UC-NRLF 
 
 B 4 101 M33 
 
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 <A "Book of Sssays 
 
 By 
 
 G. KU CHESTERTON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 RTH U R L . H U M PH R E Y S 
 
 I9IO 
 
 ONE SHILLING NET 
 
TWELVE TYPES 
 
Twelve Types 
 
 By G. K. \£HESTERTON 
 
 LONDON 
 ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS 
 
 1910 
 
Fifth Impression 
 

 These papers, with certain alterations 
 and additions, are reprinted with the 
 kind permission of the Editors of The 
 Daily News and The Speaker. 
 
 G. K. C. 
 
 Kensington. 
 
 535095 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Charlotte Bronte I 
 
 William Morris and his School . . 15 
 
 The Optimism of Byron . . . > 31 
 
 Pope and the Art of Satire ... 45 
 
 Francis 63 
 
 Rostand 79 
 
 Charles II. 93 
 
 Stevenson 107 
 
 Thomas Carlyle 120 
 
 Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity . 139 
 
 Savonarola 167 
 
 The Position of Sir Walter Scott . 179 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 Objection is often raised against realistic 
 biography because it reveals so much that 
 is important and even sacred about a man's 
 life. The real objection to it will rather 
 be found in the fact that it reveals about 
 a man the precise points which are unim- 
 portant. It reveals and asserts and insists 
 on exactly those things in a man's life of 
 which the man himself is wholly uncon- 
 scious ; his exact class in society, the cir- 
 cumstances of his ancestry, the place of 
 his present location. These are things 
 which do not, properly speaking, ever 
 a 1 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 arise before the human vision. They do 
 not occur to a man's mind ; it may be 
 said, with almost equal truth, that they 
 do not occur in a man's life. A man no 
 more thinks about himself as the inhabitant 
 of the third house in a row of Brixton 
 villas than he thinks about himself as a 
 strange animal with two legs. What a 
 man's name was, what his income was, 
 whom he married, where he lived, these 
 are not sanctities ; they are irrelevancies. 
 
 A very strong case of this is the case 
 of the Brontes. The Bronte is in the 
 position of the mad lady in a country 
 village ; her eccentricities form an endless 
 source of innocent conversation to that 
 exceedingly mild and bucolic circle, the 
 literary world. The truly glorious gossips 
 of literature, like Mr Augustine Birrell 
 
 2 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of col- 
 lecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and 
 sermons and side-lights and sticks and 
 straws which will go to make a Bronte 
 museum. They are the most personally 
 discussed of all Victorian authors, and the 
 limelight of biography has left few darkened 
 corners in the dark old Yorkshire house. 
 And yet the whole of this biographical 
 investigation, though natural and pictur- 
 esque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontes. 
 For the Bronte genius was above all things 
 deputed to assert the supreme unimport- 
 ance of externals. Up to that point truth 
 had always been conceived as existing more 
 or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte 
 Bronte electrified the world by showing 
 that an infinitely older and more elemental 
 truth could be conveyed by a novel in 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 which no person, good or bad, had any 
 manners at all. Her work represents the 
 first great assertion that the humdrum life 
 of modern civilisation is a disguise as 
 tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 
 * bal masque.' She showed that abysses may 
 exist inside a governess and eternities in- 
 side a manufacturer; her heroine is the 
 commonplace spinster, with the dress of 
 merino and the soul of flame. It is signi- 
 ficant to notice that Charlotte Bronte, 
 following consciously or unconsciously the 
 great trend of her genius, was the first to 
 take away from the heroine not only the 
 artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and 
 fashion, but even the natural gold and 
 diamonds of physical beauty and grace. 
 Instinctively she felt that the whole of the 
 
 exterior must be made ugly that the whole 
 
 4 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 of the interior might be made sublime. 
 She chose the ugliest of women in the 
 ugliest of centuries, and revealed within 
 them all the hells and heavens of Dante. 
 It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately 
 said that the externals of the Brontes' life, 
 though singularly picturesque in themselves, 
 matter less than the externals of almost any 
 other writers. It is interesting to know 
 whether Jane Austen had any knowledge 
 of the lives of the officers and women of 
 fashion whom she introduced into her 
 masterpieces. It is interesting to know 
 whether Dickens had ever seen a ship- 
 wreck or been inside a workhouse. For 
 in these authors much of the conviction 
 is conveyed, not always by adherence to 
 facts, but always by grasp of them, But 
 the whole aim and purport and meaning 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 of the work of the Brontes is that the 
 most futile thing in the whole universe is 
 fact. Such a story as 'Jane Eyre' is in 
 itself so monstrous a fable that it ought 
 to be excluded from a book of fairy tales. 
 The characters do not do what they ought 
 to do, nor what they would do, nor, it 
 might be said, such is the insanity of the 
 atmosphere, not even what they intend to 
 do. The conduct of Rochester is so prim- 
 evally and superhumanly caddish that Bret 
 Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely 
 exaggerated it. ' Then, resuming his usual 
 manner, he threw his boots at my head and 
 withdrew,' does perhaps reach to some- 
 thing resembling caricature. The scene in 
 which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy 
 has something in it which is really not to 
 be found in any other branch of art, except 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 at the end of the pantomime, where the 
 Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, 
 despite this vast nightmare of illusion and 
 morbidity and ignorance of the world, 
 'Jane Eyre' is perhaps the truest book 
 that was ever written. Its essential truth 
 to life sometimes makes one catch one's 
 breath. For it is not true to manners, 
 which are constantly false, or to facts, 
 which are almost always false; it is true 
 to the only existing thing which is true, 
 emotion, the irreducible minimum, the in- 
 destructible germ. It would not matter 
 a single straw if a Bronte story were a 
 hundred times more moonstruck and im- 
 probable than 'Jane Eyre,' or a hundred 
 times more moonstruck and improbable 
 than ' Wuthering Heights.' It would not 
 matter if George Read stood on his head, 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, if Fairfax 
 Rochester had four eyes and St John Rivers 
 three legs, the story would still remain the 
 truest story in the world. The typical 
 Bronte character is, indeed, a kind of 
 monster. Everything in him except the 
 essential is dislocated. His hands are on 
 his legs and his feet on his arms, his nose 
 is above his eyes, but his heart is in the 
 right place. 
 
 The great and abiding truth for which 
 the Bronte cycle of fiction stands is a 
 certain most important truth about the 
 enduring spirit of youth, the truth of the 
 near kinship between terror and joy. ' The 
 Bronte heroine, dingily dressed, badly edu- 
 cated, hampered by a humiliating inex- 
 perience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, 
 
 by the very fact of her solitude and her 
 
 8 v 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that 
 is possible to a human being, the delight 
 of expectation, the delight of an ardent 
 and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to 
 show how futile it is of humanity to sup- 
 pose that pleasure can be attained chiefly 
 by putting on evening dress every evening 
 and having a box at the theatre every first 
 night. It is not the man of pleasure who 
 has pleasure ; it is not the man of the 
 world who appreciates the world. The 
 man who has learnt to do all conventional 
 things perfectly has at the same time learnt 
 to do them prosaically. It is the awkward 
 man, whose evening dress does not fit him, 
 whose gloves will not go on, whose com- 
 pliments will not come off, who is really 
 full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He 
 
 is frightened enough of society actually to 
 
 9 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 enjoy his triumphs. He has that element 
 of fear which is one of the eternal ingredi- 
 ents of joy. This spirit is the central spirit 
 of the Bronte novel. It is the epic of the 
 exhilaration of the shy man. As such it 
 is of incalculable value in our time, of 
 which the curse is that it does not take 
 joy reverently because it does not take it 
 fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous 
 governess of Charlotte Bronte, with the 
 small outlook and the small creed, had 
 more commerce with the awful and ele- 
 mental forces which drive the world than 
 a legion of lawless minor poets. She ap- 
 proached the universe with real simplicity, 
 and, consequently, with real fear and 
 delight. She was, so to speak, shy before 
 the multitude of the stars, and in this she 
 
 had possessed herself of the only force 
 
 10 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 which can prevent enjoyment being as 
 black and barren as routine. The faculty 
 of being shy is the first and the most 
 delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The 
 fear of the Lord is the beginning of 
 pleasure. _ 
 
 Upon the whole, therefore, I think it 
 may justifiably be said that the dark wild 
 youth of the Brontes in their dark wild 
 Yorkshire home has been somewhat ex- 
 aggerated as a necessary factor in their 
 work and their conception. The emotions 
 with which they dealt were universal 
 emotions, emotions of the morning of 
 existence, the springtide joy and the spring- 
 tide terror. Every one of us as a boy 
 or girl has had some midnight dream of 
 nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, 
 
 in which there was, under whatever im- 
 
 11 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 becile forms, all the deadly stress and panic 
 of ' Wuthering Heights.' Every one of us 
 has had a day-dream of our own potential 
 destiny not one atom more reasonable than 
 'Jane Eyre/ And the truth which the 
 Brontes came to tell us is the truth that 
 many waters cannot quench love, and that 
 suburban respectability cannot touch or 
 damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like 
 every other earthly city, is built upon a 
 volcano. Thousands of people go to and 
 fro in the wilderness of bricks and mortar, 
 earning mean wages, professing a mean 
 religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands 
 of women who have never found any ex- 
 pression for their exaltation or their tragedy 
 but to go on working harder and yet harder 
 at dull and automatic employments, at 
 
 scolding children or stitching shirts. But 
 
 12 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 out of all these silent ones one suddenly 
 became articulate, and spoke a resonant 
 testimony, and her name was Charlotte 
 Bronte. Spreading around us upon every 
 side to-day like a huge and radiating geo- 
 metrical figure are the endless branches of 
 the great city. There are times when we 
 are almost stricken crazy, as well we may 
 be, by the multiplicity of those appalling 
 perspectives, the frantic arithmetic of that 
 unthinkable population. But this thought 
 of ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. 
 There are no chains of houses ; there are 
 no crowds of men. The colossal diagram 
 of streets and houses is an illusion, the 
 opium dream of a speculative builder. 
 Each of these men is supremely solitary 
 and supremely important to himself. Each 
 
 of these houses stands in the centre of the 
 
 13 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 world. There is no single house of all those 
 millions which has not seemed to some one 
 at some time the heart of all things and 
 the end of travel. 
 
 14 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS AND 
 HIS SCHOOL 
 
 It is proper enough that the unveiling of 
 the bust of William Morris should approxi- 
 mate to a public festival, for while there 
 have been many men of genius in the Vic- 
 torian era more despotic than he, there have 
 been none so representative. He represents 
 not only that rapacious hunger for beauty 
 which has now for the first time become 
 a serious problem in the healthy life of 
 humanity, but he represents also that 
 honourable instinct for finding beauty in 
 
 common necessities of workmanship which 
 
 15 
 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 gives it a stronger and more bony structure. 
 The time has passed when it was con- 
 ceived to be irrelevant to describe William 
 Morris as a designer of wall-papers. If 
 Morris had been a hatter instead of a 
 decorator, we should have become gradu- 
 ally and painfully conscious of an improve- 
 ment in our hats. If he had been a tailor, 
 we should have suddenly found our frock- 
 coats trailing on the ground with the 
 grandeur of mediaeval raiment. If he had 
 been a shoemaker, we should have found, 
 with no little consternation, our shoes grad- 
 ually approximating to the antique sandal. 
 As a hairdresser, he would have invented 
 some massing of the hair worthy to be the 
 crown of Venus ; as an ironmonger, his 
 nails would have had some noble pattern, 
 
 fit to be the nails of the Cross. 
 
 16 
 
AND HIS SCHOOL 
 
 The limitations of William Morris, what- 
 ever they were, were not the limitations of 
 common decoration. It is true that all his 
 work, even his literary work, was in some 
 sense decorative, had in some degree the 
 qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His 
 characters, his stories, his religious and 
 political views, had, in the most emphatic 
 sense, length and breadth without thickness. 
 He seemed really to believe that men could 
 enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no 
 account of the unexplored and explosive 
 possibilities of human nature, of the un- 
 nameable terrors, and the yet more unname- 
 able hopes. So long as a man was graceful 
 in every circumstance, so long as he had 
 the inspiring consciousness that the chest- 
 nut colour of his hair was relieved against 
 the blue forest a mile behind, he would 
 b 17 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 be serenely happy. So he would be, no 
 doubt, if he were really fitted for a de- 
 corative existence ; if he were a piece of 
 exquisitely coloured cardboard. 
 
 But although Morris took little account 
 of the terrible solidity of human nature — 
 took little account, so to speak, of human 
 figures in the round, it is altogether unfair 
 to represent him as a mere aesthete. He 
 perceived a great public necessity and ful- 
 filled it heroically. The difficulty with 
 which he grappled was one so immense 
 that we shall have to be separated from it 
 by many centuries before we can really 
 judge of it. It was the problem of the 
 elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the 
 most self-conscious of centuries. Morris 
 at least saw the absurdity of the thing. 
 
