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Statues

Monuments last for ever. Therefore the mistakes of monuments last forever. That is what the modern world does not understand about the ancient dignity of marble or of stone. If I make a mistake in writing an article, I can cross it out. But if I make a mistake in carving a colossal figure of Rameses the Seventh (if there was a Rameses the Seventh) there is a tendency for that mistake to remain, and become unalterable; you cannot cross it out. If in carving Rameses you have given that slight curl to the nostril which suggests that his cynicism was cruel (as his enemies unreasonably maintained) rather than kindly (as those who knew him best are quite prepared to assert emphatically), in that case it is to be feared that your mistake about Rameses will remain, and be perpetuated for ever in that face of marble. If you have done him any injustice, you have done him an eternal injustice. If you have slandered him at all, you have slandered him forever.

Of course there is the method of smashing every statue you see. Personally I am in favour of it. I agree with the ancient Jews that the graven image has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind. That is, it has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind if mankind has no religion; and I am speaking of the modern world. Moreover, the ordinary statue has a curious power of falsifying the ordinary person. There was a great deal to be said for the old eighteenth century method of making monumental statues of great men. The eighteenth century method of making a statue of a great man was quite simple. You simply made the statue of the great man as unlike the great man as possible; you then gave him bare shoulders and a Roman toga, and you called it the classical style, which perhaps it was. There is something to be said for this classical style. There is also something to be said for the modern realistic style of Monsieur Rodin, in which you leave out a man's leg or arm at random, to indicate that you have forgotten it in the frenzy of your genius. Both these styles have real ideas behind them; but I think there was an unfortunate period between them, especially in England, and that this period gave rise to the general disposition to smash statues which exists in all the healthy-minded English. I wonder if all the statues were as bad at the time when the army of Oliver Cromwell had finally defeated the army of Charles I. If they were as bad it would go a long way to explain the iconoclasm of the Puritans. We feel reasonably angry with them because they smashed to pieces many beautiful and celebrated images. Still, we never saw the images.

Perhaps the most pathetic instance of this English sculpture applied to the wrong purpose can be found in the five or six statues which stand in the square opposite the Houses of Parliament. The personality of the politician is there not expressed even in the smallest degree. Punch's caricatures of Palmerston make him more dignified than his statue makes him. Punch, which hated Disraeli, represented him as a more real and admirable creature than the shapeless one before whom bunches of primroses are offered on Primrose Day. If the spirit of these statesmen could return they would prefer the fleeting caricatures of the comic papers to these everlasting caricatures in stone. They would prefer the thing drawn in ill-nature by their enemies to this thing conceived in adoration by their friends. And yet the definition of the deficiency is not quite easy to state. The figures are reasonably well designed; reasonably well dressed. There are no mistakes in costume or in anatomy that the eye of a layman can detect or denounce. Lord Palmerston wears a frock-coat; I suppose he did wear a frock-coat. He holds out his hand; I suppose that from time to time in the course of his animated and interesting career he did sometimes hold out his hand. He has whiskers; I presume he had whiskers. Sometimes, in a dark dream of ecstasy, I venture to hope not such whiskers; still I never saw him, and it may be so. There is nothing essentially unreasonable or unlikely about any part of his appearance or the appearance of the other stone statesmen who share with him that sacred and most impressive place. And yet when one thinks what a place it is, one suddenly sees that all those figures are hopelessly and incurably comic. If there is any England, this is the high historic Senate of England. If there is any England, there runs the sacred English river. And when we think of England as anything everlasting, even when we think of England as anything moderately lasting, those Victorian stone figures become suddenly like silly dolls. There must be some reason for this. And I think the reason is exactly that the men who put up those statues did not really feel as if they were putting up anything permanent at all; as if there was nothing in Palmerston (or at least, in their view of Palmerston), as if there was nothing in Beaconsfield (or at least, in their admiration of Beaconsfield), that suggested any line that was eternal, any grouping or massing that seemed able to endure the open day. For this is the real and final test of a statue. Its test is in two forms of trial. First, it must be able to endure publicity. Second, it must be able to endure solitude. One must be able to think of it as abandoned. The epic of war is for the feast of great princes; the old wives' tale is for the circle of gossips and rustics; the picture is for the inhabited room; the miniature is for the locket. Even the carved church is mostly conceived for a common need, and even a common comfort. But the stone statue is something that one can leave alone under the stars.

