The Common Man/4

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The Common Man ~ Fourth Part
written by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Walter De La Mare

It has not always been sufficiently understood that a critic of poetry should be a poetical critic. Literary history is littered with the disasters of good critics who become bad critics, merely by colliding with good poets. But one of the first facts which a good poetical critic will realise, is one which the poet of necessity realises: the limitation of language, and especially the poverty and clumsiness of the language of praise. There is hardly any praise of poets that does not sound as if they were all the same sort of poets, and this is true even when the praise is intended to say precisely the opposite. Thus the habit of calling somebody "unique" has become universal, and we may insist that a man is original, and still leave the impression that originality is about as rare as original sin.

But this difficulty applies in a special way to Mr. Walter de la Mare and his poetry, because the common poetical terms of praise for that poetry are also applied to a totally different sort of poetry. He stands very close, in time and place and appearance, to a group of writers, most of them good writers and some of them great writers, from whom he is really quite free and distinct. Only the epithets applied to him are also applied to them. When we say that he is a dreamy and fantastic poet, an interpreter of elfland, a singer of strange rhymes that have a witchery and wild charm for children, and the rest, we are driven to use a number of terms that have now become a little trite, perhaps, as applied to other talented persons who are utterly different. The fountains, the foundations, the primary principles of imagination and the view of life, are really quite different in a man like Mr. de la Mare from all that they are, let us say, in a man like Sir James Barrie or a man like Mr. A. A. Milne. This, I need hardly say, has nothing to do with depreciating these authors, but only with appreciating each author for his own sake. Yet there is a sort of tangle of tradition, and a recognised traffic in certain subjects, which may well confuse a modern reader about all this sort of literature of fancy. For instance; we might start by saying that the tradition of Treasure Island and its pirates was continued in Peter Pan and its pirates. We might say that the elvish children of Peter Pan were continued in the elvish children of When We Were Very Young. And then we might imagine vaguely that all this sort of thing, the bottle of rum and the crocodile's dinner and the king's breakfast, were all somehow stuffed or stirred up together in a hotch-potch called Peacock Pie. But this is to miss the whole point about the poet, and especially where he is rather more than a poet. It would be easy to link him up with the tradition of Treasure Island; for he has himself written a very fascinating fantasia about Desert Islands. But the association would be an error, for he has not really laid up for himself treasure in the same sort of treasure islands. There is really a sort of dynasty, a Scottish dynasty, of Stevenson and Barrie. But it descended on the infantile side to Scots like Kenneth Graham and on the manly, or at least boyish side to Scots like John Buchan. It has nothing to do with Walter de la Mare; because his philosophy is different. One way of putting it would be to say that, poetic as are the fairy-tales of the Scots, they are the fairy-tales of the Sceptics. The fairy-tales of de la Mare are not those of the Sceptic but of the Mystic. Take the primary idea with which all the best work for imaginative infancy, as supplied by Stevenson and Barrie, really began. It began with an idea which is called "make-believe". That is, strictly speaking, it is written by men who do not believe; and even written for children who do not believe; children who quite logically and legitimately make believe. But de la Mare's world is not merely a world of illusion; it is in quite another sense a world of imagination. It is a real world of which the reality can only be represented to us by images. De la Mare does not, in the material sense, believe that there is an ogre who crawls round houses and is turned back by the influence of the Holy Child; any more than Barrie believes that there is an immortal little boy who plays physically in Kensington Gardens. But de la Mare does believe that there is a devouring evil that is always warring with innocence and happiness; and Barrie does not believe that innocence and happiness go on having an uninterrupted legal occupation of Kensington Gardens. Stories of the school of Peter Pan are radiant and refreshing dreams; but they are dreams. They are the dreams of somebody taking refuge from real life in an inner life of the imagination; but not necessarily of somebody believing that there is also a larger universal life corresponding to that imagination. The first is a fabulist but the second is a symbolist; as if we were to compare the talking animals of La Fontaine with the typical animals of Blake. Blake (though certainly mad in a quiet way) probably did not believe that golden lions and tigers walked about on the hills of Albion; and La Fontaine did not believe that garrulous lions engaged in chatty conversation with foxes. But Blake did believe that certain tremendous truths, only to be shown under the types of golden lions, were really true; and, what is most important of all, were not only within him, but beyond him. So the conversation of Mr. Milne's funny little pigs and bears is as delightful as La Fontaine, and only deceptive in the same sense as La Fontaine. That is to say, it is not false, because it is fictitious; or what was called fabulous. But the rhymes of the Mad Prince, though they would be called fantastic, are not merely fabulous. The Mad Prince, like the Mad Poet, in the person of poor Blake, is, after all, something essentially different from The Mad Hatter. There are hollow undertones in his queer questions, about green grass for graves, which do really re-echo from things deep and secret as the grave.

Many who remember the apparently nonsensical nursery rhymes which figure among Walter de la Mare's verses for children may imagine that I am drawing a fine distinction; but it is not a distinction of degree but of direction. The parrot and the monkey who attended the dwarfs on the Isle of Lone, may seem quite as disconnected from normal natural history as the owl and the pussy-cat who went to sea. But there remains a real distinction, outside all natural history, between unnatural history and supernatural history. Mr. de la Mare's parrots and monkeys are as symbolical as the strange beasts in the Book of Apocalypse. Only they are symbolical in a sense that means something better than the allegorical. Symbolism is superior to allegory, in so far that the symbol exactly fits; and there is therefore no superfluous explanation that needs to pass through ordinary language, or need be, or indeed can be, translated into other words. If a parrot only means speech, or a monkey only means mischief (as he generally does) then nothing beyond pictorial elegance is gained by not dealing directly with mischief, or speaking plainly about speech. And the mere allegory never gets beyond a pictorial elegance, adorning what might well be unadorned. But the great mystic can sometimes present to us a purple parrot or a sea-green monkey, in exactly such a manner as to suggest submerged or mysterious ideas, and even truths, that could not possibly be conveyed by any other creature of any other colour. The meaning fits the symbol and the symbol the meaning; and we cannot separate them from each other, as we can in the analysis of allegory. And there is a side of spiritual life, so to speak, which might well be represented by sea-green monkeys, whose colouring is not merely arbitrary colouring like that of the mysterious monsters in that admirable but purely nonsensical rhyme about the Jumblies, whose heads were green and whose hands were blue. The colour scheme here is pleasing, but it is no disrespect to the great Mr. Lear of the Nonsense Rhymes, to say that his cosmic philosophy would not have been convulsed even if their hands had been green and their heads had been blue. Walter de la Mare's nonsense is never nonsensical in that sense. If his monkey is sea-green, it is for some reason as deep and significant as the sea; even though he cannot express it in any other way except by patient and uncomplaining greenness. And he would never mention even a green weed, a dock or nettle in a ditch, without meaning it to bear the same witness in the same way.

It is the first paradox about him that we can find the evidence of his faith in his consciousness of evil. It is the second paradox that we can find the spiritual springs of much of his poetry in his prose. If we turn, for instance, to that very powerful and even terrible short story called Seaton's Aunt, we find we are dealing directly with the diabolic. It does so in a sense quite impossible in all the merely romantic or merely ironic masters of that nonsense that is admittedly illusion. There was no nonsense about Seaton's Aunt. There was no illusion about her concentrated and paralysing malignity; but it was a malignity that had an extension beyond this world. She was a witch; and the realisation that witches can occasionally exist is a part of Realism, and a test for anyone claiming a sense of Reality. For we do not especially want them to exist; but they do. Now the wonderland of the other charmers of childhood consists entirely of things that we want to exist or they want to exist. Whether they are of the older English or Victorian school of Lewis Carroll and Lear, or of the later Scottish school of Stevenson and Barrie, their whole aim is to create a sort of cosmos within the cosmos, which shall be free from evil; a crystal sphere in which there shall be no cracks or flaws or clouds of evil. Peter Pan is a wonderful evocation of the happy daydreams of childhood. There is plenty of fighting and ferocity; because fighting and ferocity are among the very happiest dreams of a really innocent and Christian childhood. But Captain Hook the Pirate is not really wicked; he is only ferocious; which, after all, it is his simple duty as an honest and industrious pirate to be. But there are rhymes, even nursery rhymes, of Walter de la Mare in which the shiver is a real shiver, not only of the spine but of the spirit. They have an atmosphere which is not merely thrilling, but also chilling. They lay a finger that is not of the flesh on a nerve that is not of the body; in their special way of suggesting the chill of change or death or antiquity. To do this was against the whole purpose and origin of the fairyland of the later Victorians. Like all literature, it cannot really be understood without reference to history; and, like all history, it cannot really be understood without reference to religion. As scepticism gradually dried up the conventional religion of the English, and even of the Scotch, poetic and humane spirits turned more and more to the construction of an inner world of fancy, that should be both a refuge and a substitute. William Morris, one of the most large and humane of these later Victorians, admitted it in acknowledging the purely decorative vision in his own work:

So with this earthly Paradise it is,

If you will read aright and pardon me

Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss

Midmost the beating of the steely sea.

And it is the irony of the case that these men, who were rationalists and realists about the real world, were for that very reason resolved to be radiant optimists when once they were inside the city of dreams which was their city of refuge. The pessimists insisted on having happy dreams; the sceptics insisted on having omnipotent drugs. But the mystic does not deal in dreams but in visions; that is, in things seen and not seeming. The mystic does not desire drugs but the drinking of that wine that wakes the dead; different in nature from any opiate that soothes the living.

In short, we may say that the early twentieth century presented two movements towards the fanciful or fantastical, and away from the merely rational or material: a centripetal movement and a centrifugal movement. The one spiritual spiral worked inwards, towards the secret subjective dreams of man; the other worked outwards towards the spiritual powers or truths that seemed beyond the reach of man. The new world made by the first was the great, glowing, iridescent bubble of the Barrie daydream; the world revealed by the second was that world of strange skies, at the ends of the earth and the corners of the sea, that appears in the far-off flashes of the de la Mare imagination. We might say shortly that Stevenson and Barrie could produce grisly buccaneers dripping with gore without frightening the children; whereas de la Mare could produce pollarded willows or whitewashed barns with an imminent risk of frightening the children, and even the grownup people. But it is only fair to say that there is a subtlety only possible to the first method, as well as a subtlety possible to the second. It is, as has been already suggested, the subtlety of an irony which at once accepts and discounts illusion. It is the whole point of the best work of Barrie, for instance, that somebody is deceiving himself, but also that somebody is looking on at somebody who is deceiving himself; and if they are both deceiving themselves, so much the better for the third person who is looking on from a third angle. Much of this sort of work is like a world of mirrors reflected in mirrors; the reduplication of reflection; the shadow of a shade. To name but one instance: a fairy-tale palace is itself only a fancy; but the court scene in A Kiss for Cinderella is not merely the fairy-tale fancy, but a child's fancy about the fancy. This sort of intensive imaginative delicacy is in theory a thing of infinite possibilities; and this does belong to the merely subjective school of symbolism. But what I have called the truly symbolic school of symbolism does still belong altogether to another and, I cannot but think, a larger world. It is all that world of the powers and mysteries beyond mankind which even the sceptic would consent to cover with the celebrated label: "Important, If True". Perhaps as good an example as can be found is in that truly extraordinary sketch by de la Mare called "The Tree". I can imagine multitudes of quite intelligent people totally unable to make head or tail of it. It is concerned with a fruit merchant and his brother, who was an artist, and with a Tree, which is talked of in a manner utterly indescribable; as if it were not only more important than anything, but were outside the world. Now Barrie might have dealt admirably with a theme like that; and probably made the human comedy clearer. But the difference is precisely this. Even the reader who cannot understand anything else about de la Mare's story does definitely understand this: that somehow the fruit merchant was wrong, and the artist was right; and, above all, the Tree was right. Now if Barrie had told the tale, he would have taken a gentle pride in leaving us in doubt on that very point; of suggesting that the sceptic might be the sane man, and the Tree might be a delusion. But the Tree is not a delusion.

The Meaning of Metre

Did Bret Harte imitate Swinburne? Or (more pleasing thought) did Swinburne imitate Bret Harte? Did Swinburne wrestle in spirit with the admirable poem called "The Heathen Chinee", and then start up from his reading inspired and inflamed to write the great Greek tragedy of "Atalanta in Calydon"? To some academic and pedantic minds I know that this will not appear an exact literary comparison; though it covers a small point that may be called a curiosity of literature. To them it will sound as if I suggested that John Ruskin was merely a plagiarist of Josh Billings. Anyhow, it is a rather curious coincidence that there is one particular poetical metre, consisting of a quatrain and one long line at the end, which is found nowhere else in all literature, so far as I know, except in the finest and most tragic chorus of Swinburne's Atalanta and in the poem of the Heathen Chinee. It would be possible to get quite a pleasing poetical effect by interleaving the verses of the one with the verses of the other and thus producing a complete and continuous poem, all to the same beautiful tune and combining (as only the greatest masterpieces can do) the qualities of the humanist and the humorist; the elements of the grave and gay. There is no space here to weave the whole of the two narratives together; but a verse or two will show that they move with the same melody in the same metre.