 He felt that it was monstrous that the 
 
 18 
 
AND HIS SCHOOL 
 
 modern man, who was pre-eminently cap- 
 able of realising the strangest and most 
 contradictory beauties, who could feel at 
 once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and 
 the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, 
 should himself, by a farcical bathos, be 
 buried in a black coat, and hidden under 
 a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why 
 the harmless man who desired to be an 
 artist in raiment should be condemned to 
 be, at best, a black and white artist. It 
 is indeed difficult to account for the cling- 
 ing curse of ugliness which blights every- 
 thing brought forth by the most prosperous 
 of centuries. In all created nature there is 
 not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly 
 as a pillar-box. Its shape is the most 
 unmeaning of shapes, its height and thick- 
 ness just neutralising each other ; its colour 
 
 19 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 is the most repulsive of colours — a fat and 
 
 soulless red, a red without a touch of blood 
 
 or fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins. 
 
 Yet there is no reason whatever why such 
 
 hideousness should possess an object full 
 
 of civic dignity, the treasure-house of a 
 
 thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand 
 
 souls. If the old Greeks had had such an 
 
 institution, we may be sure that it would 
 
 have been surmounted by the severe, but 
 
 graceful, figure of the god of letter- writing. 
 
 If the mediaeval Christians had possessed 
 
 it, it would have had a niche filled with 
 
 the golden aureole of St Rowland of the 
 
 Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands 
 
 at all our street-corners, disguising one of 
 
 the most beautiful of ideas under one of 
 
 the most preposterous of forms. It is 
 
 useless to deny that the miracles of science 
 
 20 
 
AND HIS SCHOOL 
 
 have not been such an incentive to art 
 
 and imagination as were the miracles of 
 
 religion. If men in the twelfth century 
 
 had been told that the lightning had been 
 
 driven for leagues underground, and had 
 
 dragged at its destroying tail loads of 
 
 laughing human beings, and if they had 
 
 then been told that the people alluded to 
 
 this pulverising potent chirpily as * The 
 
 Twopenny Tube,' they would have called 
 
 down the fire of Heaven on us as a race 
 
 of half-witted atheists. Probably they 
 
 would have been quite right. 
 
 This clear and fine perception of what 
 
 may be called the aesthetic element in 
 
 the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the 
 
 work of a great reformer; it requires a 
 
 fine effort of the imagination to see an 
 
 evil that surrounds us on every side. The 
 
 21 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 manner in which Morris carried out his 
 
 crusade may, considering the circumstances, 
 
 be called triumphant. Our carpets began 
 
 to bloom under our feet like the meadows 
 
 in spring, and our hitherto prosaic stools 
 
 and sofas seemed growing legs and arms 
 
 at their own wild will. An element of 
 
 freedom and rugged dignity came in with 
 
 plain and strong ornaments of copper and 
 
 iron. So delicate and universal has been 
 
 the revolution in domestic art that almost 
 
 every family in England has had its taste 
 
 cunningly and treacherously improved, and 
 
 if we look back at the early Victorian 
 
 drawing-rooms it is only to realise the 
 
 strange but essential truth that art, or 
 
 human decoration, has, nine times out of 
 
 ten in history, made things uglier than 
 
 they were before, from the * coiffure ' of a 
 
 22 
 
AND HIS SCHOOL 
 
 Papuan savage to the wall-paper of a 
 British merchant in 1830. 
 
 But great and beneficent as was the 
 aesthetic revolution of Morris, there was a 
 very definite limit to it. It did not lie 
 only in the fact that his revolution was 
 in truth a reaction, though this was a 
 partial explanation of his partial failure. 
 When he was denouncing the dresses of 
 modern ladies, ' upholstered like arm-chairs 
 instead of being draped like women,' as he 
 forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for 
 practical imitation the costumes and handi- 
 crafts of the Middle Ages. Further than 
 this retrogressive and imitative movement 
 he never seemed to go. Now, the men of 
 the time of Chaucer had many evil quali- 
 ties, but there was at least one exhibition 
 
 of moral weakness they did not give, 
 
 23 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 They would have laughed at the idea of 
 dressing themselves in the manner of the 
 bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting 
 themselves an aesthetic blue, after the cus- 
 tom of the ancient Britons. They would 
 not have called that a movement at all. 
 Whatever was beautiful in their dress or 
 manners sprang honestly and naturally out 
 of the life they led and preferred to lead. 
 And it may surely be maintained that 
 any real advance in the beauty of modern 
 dress must spring honestly and naturally 
 out of the life we lead and prefer to lead. 
 We are not altogether without hints and 
 hopes of such a change, in the growing 
 orthodoxy of rough and athletic costumes. 
 But if this cannot be, it will be no sub- 
 stitute or satisfaction to turn life into an 
 
 interminable historical fancy-dress ball. 
 
 24 
 
AND HIS SCHOOL 
 
 But the limitation of Morris's work lay 
 deeper than this. We may best suggest 
 it by a method after his own heart. Of 
 all the various works he performed, none, 
 perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly 
 valuable as his great protest for the fables 
 and superstitions of mankind. He has the 
 supreme credit of showing that the fairy- 
 tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, 
 the real record of men's feeling for things. 
 Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may 
 not have climbed up so tall a beanstalk, 
 or killed so tall a giant ; but it is not such 
 things that make a story false ; it is a far 
 different class of things that makes every 
 modern book of history as false as the 
 father of lies ; ingenuity, self-consciousness, 
 hypocritical impartiality. { It appears to us 
 
 that of all the fairy-tales none contains so 
 
 25 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 vital a moral truth as the old story, exist- 
 ing in many forms, of Beauty and the 
 Beast.) There is written, with all the 
 authority of a human scripture, the eternal 
 and essential truth that until we love a 
 thing in all its ugljness we cannot make 
 it beautiful. This was the weak point in 
 William Morris as a reformer: that he 
 sought to reform modern life, and that he 
 hated modern life, instead of loving it. 
 Modern London is indeed a beast, big 
 enough and black enough to be the beast 
 in Apocalypse, blazing with a million eyes, 
 and roaring with a million voices. But 
 unless the poet can love this fabulous mon- 
 ster as he is, can feel with some generous 
 excitement his massive and mysterious ' joie- 
 de-vivre,' the vast scale of his iron anatomy 
 
 and the beating of his thunderous heart, 
 
 2G 
 
AND HIS SCHOOL 
 
 he cannot and will not change the beast 
 into the fairy prince. Morris's disadvan- 
 tage was that he was not honestly a child 
 of the nineteenth century : he could not 
 understand its fascination, and consequently 
 he could not really develop it. An abiding 
 testimony to his tremendous personal in- 
 fluence in the aesthetic world is the vitality 
 and recurrence of the Arts and Crafts 
 Exhibitions, which are steeped in his per- 
 sonality like a chapel in that of a saint. 
 If we look round at the exhibits in one of 
 these aesthetic shows, we shall be struck by 
 the large mass of modern objects that the 
 decorative school leaves untouched. There 
 is a noble instinct for giving the right touch 
 of beauty to. common and necessary things, 
 but the things that are so touched are the 
 
 ancient things, the things that always to 
 
 27 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 some extent commended themselves to the 
 lover of beauty. There are beautiful gates, 
 beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful 
 chairs, beautiful reading-desks. But there 
 are no modern things made beautiful. 
 There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful 
 letter - boxes, beautiful engines, beautiful 
 bicycles. The spirit of William Morris 
 has not seized hold of the century and 
 made its humblest necessities beautiful. 
 And this was because, with all his healthi- 
 ness and energy, he had not the supreme 
 courage to face the ugliness of things ; 
 Beauty shrank from the Beast and the 
 fairy-tale had a different ending. 
 
 But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest 
 claim to the name of a great reformer : that 
 he left his work incomplete. There is, 
 
 perhaps, no better proof that a man is a 
 
 28 
 
AND HIS SCHOOL 
 
 mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, 
 than that his work is done perfectly. A 
 man like Morris draws attention to needs 
 he cannot supply. In after-years we may 
 have perhaps a newer and more daring Arts 
 and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not 
 decorate the armour of the twelfth century 
 but the machinery of the twentieth. A 
 lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted 
 iron, fit to hold the sanctity of fire. A 
 pillar-box shall be carved with figures em- 
 blematical of the secrets of comradeship 
 and the silence and honour of the State. 
 Railway signals, of all earthly things the 
 most poetical, the coloured stars of life and 
 death, shall be lamps of green and crimson 
 worthy of their terrible and faithful service. 
 But if ever this gradual and genuine move- 
 ment of our time towards beauty — not 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 backwards, but forwards — does truly come 
 about, Morris will be the first prophet of 
 it. Poet of the childhood of nations, crafts- 
 man in the new honesties of art, prophet 
 of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded 
 enthusiasm will be remembered when human 
 life has once more assumed flamboyant 
 colours and proved that this painful green- 
 ish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which 
 we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, 
 not of the greyness of death, but the grey- 
 ness of dawn. 
 
 30 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 Everything is against our appreciating 
 
 the spirit and the age of Byron. The 
 
 age that has just passed from us is always 
 
 like a dream when we wake in the 
 
 morning, a thing incredible and centuries 
 
 away. And the world of Byron seems a 
 
 sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman 
 
 world, where men were romantic in whiskers, 
 
 ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and 
 
 the very word has the sound of a piece 
 
 of stage scenery. Roses and nightingales 
 
 recur in their poetry with the monotonous 
 
 elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The 
 
 31 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 whole is like a revel of dead men, a 
 revel with splendid vesture and half-witted 
 faces. 
 
 But the more shrewdly and earnestly we 
 study the histories of men, the less ready 
 shall w r e be to make use of the word 
 'artificial.' Nothing in the world has 
 ever been artificial. Many customs, many 
 dresses, many works of art are branded 
 with artificiality because they exhibit vanity 
 and self-consciousness : as if vanity were 
 not a deep and elemental thing, like love 
 and hate and the fear of death. Vanity 
 may be found in darkling deserts, in the 
 hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl 
 around him. It may be good or evil, but 
 assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a 
 voice out of the abyss. 
 
 The remarkable fact is, however, and it 
 32 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 bears strongly on the present position of 
 Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to 
 us, when it is remote and the product of 
 some other age or spirit, we think it not 
 savage or terrible, but merely artificial. 
 There are many instances of this : a fair 
 one is the case of tropical plants and birds. 
 When we see some of the monstrous and 
 flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equa- 
 torial woods, we do not feel that they are 
 conflagrations of nature ; silent explosions 
 of her frightful energy. We simply find 
 it hard to believe that they are not wax 
 flowers grown under a glass case. When 
 we see some of the tropic birds, with their 
 tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we 
 do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce 
 humour of Creation. We almost believe 
 that they are toys out of a child's play-box, 
 c 33 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 artificially carved and artificially coloured. 
 So it is with the great convulsion of Nature 
 which was known as Byronism. The volcano 
 is not an extinct volcano now ; it is the 
 dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains 
 not of a natural but of an artificial fire. 
 
 But Byron and Byronism were something 
 immeasurably greater than anything that is 
 represented by such a view as this: their 
 real value and meaning are indeed little 
 understood. The first of the mistakes 
 about Byron lies in the fact that he is 
 treated as a pessimist. True, he treated 
 himself as such, but a critic can hardly 
 have even a slight knowledge of Byron 
 without knowing that he had the smallest 
 amount of knowledge of himself that ever 
 fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The 
 real character of what is known as Byron's 
 
 34 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 pessimism is better worth study than any 
 real pessimism could ever be. 
 
 It is the standing peculiarity of this 
 curious world of ours that almost every- 
 thing in it has been extolled enthusiastically 
 and invariably extolled to the disadvantage 
 of everything else. 
 
 One after another almost every one of 
 the phenomena of the universe has been 
 declared to be alone capable of making 
 life worth living. Books, love, business, 
 religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private 
 emotion, money, simplicity, mysticism, hard 
 work, a life close to nature, a life close to 
 Belgrave Square are every one of them 
 passionately maintained by somebody to 
 be so good that they redeem the evil of 
 an otherwise indefensible world. Thus 
 while the world is almost always condemned 
 
 35 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 in summary, it is always justified, and in- 
 deed extolled, in detail after detail. 
 
 Existence has been praised and absolved 
 by a chorus of pessimists. The work of 
 giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, 
 divided ingeniously among them. Schopen- 
 hauer is told off as a kind of librarian in 
 the House of God, to sing the praises of 
 the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle, 
 as steward, undertakes the working depart- 
 ment and eulogises a life of labour in the 
 fields. Omar Khayyam is established in 
 the cellar and swears that it is the only 
 room in the house. Even the blackest of 
 pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the 
 precise moment that he has written some 
 shameless and terrible indictment of Crea- 
 tion, his one pang of joy in the achievement 
 
 joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with 
 
 36 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 the scent of the wild flower and the song 
 of the bird. 
 