It would be a strange thing if, after all, those four or five stone figures expressed all that has been wrong with England for so long a time. It would be strange if the bad carving of Lord Palmerston's frock-coat were the only thing that really expressed what is wrong with the Party system. Yet I fancy that it is exactly there or thereabout that the truth lies. We admire our Party leaders. We do not believe in them. We praise them for making so much of our case, as if all the time it were really a bad case. They are all advocates and they were better in the eighteenth century, when they all wore wigs. You cannot make an enduring statue of an advocate, for you cannot make a statue unless you have an idea; and the essence of an advocate is that he has any ideas or all ideas. Exactly what men admired in Palmerston is exactly what men cannot carve in stone; his easy variety, his quickness to leap, which seemed almost like omnipresence. `What a faculty that fellow has,' said Macaulay admiringly, `for falling on his feet!' It is a splendid capacity, doubtless, to fall on one's feet; but if one is a statue it is dangerous to fall on anything else.

What people admired in Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, was simply his jumpiness. But jumpiness cannot be expressed in stone. I am aware that Monsieur Rodin and others have brought the eccentricity of statuary to a high point; but even they have not yet succeeded in making a statue of a man who has jumped clean off the ground. It was the whole point of Beaconsfield that he jumped clean off the ground. Seriously speaking, I am not sure that he had ever been on the ground; hence he was a subject inappropriate for statuary, and his statue in front of the Houses of Parliament is simply a great gown with a goatish face on top of it. But indeed the sculptors are scarcely to be blamed if they showed inadequate results, for their art can only express eternal ideas, and they were called upon to deal with personalities whose whole boast was that no ideas could be eternal. What could the best sculptors do when they were told to make characteristic statues of six acrobats?

A Theory of Tyrants

I have come to be convinced of late of a certain theory of the nature of tyranny. It may be right or wrong, but I think it is at least worthy of thought in connection with a highly interesting matter. Broadly speaking, the common theory of tyranny has been this: That men have groaned under some system for centuries, and have at last rebelled against it. But I think that men have actually done quite otherwise; they have rebelled against the system against which they have not groaned. But the matter is so mixed and also so acute that I may be permitted to state it in a more explanatory manner.

Let us take, for the sake of argument, the two risings against tyranny most commonly considered in current literature-- the English rebellion of the early seventeenth century and the French Revolution. According to the common theory, Charles I should have been the heir of at least twenty intolerable despots. The truth is that he was the heir of one tolerable despot (who had not quite effected despotism), and beyond that everything was different. Queen Elizabeth was not tolerable, and she was not tolerated. In so far as she was endured she was adored. Cavaliers and Puritans alike looked back to her reign (most mistakenly, doubtless, but most certainly) as a midsummer of popular monarchy.

In short the English Puritans did not rebel against an old system; whatever else it was it was not old. Even if Charles I had been a much worse king than he was there would not have been enough time for him to have created a complete and cruel tradition against the tradition of Elizabeth. A few years before Charles' head was cut off, most Englishmen would have died to keep Elizabeth's on. If you turn to the case of the French Monarchy before the French Revolution you will find exactly the same thing. A very short time before the Revolution the French Monarchy was the generally accepted French symbol. The King before Louis the Guillotined was Louis the Well Beloved. The Monarchy (in France as in England) became the most unpopular thing very soon after it had been the most popular thing. There was no weakness, there was no long decline: the defeat of the thing followed swiftly on its first victory. Charles I was not the last of the English despots. He was one of the first of the English despots-- only there happened to have been no more of them. Encouraged by the arrogance and popularity of Elizabeth, who had stood for patriotism and Protestantism and the defiance of Spain, Charles tried to work with Elizabethan England and found that Elizabethan England was not there. It was not too old to last, it was too new to last. Louis XVI was not the last of a line of unpopular kings. On the contrary, he was the first of a line of popular kings to be unpopular.

I can only explain all this by my private theory of tyrants; which is this. Men do not rebel against the old; rather they rebel against the new. They turn upon something when they find that it has them in a trap. They do not revolt against something that has been unpopular. They revolt (and very rightly) against something that has been popular. They hated Charles I because they had loved Elizabeth. They killed Louis XVI because they had been killed for Louis XIV. In fact, this is probably what is meant by that seemingly meaningless phrase, the fickleness of the mob. It probably means that the mob is quicker than other people in discovering that man has walked into a man-trap. England went mad with joy for the English Monarchy, because the Armada had not conquered England. And then England suddenly went mad with rage because it discovered that (during that exciting interlude) the English Monarchy had conquered England. We had escaped the snare of Philip; we walked into the snare of Elizabeth; we broke out of the snare of Charles I.

This is the essential mark of tyranny: that it is always new. Tyranny always enters by the unguarded gate. The tyrant is always shy and unobtrusive. The tyrant is always a traitor. He has always come there on the pretence that he was protecting something which people really wanted protected--religion, or public justice, or patriotic glory. Men staring at the Armada; did not watch the King; so they strengthened the King. Later when they watched the King they unconsciously strengthened the aristocracy. Again, when they attacked the aristocracy, they did not watch the big merchants who were attacking it-- and who wanted watching. All tyrannies are new tyrannies. There are no such things really as old tyrannies; there are hardly any such things as old superstitions.

