the conception of a Summer Feast. But in winter even a rich man receives some faint hint of the problem of a poor man; he may avoid being hungry, but he cannot always avoid being cold. To choose that moment of common freezing for the assertion of common fraternity is, in its own intrinsic nature, a foreshadowing of what we call the Christian idea. It involves the suggestion that joy comes from within and not from without. It involves the suggestion that peril and the potentiality of pain are themselves a ground of gratitude and rejoicing. It involves the suggestion that even when we are merely Pagans we are not merely Pantheists. We are not merely Nature-worshippers; because Man smiles when Nature frowns. It has always involved, under varying limitations in varying societies, the idea of hospitality; especially hospitality to the stranger and generally to the poor. Of course, there are perfectly natural reasons for wanting to drink wine or warm ourselves at the fire in winter; but that is not an answer, except to those who already have the ill-informed prejudice that Christianity must be opposed to things merely because they are natural. The point is in making a point of it; the special interest is in the special occasion; in the fact that during the Winter Feast, whether Pagan or Christian, there always was, in some degree, the idea of extending the enjoyment to others; of passing round the wine or seating the wanderer by the hearth. It is no controversial point against the Christians that they felt they could take up and continue such traditions among the Pagans; it only shows that the Christians knew a Christian thing when they saw it.

It may seem a gloomy sentiment for the festive season; but the plain truth is that the old original Christians would have more reasons to quarrel with the new Christian Christmas than they had to quarrel with the old Pagan Christmas. In the congested commerce of our time, it has come to stand rather for goods being sold than for gifts being given. But if any revolutionary critic complains of it on this score, he must complain of his own revolutionary criticism; or at least of the previous revolutionary critics. I remember that Mr Bernard Shaw, the chief spokesman of the Socialism of the later nineteenth century, declared that Christmas is now only kept up for the sake of the tradesmen. I think he would find it hard to prove that every little boy or girl has hung up a stocking, or slept with one eye open on Christmas Eve, solely because they calculated that Santa Claus going his round would be Good for Trade. But if the complaint contains any truth, it is not to the disadvantage of the old tradition; but rather to the disadvantage of the recent revolutions. It is strangely forgotten that it was radicals and reformers who set up the Capitalism they now desire to pull down. It was done, if not by Socialists, certainly by revolutionists; in the sense of extreme pioneers of progress. For instance, it was precisely the progressive prophet of new things who brought Christmas, and everything else, out of the country into the town. It was he who told the young man that the streets of London were paved with gold; and that in great cities like Chicago and Philadelphia there was work for all. It was he who said that life on the farm was not life but death; that the rustics were all turnips and that their creeds were all turnip ghosts. Hence it was he who was responsible for making the old Christmas mysteries and mummeries relatively unmeaning; by taking them away from the fields where they grew to the markets where they could only be bought and sold. He took away the Yule Log from the place where it had really been part of a tree, to the place where it was only a lump of dead wood; he took away the mistletoe from where it was really gathered from the oak, to the store where it was only stacked like dead sticks; he would have brought in the Boar's Head (supposing that he dealt at all in that delicacy) under conditions that made it highly improbable that he had himself slain the boar with a boar-spear in the forest, in the old heroic style of hunting, when men slew beasts stronger than themselves. All this genuine and even generous savour in the old Christmas symbols did undoubtedly suffer by being half-digested by the industrial town; but it was the same sort of reformer who built the town. True, he then called himself an Individualist and not a Socialist; and by this time he probably calls himself something else. But under all names, he is always exactly what the old Pagans and Christians would have called a profane person. He does not understand Christmas; he does not even understand the Saturnalia. Mr Scrooge hated Christmas because he was a Utilitarian; that is, he thought that economics only meant being economical. Mr Gradgrind of the Manchester School began by hating Christmas; but his partner Mr Bounderby soon perceived that he could make money by selling turkeys and toys, as well as coal or cotton. But these men in their day were all Reformers; they all called themselves Radicals. Perhaps it is time we ceased to concentrate on the Reform and went back again to the Form.

This real history of Christmas is very relevant to the real crisis of Christendom. We live in a terrible time of war and rumour of war; with a barbaric danger of the real reaction, that goes back not to the old form but to the old formlessness. International idealism in its effort to hold the world together, in a peace that can resist wars and revolutions, is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply that it does not go deep enough. Christianity could draw life out of the depths of Paganism; but mere Modernism cannot draw on the depths of either. Charity is too much of a manufactured article; and too little of a natural product. The League of Nations is too new to be natural. The modern materialistic humanitarianism is too young to be vigorous. If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder, we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod. If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the hunger of a human being, a pain as positive as toothache; and not as the fall in wages or the failure of imports, or even the lowering of the economic standard of living. We must say first of the beggar, not that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has nowhere to lay his head. We must say first of the human family, not that there are no jobs for them in the factory, but that there is no room for them in the inn. That is, we must talk of the human family in language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics used to talk of the Holy Family. We must learn again to use the naked words that describe a natural thing; and dispense for a moment with all those sociological polysyllables, with which an artificial society has learned to talk of it as an artificial thing. Then we shall draw on the driving force of many thousand years; and call up a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.

They Tell a Story

The statement that the work of the Old Masters can be effective for popular education is not such a platitude as it will at first appear. It is both more disputable and more true than it seems. For the truth is that the great art of the past can be used for this purpose where a great many other methods now generally adapted are quite clumsy and futile. Something of this utility is shared by the plays of Shakespeare; and by no other agency I know except the paintings of such men as Titian and Leonardo.