0 would that with feet

Unsandaled, unshod,

Over-bold, over-fleet,

I had swum not nor trod

From Arcadia to Calydon northward a blast of the envy

of God.

Which expressions are strong,

Yet would feebly imply

Some account of a wrong

Not to call it a lie

That was worked upon William my pardner, and the same

being W. Nye.

It may be urged maliciously, by the unmelodious, that the identity is a mere accident of arrangement on the page; since the long line could be divided or the short lines linked up. But this is not true. That last long rolling line is really unique, like a wave sweeping away all that went before. And the moral is that metre is not artificial but elemental; it is smooth like Niagara. That long rushing line does express the sea-worship of Swinburne; that long meandering line does express the detached lucidity of Truthful James. Since then, writers have broken writing to bits to make it explosive. The other Truthful James--I allude to Henry James--began it with a shower of commas; the more modern poets are quite capable of keeping the commas and leaving out the words. Others would make an explosion, or at least a noise, by some line like, "Burst. Blast. Burst-Blast back-blasted. Bang!" But it is not really even so noisy as a line like, "Where the thundering Bosphorus answers the thunder of Pontic seas"; because it somehow suggests, not a natural noise that cannot be stopped, but an artificial noise that actually is stopped, if only by full stops. Metre is more natural than free verse; because it has more of the movement of nature, and the curves of wind and wave.

Concerning a Strange City

Everyone has his own private and almost secret selection among the examples of the mysterious power of words, the power which a certain verbal combination has over the emotions and even over the soul. It is a commonplace that literature sometimes has a charm, not merely in the sense of the charm of a woman, but of the charm of a witch. Historical scholars question how the ignorant imagination of the Dark Ages distorted the poet Virgil into a magician; and one answer to the question, possibly, is that he was one. Theologians and philosophers debate about the inspiration of scripture; but perhaps the most philosophical argument, for certain scriptural sayings being inspired, is simply that they sound like it. The great lines of the poets are like landscapes or visions; but the same strange light can be found not only in the high places of poetry but in quite obscure corners of prose. And, in my own personal case, there are no words in literature that more directly produce this indescribable effect than a few that appear, almost accidentally, in one episode of Malory's romance of Arthur. They occur in one of the visions of Sir Galahad; or it may be Sir Percivale, for the rest of the scene has rather faded from my memory, save for the constellation of words that shines in the midst of it. But I think that St. Joseph of Arimathea shows the knight a vision of a veiled object; presumably the Holy Grail. And he adds the sentence: "But you shall see it unveiled in the city of Sarras, in the spiritual place."

The soul of this, of course, escapes analysis; but for all that, an attempt at analysis has certain aspects of interest. I can only express what I mean by saying that it is the finite part of the image that really suggests infinity. Most worthy and serious people, instead of saying the spiritual place, would say the spiritual world. Some dismal and disgusting people, instead of saying the spiritual place, would say the spiritual plane. And the immediate chill and disenchantment of these changes is due to a vague but vivid sense that the spiritual thing has become less real. A world sounds like an astronomical diagram, and a plane sounds like a geometrical diagram; and both these are abstractions. But a place is not an abstraction, but an actuality. And the writer not only says definitely that it is a place, but he gives it a definite name like the name of a place. Sarras is not an abstraction; it is not even an allegory. It is not even as if he had said the City of Heaven or the City of Paradise. These, though not unreal, are at least universal. But the name given has identity, which is something much more intense than universality. Sarras only means Sarras, as Sarum only means Sarum, or (for that matter) as Surbiton only means Surbiton. But the very fact that we have never heard of it before, and that it is never mentioned again, that it is referred to in passing and without explanation, gives a curious intensity to the hint of something at once distant and definite. The spiritual thrill is all in the idea that the place is a place, however spiritual; that it is some strange spot where the sky touches the earth, or where eternity contrives to live on the borderland of time and space.

I wish there were a real philosophy of comparative religion, and one that was not full of inhuman nonsense. I wish it did not tend to one particular trick of unreason, as for instance when Mr. Wells says that the Christian sacrament of bread and wine was a break-back to primitive blood sacrifices. Or sometimes a man will say that the feeling about a Madonna is only the revival of the worship of Isis, or that the idea of St. Michael smiting Satan is the same as that about Mithras who slew a bull. Now there are many other more historical objections to this sort of thing, but my primary objection to it is that it not only puts the cart before the horse, but gives me directions for finding my own horse in my own stable, by looking for a primitive Mycenaean chariot of which no traces remain. Instead of explaining x by saying it is equal to 5, it undertakes to explain 5 by saying it is equal to x. It is as if a man said, "You may not be aware that your feelings about your wife are best described as those of the Missing Link at the sight of an oyster shell." I know what a Christian feels about the idea that Michael smote a rebel angel. I do not in the least know what a Mithraist felt about the idea that Mithras killed a bull. It may really have been something like the Christian feeling, for all I know; it may also have been the worst sort of heathen feeling, for all I know. But to have the thing that I do know explained to me by the thing that I don't know, is like nonsense out of Alice in Wonderland. It is offering something inexplicable to explain something that needs no explanation. I cannot tell whether anybody really felt anything about Isis comparable to what men feel about Mary; if anybody did, I am sure I congratulate him. But I decline to have my own feelings revealed to myself, in the light of some remote alleged feelings that no man alive has ever felt. But though there is this abyss of agnosticism between dead faiths and living ones, and between religions that are experienced and religions that are only explored, it might be possible to establish some human connection if the people who did it were more human. If they took the simple things that really are similar, instead of merely trying to assimilate the civilised things to the barbaric things, they might really bridge some of those abysses in the name of the brotherhood of men. If they were not so anxious to say that the sacrament and the sacrifice were both cannibal orgies (which is nonsense) they might say that they were both sacrifices, and had something to do with the philosophy of sacrifice, which is sense. And then, instead of having less respect for the Christians, we might have more respect for the cannibals. If they were not so anxious to compare the Virgin to a heathen goddess, they might possibly compare them both to a human mother, and at least get near to something human, if not to something divine. And in the same way, if they were not so eager to compare a shrine or a sacred soil to fetishism and taboo, they might get some sort of glimpse of what all men mean by making a deity local, or talking of a spiritual place.

At least in the mind of man, if not in the nature of things, there seems to be some connection between concentration and reality. When we want to ask, in natural language, whether a thing really exists or not, we ask if it is really "there" or not. We say "there", even if we do not clearly understand where. A man cannot enter a house by five doors at once; he might do it if he were an atmosphere; but he does not want to be an atmosphere. He has a stubborn subconscious belief that an animal is greater than an atmosphere. In proportion as a thing rises in the scale of things, it tends to localise and even narrow its natural functions. A man cannot absorb his sustenance through all his pores like a sponge or some low sea-organism; he cannot take in an atmosphere of beef or an abstract essence of buns. Any buns thrown at him, as at the bear at the zoo, must be projected with such skill as to hit a particular hole in his head. In nature, in a sense, there is choice even before there is will; the plant or bulb narrows itself and pierces at one place rather than another; and all growth is a pattern of such green wedges. But however it be with these lower things, there has always been this spearlike selection and concentration in man's conception of higher things. And compared with that there is something not only vague but vulgar in most of the talk about infinity. The pantheist is right up to a certain point, but so is the sponge.

Both vitally and verbally, this infinity is the enemy of all that is fine. Such philological points are sometimes more than mere pedantries or mere puns. And it is more than a pedantic pun to say that most things that are fine are finite. We testify to it when we talk of a beautiful thing having refinement or having finish. It is brought to an end like the blade of a beautiful sword; not only to its end in the sense of its cessation but to its end in the sense of its aim. All fine things are in this sense finished, even when they are eternal. Poetry is committed to this concentration fully as much as religion; for fairyland has always been as local, one might say as parochial, as Heaven. And if religion in the recognised sense were removed tomorrow, the poets would only begin to act as the pagans acted. They would begin to say, "Lo, here", and "Lo, there", from the incurable itch of the idea that the something must be somewhere, and not merely anywhere. Even if it were in some sense found to be in everything, it would still be in everything and not merely in all. And if men did indeed seek the secret in primitive sacrifices, it was a secret and not a superficiality like fetish-worship. If they did indeed look for it behind the veil of Isis, it was a secret and not a platitude like nature-worship. And if indeed it is better sought in another fashion, it will be a secret, and therefore a real revelation, for those who see it unveiled in the city of Sarras, in the spiritual place.

The Epitaph of Pierpont Morgan

It is obvious enough that whitewashing a man is quite the opposite of washing him white. The curious thing is that people often try to whitewash a man, and fail, when it might be possible to wash him, and to some limited extent, succeed. The real story, if the culprit only had the courage to tell it, would often be much more human and pardonable than the stiff suspicious fiction that he tells instead. Many a public man, I fancy, has tried to conceal the crime and only succeeded in concealing the excuse. Many a man has sought to bury the sin and only buried the temptation. Suppose that Nelson had covered his relations with Lady Hamilton so discreetly that he left about his movements only a vague suspicion that he had a wife in every port. We should think him a far worse man than we think him, knowing the whole truth. Suppose Parnell had kept his secret so well that his disappearances were put down to an unmarried man's most vulgar and purchased type of vice, instead of an unmarried man's comparatively pardonable fault of infatuation. That great man would seem far less great to us than he does now. In our craven commercial public life there are not many of the Parnell or Nelson sort: but even among our lords and millionaires there are men, I dare say, who are less despicable than they look. If we had the key of their souls we might come upon virtues quite unexpected--or at least upon vices more generous. In many a complex human scandal, I fancy, the first real slander is the acquittal.

But there is another form of this dehumanising defence: and that is the defence of the dead. The idea of observing restraint, if not respect, in speaking of the recently departed rests on a human instinct altogether deep and free: but in modern practice it is turned exactly the wrong way. A dead man should be sacred because he is a man--perhaps a man for the first time. A baby says he is a man; a boy often thinks he is a man; a man takes for granted he is a man, and often finds out his mistake. Perhaps one never knows what being a man means until the instant of death. Perhaps in a very manly and even military sense all life is a learning to die. If I were asked to say something by the grave of a man like Pierpont Morgan, I would say: "I will not remember his name. He has fought the great unequal fight; and is of more value than he was."

Now turn to the modern newspaper method; the method of weak whitewash. The Christian Commonwealth is a paper with a perfectly genuine, though hazy and patronising, concern for social improvement. Its intentions are certainly not servile, though I think its upshot would be. But it feels as we all do, that the day after poor Morgan's death is not the time for kicking his corpse about: so, being modern, it contrives to speak well of him in the following extraordinary fashion. "It is easy to denounce the methods by which such men amass their vast fortunes, but, making every allowance for the injury done to individuals by the often ruthless methods such men adopt to gain their ends, the great fact stands out, that they are the human agents working out certain economic movements. . . . These men are helping to prepare industry for a new form of control and ownership. In the transition stage they amass huge fortunes for themselves, and ruin many who are too weak to withstand them, but it is doubtful if the sum of their harmful inflections is as great as the evils in the same period caused by the great number of small competing capitalists."

I shall have much to say of this as a social doctrine in a moment. At the start I am only concerned with it as an epitaph. In the mere matter of respect for the dead, I say this. I am ready to pass the grave of Morgan in a decent silence, as a Christian grave. The Christian Commonwealth can only think of sacrificing a thousand slaves upon it, as if it were a pagan and prehistoric grave. For to justify or palliate the capitalist today is to sacrifice a thousand slaves. My epitaph on Morgan need not even contain his name; I would write over his grave what I would over my own, "Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners." But just think how the Christian Commonwealth epitaph reads, merely as an epitaph! "Sacred to the Memory of J. Pierpont Morgan: Who, By Methods Peculiarly Easy to Denounce, Amassed a Large Fortune. Having a Preference for Ruthless Methods For the Gaining of His Ends, He Selected for Ruin Such Persons as Were Too Weak To Withstand Him. He Thus Became The Human Instrument of An Economic and Inhuman Movement. He Also Formed Trusts. For of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven." That is the amount of tenderness for the terrible dead that can be reached in the modernist manner. The sacred death is forgotten, but the profane life is excused.