There is one moral to these evident facts of history. When you look for tyrants, do not look for them among the obvious types that have oppressed men in the past--the king, the priest, or the soldier. If you do, you are merely looking at the Spanish Armada while England is being turned into a despotism behind your back. Monarchy was once a popular organ; yet it was turned against the people. Remember that newspapers are popular organs that may be turned against the people. Whatever the new tyrant is, he will not wear the exact uniform of the old tyrant.

An Anecdote of Persecution

There are many tales in Joinville's reminiscences of St Louis which would be worth retelling; I will, however, be reasonable, and retell only one of them. I will tell it with strict reference to the record; I will only expand it in so far as obvious inference and historical circumstances are clear in the case; whenever I am ornamenting it I will say so, and anybody can buy the book and bowl me out. But it is a tale which seems to me to tell in the most vivid and everyday style how it is in practice that persecution arises. It is common talk in these days that we ought to be imaginative, if only in order to be charitable. If a man commits forgery we must try to understand his temptations and his original trend. But no such mercy is generally shown to the enthusiast for ideas. The sins of the intolerant are seldom considered with any intellectual tolerance. It seems that we are to find excuses for the crimes of good men.

Wherever we have read history we have noticed one class of statements or allegations. I mean simply incredible allegations; and statements that cannot be believed. For instance, it cannot be believed (at least, I cannot believe it) that the French Jacobins who ran the Terror were diseased and hysterical doctrinaires. They fought all Europe and beat it; the thing is impossible. Now exactly in this sense it is impossible to believe the ordinary modern version of the position of the Jew in the Middle Ages. Whatever else the Jew was, he was important. If he had really lived like Isaac in Ivanhoe he could not have been important; he could not have been at all. A man from whom anybody could steal money would not have any money to steal. A man utterly outlawed must perish. Now I will tell a little tale out of Joinville. The Monastery of Our Lady at Cluny was prosperous and charitable; when the snow was on the ground in winter it showed a maze of footprints of the poor folk who came to its doors. Most of these, of course, were not only poor but of plain rank; but it sometimes happened that a man of good estate was so impoverished as to receive such aid. Among the many figures familiar at the door was one especially who crawled to it more slowly than the others, for he was crippled and hung upon a crutch. He was an old knight with white hair, quite disabled, and entirely penniless; but his eyes (I think) were fierce and restless, as are the eyes of all those. whose activity has been shifted from the body to the mind. His clothes were dropping off his back; he was a perfect gentleman, and very much of a nuisance.

Now it happened that he came to the Monastery on a day that was somewhat solemnly set apart for one of those intellectual tournaments which the men of the Middle Ages loved as much as bodily tournaments. The Abbot was presumably something of a philosopher as well as a philanthropist, and he was liberal in his mental interests as well as liberal with his corn. In the exact words of Joinville's Chronicle, `There was a great disputation between clergy and Jews at the Monastery of Cluny.' That single sentence knocks flat for ever the whole picture and conception of the medieval Jew which we all have from Scott's romances or from general report. Ignorant fools who insult a strange sect merely because it is strange, do not arrange public debates to give it a chance of explaining itself. People bent on rooting out a tribe ruthlessly like rats or weeds do not invite the heads of the tribe to make speeches about themselves on a platform. The truth is, of course, that the medievals, like all other sane human beings, started with a preference for reasonable argument and peaceable settlement. It is always afterwards, if at all, that these excellent intentions break down. And they did, unfortunately, break down in the philanthropic and philosophical Monastery of Cluny; as you shall hear.

I think we can call up some rude and dim conception of the scene. The architecture would still be Norman with the low, almost sullen arch and short, almost brutal columns; for though no date is given to the story, the Gothic can hardly have been greatly spread. Such laymen as were present would be people of all conditions; and while there would be more initial ceremony of precedence between these classes, there would be far less practical shyness or contemptuous shrinking than at the present day. Prominently, and probably in a row, would sit the Christian theologians, eager with the eagerness of all men who live much with their own sex in schools and clubs and universities, for an unending war of words. Like all men who have a complete theory of things, they would be fretting and on fire with the chance of expounding it, many of them stirring and stamping. For men who have much to say are more nervous than men who have nothing to say.