 Now Byron had a sensational popularity, 
 and that popularity was, as far as words 
 and explanations go, founded upon his 
 pessimism. He was adored by an over- 
 whelming majority, almost every individual 
 of which despised the majority of mankind. 
 But when we come to regard the matter 
 a little more deeply we tend in some degree 
 to cease to believe in this popularity of the 
 pessimist. The popularity of pure and 
 unadulterated pessimism is an oddity ; it 
 is almost a contradiction in terms. Men 
 would no more receive the news of the 
 failure of existence or of the harmonious 
 hostility of the stars with ardour or popular 
 rejoicing than they would light bonfires 
 
 for the arrival of cholera or dance a break- 
 
 37 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 down when they were condemned to be 
 hanged. When the pessimist is popular 
 it must always be not because he shows 
 all things to be bad, but because he shows 
 some things to be good. Men can only 
 join in a chorus of praise even if it is the 
 praise of denunciation. The man who is 
 popular must be optimistic about some- 
 thing even if he is only optimistic about 
 pessimism. And this was emphatically the 
 case with Byron and the Byronists. Their 
 real popularity was founded not upon the 
 fact that they blamed everything, but upon 
 the fact that they praised something. They 
 heaped curses upon man, but they used 
 man merely as a foil. The things they 
 wished to praise by comparison were the 
 energies of Nature. Man was to them, 
 what talk and fashion were to Carlyie 
 
 38 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 what philosophical and religious quarrels 
 were to Omar, what the whole race after 
 practical happiness was to Schopenhauer, 
 the thing which must be censured in order 
 that somebody else may be exalted. It 
 was merely a recognition of the fact that 
 one cannot write in white chalk except 
 on a blackboard. 
 
 Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seri- 
 ously that Byron's love of the desolate 
 and inhuman in nature was the mark of 
 vital scepticism and depression. When a< 
 young man can elect deliberately to walk 
 alone in winter by the side of the shatter- 
 ing sea, when he takes pleasure in storms 
 and stricken peaks, and the lawless melan- 
 choly of the older earth, we may deduce 
 with the certainty of logic that he is very 
 
 young and very happy. There is a certain 
 
 39 
 
 ; 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 darkness which we see in wine when seen 
 in shadow; we see it again in the night 
 that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. 
 The wine seems black, and yet at the 
 same time powerfully and almost impos- 
 sibly red ; the sky seems black, and yet at 
 the same time to be only too dense a 
 blend of purple and green. Such was the 
 darkness which lay around the Byronic 
 school. Darkness with them was only too 
 dense a purple. They would prefer the 
 sullen hostility of the earth because amid 
 all the cold and darkness their own hearts 
 were flaming like their own firesides. 
 
 Matters are very different with the more 
 modern school of doubt and lamentation. 
 The last movement of pessimism is perhaps 
 expressed in Mr Aubrey Beardsley's alle- 
 gorical designs. Here we have to deal 
 
 40 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 with a pessimism which tends naturally not 
 towards the oldest elements of the cosmos, 
 but towards the last and most fantastic 
 fripperies of artificial life. Byronism tended 
 towards the desert; the new pessimism 
 towards the restaurant. Byronism was a 
 revolt against artificiality; the new pes- 
 simism is a revolt in its favour. The 
 Byronic young man had an affectation of 
 sincerity ; the decadent, going a step deeper 
 into the avenues of the unreal, has posi- 
 tively an affectation of affectation. And 
 it is by their fopperies and their frivolities 
 that we know that their sinister philosophy 
 is sincere ; in their lights and garlands and 
 ribbons we read their indwelling despair. 
 It was so, indeed, with Byron himself; 
 his really bitter moments were his frivolous 
 moments. He went on year after year 
 
 41 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 calling down fire upon mankind, summon- 
 ing the deluge and the destructive sea and 
 all the ultimate energies of nature to sweep 
 away the cities of the spawn of man. But 
 through all this his sub-conscious mind was 
 not that of a despairer ; on the contrary, 
 there is something of a kind of lawless 
 faith in thus parleying with such immense 
 and immemorial brutalities. It was not 
 until the time in which he wrote 'Don 
 Juan ' that he really lost this inward warmth 
 and geniality, and a sudden shout of hilari- 
 ous laughter announced to the world that 
 Lord Byron had really become a pessimist. 
 
 One of the best tests in the world of 
 what a poet really means is his metre. 
 He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, 
 but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody. 
 And all the time that Byron's language 
 
 42 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a 
 
 bounding ' pas de quatre.' He may arraign 
 
 existence on the most deadly charges, he 
 
 may condemn it with the most desolating 
 
 verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that 
 
 on some walk in a spring morning when 
 
 all the limbs are swinging and all the 
 
 blood alive in the body, the lips may be 
 
 caught repeating : 
 
 * Oh, there's not a joy the world can give 
 
 like that it takes away, 
 
 When the glow of early youth declines 
 
 in beauty's dull decay ; 
 
 'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush 
 
 that fades so fast, 
 
 But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere 
 
 youth itself be past.' 
 
 That automatic recitation is the answer to 
 
 the whole pessimism of Byron. 
 
 43 
 
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON 
 
 The truth is that Byron was one of a 
 class who may be called the unconscious 
 optimists, who are very often, indeed, the 
 most uncompromising conscious pessimists, 
 because the exuberance of their nature 
 demands for an adversary a dragon as big 
 as the world. But the whole of his essential 
 and unconscious being was spirited and 
 confident, and that unconscious being, long 
 disguised and buried under emotional arti- 
 fices, suddenly sprang into prominence in 
 the face of a cold, hard, political necessity. 
 In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and 
 at the time that he was dying, he began 
 to live. He heard suddenly the call of 
 that buried and sub-conscious happiness 
 which is in all of us, and which may 
 emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass 
 
 of a meadow or the spears of the enemy. 
 
 44 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 The general critical theory common in this 
 and the last century is that it was very 
 easy for the imitators of Pope to write 
 English poetry. The classical couplet was 
 a thing that anyone could do. So far as 
 that goes, one may justifiably answer by 
 asking anyone to try. It may be easier 
 really to have wit, than really, in the bold- 
 est and most enduring sense, to have im- 
 agination. But it is immeasurably easier 
 to pretend to have imagination than to 
 pretend to have wit. A man may indulge 
 
 in a sham rhapsody, because it may be 
 
 45 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 the triumph of a rhapsody to be unintel- 
 ligible. But a man cannot indulge in a 
 sham joke, because it is the ruin of a joke 
 to be unintelligible. A man may pretend 
 to be a poet : he can no more pretend to 
 be a wit than he can pretend to bring 
 rabbits out of a hat without having learnt 
 to be a conjurer. Therefore, it may be 
 submitted, there was a certain discipline 
 in the old antithetical couplet of Pope and 
 his followers. If it did not permit of the 
 great liberty of wisdom used by the 
 minority of great geniuses, neither did it 
 permit of the great liberty of folly which 
 is used by the majority of small writers. 
 A prophet could not be a poet in those 
 days, perhaps, but at least a fool could not 
 be a poet. If we take, for the sake of 
 
 example, such a line as Pope's 
 
 46 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 * Damn with faint praise, assent with civil 
 leer/ 
 the test is comparatively simple. A great 
 poet would not have written such a line, 
 perhaps. But a minor poet could not. 
 
 Supposing that a lyric poet of the new 
 school really had to deal with such an idea 
 as that expressed in Pope's line about 
 Man? 
 
 1 A being darkly wise and rudely great.' 
 Is it really so certain that he would go 
 deeper into the matter than that old anti- 
 thetical jingle goes ? I venture to doubt 
 whether he would really be any wiser or 
 weirder or more imaginative or more pro- 
 found. The one thing that he would really 
 be, would be longer. Instead of writing 
 
 6 A being darkly wise and rudely great,' 
 
 the contemporary poet, in his elaborately 
 
 47 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 ornamented book of verses, would produce 
 something like the following : — 
 * A creature 
 Of feature 
 .More dark, more dark, more dark than 
 
 skies, 
 Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise : 
 Darkly wise as a formless fate 
 And if he be great 
 If he be great, then rudely great, 
 Rudely great as a plough that plies, 
 And darkly wise, and darkly wise.' 
 Have we really learnt to think more 
 broadly ? Or have we only learnt to spread 
 our thoughts thinner? I have a dark 
 suspicion that a modern poet might manu- 
 facture an admirable lyric out of almost 
 every line of Pope. 
 
 There is, of course, an idea in our time 
 48 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 that the very antithesis of the typical line 
 of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall 
 have occasion more than once to point out 
 that nothing in the world has ever been 
 artificial. But certainly antithesis is not 
 artificial. An element of paradox runs 
 through the whole of existence itself. It 
 begins in the realm of ultimate physics and 
 metaphysics, in the two facts that we cannot 
 imagine a space that is infinite, and that we 
 cannot imagine a space that is finite. It runs 
 through the inmost complications of divin- 
 ity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ 
 in the wilderness was truly pure, unless we 
 also conceive that he desired to sin. It 
 runs, in the same manner, through all the 
 minor matters of morals, so that we cannot 
 imagine courage existing except in con- 
 junction with fear, or magnanimity existing 
 d 49 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 except in conjunction with some temptation 
 to meanness. If Pope and his followers 
 caught this echo of natural irrationality, 
 they were not any the more artificial. Their 
 antitheses were fully in harmony with ex- 
 istence, which is itself a contradiction in 
 terms. 
 
 Pope was really a great poet ; he was the 
 last great poet of civilisation. Immediately 
 after the fall of him and his school come 
 Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards 
 the savage and the elemental. But to 
 Pope civilisation was still an exciting ex- 
 periment. Its perruques and ruffles were 
 to him what feathers and bangles are to 
 a South Sea Islander — the real romance of 
 civilisation. And in all the forms of art 
 which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he 
 
 was supreme. In one especially he was 
 
 50 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 supreme — the great and civilised art of 
 satire. And in this we have fallen away 
 utterly. 
 
 We have had a great revival in our time 
 of the cult of violence and hostility. Mr 
 Henley and his young men have an infinite 
 number of furious epithets with which to 
 overwhelm any one who differs from them. 
 It is not a placid or untroubled position 
 to be Mr Henley's enemy, though we know 
 that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. 
 And yet, despite all this, these people pro- 
 duce no satire. Political and social satire is 
 a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It 
 may be worth while to make some attempt 
 to point out a reason for this. 
 
 It may seem a singular observation to 
 say that we are not generous enough to 
 write great satire. This, however, is ap- 
 
 51 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 proximately a very accurate way of de- 
 scribing the case. To write great satire, 
 to attack a man so that he feels the attack 
 and half acknowledges its justice, it is 
 necessary to have a certain intellectual 
 magnanimity which realises the merits of 
 the opponent as well as his defects. This 
 is, indeed, only another way of putting the 
 simple truth that in order to attack an 
 army we must know not only its weak 
 points, but also its strong points. England 
 in the present season and spirit fails in 
 satire for the same simple reason that it 
 fails in war: it despises the enemy. In 
 matters of battle and conquest we have 
 got firmly rooted in our minds the idea 
 (an idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) 
 that we can best trample on a people by 
 ignoring all the particular merits which 
 
 52 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 give them a chance of trampling upon us. 
 
 It has become a breach of etiquette to 
 
 praise the enemy ; whereas when the enemy 
 
 is strong every honest scout ought to praise 
 
 the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish 
 
 an army without having a full account of 
 
 its strength. It is impossible to satirise a 
 
 man without having a full account of his 
 
 virtues. It is too much the custom in 
 
 politics to describe a political opponent as 
 
 utterly inhumane, as utterly careless of his 
 
 country, as utterly cynical, which no man 
 
 ever was since the beginning of the world. 
 
 This kind of invective may often have 
 
 a great superficial success : it may hit 
 
 the mood of the moment ; it may raise 
 
 excitement and applause ; it may impress 
 
 millions. But there is one man among 
 
 all those millions whom it does not impress, 
 
 53 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIKE 
 
 whom it hardly even touches ; that is the 
 man against whom it is directed. The 
 one person for whom the whole satire has 
 been written in vain is the man whom it 
 is the whole object of the institution of 
 satire to reach. He knows that such a 
 description of him is not true. He knows 
 that he is not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly 
 self-seeking, or utterly barbarous and re- 
 vengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary 
 man, and that he can count as many kindly 
 memories, as many humane instincts, as 
 many hours of decent work and responsi- 
 bility as any other ordinary man. But 
 behind all this he has his real weaknesses, 
 the real ironies of his soul : behind all these 
 ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, 
 the craven silences, the sullen vanities, the 
 secret brutalities, the unmanly visions of 
 
 54 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 revenge. It is to these that satire should 
 reach if it is to touch the man at whom it 
 is aimed. And to reach these it must pass 
 and salute a whole army of virtues. 
 