And now for the excuse. In order to write a polite paragraph about a poor old man whose only superiority over any of us is that he has passed what we all must fear, this paper digs up the dusty and discredited rubbish of Bellamy: and maintains the proposition that millionaires bring us nearer to Socialism. The obvious deduction for a Socialist is that he ought to be, in every hour and instant, on the side of the millionaires. No man's wage must be increased by a penny, no man's working day must be shortened by an hour; for this might delay the swift, sweet process by which the whole earth will soon be owned by its six most unscrupulous inhabitants. Then we shall get Socialism. I don't see why. I never did. But it is self-evident that, if this is the case, every capitalist must be exalted and every workman brought low. The whole argument means nothing unless it means that the rich had better smash us all as soon as possible. There are some who doubt this concept. I am one of them. We say it would not have been Napoleon's best policy to wait till the Allies had conquered him utterly, so that he might only have to write one letter, asking them to give him back the whole of Europe. We say, in our simple way, that it would not have been wise in Montenegro to wait till all the Moslems in Asia were marching upon them; so as to abolish Islam in one well-expressed proclamation. We entertain similar doubts about the sanity of making capitalists stronger than any of the past emperors of this earth, and then asking them to hand over the only thing for which they have lost their souls.

The final fact is that anyone who subscribes to this epitaph must league himself with the forces of evil until something like the Last Judgment. He must not merely give up Socialism, which is a doctrine. He must also give up Social Reform--which is a dissipation. He must not only abandon the duty of helping the poor; he must even tear from his heart the pleasure of tormenting them. I see that one paper (the name of which I forget) has even addressed an open letter to me on this matter, asking whether any of my words (which, I sadly confess, have been many) have born any fruit in practice--by which, of course, it means Westminster. Well, I am afraid I must confess that my efforts have been barren, that I have brought forth no fruit fit for the field of social reform. In all the most powerful modern movements I have been impotent. I have never segregated anybody, or tortured anybody, or unsexed anybody, or buried anybody alive--to my knowledge. I am not a philanthropist. I do not think any words of mine have led to one single man being kept in prison beyond his lawful term. I doubt if I have succeeded in adding a single lash to the torture at the triangles. I question whether I have succeeded in deducting so much as a penny from the tiny fortunes of grooms and housemaids. I have cropped no hair off the heads of other people's daughters. I have drawn no blood from poorer men's backs. My claim to be a Progressive is gone for ever; and I know it well. But I am not quite so bitterly opposed to all possible Social Reform as the Christian Commonwealth is. I agree that men like Morgan should be pardoned. I even agree that, for purposes of debate, men like Morgan should be excused. But I shall deny till death and damnation that men like Morgan should be encouraged. And if that epitaph does not mean that men like Morgan should be encouraged, it means nothing whatever.

The New Bigotry

I notice with some amusement, both in America and English literature, the rise of a new kind of bigotry. Bigotry does not consist in a man being convinced he is right; that is not bigotry, but sanity. Bigotry consists in a man being convinced that another man must be wrong in everything, because he is wrong in a particular belief; that he must be wrong, even in thinking that he honestly believes he is right. The last occasion is one applied mostly to literature and the ability of literary men. And it is all the more like the old bigotry because it is in opposition to it.

We all know what used to happen sometimes in the Puritan period; or the more critical classicism of the eighteenth century. A young idealistic poet would write a copy of verses; mostly verses somewhat in this style:

'er rushing waterfall and verdant grove

The languid moonlight throws a light of love.

The poet was considered quite respectable; perhaps the poem was even a prize poem. Then it was discovered that the poet, when slightly drunk, had expressed doubts about the exact date of the Book of Habakkuk. There was a terrible scandal; the youth was hurled from his college as an atheist; and then the learned critics went back and looked at his poem with a new darkling and suspicious eye. The "rushing waterfall", after all, had a very revolutionary sound and hinted at pantheistic anarchy. The phrase "languid moonlight" was an appeal to all the most profligate passions. "Light of love" was a term notoriously of loose significance.

Today it is just the opposite; only equally bigoted. A young idealistic poet, full of the new visions of beauty, writes verses appropriate to such vision; as, for instance:

Bug-house underbogies belch daybreak back-firing.

Daylight's a void-vomit; steadying legs to stump.

And all the young critics know he is all right; he has got cosmic rhythm; he is a regular guy.

And then a horrid whisper goes round that he was seen outside an Episcopal Church near Vermont. The whole horrid truth is soon known. He has admitted to a newspaper man that he believes in God. Then the young critics go back gloomily and stare at his poetry; and, strangely enough, see for the first time that there was something awfully old-fashioned in saying "daylight" when Binx might have said "sky-blank"; and, after all, bogies are just the sort of thing Episcopalians are forced by their bishops to believe in.

This, though some of the worst examples have occurred in England, is a strictly correct biography of a man of genius who has come to us from America--Mr. T. S. Eliot. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mr. Eliot was expelled from Harvard for being a High Churchman, as Shelley was expelled from Oxford for being an atheist. Mr. Eliot's character was not blasted by a religion until later in life, and after he had said all that can be said for modern scepticism and despair.

But this makes it all the funnier. An English critic actually accused him of asking us "to believe the unbelievable". Whatever is the sense of calling a thing unbelievable when a man like Eliot already believes it. The author of The Waste Land knows all there is to know about scepticism and pessimism; why not admit that his beliefs are beliefs, and go back to a proper criticism of his literature?

Books for Boys

A recent correspondence upon what is called pernicious literature has given rise to several declarations to the effect that the popular literature which is sold to boys in our day is greatly inferior to that of two or three decades ago. At first sight a reflective person might be inclined to suggest that perhaps there were more psychological elements involved in that far-off boyish enjoyment, and in that, as in many other instances of our youthful pleasures, we were not so much enjoying the stories as enjoying ourselves. It is at least possible that the laudator temporis acti of whom we are speaking would regard the actual task of reading through those lost romances very much in the same way that he would regard the action of a waiter in a restaurant who brought him fourteen penny buns and a plate of bull's-eyes.

The mental digestion of boys is as strong as their physical digestion. They do not heed the cookery of art any more than the art of cookery. They can eat the apples of the tree of knowledge, and they can eat them raw. It is a great mistake to suppose that boys only read boyish books. Not only do they privately revel in their sisters' most sentimental novels, but they absorb cartloads of useless information. One boy in particular, with whose career from an early age we have the best reasons for being familiar, used to read whole volumes of Chamber's Encyclopaedia, and of a very musty and unreliable History of English Trade. The thing was a mere brute pleasure of reading, a pleasure in leisurely and mechanical receptiveness. It was the sort of pleasure that a cow must have in grazing all day long.

But when all allowance has been made for the omnivorousness of youth, we incline to think that there is probably a considerable amount of truth in the idea that boys' books have to some extent degenerated. They have degenerated probably for the reason that all forms of art degenerate, because they are despised. Probably they were less despised in the days when they still had upon them, as it were, the glamour of the great masters of historical romance. The spirit of Scott and Ainsworth and Fenimore Cooper remained in them even if it was only the reflection of a hundred reflections and each in a distorting mirror.

No one will ever understand the spirit at the back of popular and juvenile literature until he realises one fact, that a large amount of it is the result of that enthusiasm of the young reader which makes him wish to hear more and more about certain heroes, and read more and more of certain types of books. He dowers the creatures of fiction with a kind of boyish immortality. He is not surprised if Dick Deadshot or Jack Harkaway renews his youth through a series of volumes which reaches further than the length of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These books have the vital philosophy of youth, a philosophy in which death does not exist, except, indeed, as an external and picturesque incident which happens to villains.

The serious student of this class of books and papers will go on to observe that a very large mass of such works has arisen directly out of the interest taken in some of the creations of great masters. An irresponsible writer for boys early in the century continued the adventures of Pickwick. An interminable book of Oriental adventure which we read in our boyhood was avowedly a supplement to the Arabian Nights, and mingled Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba in one inexhaustible tale. To take a more vulgar example, it is said that "Ally Sloper" is simply an infinitely degraded version of Mr. Micawber; the literary zoologist will trace the same rudimentary organs, the hat, the tie, and the bald head. All this amounts to one of the great laws of the question, the fact that the youthful mind takes hold of certain figures, insists upon them, tears them, as it were, out of the covers of the story, and could follow their adventures in any number of day dreams. Hence one of the essential qualities of this cheap literature-- its astonishing voluminousness. A library keeping a record of it would need a dome vaster than the Bodleian.

From this, as we have said, it may be inferred that there is likely enough to have been some decadence of late years, since we are becoming further and further removed from the great historical novelists, who left a kind of glow upon all historic fiction. New literary fashions have arisen, but they are scarcely likely to be imitated in the literature of boys. No publisher has yet brought out with gaudy-coloured illustrations "The Further Adventures of Jude the Obscure". No penny dreadfuls have been devoted to what eventually happened to Pelleas and Melisande. And in this manner we reach once more the inevitable conclusion about debased forms of art; that they are debased because they are not respected. Everything in the world, from a child to a form of fiction, will be bad until we consent to treat it as good. And of all forms of literature in the world, the one most grossly neglected, from an artistic point of view, is the boys' book of adventure.

It is a very peculiar fact, that while the educated middle-class at the present day expends infinite money and trouble upon surrounding the child with the noblest works of art and literature, the boy is in this matter treated as if he were a half-witted and inconsiderable savage. The wretched infant of four years old is expected to drink in the verses of Stevenson and the decorative curves of Walter Crane. But when he has imbibed this atmosphere, when his aesthetic hunger has by hypothesis been aroused, when his mind has developed with the rapid development of boyhood, he is suddenly put off with books and papers which are not literature at all. A child's love for what is pretty is sedulously cultivated as the dawn of an aesthetic sense, but no one seems to realise that a boy's love of adventure is another aesthetic sense quite equally noble and appropriate. A child's love of colour is treated as a spiritual thing, a sort of hint of heaven, but a boy's love of adventure is spoken of as if it were a mere brute appetite, excusable in a growing lad. If a child says, "I like the pretty flowers", he is applauded for his poetic instinct, but if a boy says, "I like a story about pirates", he is treated as if he had asked for another slice of pork.

As long as this view continues there can be no worthy school of adventurous fiction. It must be realised that both the child's love of the pretty and the boy's love of the bold are sound and admirable artistic instincts. Neither of them shows that the individual is a cherub who cannot be long for this world, but both of them show that he is a well-equipped and healthy human soul. The child in the fairy-tale is canonised for running after a butterfly. The boy in the penny dreadful is denounced for running away to sea. But the sea is more beautiful than any butterflies.

If, then, we are agreed that the first need of the problem is to understand once and for all that the love of adventure is not a temporary savagery to be satisfied, but an essential artistic tendency to be crowned and brought to consummation, it cannot but seriously affect our view of boys' literature as a whole. We want to realise that the instinct of day dream and adventure is a high spiritual and moral instinct, that it requires neither dilution nor excuse, that it has been the mother of all great travellers and missionaries and knights errant and the patroness of all the brave. The one essential of a writer for boys is that he should not write down to them. He should rather write up, arduously and reverently, as well he may, to the mysterious spirit of youth.

The Outline of Liberty

There is a quality needed today for the spread of all truth, and especially religious truth, which is very simple and vivid, but which I find it very difficult to fit with a word. So many words have become catchwords.

I suppose that our critics, in their learned way, would have recourse to the little-known Greek word paradox, if I were simply to say that they are not quite broad-minded enough to be Catholics. In their own jargon, being broad-minded so often means being blank-minded.

If I were to say that they suffer from a lack of imagination, they might suppose (heaven help them) that I meant that what we believe is all imaginary. Nor indeed do either of these two terms define the definite thing I intend. It would be nearer the mark if I said that they cannot see all round a subject; or that they cannot see anything against the background of everything else.

The learned man, of what I may call the Cambridge type, is like a man who should spend years in making a minute ordnance map of the country between Cork and Dublin, and never discover that Ireland is an island. It is not a question of understanding something difficult. It is rather a question of opening the mind wide enough to understand something easy. It is not to be attained by years of labour; it is more likely to be attained in a moment of laziness; when the map-maker who has long been poring over the map with his nose close to Cork, may lean back for a moment and suddenly see Ireland. It is much more difficult to get such men to lean back for a moment and see Christendom.

The Catholic Church is always being defined in terms of the particular quarrel that she happens to have with particular people in a particular place. Because the Protestant sects in Northern Europe, for one or two centuries, disapproved of rosaries and incense and candles and confessional boxes, there was a widespread impression that Roman Catholics were simply people who liked confessional boxes and candles and incense and rosaries. But that is not what a Manichee or a Moslem or a Hindoo or an ancient Greek philosopher would say about Roman Catholics.