Over against them, probably calmer, probably more prosperous in appearance, certainly more observant of all that was going on, would sit the great Rabbis of the mysterious race. In their hands they would hold parchments undecipherable to all the children of the West; but their very faces would be more undecipherable parchments. Their smiles would seem carved like hieroglyphics. Into that place of plain arches and Latin logicians with shaven heads they brought the memory of things cloudy and monstrous, as of many-headed cherubim or winged bulls walking enormous in the desert. For though both theologies were by this time twisted and elaborate, each worked back like a tangled tree to its original root. All the arabesque of Rabbinical riddle and commentary referred eventually to the ultimate Jewish idea; the idea of the awful distance between man and God. All the roaring and grinding syllogisms of the Schoolmen were tools and symbols of the awful union of God and man. The Jewish angel had ten eyes or twelve wings to express the idea that if ever we saw the beauty and wisdom of God it would seem to us outrageous or frightful. The Christian angel often had two wings only, in addition to eyes and two arms; to show that human beauty and dignity were divine realities which would survive and break the doors of death. Two sublime creeds were in collision; the creed that flesh is grass, and the creed that flesh was God. And at the moment, before any of the philosophers could move, the old man of the crutch stood up and asked to speak.

Joinville in his Chronicle gently says that this was received `with doubt'. Human life is so startlingly the same in all ages that one can see the scene as clearly as if it were a modern meeting when some peppery and impractical Colonel insists on addressing the meeting. One can imagine the whispers between the Abbot and his chief supporters. `If he speaks there will be a row,' and the unanswerable answer, `If we stop him there will be a worse row'. The assembled philosophers, who had been about to pose the Rabbis with the awful rationalism of medieval argument, `Why do you believe in God if He is not manifest?' or `Could anyone believe in Heaven except through revelation?' stood for a moment aside. The old cripple said, `At least you admit that Our Lady was the Mother of God.'

The Rabbi who was addressed smiled, perhaps, that rich smile which some find repulsive even when it is benevolent, and said that he did not admit this. The old man said steadily, `Then if you do not love Our Lady you were very silly to come into her house.' He plucked the crutch from under his arm, and whirling it suddenly aloft, caught the Jew a stunning crack behind the ear, bringing him to the ground. Instantly, of course, there was a scuffle, and the Jews were driven from the place. The Abbot rushed up to the old Knight and told him in no measured terms that he had made a horrible fool of himself. The old gentleman, still panting and blowing, no doubt from his exertion, told the Abbot that he thought him the greater fool of the two. Thus unfortunately ended the great experiment of religious inquiry in the Monastery of Cluny. I leave it to anyone to say whether it is not as human a tale as any that might have happened in Surbiton during the War.

The Return of Pageantry

The Puritans, in their hours of pride, seem actually to claim that our nation is fundamentally Puritan, was made by the Puritan spirit. They put Cromwell in the place of Alfred; they put him not only at the head of English patriotism, but at the beginning of English history. They make old England a sort of Puritan colony like New England. All this is, of course, a ludicrous delusion. The first facts or names that jump to the mind will remind any Englishman that his country had a splendid national literature and a very unmistakable type of national life before the hat of a single Puritan had been seen and hooted in England. Chaucer is even more English than Bunyan; Shakespeare is certainly more English than Milton. The Tabard and the Mermaid, Lady Godiva and St George, Robin Goodfellow and Robin Hood, belong to a national tradition that has not even been touched by Puritanism; yet which is quite different from the tradition of Spain, of Scotland, or of France. Chaucer's Franklin, whose beard was white as a daisy, and in whose house `it snewed meate and drinke', was as certainly an Englishman as he most certainly was not a Puritan.

Puritanism was something put into the Englishman after he had grown to his full national stature. Some hated it as an alien poison; some praised it as a violent medicine. But nobody pretended that it was the natural bread and ale that had built up the countrymen of Colet or Ben Jonson. It might indeed be maintained that in all the three cases of nations thus raided by Puritanism, the Scotch, the English and the Dutch, this religion has been rather a sort of spell or possession than a true change of personality. It might be suggested that in each case a merrier and more medieval nation went alive into that land of bondage and is now coming alive out of it. Thus the Scotch romance and witchery which Scott and Stevenson have brought to life is only the return of a spirit most marked in the old Scottish ballads and chronicles, in the tales of Tamlane in the Forest, and Thomas the Rhymer among the fairies; and in that almost Arthurian romance of the roving court of Robert Bruce, which left, like a gypsy blood for generations, a tradition of wandering Scottish kings. Even in Scotland, I believe, Calvinism has only been an episode. The Scotch are taking off their `blacks' and appearing again in the purple of their ancient poetry. We may yet hear the twang of the last precentor before we really hear the Lay of the Last Minstrel.