To explain this peculiar kind of public value one must understand one of the deepest differences, and perhaps diseases, of our time. It was the mark of the art of the past, especially the art of the Renaissance, that the great man was a man. He was an extraordinary man, but only in the sense of being an ordinary man with something extra. Shakespeare or Rubens went with the plain man as far as the plain man went; they ate and drank, and desired and died as he did. That is what people mean when they say that these Gods had feet of clay; their giant boots were heavy with the mire of the earth. That is what people mean when they say that Shakespeare was often coarse; that is what people mean when they say that he was often dull. They mean that a great poet of the elder kind had spaces which were idle and absent-minded; that his sub-consciousness often guided him; that he sprawled; that he was not `artistic'. It is not only true that Homer sometimes nodded; but nodding was part of the very greatness of Homer. His sleepy nod shakes the stars like the nod of his own Jupiter.

The old artists, then, were plain and popular in the more fundamental or (if you will) lower parts of their personality. But the typical modern artist sets out to be a separate and fantastic sort of creature, who feeds and feels in a strange manner of his own. Compare Velazquez with Whistler; compare Shakespeare with Shaw; compare even Addison with Stevenson. Whistler professed to be a butterfly, feasting on strange flowers and following incalculable flights; Stevenson was called by many of his friends an elf; and though this did not mean that he was inhumane, it did mean that he was in a manner disembodied. Bernard Shaw is certainly a fairy: and an Irish fairy, which is worse. Shakespeare, like the Shepherd in Iolanthe, was only a fairy down to the waist. He would undoubtedly, to quote the same work of art, have left his legs kicking behind if he had tried to get through the keyhole.

Now this distinction between two conceptions of genius, the Something more and the Something different, very deeply influences the effect of painting upon the public. The great painters had all the things which we call weaknesses in the great poets; they constantly pot-boiled, they occasionally pandered. They often seemed to care little for glory, and sometimes not quite enough for honour; they threw things off, and as Ruskin truly said, gave their great frescoes 'to be blasted by the sea wind, or wasted by the worm'. But if they had the everyday vices, they had the everyday virtues also; and whether they were good men or no, their idea of a good man was the same as everybody else's. If they too seldom attempted to reform their conduct, they never attempted to reform their conscience. The consequence is that they preserved a mass of primitive intuitions, appetites, and unconscious instincts, which are the same as those of the common people even in our corrupt modern cities; and which in our corrupt modern cities have now a great part to play.

For without raising, even in parentheses, the old argument of Swift's and Temple's time about the relative merits of Ancients and Moderns, we may be quite certain that for democratic purposes the ancients are better. A few scratches of grey and green on a piece of brown paper may really be as good in its own way as a `still life' by a Flemish painter or a Holy Family by an Italian painter. But it must be perfectly obvious to anybody that the two latter are more likely to make a plain man understand what painting means. We talk somewhat lightly about 'schools' of art. Whether or no the art of Raphael be better as an art it is certainly better as a school. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Post-post-Impressionism and the rest, are developments which may be credited or criticised according to every man's aesthetic philosophy. It may be the end of art, in the sense of the object of art. It may be the end of art in the sense of the abolition of art. But anyhow it is not the beginning of art; it is not the initiation, the origin, the introductory motive. What art is to begin with, what it obviously is, what is the reason that anyone ever made it, that people can learn today from the Old Masters. And they can learn it from nobody else.

A hundred cases could be taken, but take the case of a common phrase: a common sneer with the art critics. I mean the phrase `a picture that tells a story'. There could not be a sharper instance of the difference between the old hero who was man and more than man and the new hero who is not man at all. A picture by Leonardo da Vinci tells a story. A picture by Paul Veronese tells a story. A picture by Titian or Tintoretto tells a story. The first and most important question is, what story? Most medieval and Renaissance pictures tell the story; the story on which all our European civilisation is founded, and is founded as finally if the thing is a fairy tale or if the thing is a truth. The objection to pictures which `tell a story' only began in our time, for the very simple reason that the story was a dull story. I will not discuss here whether the great story of God made Man has been destroyed. I will confine myself to saying that it has certainly not been replaced.

There are other qualities in which the Old Masters are demagogues as well as demi-gods. I mean there are other elements in which they eternally appeal to a popular instinct which was in them and in their patrons and in their populace. I should select the two examples of clarity and solidity. In Michelangelo's `Vision of Judgment' a real man appears in the real skies. The man is solid. The skies are lucid. To the cultured it may appear incredible; but it will be much more credible to mankind, that universal church of which culture is a small and doubtful sect. To mankind, to men as they ordinarily are, a complete man appearing in a clear sky, will not be incredible. It will be much more credible than an impressionist portrait of a real person or a post-impressionist picture of a real place.

I should therefore urge the re-publication of old and good pictures as a real part of that grossly neglected thing--public education. Our historians lie much more than our journalists; our fashionable conceptions of the past change with every fashion; and like most fashions, are fantastic and hideous. But the old colours and the old canvases do not lie; they were really achieved in the ages which we parody or pervert; and the squareness of their drawing, the brightness of their colours, the substantial sincerity of their subject, will still tell us something of the fathers we have forgotten. I do not go so far as to say we have relapsed into barbarism. But I do say that we can just now learn best from picture writing.