Buddhists have incense; Moslems have something very like rosaries; and hardly any healthy heathen human being on earth could conceive why anybody should have any particular hatred of candles. Buddhists would say that Catholics were people who insisted on a personal God and personal immortality. Moslems would say that Catholics were people who believed that God had a Son who assumed human form, and who did not think it idolatrous that He should afterwards assume pictorial or sculptural form. Every group in the world would have its own angle or aspect; and the Protestant would hardly recognise the same object which he had only considered in his own aspect.

Nevertheless, each of these, taken in itself, is in a sense narrow; and to dwell upon it narrows the issue. What we want is to have some general impression of the whole background of humanity, especially of heathen humanity, against which we can see the outline of the object, as, in the map of Ireland, the island is seen against the sea.

Now the real background of all that human heathenry is rather a grey background. There are particular patches, which happen to be close to us in place and time, which have been freshly painted in various ways. So freshly painted that nobody knows yet how long the colours will last. As the Imperialists wanted to paint the map red, so the Internationalists and Idealists now want to paint the map pink. But none of them has painted half so much of the map anything as they, in their optimism, have sometimes supposed. And even in the areas where a sort of official optimism prevails, as in parts of America, there is a great deal more of the old ordinary melancholy of men than anyone could gather from newspaper headlines or political programmes. And I believe that the most general philosophy of men left to themselves, and perhaps the most practical illustration of the Fall of Man, is a vague impression of Fate.

If a man will really talk to the poor, in almost any country, I think he will generally find that they are either Christians or fatalists. This fatalism is more or less varied or complicated, of course, in various places by various mythologies or philosophies. It will generally be found that the mythology is a sort of poetry, embodying a worship of the wild forces of nature; a nature-worship which, when broken up, is called polytheism, and, when united, is called pantheism. But there is sometimes very little left of theism in pantheism.

Then there are whole districts where there is true theism which is, nevertheless, permeated with a mood of fatalism. That, I suppose, is true at least of large areas of Islam. Then there are what may be called the philosophies of resignation, which probably cover equally large areas of the ancient civilisation of Asia.

We need not insist here on any controversial points against or even about these things. But I take it as certain that all those notes of recurrence and cosmic rhythm, and a cycle beginning and ending with itself, which repeat themselves so frequently in connection with Buddhism and Brahminism and Theosophy, are in a general sense allied to an almost impersonal submission to an ultimately impersonal law. That is the tone of the whole thing; and, as I have said, the tone or tint of it strikes us as rather grey; or at least, neutral and negative.

It is the same with almost all we know of the pagan myths and metaphysics of antiquity. It is a modern slander on pagans to represent paganism as almost identical with pleasure. But anyhow, nobody acquainted with the great Greek and Latin literature, even in the smallest degree, will ever dream of identifying paganism with optimism. It would at least be a great deal nearer the truth to say that there, as everywhere else, the fundamental character of paganism is pessimism. But in any case, it can quite fairly be said that it is fatalism.

Upon this grey background there is one splash or star of silver or gold; a thing like a flame. It is quite exceptional and extraordinary. Of its many extraordinary characters, this is perhaps the chief; that it proclaims Liberty. Or, as the only true meaning of that term, it proclaims Will. In a strange voice, as of a trumpet from heaven, it tells a strange story, of which the very essence is that it is made up of Will, or of a free divergence of Wills.

Will made the world; Will wounded the world; the same Divine Will gave to the world for the second time its chance; the same human Will can for the last time make its choice. That is the real outstanding peculiarity, or eccentricity, of the peculiar sect called Roman Catholics. And if anyone objects to my limiting so large a conception to Roman Catholics, I willingly agree that there are many who value it so much that they obviously ought to be Roman Catholics. But if anyone says that it is not in fact and history bound up with the Faith of Roman Catholicism, it is enough to refer him to the history and the facts.

Nobody especially emphasised this spiritual liberty until the Church was established. People began instantly to question this spiritual liberty, when the Church began to be broken up. The instant a breach, or even a crack, had been made in the dyke of Catholicism, there poured through it the bitter sea of Calvinism, or in other words, of a very cruel form of fatalism. Since that time, it has taken the much duller form of Determinism. This sadness and sense of bondage is so general to mankind that it immediately made its appearance, when the special spiritual message of liberty was silenced or interrupted anywhere. Wherever that message is heard, men think and talk in terms of will and choice; and they see no meaning in any of the philosophies of fate, whether desperate or resigned.

It is idle to talk to a Catholic about optimism or pessimism; for he himself shall decide whether the universe shall be, for him, the best or the worst of all possible worlds. It is useless to tell him that he might be more at one with the universal life as a Buddhist or a pantheist; for he knows that, in that sense, he might be more at one with the universal life as a turnip or a tree. It is his whole hope and glory that he is not at one with the universal life; but stands out from it, an exception and even a miracle.

There is a great passage in the "Paradiso" of Dante, which I wish I knew enough Italian to appreciate or enough English to translate. But I would commend it to those who may fancy that my emphasis on this exceptional quality is a mere modern whitewashing of a medieval superstition; and especially to those who have been taught in laborious detail, by learned and very stupid historians, to regard medievalism as narrow and enchained. For it runs roughly like this:

The mightiest gift that God of his largesse Made in creation, perfect even as He, Most of His substance, and to Him most dear, He gave to the Will and it was Liberty.

A Note on Nudism

There is one little habit of some of the most intelligent modern writers against which I should like to protest. It consists of flatly refusing to state somebody else's opinion as it stands; and consider it on its own merits. The modern writer must always assume that it is a choice between his own extreme opinion and something at the other extreme. I found a curious example in a very excellent book by Miss Cicely Hamilton called Modern Germanies. She was referring to the sect of the Nudists, who have revived the ancient heresy of the Adamites and go about without any clothes, taking themselves very seriously; as if nakedness were a new invention. I think Miss Hamilton really hesitated a little, being moved by her instincts as a civilised person to laugh, and by her instincts as a progressive person to applaud. What then does she do? She immediately repeats the old story that in Paul et Virginie, the very artificial sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, the heroine is drowned because she refuses to take off her clothes. She then adds that "if she has to choose" between Virginie and some German flapper who finds it more comfortable to have no clothes to flap, she will choose the latter. But, first of all, why should she "have to choose"? Why should she not consider Nudism on its own merits; and the normal view of clothes, among sane people, also on its own merits? If I have to judge a drunkard, I will judge him without dragging in the comparison of a mad fakir who deliberately died of thirst in the desert. If I have to judge a miser, I will call him a miser; despite the possible existence of an insane and intoxicated nobleman in Vienna, who poured ten thousand gold coins down a drain. I cannot see why Miss Hamilton should call in one extravagance merely to justify another.

Next, if she really does suppose that normal, traditional or Christian morality are represented by Virginie, she is probably quite wrong. Most Christian authorities would say that her notion of sacrifice came very near to the sin of suicide. For Paul et Virginie was not written in a Christian period but in a very pagan period, when pre-Revolutionary France was in love with the pagan Stoics who did not disapprove of suicide. The story itself is largely founded on an old classical romance. It cannot be taken as typical of modern Christianity, or even of medieval Christianity. It is only fair to remember that in this sense Virginie is a heathen heroine; and Godiva was a Christian heroine.

Lastly, I am not sure I should choose the German flapper, even if I were driven to the choice. We may think a sacrifice is made to a mistaken code of honour; but there is the sacrifice; and there is the honour. We have no reason to suppose that the Nudist even knows what we mean by honour. We know nothing about her, except that she does not know what we mean by dignity. As a plain piece of practical psychology, I think it extremely likely that the poor mistaken maiden, who would die for her dignity, would also die for her country, would die for her friends, would die for her faith or promise, or any worthy obligation. We know nothing about the other woman, except that (like the pig and other animals), she feels more comfortable without clothes. It seems to me an insufficient basis for moral confidence.

Consulting the Encyclopedia

The Historical Student will raise his refined eyebrows if I say that a Catholic is an Encyclopaedist. The name of Encyclopaedism was given in the eighteenth century to the most coldly eager of the enemies of Catholicism. And even now it is generally believed that we bow submissively before the storm of the ephemeral Encyclical, but dare not open the scientific and solid Encyclopaedia-- which, by the way, is generally at any given moment much more out of date than the Encyclical.

It is none the less true that the Catholic Church presents itself, though on a higher plane and plan, in a certain double character to which perhaps the nearest natural parallel is the use of an encyclopaedia. For it is the test of a good encyclopaedia that it does two rather different things at once. The man consulting it finds the thing he wants; he also finds how many thousand things there are that he does not want. It advises the particular man upon his particular problem, though it were quite a private problem, almost as if it were giving private advice. And the man must be so far touched to some tinge of healthy humility, if it be only the admission that he does not know everything, and must seek outside himself for something. Even if he is so ill-advised as to consult a medical work of reference for the proper proportions of hyoscine for the poisoning of an aunt, he must be so far in a pious and respectful attitude and accepting something upon a sort of authority.

I remember a man who told me he never accepted anything on any sort of authority; I also remember asking him whether he ever consulted Bradshaw, or whether he insisted on travelling by every train first, to see whether it was safe to travel by it. The journey itself might be highly private, the visit to the aunt almost pressingly private, but he would not evolve a railway train entirely out of his private judgment.

But a work of reference works in another way also. It reminds the traveller in the train that there are a good many other trains full of travellers. It reminds the neoethical nephew that there are a good many different words in the dictionary. In his search for hyoscine he will pass carelessly over the honey of Hymettus, and think it needless to dwell on the life of Heliogabalus or the science of hydraulics. And thus he will learn the same lesson in another way; the somewhat difficult lesson that he is nobody except himself.

Those two discoveries commonly combine in a conversion; and this is perhaps the most workable framework in which to state the two chief elements of my own. There was first the relation of Catholicism to my own original and personal problem; and there was a second rather curious and illuminating illustration of the necessity of keeping it in proportion to all the other problems, the problems of all the other people.

Now all the very varied types of people who sooner or later draw near to the Catholic Faith have moved towards it from the most widely different standpoints, across most varying distances, and rejecting or renewing or reshaping the most queerly contrasted types of non-Catholic thought. My own thought, when it was not yet Catholic, was often blasted with the name of Optimist; but it was not quite so bad as that sounds today. It was an attempt to hold on to religion by the thread of thanks for our creation; by the praise of existence and of created things. And the curious part of it is that I found that this piece of private judgment, or private nonsense, was really much more true than I ever thought it was; and yet, if that truth were left to stand alone, it would be a complete falsehood.

For the sake of illustration, or in a rather special sense of illumination, I will take the metaphor of a window; a thing which always had, and still has, an almost weirdly vivid effect on my own imagination. My own original view, which would originally have been an entirely non-Catholic if not anti-Catholic view, might be roughly stated thus. "After all, what could be more mystical or magical than ordinary daylight coming in through an ordinary window? Why should anybody want a new heaven shining on a new earth; why need they dream of strange stars or miraculous flames, or the sun and moon turned to blood and darkness, in order to imagine a portent? The mere fact of existence and experience is a perpetual portent. Why should we ever ask for more?"

There is an old literary joke or game, familiar I think among the transcendental tricks of the Cavalier poets; a game that is called echo verses. It is a sort of punning upon the last syllable of a word; by which Echo is made to answer mockingly the question asked in the line of verse. Thus, to transfer it to a modern topic, the poet might ask, "Say, what high hope is founded on eugenics?" And the obliging echo would answer, "Nix"; or a paean in praise of some Socialist or ex-Socialist statesman would begin with the line, "Labour's great leader; mighty Democrat", and end with the repetition, "Rat".

I am haunted by this parallel in the curious logical answer to my own question; which was at once a repetition and a contradiction and a completion. For it seemed to me that when I asked that question, "Why is not the daylight enough?" the ancient voice of some mystery such as an old religion answered my words merely by repeating them, "Why is not the daylight enough?" And when I said, "Why should not that wonderful white fire, breaking through the window, inspire us every day like an ever-returning miracle?" the echo out of that old crypt or cavern only answered, "Why not indeed?"

And, the more I thought of it, the more I thought that there was the hint of some strange answer in the very fact that I had to ask the question. I had not lost, and I have never lost, the conviction that such primal things are mysterious and amazing; but if they were amazing, why did anybody have to remind us that they were amazing? Why was there, as I had already realised that there certainly was, a sort of daily fight to appreciate the daylight; to which we had to summon all imagination and poetry and the labour of the arts to aid us? If the first imaginative instinct was right, it seemed clearer and clearer that something else was wrong. And as I indignantly denied that there was anything wrong with the window, I eventually concluded that there was something wrong with me.