Even in the third case of Holland, of which I know far less, something of the same kind could be suggested. Before the coming of the Puritan, the people of the flat country had already shown that talent for a certain detail and domesticity in art which fills so many galleries with their quaint interiors and their convincing still life. It might well be maintained that the same note of half religious realism, of an almost mystical silence and solidity, is being sounded in much of the new literature of the Netherlands. It is marked in Maeterlinck's love of interiors and the unconscious shapes of things; in the way in which he writes of a window standing open or a passage leading to a door. He lives in a dumb fairyland of furniture. Nothing could be more like the almost conventual quietude and neatness of the pre-Reformation art among the Flemings. And nothing certainly could be more unlike the somewhat vulgar yet really demonic energy, the curious mixture of bourgeois smugness and visionary anarchy that marked the mighty days of the Puritan. Nothing could be further from the sensational art and literature of the Protestant extremists, as you may see it in old Bibles or illustrations of Bunyan; an atmosphere at once monstrous and prosaic, mixed of a mild view of this world, and a mad view of the other; the earth an endless Clapham and the sky a permanent apocalypse. It left on the mind a confused sense that angels had whiskers and saints had top hats; and certainly the dull energy in it was at the opposite extreme from the spirit of a small room either described by Maeterlinck or painted by Memlinc.

But the case of England at least admits of no mistake. Not only did England produce a most anti-Puritan literature before the Puritans existed, but it went on, under the Puritans and in spite of the Puritans, producing a literature that was quite anti-Puritan. There is as little that is Puritan about Fielding and Dickens as there is about Chaucer and Shakespeare. Dickens quite obviously existed to champion everything that the Puritans existed to destroy; when Mr Scrooge is converted to Christmas, the Puritan would have thought that Scrooge was relapsing and not repenting. When Scrooge and his clerk sit down to `a bowl of smoking Bishop', the Puritan would have been equally disgusted with the spirit and with the name. Nevertheless the Ironside element, though alien to England, was to a certain extent mixed with it; and I myself believe that it is to this partial mingling of a foreign and a native idea that we owe the curious attitude of the English, until lately, towards processions and pomps.

The Calvinist colour, mixing with each separate national colour, made in each case a different blend or tint. The Scotch had been restless, rebellious, fond of mystery, valiant, and sometimes cruel. The combinations of Calvinism with this produced a sort of sombre romanticism which one can feel very strongly in Burns and in the blacker tales of Stevenson. The Dutch, I imagine, were domestic and devout; the combination of Calvinism with this produced a slight dullness and a rage for keeping things clean. The English certainly were lusty, casual and fond of broad fun. The combination of Calvinism with this produced a curious kind of bourgeois embarrassment, part humour, part respectability and part good sense. Since the Englishman was not to wear crimson clothes carelessly, the next most English thing was to wear black clothes casually and unobtrusively. Where the Catholic Englishman had been modest enough to make a fool of himself, the Protestant Englishman had only that lower sort of modesty that will not make a show of itself. He objected to making a Pageant, because it is, literally speaking, `making a scene'. It is said that the Frenchman shrugs his shoulders; but the Victorian Englishman was born with his shoulders shrugged. His whole attitude until lately has been `What's the good of making a fuss?' It is a sensible and pleasant temper; it is the remains of the real Englishman who gave its patient Pickwickian cheerfulness to the Canterbury Pilgrimage. But it will be gain and not loss if this minor humility of drab and grey can give place to that higher, and much more humble humility, which can forget itself in flowers and fireworks and in the colours of Carnival.

Rational History

There is a sort of phrase or joke about `whitewashing' the villains of history; but to be quite just there ought to be some phrase such as `blackwashing' also. For the truth is that such rehabilitations are of two very different kinds. One is a mere anarchist itch to upset a traditional and universal verdict. The other is a reasonable petition to appeal against a very hasty and sectarian verdict. In other words, we may appeal for whitewashing if we can prove that there has been blackwashing. There are men in history who may rationally be held to be better than they appear in history. And they are those who have been, for fairly obvious reasons, blackened immediately after their death. We have a right to doubt in every case where it was indispensable (to a new dynasty or regime) that a man who was dead should also be damned. Two very interesting cases of such rational rehabilitation have appeared of late. An American writer has written a romantic sketch of the sympathetic view of Richard III. A French writer has written a scholarly and historic study of the sympathetic view of Napoleon. In both cases there is the same real and intellectual reason for a reconsideration. We are right to remember that these victorious soldiers were at the mercy of their ultimate victors. It is common sense to ask ourselves what tales would most probably be set about by the enemies of one after Bosworth or of the other after Waterloo.