 If we turn to the great English satirists 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
 for example, we find that they had this 
 rough but firm grasp of the size and 
 strength, the value and the best points of 
 their adversary. Dryden, before hewing 
 Ahitophel in pieces, gives a splendid and 
 spirited account of the insane valour and 
 inspired cunning of the 
 
 6 daring pilot in extremity,' 
 who was more untrustworthy in calm than 
 in storm, and 
 
 ' Steered too near the rocks to boast 
 his wit.' 
 The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and 
 
 55 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 picturesque version of the great Shaftesbury. 
 It would, in many ways, serve as a very 
 sound and picturesque account of Lord 
 Randolph Churchill. But here comes in 
 very pointedly the difference between our 
 modern attempts at satire and the ancient 
 achievement of it. The opponents of Lord 
 Randolph Churchill, both Liberal and Con- 
 servative, did not satirise him nobly and 
 honestly, as one of those great wits to 
 madness near allied. They represented 
 him as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent 
 upstart whose impudence supplied the lack 
 of policy and character. Churchill had 
 grave and even gross faults, a certain coarse- 
 ness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, 
 a certain lack of magnanimity, a certain 
 peculiar patrician vulgarity. But he was 
 
 a much larger man than satire depicted 
 
 56 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 him, and therefore the satire could not and 
 did not overwhelm him. And here we 
 have the cause of the failure of contem- 
 porary satire, that it has no magnanimity, 
 that is to say, no patience. It cannot 
 endure to be told that its opponent has 
 his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain 
 could not endure to be told that the 
 Boers had a regular army. It can be con- 
 tent with nothing except persuading itself 
 that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly 
 stupid — that is, that he is what he is not 
 and what nobody else is. If we take any 
 prominent politician of the day — such, for 
 example, as Sir William Harcourt — we 
 shall find that this is the point in which 
 all party invective fails. The Tory satire 
 at the expense of Sir William Harcourt is 
 
 always desperately endeavouring to represent 
 
 57 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 that he is inept, that he makes a fool of 
 himself, that he is disagreeable and disgrace- 
 ful and untrustworthy. The defect of all 
 this is that we all know that it is untrue. 
 Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt 
 is not inept, but is almost the ablest Par- 
 liamentarian now alive. Everyone knows 
 that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, 
 but a gentleman of the old school who is 
 on excellent social terms with his antagon- 
 ists. Everyone knows that he is not un- 
 trustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable 
 honour who is much trusted. Above all, 
 he knows it himself, and is therefore affected 
 by the satire exactly as any one of us would 
 be if we were accused of being black or of 
 keeping a shop for the receiving of stolen 
 goods. We might be angry at the libel, 
 
 but not at the satire ; for a man is angry 
 
 58 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 at a libel because it is false, but at a satire 
 
 because it is true. 
 
 Mr Henley and his young men are very 
 
 fond of invective and satire : if they wish 
 
 to know the reason of their failure in these 
 
 things, they need only turn to the opening 
 
 of Pope's superb attack upon Addison. 
 
 The Henleyite's idea of satirising a man 
 
 is to express a violent contempt for him, 
 
 and by the heat of this to persuade others 
 
 and himself that the man is contemptible. 
 
 I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr 
 
 Gladstone by one of the young anarchic 
 
 Tories, which began by asserting that Mr 
 
 Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If 
 
 these people would, as I have said, go 
 
 quietly and read Pope's 'Atticus,' they 
 
 would see how a great satirist approaches 
 
 a great enemy : 
 
 59 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 ' Peace to all such ! But were there one 
 whose fires 
 True genius kindles, and fair fame in- 
 spires, 
 Blest with each talent, and each art to 
 
 please, 
 And born to write, converse, and live 
 with ease. 
 
 Should such a man ' 
 
 And then follows the torrent of that terrible 
 criticism. Pope was not such a fool as to 
 try to make out that Addison was a fool. 
 He knew that Addison was not a fool, and 
 he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, 
 in Pope's case, had become so great and, I 
 was almost going to say, so pure, that it 
 illuminated all things, as love illuminates 
 all things. He said what was really wrong 
 
 with Addison ; and in calm and clear and 
 
 60 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 everlasting colours he painted the picture 
 of the evil of the literary temperament : 
 1 Bear like the Turk, no brother near the 
 throne, 
 View him with scornful, yet with jealous 
 
 eyes, 
 And hate for arts that caused himself to 
 rise. 
 
 Like Cato give his little Senate laws, 
 
 And sit attentive to his own applause. 
 
 While wits and templars every sentence 
 raise, 
 
 And wonder with a foolish face of praise.' 
 This is the kind of thing which really goes 
 to the mark at which it aims. It is pene- 
 trated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, 
 and it is addressed directly to a man. This 
 
 is no mock-tournament to gain the applause 
 
 61 
 
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE 
 
 of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the 
 lonely seashore. 
 
 In current political materialism there is 
 everywhere the assumption that, without 
 understanding anything of his case or his 
 merits, we can benefit a man practically. 
 Without understanding his case and his 
 merits, we cannot even hurt him. 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 Asceticism is a thing which in its very- 
 nature, we tend in these days to misunder- 
 stand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, 
 is the repudiation of the great mass of 
 human joys because of the supreme joyful- 
 ness of the one joy, the religious joy. But 
 asceticism is not in the least confined to 
 religious asceticism: there is scientific as- 
 ceticism which asserts that truth is alone 
 satisfying : there is aesthetic asceticism which 
 asserts that art is alone satisfying: there 
 is amatory asceticism which asserts that 
 love is alone satisfying. There is even 
 
 63 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 epicurean asceticism, which asserts that 
 beer and skittles are alone satisfying. 
 Wherever the manner of praising anything 
 involves the statement that the speaker 
 could live with that thing alone, there lies 
 the germ and essence of asceticism. When 
 William Morris, for example, says that 
 'love is enough,' it is obvious that he 
 asserts in those words that art, science, 
 politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, 
 concerts, gloves, walking - sticks, door- 
 knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and 
 any other things one may choose to tabulate 
 are unnecessary. When Omar Khayyam 
 says: 
 ' A book of verses underneath the bough, 
 A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou 
 Beside me singing in the wilderness 
 
 Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow. 
 64 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 It is clear that he speaks fully as much 
 ascetically as he does aesthetically. He 
 makes a list of things and says that he 
 wants no more. The same thing was done 
 by a mediaeval monk. Examples might, 
 of course, be multiplied a hundred - fold. 
 One of the most genuinely poetical of our 
 younger poets says, as the one thing certain, 
 that 
 ' From quiet home and first beginning 
 Out to the undiscovered ends — 
 
 There's nothing worth the wear of winning 
 But laughter and the love of friends.' 
 Here we have a perfect example of the 
 main important fact, that all true joy ex- 
 presses itself in terms of asceticism. 
 
 But if in any case it should happen that 
 a class or a generation lose the sense of 
 the peculiar kind of joy which is being 
 e 65 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 celebrated, they immediately begin to call 
 the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and self- 
 destroying. The most formidable liberal 
 philosophers have called the monks melan- 
 choly because they denied themselves the 
 pleasures of liberty and marriage. They 
 might as well call the trippers on a Bank 
 Holiday melancholy because they deny 
 themselves, as a rule, the pleasures of silence 
 and meditation. A simpler and stronger 
 example is, however, to hand. If ever it 
 should happen that the system of English 
 athletics should vanish from the public 
 schools and the universities, if science 
 should supply some new and non-competi- 
 tive manner of perfecting the physique, if 
 public ethics swung round to an attitude 
 of absolute contempt and indifference to- 
 wards the feeling called sport, then it is 
 
 66 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 easy to see what would happen. Future 
 historians would simply state that in the 
 dark days of Queen Victoria young men 
 at Oxford and Cambridge were subjected to 
 a horrible sort of religious torture. They 
 were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, 
 to indulge in wine or tobacco during certain 
 arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before 
 certain brutal fights and festivals. Bigots 
 insisted on their rising at unearthly hours 
 and running violently around fields for no 
 object. Many men ruined their health in 
 these dens of superstition, many died there. 
 All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. 
 Athleticism in England is an asceticism, as 
 much as the monastic rules. Men have 
 over-strained themselves and killed them- 
 selves through English athleticism. There 
 
 is one difference and one only : we do feel 
 
 67 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 the love of sport ; we do not feel the love 
 of religious offices. We see only the price 
 in the one case and only the purchase in 
 the other. 
 
 The only question that remains is what 
 was the joy of the old Christian ascetics 
 of which their asceticism was merely the 
 purchasing price. The mere possibility of 
 the query is an extraordinary example of 
 the way in which we miss the main points 
 of human history. We are looking at 
 humanity too close, and see only the details 
 and not the vast and dominant features. 
 We look at the rise of Christianity, and 
 conceive it as a rise of self-abnegation and 
 almost of pessimism. It does not occur to 
 us that the mere assertion that this raging 
 and confounding universe is governed by 
 
 justice and mercy is a piece of staggering 
 
 68 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 optimism fit to set all men capering. The 
 detail over which these monks went mad 
 with joy was the universe itself; the only- 
 thing really worthy of enj oy ment. The white 
 daylight shone over all the world, the end- 
 less forests stood up in their order. The 
 lightning awoke and the tree fell and the 
 sea gathered into mountains and the ship 
 went down, and all these disconnected and 
 meaningless and terrible objects were all 
 part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of 
 goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy. 
 That this scheme of Nature was not accurate 
 or well founded is perfectly tenable, but 
 surely it is not tenable that it was not 
 optimistic. We insist, however, upon 
 treating this matter tail foremost. We 
 insist that the ascetics were pessimists be- 
 cause they gave up threescore years and 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 ten for an eternity of happiness. We for- 
 get that the bare proposition of an eternity 
 of happiness is by its very nature ten thou- 
 sand times more optimistic than ten thou- 
 sand pagan saturnalias. 
 
 Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi 
 does not, of course, bring this out ; nor does 
 it fully bring out the character of Francis. 
 It has rather the tone of a devotional 
 book. A devotional book is an excellent 
 thing, but we do not look in it for the 
 portrait of a man, for the same reason that 
 we do not look in a love-sonnet for the 
 portrait of a woman, because men in such 
 conditions of mind not only apply all virtues 
 to their idol, but all virtues in equal quan- 
 tities. There is no outline, because the 
 artist cannot bear to put in a black line. 
 
 This blaze of benediction, this conflict 
 
 70 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 between lights, has its place in poetry, not 
 in biography. The successful examples of 
 it may be found, for instance, in the more 
 idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is 
 sometimes almost indecipherable, for the 
 poet draws in silver upon white. 
 
 It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley 
 should see Francis primarily as the founder 
 of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this 
 was only one, perhaps a minor one, of the 
 things that he was ; we suspect that one 
 of the minor things that Christ did was 
 to found Christianity. But the vast practi- 
 cal work of Francis is assuredly not to be 
 ignored, for this amazingly unworldly and 
 almost maddening simple-minded infant 
 was one of the most consistently successful 
 men that ever fought with this bitter world. 
 
 It is the custom to say that the secret of 
 
 71 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 such men is their profound belief in them- 
 selves, and this is true, but not all the 
 truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums 
 are thronged with men who believe in 
 themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to 
 say that the secret of his success was his 
 profound belief in other people, and it is 
 the lack of this that has commonly been 
 the curse of these obscure Napoleons. 
 Francis always assumed that everyone must 
 be just as anxious about their common 
 relative, the water-rat, as he was. He 
 planned a visit to the Emperor to draw 
 his attention to the needs of * his little 
 sisters the larks.' He used to talk to any 
 thieves and robbers he met about their 
 misfortune in being unable to give rein to 
 their desire for holiness. It was an innocent 
 
 habit, and doubtless the robbers often ' got 
 
 72 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 round him,' as the phrase goes. Quite as 
 often, however, they discovered that he 
 had 'got round' them, and discovered the 
 other side, the side of secret nobility. 
 
 Conceiving of St Francis as primarily 
 the founder of the Franciscan Order, Mr 
 Adderley opens his narrative with an admir- 
 able sketch of the history of Monasticism 
 in Europe, which is certainly the best thing 
 in the book. He distinguishes clearly and 
 fairly between the Manichaean ideal that 
 underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism 
 and the ideal of self-discipline which never 
 wholly vanished from the Christian form. 
 But he does not throw any light on what 
 must be for the outsider the absorbing 
 problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the 
 excellent reason that not being an outsider 
 
 he does not find it a problem at all. 
 
 73 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 To most people, however, there is a 
 fascinating inconsistency in the position of 
 St Francis. He expressed in loftier and 
 bolder language than any earthly thinker 
 the conception that laughter is as divine 
 as tears. He called his monks the mounte- 
 banks of God. He never forgot to take 
 pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, 
 or a drop of water as it fell from his finger : 
 he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of 
 men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded 
 his whole polity on the negation of what 
 we think the most imperious necessities; 
 in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and 
 obedience, he denied to himself and those 
 he loved most, property, love, and liberty. 
 Why was it that the most large-hearted 
 and poetic spirits in that age found their 
 most congenial atmosphere in these awful 
 
 74 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 renunciations? Why did he who loved 
 
 where all men were blind, seek to blind 
 
 himself where all men loved? Why was 
 
 he a monk, and not a troubadour ? These 
 
 questions are far too large to be answered 
 
 fully here, but in any life of Francis they 
 
 ought at least to have been asked ; we have 
 
 a suspicion that if they were answered we 
 
 should suddenly find that much of the 
 
 enigma of this sullen time of ours was 
 
 answered also. So it was with the monks. 
 
 The two great parties in human affairs are 
 
 only the party which sees life black against 
 
 white, and the party which sees it white 
 
 against black, the party which macerates 
 
 and blackens itself with sacrifice because 
 
 the background is full of the blaze of an 
 
 universal mercy, and the party which crowns 
 
 itself with flowers and lights itself with 
 
 75 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 bridal torches because it stands against a 
 black curtain of incalculable night. The 
 revellers are old, and the monks are young. 
 It was the monks who were the spend- 
 thrifts of happiness, and we who are its 
 misers. 
 
 Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Ad- 
 derley's book, the clear and tranquil life 
 of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate 
 effect on the genius of Francis. He was 
 primarily a poet. The perfection of his 
 literary instinct is shown in his naming the 
 fire * brother,' and the water * sister,' in the 
 quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal 
 in the sermon to the fishes * that they 
 alone were saved in the Flood.' In the 
 amazingly minute and graphic dramatisa- 
 tion of the life, disappointments and ex- 
 cuses of any shrub or beast that he 
 
 76 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 happened to be addressing, his genius has 
 a curious resemblance to that of Burns. 
 But if he avoided the weakness of Burns' 
 verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, 
 bombast and moralisation on himself, the 
 credit is surely due to a cleaner and more 
 transparent life. 
 