In this case, the divine dictionary had answered my own personal question as directly and even personally as if the answer had been written for me. It justified the instinct that inspired me to accept the daylight as a divine reality; but it also solved the problem that puzzled me about the difficulty of thus accepting the daylight all day and every day. Creation was of the Creator and declared as good; the power in it could be praised by angels forever and by the sons of God shouting for joy. If we were ourselves only occasionally overheard in the act of shouting for joy, it was because we were only partially or imperfectly the sons of God; not indeed wholly disinherited, but not wholly domesticated. In short, we suffered by the Fall or Original Sin; but it is important to note that this is not an answer to the particular question, except in the form of the more moderate Catholic doctrine, and not the old pessimist Protestant doctrine of the Fall.

This particular problem arose entirely out of the fact that man is imperfect; but not, in the pessimist sense, perfectly imperfect. The whole paradox is in the fact that a part of his mind remains almost perfect; and he can perpetually perceive what he cannot perpetually enjoy. I was as certain that existence is ecstatically more excellent than non-existence as I was that plus two is different from minus two. Only there is a practical psychological difficulty about always going into ecstasies over this fact. Man is not symmetrically unsymmetrical; he is a sort of one-eyed creature ever since he fought a duel with the devil; and the one eye sees the eternal light eternally, while the other has grown tired and blinks or is almost blind. Thus the authority solved this private problem, not by denying the truth of my private judgment, but by adding to it the larger and more general judgment of the Fall.

And then, in the very act of understanding my own little private problem, I understood the public authority which I have compared to an encyclopaedia. Here there were thousands of other private problems solved for thousands of other private persons; masses of them had nothing to do with my own case at all; but one of them turned and confronted my own case in a curious way. I began to realize that it would not do to act as so many of the most brilliant men of my time had acted. It was not enough for a man to value a truth merely because he had picked it up by himself; to take it away with him and turn it into a private system; at the best into a philosophy and at the worst into a sect. He was very proud of answering his own question without the help of an encyclopaedia; but he did not even pretend to answer all the other questions in the encyclopaedia.

Now I felt very strongly that there ought to be answers, not only to all the other questions which all the other people were asking, but also answers to other questions which I should ask myself. And the moment I began to think about these other problems I saw at once that I could not even satisfy myself with the solution of one of those problems. The practical example which occurred to me was this. I said to myself; it is all very well to say that the miracle of daylight coming through a window ought to be enough to make a man dance with joy. But suppose another man uses your argument as a justification for putting innocent men in prison for life, in a cell with one window, and then leaving them to dance. What will become of all your own denunciations of slavery and the oppression of the poor, when that highly practical statesman has founded a new commonwealth on your new creed?

And then I think there spread out before me, like a vast dazzling plan with innumerable details, some vision of the thousand things that have to be interrelated and balanced in Catholic thought; justice as well as joy; liberty as well as light; and I felt certain that the mere proportion of all these things, not the negation of any of them, needed, to harmonize it and hold it steady, a power and a presence mightier than the mind of any mortal man.

If I had only one sermon to preach

If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.

Now the first fact to note about this notion is a rather curious one. Of all such notions, it is the one most generally dismissed in theory and most universally accepted in practice. Modern men imagine that such a theological idea is quite remote from them; and, stated as a theological idea, it probably is remote from them. But, as a matter of fact, it is too close to them to be recognised. It is so completely a part of their minds and morals and instincts, I might almost say of their bodies, that they take it for granted and act on it even before they think of it. It is actually the most popular of all moral ideas; and yet it is almost entirely unknown as a moral idea. No truth is now so unfamiliar as a truth, or so familiar as a fact.

Let us put the fact to a trifling but not unpleasing test. Let us suppose that the reader, or (preferably) the writer, is going into a public-house or some public place of social intercourse; a public tube or tram might do as well, except that it seldom allows of such long and philosophical intercourse as did the old public house. Anyhow, let us suppose any place where men of motley but ordinary types assemble; mostly poor because the majority is poor some moderately comfortable but rather what is snobbishly called common; an average handful of human beings. Let us suppose that the enquirer, politely approaching this group, opens the conversation in a chatty way by saying, "Theologians are of opinion that it was one of the superior angelic intelligences seeking to become the supreme object of worship, instead of finding his natural joy in worshipping, which dislocated the providential design and frustrated the full joy and completion of the cosmos". After making these remarks the enquirer will gaze round brightly and expectantly at the company for corroboration, at the same time ordering such refreshments as may be ritually fitted to the place or time, or perhaps merely offering cigarettes or cigars to the whole company, to fortify them against the strain. In any case, we may well admit that such a company will find it something of a strain to accept the formula in the above form. Their comments will probably be disjointed and detached; whether they take the form of "Lorlumme" (a beautiful thought slurred somewhat in pronunciation), or even "Gorblimme" (an image more sombre but fortunately more obscure), or merely the unaffected form of "Garn"; a statement quite free from doctrinal and denominational teaching, like our State compulsory education. In short, he who shall attempt to state this theory as a theory to the average crowd of the populace will doubtless find that he is talking in an unfamiliar language. Even if he states the matter in the simplified form, that Pride is the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, he will only produce a vague and rather unfavourable impression that he is preaching. But he is only preaching what everybody else is practising; or at least is wanting everybody else to practise.

Let the scientific enquirer continue to cultivate the patience of science. Let him linger--at any rate let me linger-- in the place of popular entertainment whatever it may be, and take very careful note (if necessary in a note-book) of the way in which ordinary human beings do really talk about each other. As he is a scientific enquirer with a note-book, it is very likely that he never saw any ordinary human beings before. But if he will listen carefully, he will observe a certain tone taken towards friends, foes and acquaintances; a tone which is, on the whole, creditably genial and considerate, though not without strong likes and dislikes. He will hear abundant if sometimes bewildering allusion to the well-known weaknesses of Old George; but many excuses also, and a certain generous pride in conceding that Old George is quite the gentleman when drunk, or that he told the policeman off proper. Some celebrated idiot, who is always spotting winners that never win, will be treated with almost tender derision; and, especially among the poorest, there will be a true Christian pathos in the reference to those who have been "in trouble" for habits like burglary and petty larceny. And as all these queer types are called up like ghosts by the incantation of gossip, the enquirer will gradually form the impression that there is one kind of man, probably only one kind of man, perhaps, only one man, who is really disliked. The voices take on quite a different tone in speaking of him; there is a hardening and solidification of disapproval and a new coldness in the air. And this will be all the more curious because, by the current modern theories of social or anti-social action, it will not be at all easy to say why he should be such a monster; or what exactly is the matter with him. It will be hinted at only in singular figures of speech, about a gentleman who is mistakenly convinced that he owns the street; or sometimes that be owns the earth. Then one of the social critics will say, "'E comes in 'ere and 'e thinks 'e's Gawd Almighty." Then the scientific enquirer will shut his note-book with a snap and retire from the scene, possibly after paying for any drinks he may have consumed in the cause of social science. He has got what he wanted. He has been intellectually justified. The man in the pub has precisely repeated, word for word, the theological formula about Satan.

Pride is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices. This is what is felt by the poor men in the public tavern, when they tolerate the tippler or the tipster or even the thief, but feel something fiendishly wrong with the man who bears so close a resemblance to God Almighty. And we all do in fact know that the primary sin of pride has this, curiously freezing and hardening effect upon the other sins. A man may be very susceptible and in sex matters rather loose; he may waste himself on passing and unworthy passions, to the hurt of his soul; and yet always retain something which makes friendship with his own sex at least possible, and even faithful and satisfying. But once let that sort of man regard his own weakness as a strength, and you have somebody entirely different. You have the Lady-Killer; the most beastly of all possible bounders; the man whom his own sex almost always has the healthy instinct to hate and despise. A man may be naturally slothful and rather irresponsible; he may neglect many duties through carelessness, and his friends may still understand him, so long as it is really a careless carelessness. But it is the devil and all when it becomes a careful carelessness. It is the devil and all when he becomes a deliberate and self-conscious Bohemian, sponging on principle, preying on society in the name of his own genius (or rather of his own belief in his own genius) taxing the world like a king on the plea that he is a poet, and despising better men than himself who work that he may waste. It is no metaphor to say that it is the devil and all. By the same fine old original religious formula, it is all of the devil. We could go through any number of social types illustrating the same spiritual truth. It would be easy to point out that even the miser, who is half-ashamed of his madness, is a more human and sympathetic type than the millionaire who brags and boasts of his avarice and calls it sanity and simplicity and the strenuous life. It would be easy to point out that even cowardice, as a mere collapse of the nerves, is better than cowardice as an ideal and theory of the intellect; and that a really imaginative person will have more sympathy with men who, like cattle, yield to what they know is panic, than with a certain particular type of prig who preaches something that he calls peace. Men hate priggishness because it is the driest form of pride.

Thus there is a paradox in the whole position. The spiritual idea of the evil of pride, especially spiritual pride, was dismissed as a piece of mysticism not needed by modern morality, which is to be purely social and practical. And, as a fact, it is very specially needed because the morality is social and practical. On the assumption that we need care for nothing except making other human beings happy, this is quite certainly the thing that will make them unhappy. The practical case against pride, as a mere source of social discomfort and discord, is if possible even more self-evident than the more mystical case against it, as a setting up of the self against the soul of the world. And yet though we see this thing on every side in modern life, we really hear very little about it in modern literature and ethical theory. Indeed, a great deal of modern literature and ethics might be meant specially for the encouragement of spiritual pride. Scores of scribes and sages are busy writing about the importance of self-culture and self-realisation; about how every child is to be taught to develop his personality (whatever that may be); about how every man must devote himself to success, and every successful man must devote himself to developing a magnetic and compelling personality; about how every man may become a superman (by taking Our Correspondence Course) or, in the more sophisticated and artistic type of fiction, how one specially superior superman can learn to look down on the mere mob of ordinary supermen, who form the population of that peculiar world. Modern theory, as a whole, is rather encouraging egoism. But we need not be alarmed about that. Modern practice, being exactly like ancient practice, is still heartily discouraging it. The man with the strong magnetic personality is still the man whom those who know him best desire most warmly to kick out of the club. The man in a really acute stage of self-realisation is a no more pleasing object in the club than in the pub. Even the most enlightened and scientific sort of club can see through the superman; and see that he has become a bore. It is in practice that the philosophy of pride breaks down; by the test of the moral instincts of man wherever two or three are gathered together; and it is the mere experience of modern humanity that answers the modern heresy.

There is indeed another practical experience, known to us all, even more pungent and vivid than the actual unpopularity of the bully or the bumptious fool. We all know that there is a thing called egoism that is much deeper than egotism. Of all spiritual diseases it is the most intangible and the most intolerable. It is said to be allied to hysteria; it sometimes looks as if it were allied to diabolic possession. It is that condition in which the victim does a thousand varying things from one unvarying motive of a devouring vanity; and sulks or smiles, slanders or praises, conspires and intrigues or sits still and does nothing, all in one unsleeping vigilance over the social effect of one single person. It is amazing to me that in the modern world, that chatters perpetually about psychology and sociology, about the tyranny with which we are threatened by a few feeble-minded infants, about alcoholic poisoning and the treatment of neurotics, about half a hundred things that are near the subject and never on the spot-- it is amazing that these moderns really have so very little to say about the cause and cure of a moral condition that poisons nearly every family and every circle of friends. There is hardly a practical psychologist who has anything to say about it that is half so illuminating as the literal exactitude of the old maxim of the priest; that pride is from hell. For there is something awfully vivid and appallingly fixed, about this madness at its worst, that makes that short and antiquated word seem much more apt than any other. And then, as I say, the learned go wandering away into discourses about drink or tobacco, about the wickedness of wine glasses or the incredible character of public-houses. The wickedest work in this world is symbolised not by a wine glass but by a looking-glass; and it is not done in public-houses;, but in the most private of all private houses which is a house of mirrors.

The phrase would probably be misunderstood; but I should begin my sermon by telling people not to enjoy themselves. I should tell them to enjoy dances and theatres and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; to enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if they can enjoy nothing better; to enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to this other alternative; but never to learn to enjoy themselves. Human beings are happy so long as they retain the receptive power and the power of reaction in surprise and gratitude to something outside. So long as they have this they have as the greatest minds have always declared, a something that is present in childhood and which can still preserve and invigorate manhood. The moment the self within is consciously felt as something superior to any of the gifts that can be brought to it, or any of the adventures that it may enjoy, there has appeared a sort of self-devouring fastidiousness and a disenchantment in advance, which fulfils all the Tartarean emblems of thirst and of despair.