Shakespeare was a very English type of genius; but so was Gillray. And it may fairly be said that Shakespeare's version of Richard is pretty much like Gillray's version of Napoleon. He is a diabolic dwarf, far less temperately and sanely conceived than Quilp. But Richard of Gloucester was not a dwarf, either physically or morally. And Napoleon was not a devil, either in incredible crime or incredible capacity. He made many concessions--and many mistakes. It was his normality that succeeded not his abnormality. In so far as he conquered Europe, it was as Man not as Superman. The Rights of Man formed his only working and real droits de seigneur. He was popular with soldiers not only because he was a conqueror, but also because he was a soldier. He ruled France not because he had conquered it, but because he had conquered its enemies. A great French writer put the truth in its unfavourable form by saying that men of the world sympathise with Napoleon because he had no internal life. He did not think about himself; he was not a Higher Thinker, a Buddhist. He was a creator--that is, a Christian. He did not know his own portrait till he saw it in his own works.

The sins of the Superman are unpardonable. But the sins of man are as the hairs of his head. So long as we regard Napoleon as a Superman, we are bound to regard all his cruelties as cold-blooded, all his pride as blasphemous, all his diplomacy as `black causeless duplicity' (as Stevenson said of his own Master of Ballantrae), all his sins, in short, as sins against the Holy Ghost--and, above all, all his misfortunes as deserved. But if we regard him as Man, we pretty soon find that his sins were the sins of a selfish, simple, generous, crude Corsican officer of artillery. His few cruelties were of the half-constrained kind--the kind that twenty other officers of artillery would have committed if they had been in the same hole. His pride was pure vanity; as innocent and as active as the vanity of a schoolboy. His diplomacy was at once less secret and less bullying than nearly all the diplomacy before and after his time. Compared with Metternich or with Bismarck, he was a straightforward but persuasive person. Unlike these other diplomatists, he did appeal to the reason and conscience of other nations and other Kings. He did not merely try to conceal; he did not merely try to convict. He did not even merely try to conquer. He did really try to convert--that is, to convince. And as for his misfortunes, he may have deserved to be called the Corsican Ogre, but he never really deserved to be called the Man of Destiny. It was a slander of which his misfortunes should have purged him for ever.

Much of the same is true, as I have said, of the last stand of the remote Plantagenet at Bosworth: when Henry Tudor rode as best he could into battle, making up his pedigree as he went along. The real medieval king was the man who died calling out `Treason' and killing men on every side of him. Richard III was doing exactly what would have been expected of Richard I. But nothing was ever expected of the Tudors except the unexpected. They were the first English monarchs who were Sultans instead of Kings. They acted by a caprice, and not by a creed. It was owing to their brief and impatient despotism that England, ever since, has been capricious and creedless. One can almost see the lean, long face of the Welsh usurper, as he rode with the great nobles who had deserted to his standard; one can see his smile as he entered London; and one can guess what kind of tale he would tell of the fallen King.

The Unknown Warrior

The recent ritual of Armistice Day was overshadowed, as everyone knows, by the shadowy figure of the Unknown Warrior. And this was well; for that figure, however like a shadow, alone possesses something of the character of a statue. It is one of the very few monumental things in modern civilisation. The world will never forget that altar which St Paul saw as he passed by, where the Greeks had built a shrine to the Unknown God. So it is in this case, almost alone among all modern cases; it is really possible that the world may never forget that we built a shrine to the Unknown Man.

For whatever the future is like, it will not be Futurist. The very notion of always talking in terms of tomorrow is a passing taste that will soon be a thing of yesterday. Those who are concerned for the coming thing are really rather concerned for the vanishing thing, concerned to catch a fashion before it vanishes. Most of the artistic experiments and social prophecies which appeal to the next age, are in fact stamped with all the special marks and limitations of this age. Our Utopian predictions may not be very easily fulfilled, but they will be very easily dated. Our Futurist pictures may be mistaken at the first glance for the primitive drawings of the Sandwich Islanders, but a more expert examination will certainly reveal the characteristic conventions of the twentieth century. This is as true of War Memorials as of everything else; and those who insisted on things of immediate usefulness were mostly denying and destroying the whole of their ultimate use. Whatever else might be said of such War Memorials, they do not happen to discharge the function of being memorials of the war. With a changing Society these practical things will become impracticable; these useful things will be disused. The building of cottages, let us say, is vital to the present shortage of housing; but it might become almost unintelligible in a society with a decently distributed power over the means of production, where a common man could afford to build his own cottage. A club or institute may be established with enthusiasm and applause; it may be regarded as a mere saving of wealth and life by `keeping people out of the public house'. But it may be regarded as a meaningless waste by people who will, perhaps, have restored the public house to the proper public dignity, and made the old Christian inn a place for Christian men. These things are at best modern medicines for modern maladies. They will appear to another age like some special provisions against the Black Death, or some particular warning against the Norse pirates. But though the advanced ideas of our own age are the very last that are likely to endure into another age, neither is it enough to express common ideas in the sense of conventional ideas. That is, it is not enough to express common ideas in a conventional way.