 The general attitude of St Francis, like 
 that of his Master, embodied a kind of 
 terrible common-sense. The famous re- 
 mark of the Caterpillar in ' Alice in Won- 
 derland ' — ' Why not ? ' impresses us as his 
 general motto. He could not see why 
 he should not be on good terms with all 
 things. The pomp of war and ambition, 
 the great empire of the Middle Ages and 
 all its fellows begin to look tawdry and 
 top-heavy, under the rationality of that 
 
 innocent stare. His questions were blasting 
 
 77 
 
FRANCIS 
 
 and devastating, like the questions of a 
 child. He would not have been afraid 
 even of the nightmares of cosmogony, for 
 he had no fear in him. To him the world 
 was small, not because he had any views 
 as to its size, but for the reason that 
 gossiping ladies find it small, because so 
 many relatives were to be found in it. If 
 you had taken him to the loneliest star 
 that the madness of an astronomer can 
 conceive, he would have only beheld in it 
 the features of a new friend. 
 
 78 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 When ' Cyrano de Bergerac ' was published, 
 it bore the subordinate title of a heroic 
 comedy. We have no tradition in English 
 literature which would justify us in calling 
 a comedy heroic, though there was once 
 a poet who called a comedy divine. By 
 the current modern conception, the hero 
 has his place in a tragedy, and the one 
 kind of strength which is systematically 
 denied to him is the strength to succeed. 
 That the power of a man's spirit might pos- 
 sibly go to the length of turning a tragedy 
 
 into a comedy is not admitted ; neverthe- 
 
 79 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 less, almost all the primitive legends of the 
 world are comedies, not only in the sense 
 that they have a happy ending, but in the 
 sense that they are based upon a certain 
 optimistic assumption that the hero is 
 destined to be the destroyer of the mon- 
 ster. Singularly enough, this modern idea 
 of the essential disastrous character of life, 
 when seriously considered, connects itself 
 with a hyper-aesthetic view of tragedy and 
 comedy which is largely due to the in- 
 fluence of modern France, from which the 
 great heroic comedies of Monsieur Rostand 
 have come. The French genius has an 
 instinct for remedying its own evil work, 
 and France gives always the best cure for 
 ' Frenchiness.' The idea of comedy which 
 is held in England by the school which 
 
 pays most attention to the technical nice- 
 
 80 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 ties of art is a view which renders such 
 an idea as that of heroic comedy quite 
 impossible. The fundamental conception in 
 the minds of the majority of our younger 
 writers is that comedy is, ' par excellence,' 
 a fragile thing. It is conceived to be a 
 conventional world of the most absolutely 
 delicate and gimcrack description. Such 
 stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's * Happy 
 Hypocrite' are conceptions which would 
 vanish or fall into utter nonsense if viewed 
 by one single degree too seriously. But 
 great comedy, the comedy of Shakespeare 
 or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, 
 taken seriously. There is nothing to which 
 a man must give himself up with more 
 faith and self-abandonment than to genuine 
 laughter. In such comedies one laughs 
 with the heroes and not at them. The 
 f 81 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 humour which steeps the stories of Fal- 
 stafF and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and 
 philosophic humour, a geniality which goes 
 down to the depths. It is not superficial 
 reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, 
 light reading. Our sympathies are as much 
 committed to the characters as if they 
 were the predestined victims in a Greek 
 tragedy. The modern writer of comedies 
 may be said to boast of the brittleness of 
 his characters. He seems always on the 
 eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. 
 When John Oliver Hobbes wrote for the 
 first time a comedy of serious emotions, 
 she named it, with a thinly-disguised con- 
 tempt for her own work, *A Sentimental 
 Comedy.' The ground of this conception 
 of the artificiality of comedy is a pro- 
 found pessimism. Life in the eyes of these 
 
 82 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 mournful buffoons is itself an utterly tragic 
 thing ; comedy must be as hollow as a 
 grinning mask. It is a refuge from the 
 world, and not even, properly speaking, 
 a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet 
 of shining ice over the eternal waters of 
 bitterness. 
 
 ' Cyrano de Bergerac ' came to us as the 
 new decoration of an old truth, that merri- 
 ment was one of the world's natural 
 flowers, and not one of its exotics. The 
 gigantesque levity, the flamboyant elo- 
 quence, the Rabelaisian puns and digres- 
 sions were seen to be once more what 
 they had been in Rabelais, the mere out- 
 bursts of a human sympathy and bravado 
 as old and solid as the stars. The human 
 spirit demanded wit as headlong and 
 
 haughty as its will. All was expressed in 
 
 83 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 the words of Cyrano at his highest moment 
 of happiness. * II me faut des geants.' 
 An essential aspect of this question of 
 heroic comedy is the question of drama 
 in rhyme. There is nothing that affords 
 so easy a point of attack for the dramatic 
 realist as the conduct of a play in verse. 
 According to his canons, it is indeed 
 absurd to represent a number of characters 
 facing some terrible crisis in their lives 
 by capping rhymes like a party playing 
 'bouts rimes.' In his eyes it must appear 
 somewhat ridiculous that two enemies 
 taunting each other with insupportable 
 insults should obligingly provide each other 
 with metrical spacing and neat and con- 
 venient rhymes. But the whole of this 
 view rests finally upon the fact that few 
 
 persons, if any, to-day understand what is 
 
 84 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 meant by a poetical play. It is a singular 
 thing that those poetical plays which are 
 now written in England by the most 
 advanced students of the drama follow 
 exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and 
 use verse and rhyme for the adornment 
 of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme 
 has a supreme appropriateness for the 
 treatment of the higher comedy. The 
 land of heroic comedy is, as it were, a 
 paradise of lovers, in which it is not 
 difficult to imagine that men could talk 
 poetry all day long. It is far more con- 
 ceivable that men's speech should flower 
 naturally into these harmonious forms, 
 when they are filled with the essential 
 spirit of youth, than when they are sitting 
 gloomily in the presence of immemorial 
 
 destiny. The great error consists in sup- 
 
 85 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 posing that poetry is an unnatural form 
 of language. We should all like to speak 
 poetry at the moment when we truly live, 
 and if we do not speak it, it is because we 
 have an impediment in our speech. It is 
 not song that is the narrow or artificial 
 thing, it is conversation that is a broken 
 and stammering attempt at song. When 
 we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, 
 like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in 
 rhyme, it is not our language disguised 
 or distorted, but our language rounded 
 and made whole. Rhymes answer each 
 other as the sexes in flowers and in 
 humanity answer each other. Men do 
 not speak so, it is true. Even when they 
 are inspired or in love they talk inanities. 
 But the poetic comedy does not misrepre- 
 sent the speech one half so much, as the 
 
 86 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur 
 Rostand showed even more than his usual 
 insight when he called ' Cyrano de Ber- 
 gerac' a comedy, despite the fact that, 
 strictly speaking, it ends with disappoint- 
 ment and death. The essence of tragedy 
 is a spiritual breakdown or decline, and 
 in the great French play the spiritual 
 sentiment mounts unceasingly until the 
 last line. It is not the facts themselves, 
 but our feeling about them, that makes 
 tragedy and comedy, and death is more 
 joyful in Rostand than life in Maeter- 
 linck. The same apparent contradiction 
 holds good in the case of the drama of 
 'L'Aiglon.' Although the hero is a 
 weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a 
 premature death and a personal disillusion- 
 ment, yet, in spite of this theme, which 
 
 87 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 might have been chosen for its depressing 
 qualities, the unconquerable paean of the 
 praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety 
 of the poet's song swells so high that at 
 the end it seems to drown all the weak 
 voices of the characters in one crashing 
 chorus of great things and great men. A 
 multitude of mottoes might be taken from 
 the play to indicate and illustrate, not 
 only its own spirit, but much of the spirit 
 of modern life. When in the vision of 
 the field of Wagram the horrible voices 
 of the wounded cry out, ■ Les corbeaux, 
 les corbeaux,' the Duke, overwhelmed 
 with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, 
 cries out, ■ Ou, ou sont les aigles ? ' That 
 antithesis might stand alone as an in- 
 vocation at the beginning of the twentieth 
 century to the spirit of heroic comedy. 
 
 88 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 When an ex- General of Napoleon is 
 asked his reason for having betrayed the 
 Emperor he replies, * La fatigue,' and at 
 that a veteran private of the Great Army 
 rushes forward, and crying passionately, 
 ' Et nous ? ' pours out a terrible descrip- 
 tion of the life lived by the common 
 soldier. To-day when pessimism is almost 
 as much a symbol of wealth and fashion 
 as jewels or cigars, when the pampered 
 heirs of the ages can sum up life in few 
 other words but 'la fatigue/ there might 
 surely come a cry from the vast mass of 
 common humanity from the beginning 'et 
 nous?' It is this potentiality for enthu- 
 siasm among the mass of men that makes 
 the function of comedy at once common 
 and sublime. Shakespeare's 'Much Ado 
 
 about Nothing ' is a great comedy, because 
 
 89 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 behind it is the whole pressure of that 
 
 love of love which is the youth of the 
 
 world, which is common to all the young, 
 
 especially to those who swear they will die 
 
 bachelors and old maids. ' Love's Labour's 
 
 Lost' is filled with the same energy, and 
 
 there it falls even more definitely into 
 
 the scope of our subject since it is a 
 
 comedy in rhyme in which all men speak 
 
 lyrically as naturally as the birds sing in 
 
 pairing time. What the love of love is to 
 
 the Shakespearian comedies, that other and 
 
 more mysterious human passion, the love of 
 
 death, is to 'L'Aiglon.' Whether we shall 
 
 ever have in England a new tradition of 
 
 poetic comedy it is difficult at present to 
 
 say, but we shall assuredly never have it 
 
 until we realise that comedy is built upon 
 
 everlasting foundations in the nature of 
 
 90 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 things, that it is not a thing too light to 
 capture, but too deep to plumb. Monsieur 
 Rostand, in his description of the Battle of 
 Wagram, does not shrink from bringing 
 about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of 
 actual battle, of men torn by crows, and 
 suffocated with blood, but when the Duke, 
 terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks 
 them for their final word, they all cry to- 
 gether, 'Vive l'Empereur ! ' Monsieur Ros- 
 tand, perhaps, did not know that he was 
 writing an allegory. To me that field of 
 Wagram is the field of the modern war 
 of literature. We hear nothing but the 
 voices of pain ; the whole is one phono- 
 graph of horror. It is right that we should 
 hear these things, it is right that not one 
 of them should be silenced ; but these 
 
 cries of distress are not in life as they are 
 
 91 
 
ROSTAND 
 
 in modern art the only voices, they are 
 the voices of men, but not the voice of 
 man. When questioned finally and seri- 
 ously as to their conception of their destiny, 
 men have from the beginning of time 
 answered in a thousand philosophies and 
 religions with a single voice and in a 
 sense most sacred and tremendous, 'Vive 
 rEmpereur.' 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 There are a great many bonds which still 
 connect us with Charles II., one of the idlest 
 men of one of the idlest epochs. Among 
 other things Charles II. represented one 
 thing which is very rare and very satisfying ; 
 he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scep- 
 ticism both in its advantages and disad- 
 vantages is greatly misunderstood in our 
 time. There is a curious idea abroad that 
 scepticism has some connection with such 
 theories as materialism and atheism and 
 secularism. This is of course a mistake ; 
 the true sceptic has nothing to do with 
 
 93 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 these theories simply because they are 
 
 theories. The true sceptic is as much a 
 
 spiritualist as he is a materialist. He thinks 
 
 that the savage dancing round an African 
 
 idol stands quite as good a chance of being 
 
 right as Darwin. He thinks that mysticism 
 
 is every bit as rational as rationalism. He 
 
 has indeed the most profound doubts as 
 
 to whether St Matthew wrote his own 
 
 gospel. But he has quite equally profound 
 
 doubts as to whether the tree he is looking 
 
 at is a tree and not a rhinoceros. 
 
 This is the real meaning of that mystery 
 
 which appears so prominently in the lives 
 
 of great sceptics, which appears with special 
 
 prominence in the life of Charles II. I 
 
 mean their constant oscillation between 
 
 atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman 
 
 Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed 
 
 9-4 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 and formidable system, but so is atheism. 
 
 Atheism is indeed the most daring of all 
 
 dogmas, more daring than the vision of a 
 
 palpable day of judgment. For it is the 
 
 assertion of a universal negative; for a 
 
 man to say that there is no God in the 
 
 universe is like saying that there are no 
 
 insects in any of the stars. 
 
 Thus it was with that wholesome and 
 
 systematic sceptic, Charles II. When 
 
 he took the Sacrament according to the 
 
 forms of the Roman Church in his 
 
 last hour he was acting consistently as 
 
 a philosopher. The wafer might not be 
 
 God ; similarly it might not be a wafer. 
 