Difficulties can easily be raised, of course, in any such debate by the accident of words being used in different senses; and sometimes in quite contrary senses. For instance, when we speak of somebody being "proud of" something, as of a man being proud of his wife or a people proud of its heroes, we really mean something that is the very opposite of pride. For it implies that the man thinks that something outside himself is needed to give him great glory; and such a glory is really acknowledged as a gift. In the same way, the word will certainly be found misleading, if I say that the worst and most depressing element in the mixed elements of the present and the immediate future, seems to me to be an element of impudence. For there is a kind of impudence that we all find either amusing or bracing; as in the impudence of the guttersnipe. But there again the circumstances disarm the thing of its real evil. The quality commonly called "cheek" is not an assertion of superiority; but rather a bold attempt to balance inferiority. When you walk up to a very wealthy and powerful nobleman and playfully tip his hat over his eyes (as is your custom) you are not suggesting that you yourself are above all human follies, but rather that you are capable of them, and that he also ought to have a wider and richer experience of them. When you dig a Royal Duke in the waistcoat, in your playful manner, you are not taking yourself too seriously, but only, perhaps, not taking him so seriously as is usually thought correct. This sort of impudence may be open to criticism, as it is certainly subject to dangers. But there is a sort of hard intellectual impudence, which really treats itself as intangible to retort or judgment; and there are a certain number among the new generations and social movements, who fall into this fundamental weakness. It is a weakness; for it is simply settling down permanently to believe what even the vain and foolish can only believe by fits and starts, but what all men wish to believe and are often found weak enough to believe; that they themselves constitute the supreme standard of things. Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself. Now in the general clouding of clear and abstract standards, there is a real tendency today for a young man (and even possibly a young woman) to fall back on that personal test, simply for lack of any trustworthy impersonal test. No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be moulded to suit it, all standards may be moulded to suit the self. But the self as a self is a very small thing and something very like an accident. Hence arises a new kind of narrowness; which exists especially in those who boast of breadth. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all. There is produced also a sort of subconscious ossification; which hardens the mind not only against the traditions of the past, but even against the surprises of the future. Nil admirari becomes the motto of all nihilists; and it ends, in the most complete and exact sense, in nothing.

If I had only one sermon to preach, I certainly could not end it in honour, without testifying to what is in my knowledge the salt and preservative of all these things. This is but one of a thousand things in which I have found the Catholic Church to be right, when the whole world is perpetually tending to be wrong; and without its witness, I believe that this secret, at once a sanity and a subtlety, would be almost entirely forgotten among men. I know that I for one had hardly heard of positive humility until I came within the range of Catholic influence; and even the things that I love most, such as liberty and the island poetry of England, had in this matter lost the way, and were in a fog of self-deception. Indeed there is no better example of the definition of pride than the definition of patriotism. It is the noblest of all natural affections, exactly so long as it consists of saying, "May I be worthy of England." It is the beginning of one of the blindest forms of Pharisaism when the patriot is content to say, "I am an Englishman." And I cannot count it an accident that the patriot has generally seen the flag as a flame of vision, beyond and better than himself, in countries of the Catholic tradition, like France and Poland and Ireland; and has hardened into this heresy of admiring merely his own breed and bone and inherited type, and himself as a part of it, in the places most remote from that religion, whether in Berlin or Belfast. In short, if I had only one sermon to preach, it would be one that would profoundly annoy the congregation, by bringing to their attention the permanent challenge of the Church. If I had only one sermon to preach, I should feel specially confident that I should not be asked to preach another.

If Don John of Austria had married Mary Queen of Scots

Why is it that the world's most famous love story, after the archetypal story of Adam and Eve, is the story of Antony and Cleopatra? I for one should answer, to begin with, because of the solid truth of the story of Adam and Eve. I have often wondered whether, when the moderns have done playing with that story, burlesquing it, and turning it upside down and tacking on a modern moral like a new tail, or expanding it into an evolutionary fantasia that nobody can make head or tail of, it will ever occur to anybody to see bow sensible it is, exactly as it stands. Even if it is an old fable, the old fable is much truer with the old moral. Christians are not constrained, and least of all Christians of my own confession, to treat Genesis with the heavy verbalism of the Puritan--the Hebraiser who knows no Hebrew. But the curious thing is that the more literally we take it the truer it is; and even if it were materialised and modernised into a story of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the old moral would still be the sound one. A man naked and with nothing of his own is given by a friend the free run of all the fruits and flowers of a very beautiful estate; and only asked to promise that he will not interfere with one particular fruit-tree. If we all talk till we are as old as Methuselah, the moral remains the same for any honourable man. If he breaks his word he is a cad; if he says, "I broke my word because I believe in breaking all limitations and expanding into infinite progress and evolution, he is ten times more of a cad; and has, moreover, become a bore as well as a bounder. But it is this modern suggestion, that Man was right to be bored with Eden and to demand evolution (otherwise mere change), that is very relevant to the question I have asked about Antony and Cleopatra. It is also very relevant to the question I am going to ask about two other famous figures in history: a woman and a man.

For upon this modern theory the Fall really was the Fall; for it was the first action that had only tedium as a motive. Progress began in boredom; and, heaven knows, it sometimes seems likely to end in it. And no wonder; for of all utter falsehoods the most false, I think, is this notion that men can be happy in movement, when nothing but dullness drives them on from behind. Children, and such happy people, can go on from something they really like to something they will like more. But if ever there was a whisper that might truly come from the devil, it is the suggestion that men can despise the beautiful things they have got, and only delight in getting new things because they have not got them. It is obvious that, on that principle, Adam will tire of the tree just as he has tired of the garden. "It is enough that there is always a beyond"; that is, there is always something else to get tired of. All progress based on that mood is truly a Fall; man did fall, does fall, and we can today see him falling. It is the great progressive proposition; that he must seek only for enjoyment because he has lost the power to enjoy.

Now this shadow of failure on all fame and civilisation which the agnostic poet preferred to call "the something that infects the world," and I shall cause general pain by calling Original Sin, does manifest itself markedly in the sort of historical legends that exist. But I would urge here that it appears in the historical legends that do not exist. I refer especially to that grand historical episode of the heroic honeymoon, otherwise called the marriage of pure minds, which I study here as closely as is possible in a case that does not exist. It is a remarkable fact, when we consider how much happiness love has doubtless given to mankind as a whole, that mankind has never pointed to any great historical example of a hero and a heroine wedded in a way entirely worthy of them; of a great man and a great woman united by a great love that was entirely supreme and satisfying, as in the tradition of the gigantic loves of Eden. Anybody who imagines that I am talking pessimism, about ordinary people in love, will impute to me the very reverse of what I mean. Millions of people have been happy in love and marriage, in the ordinary way of human happiness; but then that precisely consists in a certain commonsense admission of original sin; in humility and pardon and taking things as they come. But there has not been any example on the grand scale, of a perfect marriage--that has remained in human memory like a great monument. All those monuments, though often of the purest marble, hewn from the loftiest mountain, have very clearly across them the crack from the earthquake in the beginning. The noblest knight of the Middle Ages, St. Louis, was less happy in his marriage than in all other relations. Dante did not marry Beatrice; he lost his love in infancy and found her again in Paradise or in a dream. Nelson was a great lover, but we cannot say that his love made him more great, since it made him do in Naples the only mean action of his life. These historic examples have become legends or traditions; but they have become tragic traditions. And the central literary tradition of all is that typically tragic one I have named, in which even perfect love was whimsically imperfect, and certainly suffered by very imperfect people; in which the hero learned no lesson except delay; in which the heroine inspired nothing except defeat; in which romance made him less than a Caesar and has unkindly compared her to a snake; in which the man was weakened by love and the woman by lovers. Men have taken Antony and Cleopatra as the perfect love story, precisely because it is the imperfect love story. It mirrors the thwarting, the unworthiness, the disproportion which they have felt as spoiling so many splendid passions and divine desires; and mirrors them all the more truly because the mirror is cracked. I imagine that poets will never leave off writing about Antony and Cleopatra; and all they write will be in the mood of that great French poet of our own time, who describes the Roman warrior gazing into the unfathomable eyes of the Egyptian queen, and seeing beneath a spinning and sparkling light the eddies of a vast sea, filled with the rout of all his ships.

I have here dared to call up out of the dust another warrior, whose destiny turned also with the topsails and high poops of the galleys; and another woman, whose legend also has been sometimes twisted into the legend of a snake. There was never any doubt about the beautiful colours or graceful curves of the snake; but, in fact, the woman was not a snake, but very much of a woman; even by the account of those who call her a wicked woman. And the man was not only a warrior, but a conqueror; and his great ships sweep through history not merely to defeat, but to a high deliverance, in which he did not lose the empire, but saved the world. Whatever else we may think of the woman, none can doubt where her heart would have been in that battle, or what sort of song of praise she would have sent up after that victory. There was much about her that was militant, though her life might well have sickened her of militancy; there was much about him that was sensitive and sympathetic with that wider world of culture for which her soul sickened till she died. They were made for each other; they were in fact the heroic lovers, or perfect human pair, for whom we have looked elsewhere in history in vain. There was only one small defect in their purple and impassioned love story; and that is that they never met.

In truth, this dream began to drift through my mind when I first read a parenthetical remark by Andrew Lang, in a historical study about Philip of Spain. Referring to the King's half-brother, the famous Don John of Austria, Lang remarked casually: "He intended to carry off Mary Queen of Scots," and added caustically: "He was incapable of fear." Of course nobody is incapable of fear. He was certainly, in the common sense, incapable of obeying fear: but, if I understand the type, he was not incapable of enjoying fear as an element in a mystery like that of love. It is exactly because love has lost that slight touch of fear, that it has become in our time so flat and flippant and vulgar; when it has not become laboriously biological, not to say bestial. And Mary was dangerous as well as in danger; that heart-shaped face looking out of the ruff in so many pictures was like a magnet, a talisman, a terrible jewel. There was, even then, in the idea of eloping with the tragic yet attractive Franco-Scottish princess, all the ancient savour of the romances about delivering a lady from dragons, or even disenchanting her out of the shape of a dragon. But though the idea was romantic, it was also in a sense what is now called psychological; for it exactly answered the personal needs of two very extraordinary personalities.

If ever there was a man who ought to have rounded off his victorious career by capturing something more human and spiritual and satisfying than wreaths of laurel or flags of defeated foes, it was Don John of Austria. Because his actual historical life rises on a wave of conquest in relation to these things, and then sinks again into something less epical and simple, his life has something of the appearance of an anti-climax; and reads like a mere stale maxim that all victories are vanities. He tried to crown his chief exploit by founding a kingdom of his own, and was prevented by the jealousy of his brother; he then went, somewhat wearily, I imagine, as the representative of the same brother to the Flemish fields laid waste by the wars of the Dutch and the Duke of Alva. He set out to be more merciful and magnanimous than the Duke of Alva; but he died in a net or tangle of policies; of which the only touch of poetry was a suggestion of poison.

But in that broad and golden dawn of the Renaissance, full of classical legends, carrying off Mary Stuart would have been like carrying off Helen of Troy. In that red sunset of the old chivalric romance (for the sunrise and the sunset were both in that bewildering sky) it would have seemed a magnificent materialisation of one of those strange and stately public love affairs, or knightly services, which preserved something of the Courts of Love and the pageant of the Troubadours; as when Rudel publicly pledged himself to an unknown lady in a castle in the east, almost as distant as a castle east of the sun; or the sword of Bayard sent across the mountains its remote salute to Lucretia. That one of these great loves of the great should actually be achieved in the grand style, that, I fancy, would have been a wildly popular episode in that epoch. And to the career of Don John it would have given a climax and a clue of meaning which its merely military successes could not give; and handed his name down in history and (what is much more important) in legend and literature, as a happier Antony married to a nobler Cleopatra. And when he looked into her eyes he would not have seen only bright chaos and the catastrophe of Actium, the ruin of his ships and his hopes of an imperial throne; but rather the flying curve and crescent of the Christian ships, sweeping to the rescue of the Christian captives, and blazed upon their golden sails the sunburst of Lepanto.