If there are many mad pamphlets and queer pictures and fantastic flags of revolt in the dust-bin of the ages, it is equally true that there are whole rubbish-heaps of lost Latin epitaphs and dead English epics, and pompous monuments like the urns and nymphs in a deserted garden. The thing that survives is that which has a certain combination of normality with distinction. It has simplicity with a slight touch of strangeness; as has the style of Milton or Michelangelo. It is a tale just sufficiently unusual to be worth telling, and yet immediately intelligible when told. It is what the hero is to the human being; a thing magnified but made to scale. Of this really enduring quality I know no other modern example except the burial of the Unknown Warrior, with a King for his chief Mourner.

It is a tale that could be told in any future society, and remain simple and striking. It is a monument that could be looked at by any future generation, with any customs or costumes, and looked at with the same mixture of mystery and familiarity. If we wish to imagine the feelings of the future, the best approximation to it is not to trust the fancies of our own futurism, but to note the facts of our own attitude towards the past, especially the remote past. Now this story of the Unknown Warrior would have a point and a pathos if it were told about a prehistoric tribe burying a man in a barrow, or an ancient Egyptian procession bearing a faceless mummy to a pyramid. If we read that a nameless legionary was buried high upon the Capitol, and that the Roman Emperor offered some sacrifice or libation to his manes, we should understand what was meant. If we were told that some great medieval king spent wealth on masses to be sung in some great cathedral for the soul of some unknown archer, picked up at random on the field of Courtrai or Crecy, we should feel what we were meant to feel. We should feel what we felt on Armistice Day in London. It is something perhaps better expressed, in any age, by the silent symbol of gesture and action than by any definition of a thing so deep. It is strange that the same thinkers who disapprove of dogma often disapprove of ritualism. For ritualism is the only possible alternative to dogma. In this case the dogma is so deep and vital that its verbal definition invariably leads to disputes and absurd misunderstandings. It is a truth that worries people when put into words; so that they talk the wildest nonsense about it, and especially against it. Perhaps, therefore, it is just as well that their subconscious faith in this dogma should only be expressed in a grave and graceful ceremonial action. But the dogma itself, the truth symbolised itself, is something that was almost rediscovered in the realities of war: it is that in the darkness of battle, and in the very heart of the whirlwind of death, is discovered that mystery whose name is the quality of men.

Men are not equal in their realisation of equality. They are really equal in many other essentials of the true egalitarian idea, but they are not equal in that. Certain conditions favour the growth of plutocratic fashions obscuring our brotherhood; certain other conditions make intensely vivid the great things we have in common, as compared with the small things that divide us. And anyone who understands the real doctrine of equality (there are not very many in the modern world who do) will understand that some sense of it vaguely but invariably comes to the surface under the hideous conditions of war. An army, which in one sense would seem the very home of subordination, has nevertheless an ultimate tendency to encourage equality; because, whatever may be the rule or the orders, the facts are those of an intense independence. If any man really fails to understand the mystical dogma of the equality of man, he can immediately test it by thinking of two men, of totally different types and fortunes, falling on the same field at some terrible crisis in the war which saved our country. One might be, and often was, a gentleman of the finer tradition, fortunate in his friends, in his tastes, in his culture as well as his character.

Another might be some stunted serf of our servile industrial slums, a man whom all modern life conspired to crush and deform. In the hour when the flag of England was saved, there was no man who dared to say, or would have dreamed of saying, that one death was less glorious than the other.

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William Penn and His Royalist Friends

The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England. I know this is still regarded as a historical heresy by those who have long ceased to worry about a religious heresy. For while these persons still insist that the Pilgrim Fathers were champions of religious liberty nothing is more certain than the fact that an ordinary modern liberal sailing with them would have found no liberty and would have intensely disliked almost all that he found of religion. Even Thanksgiving Day itself, though it is now kept in a most kindly and charming fashion by numbers of quite liberal and large-minded Americans, was originally intended, I believe, as a sort of iconoclastic expedient for destroying the celebration of Christmas, which does not encourage me, for one, to develop a special and spiritual fervour for Puritanism. Oddly enough, however, the Puritan tradition in America has always celebrated Thanksgiving Day by often eliminating the Christmas Pudding but preserving the Christmas Turkey. I do not know why, unless the very name of Turkey reminded them of the Prophet of Islam, who was also the first Prophet of Prohibition.