 To the genuine and poetical sceptic the 
 
 whole world is incredible, with its bulbous 
 
 mountains and its fantastic trees. The 
 
 whole order of things is as outrageous as 
 
 95 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 any miracle which could presume to violate 
 
 it. Transubstantiation might be a dream, 
 
 but if it was, it was assuredly a dream 
 
 within a dream. Charles II. sought to 
 
 guard himself against hell fire because he 
 
 could not think hell itself more fantastic 
 
 than the world as it was revealed by science. 
 
 The priest crept up the staircase, the doors 
 
 were closed, the few of the faithful who 
 
 were present hushed themselves respectfully, 
 
 and so, with every circumstance of secrecy 
 
 and sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the 
 
 prayers poured out, was consummated the 
 
 last great act of logical unbelief. 
 
 The problem of Charles II. consists in 
 
 this, that he has scarcely a moral virtue to 
 
 his name, and yet he attracts us morally. 
 
 We feel that some of the virtues have 
 
 been dropped out in the lists made by all 
 
 96 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 the saints and sages, and that Charles II. 
 
 was pre-eminently successful in these wild 
 
 and unmentionable virtues. The real truth 
 
 of this matter and the real relation of 
 
 Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth 
 
 somewhat more exhaustive study. 
 
 It is a commonplace that the Restoration 
 
 movement can only be understood when 
 
 considered as a reaction against Puritanism. 
 
 But it is insufficiently realised that the 
 
 tyranny which half frustrated all the good 
 
 work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar 
 
 kind. It was not the fire of Puritanism, 
 
 the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of 
 
 a restraint, which passed away ; that still 
 
 burns in the heart of England, only to be 
 
 quenched by the final overwhelming sea. 
 
 But it is seldom remembered that the 
 
 Puritans were in their day emphatically 
 a 97 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 intellectual bullies, that they relied swagger- 
 
 ingly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, 
 
 that they bound omnipotence itself in the 
 
 chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, 
 
 through the damning fact that they had a 
 
 complete theory of life, through the eternal 
 
 paradox that a satisfactory explanation can 
 
 never satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical 
 
 Romans, like the logical French Jacobins, 
 
 like the logical English utilitarians, they 
 
 taught the lesson that men's wants have 
 
 always been right and their arguments 
 
 always wrong. Reason is always a kind 
 
 of brute force ; those who appeal to the 
 
 head rather than the heart, however pallid 
 
 and polite, are necessarily men of violence. 
 
 We speak of ' touching ' a man's heart, but 
 
 we can do nothing to his head but hit it. 
 
 The tyranny of the Puritans over the bodies 
 
 98 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 of men was comparatively a trifle ; pikes, 
 bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively 
 a trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny 
 of aggressive reason over the cowed and 
 demoralised human spirit. Their brooding 
 and raving can be forgiven, can in truth 
 be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity 
 on fire ; hatred can be genial, madness can 
 be homely. The Puritans fell, not because 
 they were fanatics, but because they were 
 rationalists. 
 
 When we consider these things, when we 
 remember that Puritanism, which means 
 in our day a moral and almost tempera- 
 mental attitude, meant in that day a 
 singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall 
 comprehend a little more the grain of good 
 that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of 
 
 the Restoration. The Restoration, of which 
 
 99 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in 
 part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed 
 parts of human nature, the parts that are 
 left over, and will always be left over, by 
 every rationalistic system of life. This 
 does not merely account for the revolt of 
 the vices and of that empty recklessness 
 and horseplay which is sometimes more 
 irritating than any vice. It accounts also 
 for the return of the virtue of politeness, 
 for that also is a nameless thing ignored by 
 logical codes. Politeness has indeed about 
 it something mystical ; like religion, it is 
 everywhere understood and nowhere de- 
 fined. Charles is not entirely to be despised 
 because, as the type of this movement, he let 
 himself float upon this new tide of politeness. 
 There was some moral and social value in 
 
 his perfection in little things. He could 
 
 100 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 not keep the Ten Commandments, but he 
 kept the ten thousand commandments. 
 His name is unconnected with any great 
 acts of duty or sacrifice, but it is con- 
 nected with a great many of those acts 
 of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of 
 dramatic delicacy, which lie on the dim 
 borderland between morality and art. 
 'Charles II.,' said Thackeray, with un- 
 erring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a 
 snob.' Unlike George IV. he was a 
 gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who 
 obeys strange statutes, not to be found in 
 any moral text-book, and practises strange 
 virtues nameless from the beginning of 
 the world. 
 
 So much may be said and should be 
 said for the Restoration, that it was the 
 
 revolt of something human, if only the 
 101 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 ddbris of human nature. But more cannot 
 be said. It was emphatically a fall and 
 not an ascent, a recoil and not an advance, 
 a sudden weakness and not a sudden 
 strength. That the bow of human nature 
 was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too 
 far, that it overstrained the soul by stretch- 
 ing it to the height of an almost horrible 
 idealism, makes the collapse of the Re- 
 storation infinitely more excusable, but it 
 does not make it any the less a collapse. 
 Nothing can efface the essential distinction 
 that Puritanism was one of the world's 
 great efforts after the discovery of the true 
 order, whereas it was the essence of the 
 Restoration that it involved no effort at 
 all. It is true that the Restoration was 
 not, as has been widely assumed, the most 
 immoral epoch of our history. Its vices 
 
 102 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 cannot compare for a moment in this re- 
 spect with the monstrous tragedies and 
 almost suffocating secrecies and villainies 
 of the Court of James I. But the dram- 
 drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia 
 of Charles II. seem at once more human 
 and more detestable than the passions and 
 poisons of the Renaissance, much in the 
 same way that a monkey appears inevitably 
 more human and more detestable than a 
 tiger. Compared with the Renaissance, 
 there is something Cockney about the 
 Restoration. Not only was it too indolent 
 for great morality, it was too indolent even 
 for great art. It lacked that seriousness 
 which is needed even for the pursuit of 
 pleasure, that discipline which is essential 
 even to a game of lawn tennis. It would 
 have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite 
 103 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 as arduous to write ' Paradise Lost ' as to 
 regain Paradise. 
 
 All old and vigorous languages abound 
 in images and metaphors, which, though 
 lightly and casually used, are in truth poems 
 in themselves, and poems of a high and 
 striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so 
 terribly significant as the phrase * killing 
 time.' It is a tremendous and poetical 
 image, the image of a kind of cosmic 
 parricide. There is on the earth a race 
 of revellers who do, under all their exuber- 
 ance, fundamentally regard time as an 
 enemy. Of these were Charles II. and 
 the men of the Restoration. Whatever 
 may have been their merits, and as we 
 have said we think that they had merits, 
 they can never have a place among the 
 
 great representatives of the joy of life, for 
 
 101 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 they belonged to those lower epicureans 
 who kill time, as opposed to those higher 
 epicureans who make time live. 
 
 Of a people in this temper Charles II. 
 was the natural and rightful head. He 
 may have been a pantomime King, but he 
 was a King, and with all his geniality he 
 let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, 
 the aimless flaneur that he has been repre- 
 sented. He was a patient and cunning 
 politician, who disguised his wisdom under 
 so perfect a mask of folly that he not only 
 deceived his allies and opponents, but has 
 deceived almost all the historians that have 
 come after him. But if Charles was, as 
 he emphatically was, the only Stuart who 
 really achieved despotism, it was greatly 
 due to the temper of the nation and 
 the age. Despotism is the easiest of 
 
 105 
 
CHARLES II 
 
 all governments, at any rate for the 
 governed. 
 
 It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is 
 the despot who is the slave. Men in a 
 state of decadence employ professionals to 
 fight for them, professionals to dance for 
 them, and a professional to rule them. 
 
 Almost all the faces in the portraits of 
 that time look, as it were, like masks put 
 on artificially with the perruque. A strange 
 unreality broods over the period. Dis- 
 tracted as we are with civic mysteries and 
 problems, we can afford to rejoice. Our 
 tears are less desolate than their laughter, 
 our restraints are larger than their liberty. 
 
 100 
 
STEVENSON * 
 
 A recent incident has finally convinced 
 us that Stevenson was, as we suspected, a 
 great man. We knew from recent books 
 that we have noticed, from the scorn of 
 ' Ephemera Critica ' and Mr George Moore, 
 that Stevenson had the first essential quali- 
 fication of a great man : that of being mis- 
 understood by his opponents. But from 
 the book which Messrs Chatto & Windus 
 have issued, in the same binding as Steven- 
 son's works, ' Robert Louis Stevenson,' by 
 Mr H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he 
 
 * ■ Robert Louis Stevenson : A Life Study in Criticism.' 
 By H. Bellyse Baildon. Chatto & Windus. 
 107 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 has the other essential qualification, that 
 of being misunderstood by his admirers. 
 Mr Baildon has many interesting things 
 to tell us about Stevenson himself, whom 
 he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms 
 by any means valueless. That upon the 
 plays, especially * Beau Austin,' is remark- 
 ably thoughtful and true. But it is a very 
 singular fact, and goes far, as we say, to 
 prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable 
 quality which belongs to the great, that 
 this admiring student of Stevenson can 
 number and marshal all the master's work 
 and distribute praise and blame with de- 
 cision and even severity, without ever 
 thinking for a moment of the principles 
 of art and ethics which would have struck 
 us as the very thing that Stevenson nearly 
 
 killed himself to express. 
 
 108 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 Mr Baildon, for example, is perpetually 
 lecturing Stevenson for his * pessimism ' ; 
 surely a strange charge against the man 
 who has done more than any modern artist 
 to make men ashamed of their shame of 
 life. But he complains that, in ' The Master 
 of Ballantrae' and <Dr Jekyll and Mr 
 Hyde,' Stevenson gives evil a final victory 
 over good. Now if there was one point 
 that Stevenson more constantly and pas- 
 sionately emphasised than any other it was 
 that we must worship good for its own 
 value and beauty, without any reference 
 whatever to victory or failure in space and 
 time. 'Whatever we are intended to do,' 
 he said, 'we are not intended to succeed.' 
 That the stars in their courses fight against 
 virtue, that humanity is in its nature a 
 
 forlorn hope, this was the very spirit that 
 109 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 through the whole of Stevenson's work 
 sounded a trumpet to all the brave. The 
 story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but 
 could anyone stand beside the grave of 
 that sodden monomaniac and not respect 
 him ? It is strange that men should see 
 sublime inspiration in the ruins of an old 
 church and see none in the ruins of a man. 
 The author has most extraordinary ideas 
 about Stevenson's tales of blood and spoil ; 
 he appears to think that they prove Steven- 
 son to have had (we use Mr Baildon's own 
 phrase) a kind of 'homicidal mania.' ''He 
 (Stevenson) arrives pretty much at the 
 paradox that one can hardly be better 
 employed than in taking life.' Mr Baildon 
 might as well say that Dr Conan Doyle 
 delights in committing inexplicable crimes, 
 
 that Mr Clark Russell is a notorious pirate, 
 110 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought that 
 one could hardly be better employed than 
 in stealing moonstones and falsifying mar- 
 riage registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely 
 alone in this error : few people have under- 
 stood properly the goriness of Stevenson. 
 Stevenson was essentially the robust school- 
 boy who draws skeletons and gibbets in 
 his Latin grammar. It was not that he 
 took pleasure in death, but that he took 
 pleasure in life, in every muscular and 
 emphatic action of life, even if it were an 
 action that took the life of another. \ 
 
 Let us suppose that one gentleman throws 
 a knife at another gentleman and pins him 
 to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to 
 remark that there are in this transaction 
 two somewhat varying personal points of 
 
 view. The point of view of the man 
 111 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 pinned is the tragic and moral point of 
 view, and this Stevenson showed clearly 
 that he understood in such stories as ' The 
 Master of Ballantrae ' and ' Weir of Her- 
 miston.' But there is another view of the 
 matter — that in which the whole act is an 
 abrupt and brilliant explosion of bodily- 
 vitality, like breaking a rock with a blow 
 of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred 
 gate. This is the standpoint of romance, 
 and it is the soul of ' Treasure Island ' and 
 * The Wrecker.' It was not, indeed, that 
 Stevenson loved men less, but that he loved 
 clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, 
 in the devouring universalism of his soul, 
 a positive love for inanimate objects such 
 as has not been known since St Francis 
 called the sun brother and the well sister. 
 
 We feel that he was actully in love with 
 112 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 the wooden crutch that Silver sent hurtling 
 in the sunlight, with the box that Billy 
 Bones left at the ' Admiral Benbow,' with 
 the knife that Wicks drove through his 
 own hand and the table. There is always 
 in his work a certain clean-cut angularity 
 which makes us remember that he was 
 fond of cutting wood with an axe. 
 