The converse is also true. If ever there was a woman who was manifestly meant, destined, created, and as it were crying aloud to be carried off by Don John of Austria, or some such person, it was Mary Queen of Scots. If ever there was a woman who went to seed for want of meeting any sort of man who was anything like her equal, it was she. The tragedy of her life was not that she was abnormal, but that she was normal. It was the crowd all round her that was abnormal. There is almost a sort of antic allegory, in that sense, in such accidents as the fact that Rizzio had a hump and Bothwell some sort of a squint. If her story seems now to be steeped in morbidity, it was because the mob was morbid. Unfortunately for this ill-fated queen, she was not morbid. It is the other characters, each in his own way, which pass before us in misshapen outlines like the dwarfs and lunatics in some tropic tragedy of Ford or Webster, dancing round a deserted queen. And, by a final touch, all these ungainly figures seem more tolerable than the one that is externally elegant, the hollow doll, Darnley; just as a handsome waxwork can seem more uncanny than an ugly man. In that sense she had seen handsome men and ugly men and strong men and clever men; but they were all half-men; like the hideous cripples imagined by Flaubert, living in their half-houses with their half-wives and half-children. She never met a complete man; and Don John was very complete. In that sense she had been given many things; the crown of Scotland, the prospect of the crown of France; the prospect of the crown of England. She had been given everything except fresh air and the sunlight treatment; and all that is typified by the great ships with their golden castles and their leaping flags, that go forth to meet the winds of the world.

We know why Mary Stuart was killed. She was not killed for having killed her husband, even if she had killed her husband; and recent study of the Casket Letters suggests that her enemies are more clearly convicted of forgery than she was ever convicted of murder. She was not killed for trying to kill Elizabeth, even if the whole story of trying to kill Elizabeth was not a fiction employed by those who were trying to kill Mary. She was not killed for being beautiful; that is one of the many popular slanders on poor Elizabeth. She was killed for being in good health. Perhaps she was the only person who was ever condemned and executed merely for being in good health. The legend which represented Elizabeth as a lioness and Mary as a sort of sickly snake is largely abandoned; anyhow, it is the very reverse of the fact. Mary was very vigorous; a strong rider, and as a dancer almost ready to outrun the Modern Girl. Curiously enough, her contemporary portraits do not convey much of her charm, but do convey a great deal of her vigour. But, as anyone may have noticed in the animal spirits of some of the finest actresses, vigour has sometimes a great deal to do with charm. Now it was essential to the policy of Cecil, and the oligarchs rich with the loot of the old religion, that Mary should die for Elizabeth, and Mary, despite her misfortunes, did not show the smallest disposition to die. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was still dying rather than still living. And when the Catholic heir inherited, it might go ill with the Protestant lords. They therefore applied to Mary, at Fotheringay, one of the sharpest possible remedies for good health, which has seldom been known to fail.

Her energy, which had thus brought her to her death, had also brought her through her life; and may be the key to many of the riddles of her life. It may be that her repeated ill-luck in marriage embittered her more than it might a woman less normal and elemental; and that the very levities, which led to her being painted as a harlot or a vampire, sprang from her primary fitness to be a mother and a wife. It may be (for all I know) that a fairly healthy person, in such a horrible experience, might have wasted her natural instincts on some violent adventurer like Bothwell; those things are always possible; but I confess I could never see that in this case they were necessary. I have often fancied that the alliance may have been more politic, and even cynical, than appeared to that fine romantic novelist, the forger of the Casket Letters. Or it might have been surrender to a sort of blackmail; it might have been many things. Anyhow, being surrounded by brutes, she chose the best brute; though he is always represented as the worst. He was the only one of them who was a man as well as a brute; and a Scotsman as well as a man. He at least never betrayed her to Elizabeth; and all the others did nothing else. He kept the borders of her kingdom against the English like a good subject and a normal soldier; and she might very well have thrown herself under his protection for that alone. But whether or no she sought satisfaction in such a marriage, I am sure that she never found satisfaction in it; I am sure she found only a new phase of the long degradation of living with her inferiors.

There was always in her heart a hunger for civilisation. It is an appetite not easily appreciated now, when people are so over-civilised that they can only have a hunger for barbarism. But she loved culture as the Italian artists of the previous century had loved it; as something not only beautiful but bright and shining and new; like Leonardo's first sketches of flying-machines or the full revelations of perspective and light. She was the Renaissance chained up like a prisoner; just as Don John was the Renaissance roaming the world like a pirate. This was, of course, the perfectly simple explanation of her frequent and friendly toleration of a hunchback like Rizzio and a young lunatic like Chastelard. They were Italy and France; they were music and letters; they were singing-birds from the South who had happened to perch on her window-sill. If there are still any historians who suppose that they were anything more to her than that, especially in the case of the Italian secretary, I can only say that such learned old gentlemen must be pretty much on the moral and mental level of Darnley and his company of cut-throats. Even if she was a wicked woman, there is no sense in supposing that she was not an intelligent woman, or that she never wished to turn from her laborious and life-long wickedness for a little intelligent conversation. The apology for my own (somewhat belated) experiment in matchmaking is that she might have been very different, when married to a man who was quite as brave as Bothwell and quite as intelligent as Rizzio, and, in a more practical and useful fashion, at least as romantic as Chastelard.

But we must not be romantic; that is, we must not concern ourselves with the real feelings of real and recognisable human beings. It is not allowed. We must now sternly turn our attention to scientific history; that is, to certain abstractions which have been labelled The Elizabethan Settlement, the Union, the Reformation, and the Modern World. I will leave the Romantics, those unpresentable Bohemians (with whom, of course, I would not be seen for worlds), to decide at what date and crisis they would like Don John finally to fulfil his design; whether his shining ship is to appear in the wide waters of the Forth as the mad mob in Edinburgh is waving scurrilous scrolls and banners before the window of the Queen; or, on the contrary, a dark boat with a solitary figure is to slide across the glassy stillness of Loch Leven; or a courier hot with haste in advance of a new army hurl a new challenge into the bickering parleys of Carberry, or a herald emblazoned with God knows what eagles and castles and lions (and presumably a bar sinister) blow a trumpet before the barred portals of Fotheringay. I leave that to them; they know all about it. I am an earnest and plodding student of the dry scientific details of history; and we really must consider the possible effect on such details as England, Scotland, Spain, Europe, and the world. We must suppose, for the sake of argument, that Don John was at least sufficiently strong to assert Mary's claim to sovereignty in Scotland to begin with; and, despite the unpleasant moralising of the mob in Edinburgh, I think such a restoration would have been generally successful in Scotland. Professor Phillimore used to say that the tragedy of Scotland was that she had the Reformation without the Renaissance. And I certainly think that, while Mary and the southern prince were discussing Plato and Pico della Mirandola, John Knox would have found himself a little out of his depth. But on the assumption of popular rulers and a strong Spanish backing, which is the essence of this fantasy, I should say that a people like the Scots would have gobbled up the strong meat of the Revival of Learning quicker than anybody else. But in any case, there is another point to be considered. If the Scots did not figure prominently in the Renaissance, they had, in their own way, figured most brilliantly in the Middle Ages. Glasgow was one of the oldest universities; Bruce was counted the fourth knight in Christendom; and Scotland, not England, continued the tradition of Chaucer. The chivalrous side of the regime would surely have awakened noble memories, even in that ignoble squabble. I must here unfortunately omit a very fine chapter from the unpublished Romance, in which the lovers ride down to Melrose (if necessary by moonlight) to the reputed resting-place of the Heart of Bruce; and recall (in ringing phrases) how Spanish and Scottish spears had once charged side by side upon the Saracen, and hurled far ahead, like a bolt above the battle, the heart of a Scottish King. This fine piece of prose must not delay us, however, from facing the next fact; which is that Mary, once safe, would survive as the Queen of England as well as Scotland. It is enough to say that medieval memories might have awakened in the North; and the Scots might even have remembered the meaning of Holyrood.

Don John died trying to keep his temper with Dutch Calvinists, about ten years before the affair of the Armada; and, much as I admire him, I am glad he did. I do not want my individual dream or romance, about the rescue and elopement of Mary Stuart, mixed up with that famous international collision, in which as an Englishman I am bound to sympathise with England and as an Anti-Imperialist with the smaller nation. But, it may be said, how can an Englishman in any case reconcile himself to a romance that would involve the Elizabethan policy being overthrown by a Spanish prince, the throne occupied by a Scottish queen; or some part at least of the Armada's purposes achieved? To which I answer that such a question recoils ruinously on those who ask it. Let them merely compare what might have happened with what did happen. Was Mary a Scot? We endured one in her son. Was Don John a foreigner? We submitted to one when we expelled the grandson of her son. Mary was as English as James the First. Don John was as English as George the First. The fact is that, whatever else our policy of insular religion (or whatever we call it) may have done, it certainly did not save us from alien immigration, or even from alien invasion. Some may say we could not accept a Spaniard, when we had been recently fighting the Spaniards. But, when we did accept a Dutch prince, we had been recently fighting the Dutch. Blake as well as Drake might complain that his victories had been reversed; and that we had, after all, allowed the broom of Van Tromp to sweep not only the English seas, but the English land. A whole generation before the first George came from Hanover, William of Orange had marched across England with an invading army from Holland. If Don John had really brought an Armada with him (and Armadas are often awkward during elopements) he could hardly have inflicted a heavier humiliation on us than that. But, of course, the truth is that I am sensitive on the point of patriotism; much more sensitive than anybody was in those days. Extreme nationalism is a relatively new religion; and what these people were thinking of was the old sort of religion. It really made a great difference to them that Dutch William was a Calvinist while Don John was a Catholic; and that whatever George the First was (and he was nearly nothing) he was not a Papist. That brings me to a much more vital phase of my vision of what never happened. But those who expect me to break forth into thunders of theological anathema, will here be rather abruptly disappointed. I have no intention, I have no need, to argue here about Luther and Leo and the rights and wrongs of the revolt of new sects in the North. I need not do so, for the simple reason that I do not believe, in the case here imagined, that we should have been primarily concerned about the North. I believe we should have realised instead the enormously important position in the South; and even more so in the East. All eyes would have been turned to a far more central battle of civilisation; and the hero of that battle was Don John of Austria.

It has been remarked, and not untruly, that the Papacy seemed curiously negligent of the northern danger from Protestantism. It was; but chiefly because it was not at all negligent of the eastern danger from Islam. Throughout all that period Pope after Pope issued appeal after appeal to the princes of Europe to combine in defence of all Christendom against the Asiatic attack. They had hardly any response; and only a scratch fleet of their own galleys with some Venetian, Genoese, and others, could be sent to stop the Turk from sweeping the whole Mediterranean. This is the huge historic fact which the northern doctrinal quarrels have concealed; and that is why I am not concerned here with the northern doctrinal quarrels. That age was not the age of the Reformation. It was the age of the last great Asiatic invasion, which very nearly destroyed Europe. About the time the Reformation was beginning, the Turks, in the very middle of Europe, destroyed at a blow the ancient kingdom of Bohemia. About the time the Reformation had finished its work, the hordes out of Asia were besieging Vienna. They were foiled by the stroke of Sobieski the Pole, as a hundred years before by the stroke of Don John of Austria. But they came as near as that to submerging the cities of Europe. It must also be remembered that this last Moslem thrust was really a savage and incalculable thing, compared with the first thrust of Saladin and the Saracens. The high Arab culture of the Crusades had long perished; and the invaders were Tartars and Turks and a rabble from really barbarous lands. It was not the Moors but the Huns. It was not Saladin against Richard or Averroes against Aquinas; it was something much more like the worst and wildest shocker about the Yellow Peril.

I have a great respect for the real virtues and the sane if sleeping virility of Islam. I like that element in it that is at once democratic and dignified; I sympathise with many elements in it which most Europeans (and all Americans) would call lazy and unprogressive. But when all allowance has been made for these moral merits, of the simpler sort, I defy anybody with a sense of cultural comparison to tolerate the image of Europe of the Renaissance given up to Bashi-Bazouks and the wild Mongol mobs of the decline. But it is almost as bad if we consider only the vetoes of primitive Islam; and most of its virtues were vetoes. When all is said, to the eyes of Mediterranean men especially, there passed across their shining sea merely the shadow of a great Destroyer. What they heard was the voice of Azrael rather than Allah. Theirs was the vision that would have been the background of my dream; and lifted all its nobler figures, English, Spanish, or Scottish, into the altitudes of defiance and martyrdom. The dry wind that drove before it a dust of broken idols was threatening the poised statues of Angelo and Donatello, where they shine on the high places around the central sea; and the sand of the high deserts descended, like moving mountains of dust and thirst and death, on the deep culture of the sacred vines; and the songs and the deep laughter of the vineyards. And above all, those clouds that were closing round them were like the curtains of the harem, from whose corners look out the stony faces of the eunuchs; there spread like a vast shadow over shining courts and closing spaces the silence of the East, and all its dumb compromise with the coarseness of man. These things, above all, were closing in upon that high and thwarted romance of the perfect Knight and Lady, which men of the Christian blood can never attain and never abandon; but which these two alone, perhaps, might have attained and made one flesh.