It is not, however, in connection with either Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day, that I recur for a moment to the somewhat controversial question of the Pilgrim Fathers. It is merely to note anew that there has always seemed to me too much emphasis on the Pilgrim Fathers, as compared with many others who were at least as truly Fathers of the Republic. There has certainly been in recent times a considerable combination between Puritanism and Publicity. The Puritans may not always have approved of the stage, but for all that they got a great deal of the limelight. Somebody managed to make the Mayflower as legendary as the Ark or the Argo; indeed, it is legendary in more ways than one, so far as the aim and atmosphere of the expedition are concerned. But I doubt whether most people even know the names of the ships in which many of the other devoted or heroic colonists of America sailed; I, for one, most certainly do not. I will not insist especially on the very noble example of Lord Baltimore and the founders of the State of Maryland, who established the first system of religious toleration in history, for there I might be accused of favouring my own religious sympathies and ideas. But I am at least detached and impartial in the subsequent and somewhat similar story of the founding of the State of Pennsylvania. And whatever ship brought the great Quakers to that settlement has a rather better right than the Mayflower to be called a Peace Ship.

These reflections occurred to me when I was recently standing in the city of Philadelphia, on which looks down the great statue of William Penn, whose unmarked grave lies a mile or two from my own house at home. And it struck me as very strange that all the millions of men with modern humanitarian sympathies have said so little of the immense superiority of that intellectual and spiritual leader to the clamorously advertised Calvinists of the Mayflower. I gravely fear that a great many of them do not see much difference between the two.

Among the most curious of all curiosities of literature or of legend, I have actually heard a sort of romantic rumour (which I have never been able either to trace or test) that portions of the timber of the Mayflower were found in some strange way attached to the old Quaker meeting-house which stands beside Penn's grave. I cannot imagine what the story could possibly mean, or how the incident can possibly be supposed to have come about; unless, indeed, some enthusiastic American globetrotter merely threw fragments of Mayflower furniture (said to be rather suspiciously common in the States) at any house that had any connection with any founder of any American State. Anyhow, he might just as well have said that Sir Walter Raleigh sailed in the Mayflower as connect William Penn and his people with the fanaticism that filled that famous vessel. He might as well have hung the first Calvinistic meeting-house with rosaries and relics and scapularies belonging to the Catholic Calverts as pretend to have patched up the house of the first Friends with the relics of their mortal enemies and persecutors, the Old Puritans.

An American Puritan in the seventeenth century would have regarded a Quaker very much as an American Puritan in the twentieth century would regard a Bolshevist. And, though Bolshevists are supposed to be fierce and Quakers were supposed to be meek, they were at least like each other in this: they were what modern America would call Radical, in the sense of going to the real root of the question and answering it rightly or wrongly. In short, they were really Fundamentalists, and most Fundamentalists are not Fundamentalists. For whatever we think of the thing now called Fundamentalism, it is not fundamental. It is not particularly fundamental to throw a big Bible at people's heads (or rather, a particular translation of the Bible, with a lot of books left out as Apocrypha) any more than to throw the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Institutes of Calvin. Even if it be a truth, it is not a first principle. But it is fundamental and it is a first principle, right or wrong, to go back, as William Penn did, to the doctrine of the Inner Light. For William Penn really was a great man and not merely a seventeenth-century sectarian; his thoughts, whether we think with him or no, having a meaning in the twentieth century or any century; and he founded something much larger than Pennsylvania and much greater than Philadelphia--a faith that has not yet failed.

I think I know why Penn has been thrown into the shade by the Pilgrim Fathers. It was his politics; and for some they are still a dreadful secret. I was once asked by some worthy modern pacifists, of the Nonconformist culture, to lecture on something in one of the oldest meeting-houses of the Society of Friends. I agreed to lecture upon William Penn and with secret and malignant joy drew up an elaborate plan for a eulogium on that Quaker hero. I set myself specially to express boundless admiration for all those parts of his life and opinion which his modern Puritan admirers do not admire. I proposed to praise extravagantly his loyal and devoted sympathy with the House of Stuart. I intended to point out eagerly how worthy he was of the gracious and glorious friendship of a man like Charles the Second. I meant to rub in every detail of his diplomatic and political support of the admirable political designs of James the Second. I intended to insist on the intellectual amity, almost amounting to intellectual alliance which so often bound him to Cavaliers and even to Catholics. In short, it was my evil intention to praise him for everything for which Macaulay blamed him. Then, I thought, when I had explained how intimately identified was Penn with Royalists, and especially with Papists, then surely all the Nonconformist ministers would be frightfully pleased. Then should I be acclaimed and admired by all the modern Puritans for my perfect understanding of the great seventeenth-century sectary. Then should I become the idol of all the people who glorify the Pilgrim Fathers and talk enthusiastically about the Mayflower. Then it would be admitted that I also was a grand, grim old Puritan, like all the rest of them. Unfortunately, I fancy I must have boasted of my intention, and some rumour of it must have reached them. For I received at the eleventh hour a hurried request to give a lecture on Dickens. And from this we may learn that, if Dickens was an enemy of the Puritans, he was not so much of an enemy as Penn.