 Stevenson's new biographer, however, 
 cannot make any allowance for this deep- 
 rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He 
 is always imputing something to Stevenson 
 as a crime which Stevenson really professed 
 as an object. He says of that glorious riot 
 of horror, 'The Destroying Angel,' in 'The 
 Dynamiter,' that it is ■ highly fantastic and 
 putting a strain on our credulity.' This 
 is rather like describing the travels of 
 
 Baron Munchausen as ' unconvincing. ' The 
 h 113 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 whole story of ' The Dynamiter ' is a kind 
 
 of humorous nightmare, and even in that 
 
 story 'The Destroying Angel' is supposed 
 
 to be an extravagant lie made up on the 
 
 spur of the moment. It is a dream within 
 
 a dream, and to accuse it of improbability 
 
 is like accusing the sky of being blue. But 
 
 Mr Baildon, whether from hasty reading 
 
 or natural difference of taste, cannot in the 
 
 least comprehend the rich and romantic 
 
 irony of Stevenson's London stories. He 
 
 actually says of that portentous monument 
 
 of humour, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, 
 
 that, * though evidently admired by his 
 
 creator, he is to me on the whole rather 
 
 an irritating presence.' From this we are 
 
 almost driven to believe (though desperately 
 
 and against our will) that Mr Baildon thinks 
 
 that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, 
 114 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 as if he were a man in real life. For our- 
 selves, Prince Florizel is almost our favourite 
 character in fiction ; but we willingly add 
 the proviso that if we met him in real life 
 we should kill him. 
 
 The fact is, that the whole mass of 
 Stevenson's spiritual and intellectual virtues 
 have been partly frustrated by one addi- 
 tional virtue — that of artistic dexterity. 
 If he had chalked up his great message on 
 a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and 
 straggling letters, it would have startled 
 men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his 
 light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy- 
 book hand that everyone supposed they 
 must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered 
 from his versatility, not, as is loosely said, 
 by not doing every department well enough, 
 
 but by doing every department too well. 
 115 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 As child, cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his 
 disguises were so good that most people 
 could not see the same man under all. It 
 is an unjust fact that if a man can play 
 the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black 
 boots just tolerably, he is called an Admir- 
 able Crichton, but if he does all three 
 thoroughly well, he is apt to be regarded, 
 in the several departments, as a common 
 fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common 
 boot-black. This is what has happened 
 in the case of Stevenson. If * Dr Jekyll,' 
 'The Master of Ballantrae,' 'The Child's 
 Garden of Verses,' and ' Across the Plains ' 
 had been each of them one shade less 
 perfectly done than they were, everyone 
 would have seen that they were all parts 
 of the same message ; but by succeeding 
 
 in the proverbial miracle of being in five 
 116 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 places at once, he has naturally convinced 
 others that he was five different people. 
 But the real message of Stevenson was 
 as simple as that of Mahomet, as moral 
 as that of Dante, as confident as that 
 of Whitman, and as practical as that of 
 James Watt. 
 
 The conception which unites the whole 
 varied work of Stevenson was that romance, 
 or the vision of the possibilities of things, 
 was far more important than mere occur- 
 rences : that one was the soul of our life, 
 the other the body, and that the soul was 
 the precious thing. The germ of all his 
 stories lies in the idea that every landscape 
 or scrap of scenery has a soul: and that 
 soul is a story. Standing before a stunted 
 orchard with a broken stone wall, we may 
 know as a mere fact that no one has been 
 117 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 through it but an elderly female cook. 
 But everything exists in the human soul: 
 that orchard grows in our own brain, and 
 there it is the shrine and theatre of some 
 strange chance between a girl and a ragged 
 poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands 
 for the conception that ideas are the real 
 incidents : that our fancies are our adven- 
 tures. To think of a cow with wings is 
 essentially to have met one. And this is 
 the reason for his wide diversities of nar- 
 rative: he had to make one story as rich 
 as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary 
 monolith : for the story was the soul, or 
 rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. 
 It is quite inappropriate to judge * The 
 Teller of Tales' (as the Samoans called 
 him) by the particular novels he wrote, 
 
 as one would judge Mr George Moore by 
 118 
 
STEVENSON 
 
 'Esther Waters.' These novels were only 
 the two or three of his soul's adventures 
 that he happened to tell. But he died 
 with a thousand stories in his heart. 
 
 119 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 There are two main moral necessities for 
 
 the work of a great man: the first is that 
 
 he should believe in the truth of his 
 
 message ; the second is that he should 
 
 believe in the acceptability of his message. 
 
 It was the whole tragedy of Carlyle that 
 
 he had the first and not the second. 
 
 The ordinary capital, however, which is 
 
 made out of Carlyle's alleged gloom is a 
 
 very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, 
 
 both as a man and as a writer, but the 
 
 attempt to -explain his gospel in terms of 
 
 his * liver ' is merely pitiful. If indigestion 
 120 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 invariably resulted in a * Sartor Resartus,' 
 
 it would be a vastly more tolerable thing 
 
 than it is. Diseases do not turn into 
 
 poems; even the decadent really writes 
 
 with the healthy part of his organism. 
 
 If Carlyle's private faults and literary 
 
 virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he 
 
 is only in the situation of every man ; for 
 
 every one of us it is surely very difficult 
 
 to say precisely where our honest opinions 
 
 end and our personal predilections begin. 
 
 But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as 
 
 a mere savage egotist cannot arise from 
 
 anything but a pure inability to grasp 
 
 Carlyle's gospel. 'Ruskin,' says a critic, 
 
 ' did, all the same, verily believe in God ; 
 
 Carlyle believed only in himself.' This 
 
 is certainly a distinction between the author 
 
 he has understood and the author he has 
 121 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 not understood. Carlyle believed in him 
 self, but he could not have believed in 
 himself more than Ruskin did ; they both 
 believed in God, because they felt that if 
 everything else fell into wrack and ruin, 
 themselves were permanent witnesses to 
 God. Where they both failed was not in 
 belief in God or in belief in themselves ; 
 they failed in belief in other people. It 
 is not enough for a prophet to believe 
 in his message ; he must believe in its 
 acceptability. Christ, St Francis, Bunyan, 
 Wesley, Mr Gladstone, Walt Whitman, 
 men of indescribable variety, were all alike 
 in a certain faculty of treating the average 
 man as their equal, of trusting to his 
 reason and good feeling without fear and 
 without condescension. It was this sim- 
 plicity of confidence, not only in God, 
 122 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 but in the image of God, that was lacking 
 in Carlyle. 
 
 But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's 
 religious sentiment must absolutely fall to 
 the ground. The profound security of 
 Carlyle's sense of the unity of the Cosmos 
 is like that of a Hebrew prophet ; and it 
 has the same expression that it had in the 
 Hebrew prophets — humour. A man must 
 be very full of faith to jest about his 
 divinity. No Neo-Pagan delicately suggest- 
 ing a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half- 
 converted Theosophist groping towards a 
 recognition of Buddha, would ever think 
 of cracking jokes on the matter. But to 
 the Hebrew prophets their religion was so 
 solid a thing, like a mountain or a mam- 
 moth, that the irony of its contact with 
 trivial and fleeting matters struck them 
 
 123 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His 
 supreme contribution, both to philosophy 
 and literature, was his sense of the sarcasm 
 of eternity. Other writers had seen the 
 hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone 
 saw the humour of them. Other writers 
 had seen that there could be something 
 elemental and eternal in a song or statute, 
 he alone saw that there could be something 
 elemental and eternal in a joke. No one 
 who ever read it will forget the passage, 
 full of dark and agnostic gratification, in 
 which he narrates that some Court chronicler 
 described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in 
 the Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did 
 fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, 
 under what keeping we ask not, he at 
 least will never, through unending ages, 
 insult the face of the sun any more , . , 
 
 124 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 and we go on, if not to better forms of 
 beastliness, at least to fresher ones.' 
 
 The supreme value of Carlyle to English 
 literature was that he was the founder of 
 modern irrationalism ; a movement fully 
 as important as modern rationalism. A 
 great deal is said in these days about 
 the value or valuelessness of logic. In 
 the main, indeed, logic is not a productive 
 tool so much as a weapon for defence. A 
 man building up an intellectual system has 
 to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in 
 one hand and the trowel in the other. The 
 imagination, the constructive quality, is the 
 trowel, and argument is the sword. A 
 wide experience of actual intellectual affairs 
 will lead most people to the conclusion 
 that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon 
 wherewith to exterminate logicians. 
 125 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Rut though this may be true enough in 
 
 practice, it scarcely clears up the position 
 
 of logic in human affairs. Logic is a 
 
 machine of the mind, and if it is used 
 
 honestly it ought to bring out an honest 
 
 conclusion. When people say that you 
 
 can prove anything by logic, they are not 
 
 using words in a fair sense. What they 
 
 mean is that you can prove anything by 
 
 bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude 
 
 of the soul of man there is an extraordinary 
 
 tendency to use the name for an organ, 
 
 when what is meant is the abuse or decay 
 
 of that organ. Thus we speak of a man 
 
 suffering from 'nerves,' which is about as 
 
 sensible as talking about a man suffering 
 
 from ten fingers. We speak of * liver ' 
 
 and 'digestion' when we mean the failure 
 
 of liver and the absence of digestion. And 
 126 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 in the same manner we speak of the 
 dangers of logic, when what we really 
 mean is the danger of fallacy. 
 
 But the real point about the limitation 
 of logic and the partial overthrow of logic 
 by writers like Carlyle is deeper and some- 
 what different. The fault of the great 
 mass of logicians is not that they bring 
 out a false result, or, in other words, are 
 not logicians at all. Their fault is that by 
 an inevitable psychological habit they tend 
 to forget that there are two parts of a 
 logical process — the first the choosing of 
 an assumption, and the second the arguing 
 upon it ; and humanity, if it devotes itself 
 too persistently to the study of sound 
 reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose 
 the faculty of sound assumption. It is 
 
 astonishing how constantly one may hear 
 127 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 from rational and even rationalistic persons 
 such a phrase as * He did not prove the 
 very thing with which he started,' or * The 
 whole of his case rested upon a pure 
 assumption,' two peculiarities which may 
 be found by the curious in the works of 
 Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how con- 
 stantly one hears rationalists arguing upon 
 some deep topic, apparently without troub- 
 ling about the deep assumptions involved, 
 having lost their sense, as it were, of the 
 real colour and character of a man's assump- 
 tion. For instance, two men will argue 
 about whether patriotism is a good thing 
 and never discover until the end, if at all, 
 that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole 
 case upon the idea that man should, if he 
 can, become as God, with equal sympathies 
 
 and no prejudices, while the nationalist 
 128 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 denies any such duty at the very start, and 
 regards man as an animal who has prefer- 
 ences, as a bird has feathers. 
 
 Thus it was with Carlyle : he startled 
 men by attacking not arguments but as- 
 sumptions. He simply brushed aside all 
 the matters which the men of the nine- 
 teenth century held to be incontrovertible, 
 and appealed directly to the very different 
 class of matters which they knew to be 
 true. He induced men to study less the 
 truth of their reasoning, and more the truth 
 of the assumptions upon which they 
 reasoned. Even where his view was not 
 the highest truth, it was always a refreshing 
 and beneficent heresy. He denied every 
 one of the postulates upon which the age 
 
 of reason based itself. He denied the 
 i 129 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 theory of progress which assumed that we 
 must be better off than the people of the 
 twelfth century. Whether we were better 
 than the people of the twelfth century 
 according to him depended entirely upon 
 whether we chose or deserved to be. 
 
 He denied every type and species of 
 prop or association or support which threw 
 the responsibility upon civilisation or society, 
 or anything but the individual conscience. 
 He has often been called a prophet. The 
 real ground of the truth of this phrase is 
 often neglected. Since the last era of 
 purely religious literature, the era of English 
 Puritanism, there has been no writer in 
 whose eyes the soul stood so much alone. 
 
 Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a 
 
 mystic, and mysticism was with him, as 
 
 with all its genuine professors, only a tran- 
 130 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 scendent form of common-sense. Mysticism 
 and common-sense alike consist in a sense 
 of the dominance of certain truths and 
 tendencies which cannot be formally de- 
 monstrated or even formally named. Mys- 
 ticism and common-sense are alike appeals 
 to realities that we all know to be real, but 
 which have no place in argument except 
 as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist 
 in breaking through formulae, old and new, 
 to these old and silent and ironical sanities. 
 Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred 
 times over, he maintained, they could not 
 alter the fact that every man and woman 
 does choose a king and repudiate all the 
 pride of citizenship for the exultation of 
 humility. If inequality of this kind was 
 a weakness, it was a weakness bound up 
 
 with the very strength of the universe. 
 131 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 About hero worship, indeed, few critics have 
 done the smallest justice to Carlyle. Misled 
 by those hasty and choleric passages in which 
 he sometimes expressed a preference for 
 mere violence, passages which were a great 
 deal more connected with his temperament 
 than with his philosophy, they have finally 
 imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory 
 of hero worship was a theory of terrified 
 submission to stern and arrogant men. As 
 a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane 
 about some questions, but he is never in- 
 humane about hero worship. His view is 
 not that human nature is so vulgar and 
 silly a thing that it must be guided and 
 driven ; it is, on the contrary, that human 
 nature is so chivalrous and fundamentally 
 magnanimous a thing that even the mean- 
 est have it in them to love a leader more 
 132 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to 
 rebellion. When he speaks of this trait 
 in human nature Carlyle's tone invariably 
 softens. We feel that for the moment he 
 is kindled with admiration of mankind, 
 and almost reaches the verge of Chris- 
 tianity. Whatever else was acid and 
 captious about Carlyle's utterances, his 
 hero worship was not only humane, it was 
 almost optimistic. He admired great men 
 primarily, and perhaps correctly, because 
 he thought that they were more human 
 than other men. The evil side of the 
 influence of Carlyle and his religion of 
 hero worship did not consist in the emo- 
 tional worship of valour and success ; that 
 was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part 
 of all healthy children. Where Carlyle 
 