Historians quarrel about whether the English under Elizabeth preferred the Prayer-Book or the Mass-Book. But surely nobody will quarrel about whether they preferred the Crescent or the Cross. The learned dispute about how England was divided into Catholics and Protestants. But nobody will dispute what England would have felt, when told that the whole world was now desperately divided into Christians and Mohammedans. In short, I think that under this influence England would have simply broadened her mind; even if it were only broadened to take in a big battle instead of a small battle. Of that broader battle, and our best chances in it, Don John of Austria was universally regarded as the incarnation and the uplifted sign. Not only the praise due to heroes, but the flattery inevitably paid to princes, would have carried that triumph before him wherever he went like a noise of trumpets. Everybody would have felt in him both the Renaissance and the Crusade; as those two things are warp and woof in the golden tapestries of Ariosto. Everybody would have felt both the rebirth of Europe and its all-but death. Nor need the praise have come merely from any common flatterers. All good Englishmen could have become good Europeans; I should express my meaning better if I said great Europeans. In all that crowd, perhaps, only Shakespeare could not have been greater. And yet I am not so sure; for he might certainly have been gayer. Whatever his politics were (and I suspect they were much like those of his friend the Catholic Southampton) there is no doubt that his tragedies are eternally twisted and tortured with something like an obsession about usurpation and slain kings and stolen crowns; and all the insecurity of royal and every other right. Nobody knows how his heart, if not his mind, might have expanded in that truly "glorious summer" of a sovereignty which satisfied his sixteenth-century hunger for a heroic and high-hearted sovereign. He at least would not have been indifferent to the significance of the great triumph in the Mediterranean. Supporters of the extreme spiritual insularity have often quoted the great lines in which Shakespeare praised England, as something separate and cut-off by the sea. They rather tend to forget what he really praised her for.

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Feared by their breed and famous by their birth,

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,

For Christian service and true chivalry,

As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry

Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son.

I really think that the man who wrote those lines would have welcomed the victor of Lepanto almost as warmly as he must have welcomed a Scotch Calvinist who was frightened of a drawn dirk.

About Mary I imagine there would have been no difficulty at all. Mary was the perfectly legitimate heir to the throne of England, which is more than can be said for Elizabeth. The general sense of loyalty to the legitimate sovereign, which was enormously strong in England, would have flowed towards her more freely than towards Elizabeth; because she was a more popular and approachable sort of person. She who had so often, and perhaps too often, kindled love even in the very house of hatred, might surely have been loved sufficiently in a happier household of love enthroned; as in the glowing palace of René of Provence. I see no difficulty about her popularity; but even her husband, whether he were called Consort or King, might surely, to say the least of it, have been as popular as any other king-consort. I will not say he would be more popular than William of Orange; for he could not be less. But the English can be polite to foreigners, even foreign consorts. Tennyson, as Poet Laureate, was struck by the resemblance between Prince Albert and an ideal knight of the Round Table. Ben Jonson, as Poet Laureate, would not have to stretch politeness quite so far, in order to compare Don John to an Arthurian knight. At least nobody could say he was a carpet-knight. But, what is much more important, Britain would have been in another and more real sense back in Arthurian times. It would be defending the whole tradition of Roman culture and Christian morals against heathens and barbarians from the ends of the earth. If that had been fully realised, do you think anyone would have gone about asking whether a good Calvinist ought to be a Supralapsarian or a Sublapsarian? It would no longer be a provincial question of whether some Puritan trooper had knocked the nose off a stone saint in Salisbury Cathedral; it would be a question of whether some dervish out of the desert should dance among the shattered fragments of the Moses of Michelangelo. All normal Christians, if they had understood the peril, would have closed up in defence of Christendom. And England would have got glory in the battle, as she did when that ship with crimson sails carried the English leopards to the storming of Acre.

It might, I fear, have meant a certain amount of hostility to France: the rival of the Spanish-Austrian combination; though even here there are reconciling influences and Mary's sympathies would always have been with the country of her youth and her most famous poem. But, anyhow, it would not have been like the hostility to France, or rather blind hatred of France, which we did inherit from the victory of the Whigs. It would have been more like the medieval wars with the French, waged by men who were half French themselves. The English conquests in France were a sort of eddy and backwash of the original French conquest in England; the whole business was almost a civil war. For there was more internationalism in medieval war than there is in modern peace. The same was true of the actual wars which did break out between France and Spain; they did not break the inner unity of the Latin culture. Louis the Fourteenth was guilty of a slight exaggeration in saying that the mountains called the Pyrenees have entirely disappeared from the landscape. Many careful tourists have verified their existence and reported the royal error. But there was this truth in it; that the Pyrenees were in every sense a natural division. The Straits of Dover soon became a very unnatural division. They became a spiritual abyss, not between different patron saints but between different gods; perhaps between different universes. The men who fought at Crecy and Agincourt had the same religion-- to disregard. But the men who fought at Blenheim and at Waterloo had this entirely novel feature--that the English had an equal hatred for French religion and for French irreligion. They could not understand the ideals of either side in the great civil war of all civilisation. The limitation was really rather like the Straits of Dover, being both narrow and bleak and dangerous enough to be decisive; bitter as the sea and aptly symbolised by sea-sickness. Perhaps, after all, there was a point in the tale told in our nursery histories-- that it was the last Catholic queen who felt the loss of the last French possession, and had "Calais" written on her heart. With her died, perhaps, the last of that spirit which had somewhere in its depths a spiritual Channel Tunnel.

But this linking up of Europe in the Renaissance would have made easier and not harder the linking up of Europe in the Revolution; in the sense of the general Reform that was really rational and necessary in the eighteenth century. It would have been larger and clearer in its tests and ideals, if it had not been anticipated by a mere triumph of the richest aristocrats over the English crown. If England had not become entirely a country of squires, it might have become, like Spain, a country of peasants; or at any rate remained a country of yeomen. It might have stood the siege of commercial exploitation and commercial decline, of mere employment followed by mere unemployment. It might have learned the meaning of equality as well as liberty. I know at least one Englishman who wishes to-day that he were as hopeful about the immediate future of England as about the immediate future of Spain. But in my vision they might have learned from each other and produced, among other things, one prodigious consequence; America would be a very different place.

There was a moment when all Christendom might have clustered together and crystallised anew, under the chemistry of the new culture; and yet have remained a Christendom that was entirely Christian. There was a moment when Humanism had the road straight before it; but, what is even more important, the road also straight behind it. It might have been a real progress, not losing anything of what was good in the past. The significance of two people like Mary Stuart and Don John of Austria is that in them Religion and the Renaissance had not quarrelled; and they kept the faith of their fathers while full of the idea of handing on new conquests and discoveries to their sons. They drew their deep instincts from medieval chivalry without refusing to feed their intellects on the sixteenth-century learning; and there was a moment when this spirit might have pervaded the whole world and the whole Church. There was a moment when religion could have digested Plato as it had once digested Aristotle. For that matter, it might have digested all that is soundest in Rabelais and Montaigne and many others; it might have condemned some things in these thinkers; as it did in Aristotle. Only the shock of the new discoveries could have been absorbed (to a great extent indeed it was absorbed) by the central Christian tradition. What darkened that dawn was the dust and smoke from the struggles of the dogmatising sectaries in Scotland, in Holland, and eventually in England. But for that, on the Continent, the heresy of Jansenism had never so much over-shadowed the splendour of the Counter-Reformation. And England would have gone the way of Shakespeare rather than the way of Milton; which latter degenerated rapidly into the way of Muggleton.

There is perhaps, therefore, something more than a fancy, certainly something more than an accident, in this connection between the two romantic figures and the great turning-point of history. They might really have turned it to the right rather than the left; or at least prevented it from turning too far to the left. The point about Don John of Austria is that, like Bayard and a few others in that transition, he was unmistakably the original medieval knight, with the wider accomplishments and ambitions of the Renaissance added to him. But if we look at some of his contemporaries, as for instance, at Cecil, we see an entirely new type, in which there is no such combination or tradition. A man like Cecil is not chivalrous, does not want to be chivalrous, and (what is most important of all) does not pretend to be chivalrous. Of course there was sham chivalry, as there is a sham of everything; and mean and treacherous medieval men made a false parade of it with pageants and heraldry. But a mean man like Cecil did not make any parade of it, or any pretence of it. So far as he knew or cared, it had gone clean out of the world. Yet in fact it had not gone; and a great rally of it among his foes would still have commanded the natural loyalty of Europeans. That is what makes this story so strange; that the forces were there for the deliverance. The Romance of the North could really have replied to the Romance of the South, the rose crying to the laurel; and she who had changed songs with Ronsard, and he who had fought side by side with Cervantes, might truly have met by the very tide and current of their time. It was as if a great wind had turned northward, bearing a gallant ship; and far away in the North a lady opened her lattice upon the sea.

It never happened. It was too natural to happen. I had almost said it was too inevitable to happen. Anyhow, there was nothing natural, let alone inevitable, about what did happen. Now and again Shakespeare, with a horror almost bordering on hysteria, will thrust into the limelight some clown or idiot, to suggest, against the black curtain of tragedy, this incongruity and inconsequence in the things that really do happen. The dark curtains open and there comes forth something; certainly not the Lion of Lepanto clad in gold, nor the Heart of Holyrood, the queen of the poets, who called up the songs of Ronsard and Chastelard; but something quite different and doubtless a sort of comic relief: Jacobus Rex, the grotesque king; clumsy, querulous, padded like an armchair; pedantic; perverted. He had been brought up carefully by the elders of the True Kirk, and he did them credit; piously explaining that he could not bring himself to save his mother's life because of the superstition to which she was attached. He was a good Puritan; a typical Prohibitionist; intolerant of tobacco; more tolerant of torture and murder and things yet more unnatural. For though he shook with terror at the very shape of the shining sword, he had no difficulty about consigning Fawkes to the rack, and when death had merely been attained by the art of poisoning, he was ready with a pardon, as he cowered under the threats of Carr. What things lay behind those threats and that pardon there is here, I am glad to say, no need to inquire; but the stink of that court, as it reaches us through the purlieus of the Overbury Murder, is such as to make us turn for fresh air. I will not say to the ideal loves of Mary and Don John of Austria, which I have merely imagined, but to the very worst version of the bloody loves of Mary and Bothwell which their most furious enemies have denounced. Compared with all that, loving Bothwell would be as innocent as plucking a rose, and killing Darnley as natural as pulling up a weed.

And so, after that one wild glimpse of the possibility of the impossible, we sink back at the best into a series of third-rate things. Charles the First was better, a man sad and proud, but good so far as a man can be good without being good-humoured. Charles the Second was good-humoured without being good; but the worst of him was that his life was a long surrender; James the Second had his grandfather's virtues, so far as they went, and was therefore betrayed and broken. Then came William the Dutchman, with whom there again enters the savour of something sinister and alien. I would not suggest that such Calvinists were Antinomian Calvinists; but there is something strange in the thought that twice, in that time, there entered with that unnatural logic the rumour and savour of unnatural desire. But by the time we come to Anne and the first featureless George, it is no longer the King that counts. Merchant princes have superseded all other princes; England is committed to mere commerce and the capitalist development; and we see successively established the National Debt, the Bank of England, Wood's Halfpence, the South Sea Bubble, and all the typical institutions of Business Government. I will not discuss here whether the modern sequel, with its cosmopolitan trusts, its complicated and practically secret financial control, its march of machinery and its effacement of private property and personal liberty, be on the whole good or bad. I will only express an intuition that, even if it is very good, something else might have been better. I need not deny that in certain respects the world has progressed in order and philanthropy; I need only state my suspicion that the world might have progressed much quicker. And I think that the northern countries, especially, would have progressed much quicker, if the philanthropy had been from the first guided by a larger philosophy, like that of Bellarmine and More; if it had drawn directly from the Renaissance and not been deflected and delayed by the sulky sectarianism of the seventeenth century. But in any case the great moral institutions of modern times, the Straddle, the Wheat Corner, the Merger, and the rest will not be affected by my little literary fancy; and I need feel no responsibility if I waste some hours of my inefficient existence in dreaming of the things that might have been (which the determinists will tell me could never have been) and in weaving this faded chaplet for the prince of heroes and the queen of hearts.

Perhaps there are things that are too great to happen, and too big to pass through the narrow doors of birth. For this world is too small for the soul of man; and, since the end of Eden, the very sky is not large enough for lovers.

NOTICE

The Common Man/4

Free texts and images.

Contents

Walter De La Mare

The Meaning of Metre

Concerning a Strange City

The Epitaph of Pierpont Morgan

The New Bigotry

Books for Boys

The Outline of Liberty

A Note on Nudism

Consulting the Encyclopedia

If I had only one sermon to preach

If Don John of Austria had married Mary Queen of Scots

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