 really did harm was in the fact that he, 
 
 133 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 more than any modern man, is responsible 
 for the increase of that modern habit of 
 what is vulgarly called ' Going the whole 
 hog.' Often in matters of passion and 
 conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog. 
 This remarkable modern craze for making 
 one's philosophy, religion, politics, and 
 temper all of a piece, of seeking in all 
 incidents for opportunities to assert and 
 reassert some favourite mental attitude, is 
 a thing which existed comparatively little 
 in other centuries. Solomon and Horace, 
 Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists 
 when they were melancholy, and optimists 
 when they were happy. But the optimist 
 of to-day seems obliged to prove that gout 
 and unrequited love make him dance with 
 joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove 
 that sunshine and a good supper convulse 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle 
 was strongly possessed with this mania 
 for spiritual consistency. He wished to 
 take the same view of the wars of the 
 angels and of the paltriest riot at Donny- 
 brook Fair. It was this species of insane 
 logic which led him into his chief errors, 
 never his natural enthusiasms. Let us take 
 an example. Carlyle's defence of slavery is 
 a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak alike in 
 argument and in moral instinct. The truth 
 is, that he only took it up from the passion 
 for applying everywhere his paradoxical 
 defence of aristocracy. He blundered, of 
 course, because he did not see that slavery 
 has nothing in the world to do with aris- 
 tocracy, that it is, indeed, almost its 
 opposite. The defence which Carlyle and 
 
 all its thoughtful defenders have made for 
 135 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 aristocracy was that a few persons could 
 more rapidly and firmly decide public 
 affairs in the interests of the people. But 
 slavery is not even supposed to be a 
 government for the good of the governed. 
 It is a possession of the governed avowedly 
 for the good of the governors. Aristocracy 
 uses the strong for the service of the weak ; 
 slavery uses the weak for the service of 
 the strong. It is no derogation to man as 
 a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed 
 he was, that he should be ruled and guided 
 for his own good like a child — for a child 
 who is always ruled and guided we regard 
 as the very type of spiritual existence. But 
 it is a derogation and an absolute contra- 
 diction to that human spirituality in which 
 Carlyle believed that a man should be 
 owned like a tool for someone else's good, as 
 13G 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 if he had no personal destiny in the Cosmos. 
 We draw attention to this particular error 
 of Carlyle's because we think that it is a 
 curious example of the waste and unclean 
 places into which that remarkable animal, 
 'the whole hog,' more than once led him. 
 In this respect Carlyle has had unques- 
 tionably long and an unquestionably bad 
 influence. The whole of that recent political 
 ethic which conceives that if we only go 
 far enough we may finish a thing for once 
 and all, that being strong consists chiefly 
 in being deliberately deaf and blind, owes 
 a great deal of its complete sway to his 
 example. Out of him flows most of the 
 philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern 
 times the supreme maniac of this moon- 
 struck consistency. Though Nietzsche and 
 Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, 
 
 137 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Carlyle being a stiff-necked peasant and 
 Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat, they 
 were alike in this one quality of which we 
 speak, the strange and pitiful audacity with 
 which they applied their single ethical test 
 to everything in heaven and earth. The 
 disciple of Nietzsche, indeed, embraces im- 
 morality like an austere and difficult faith. 
 He urges himself to lust and cruelty with 
 the same tremulous enthusiasm with which 
 a Christian urges himself to purity and 
 patience ; he struggles as a monk struggles 
 with bestial visions and temptations with 
 the ancient necessities of honour and justice 
 and compassion. To this madhouse, it can 
 hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual 
 courage brought many at last. 
 
 138 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF 
 SIMPLICITY 
 
 The whole world is certainly heading for 
 a great simplicity, not deliberately, but 
 rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion 
 of false innocence, like that of the French 
 aristocrats before the Revolution, who built 
 an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peas- 
 antry for the enormous expenditure which 
 is needed in order to live the simple life 
 of peasants. The simplicity towards which 
 the world is driving is the necessary out- 
 come of all our systems and speculations 
 
 and of our deep and continuous contem- 
 139 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 plation of things. For the universe is like 
 everything in it ; we have to look at it 
 repeatedly and habitually before we see it. 
 It is only when we have seen it for the 
 hundredth time that we see it for the 
 first time. The more consistently things 
 are contemplated, the more they tend to 
 unify themselves and therefore to simplify 
 themselves. The simplification of anything 
 is always sensational. Thus monotheism 
 is the most sensational of things : it is as 
 if we gazed long at a design full of dis- 
 connected objects, and, suddenly, with a 
 stunning thrill, they came together into 
 a huge and staring face. 
 
 Few people will dispute that all the 
 typical movements of our time are upon 
 this road towards simplification. Each 
 
 system seeks to be more fundamental than 
 HO 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 the other ; each seeks, in the literal sense, 
 to undermine the other. In art, for ex- 
 ample, the old conception of man, classic 
 as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been 
 attacked by the realist, who asserts that 
 man, as a fact of natural history, is a 
 creature with colourless hair and a freckled 
 face. Then comes the Impressionist, going 
 yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical 
 eye, which alone is certain, man is a 
 creature with purple hair and a grey face. 
 Then comes the Symbolist, and says that 
 to his soul, which alone is certain, man is 
 a creature with green hair and a blue 
 face. And all the great writers of our 
 time represent in one form or another this 
 attempt to re-establish communication with 
 the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more 
 
 roughly and fallaciously expressed, to return 
 141 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 to nature. Some think that the return to 
 nature consists in drinking no wine ; some 
 think that it consists in drinking a great 
 deal more than is good for them. Some 
 think that the return to nature is achieved 
 by beating swords into ploughshares ; some 
 think it is achieved by turning plough- 
 shares into very ineffectual British War 
 Office bayonets. It is natural, according 
 to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people 
 with gunpowder and himself with gin. It 
 is natural, according to the humanitarian 
 revolutionist, to kill other people with 
 dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. 
 It would be too obviously Philistine a 
 sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the 
 claim of either of these persons to be 
 obeying the voice of nature is interesting 
 when we consider that they require huge 
 142 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 volumes of paradoxical argument to per- 
 suade themselves or anyone else of the 
 truth of their conclusions. But the giants 
 of our time are undoubtedly alike in that 
 they approach by very different roads this 
 conception of the return to simplicity. 
 Ibsen returns to nature by the angular 
 exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal 
 tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to 
 nature by seeing how much he can accept, 
 Tolstoy by seeing how much he can reject. 
 Now, this heroic desire to return to 
 nature is, of course, in some respects, 
 rather like the heroic desire of a kitten 
 to return to its own tail. A tail is a 
 simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in 
 curve and soothing in texture ; but it is 
 certainly one of the minor but character- 
 istic qualities of a tail that it should hang 
 143 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 behind. It is impossible to deny that it 
 would in some degree lose its character 
 if attached to any other part of the ana- 
 tomy. Now, nature is like a tail in the 
 sense that it is vitally important if it is 
 to discharge its real duty that it should 
 be always behind. To imagine that we 
 can see nature, especially our own nature, 
 face to face is a folly; it is even a blas- 
 phemy. It is like the conduct of a cat 
 in some mad fairy-tale, who should set 
 out on his travels with the firm conviction 
 that he would find his tail growing like 
 a tree in the meadows at the end of the 
 world. And the actual effect of the travels 
 of the philosopher in search of nature when 
 seen from the outside looks very like the 
 gyrations of the tail-pursuing kitten, ex- 
 hibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity, 
 
 144 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 much cry and very little tail. The grandeur 
 of nature is that she is omnipotent and 
 unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most 
 when we think that she is heeding us least. 
 < Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,' 
 said the Hebrew poet. It may be said 
 with all reverence that it is behind a man's 
 back that the spirit of nature hides. 
 
 It is this consideration that lends a cer- 
 tain air of futility even to all the inspired 
 simplicities and thunderous veracities of 
 Tolstoy. We feel that a man cannot make 
 himself simple merely by warring on com- 
 plexity ; we feel, indeed, in our saner 
 moments that a man cannot make himself 
 simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity 
 may well be far more intrinsically ornate 
 than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal 
 of the pomp and sumptuousness of the 
 k 145 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 world's history was simple in the truest 
 sense. It was born of an almost babyish 
 receptiveness ; it was the work of men 
 who had eyes to wonder and men who 
 had ears to hear. 
 
 * King Solomon brought merchant men 
 Because of his desire 
 With peacocks, apes and ivory, 
 From Tarshish unto Tyre.' 
 
 But this proceeding was not a part of the 
 
 wisdom of Solomon ; it was a part of his 
 
 folly — I had almost said of his innocence. 
 
 Tolstoy, we feel, would not be content 
 
 with hurling satire and denunciation at 
 
 1 Solomon in all his glory.' With fierce 
 
 and unimpeachable logic he would go a 
 
 step further. He would spend days and 
 
 nights in the meadows stripping the shame- 
 
 146 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 less crimson coronals off the lilies of the 
 field. 
 
 The new collection of 'Tales from Tolstoy,' 
 translated and edited by Mr R. Nisbet Bain, 
 is calculated to draw particular attention 
 to this ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy's 
 work. In one sense, and that the deepest 
 sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a 
 genuine and noble appeal to simplicity. 
 The narrow notion that an artist may not 
 teach is pretty well exploded by now. But 
 the truth of the matter is, that an artist 
 teaches far more by his mere background 
 and properties, his landscape, his costume, 
 his idiom and technique — all the part of 
 his work, in short, of which he is probably 
 entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate 
 and pompous moral dicta which he fondly 
 
 imagines to be his opinions. The real 
 147 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 distinction between the ethics of high art 
 and the ethics of manufactured and didactic 
 art lies in the simple fact that the bad 
 fable has a moral, while the good fable is 
 a moral. And the real moral of Tolstoy 
 comes out constantly in these stories, the 
 great moral which lies at the heart of all 
 his work, of which he is probably uncon- 
 scious, and of which it is quite likely that 
 he would vehemently disapprove. The 
 curious cold white light of morning that 
 shines over all the tales, the folklore sim- 
 plicity with which ' a man or a woman ' 
 are spoken of without further identification, 
 the love — one might almost say the lust — 
 for the qualities of brute materials, the 
 hardness of wood, and the softness of mud, 
 the ingrained belief in a certain ancient 
 
 kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of 
 148 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 the race of man — these influences are truly- 
 moral. When we put beside them the 
 trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the 
 didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene 
 purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, 
 hacking up human life into small sins with 
 a chopper, sneering at men, women, and 
 children out of respect to humanity, com- 
 bining in one chaos of contradictions an 
 unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, 
 then, indeed, we scarcely know whither 
 Tolstoy has vanished. We know not what 
 to do with this small and noisy moralist 
 who is inhabiting one corner of a great and 
 good man. 
 
 It is difficult in every case to reconcile 
 Tolstoy the great artist with Tolstoy the 
 almost venomous reformer. It is difficult 
 
 to believe that a man who draws in such 
 149 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 noble outlines the dignity of the daily life 
 of humanity regards as evil that divine act 
 of procreation by which that dignity is 
 renewed from age to age. It is difficult to 
 believe that a man who has painted with 
 so frightful an honesty the heartrending 
 emptiness of the life of the poor can really 
 grudge them every one of their pitiful 
 pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It 
 is difficult to believe that a poet in prose 
 who has so powerfully exhibited the earth- 
 born air of man, the essential kinship of a 
 human being, with the landscape in which 
 he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as 
 that which attaches a man to his own 
 ancestors and his own land. It is difficult 
 to believe that the man who feels so poig- 
 nantly the detestable insolence of oppression 
 
 would not actually, if he had the chance, 
 150 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, 
 however, arises from the search after a false 
 simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so 
 express it, more natural than it is natural 
 to be. It would not only be more human, 
 it would be more humble of us to be con- 
 tent to be complex. The truest kinship 
 with humanity would lie in doing as 
 humanity has always done, accepting with 
 a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which 
 we are called, the star of our happiness, and 
 the fortunes of the land of our birth. 
 
 The work of Tolstoy has another and 
 more special significance. It represents the 
 re-assertion of a certain awful common-sense 
 which characterised the most extreme utter- 
 ances of Christ. It is true that we cannot 
 turn the cheek to the smiter ; it is true that 
 
 we cannot give our cloak to the robber ; 
 151 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 civilisation is too complicated, too vain- 
 glorious, too emotional. The robber would 
 brag, and we should blush ; in other words, 
 the robber and we are alike sentimentalists. 
 The command of Christ is impossible, but 
 it is not insane ; it is rather sanity preached 
 to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world 
 was suddenly stricken with a sense of 
 humour it would find itself mechanically 
 fulfilling the Sermon on the Mount. It is 
 not the plain facts of the world which stand 
 in the way of that consummation, but its 
 passions of vanity and self-advertisement 
 and morbid sensibility. It is true that we 
 cannot turn the cheek to the smiter, and 
 the sole and sufficient reason is that we 
 have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his fol- 
 lowers have shown that they have the pluck, 
 
 and even if we think they are mistaken, 
 152 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 by this sign they conquer. Their theory 
 has the strength of an utterly consistent 
 thing. It represents that doctrine of mild- 
 ness and non-resistance which is the last 
 and most audacious of all the forms of 
 resistance to every existing authority. It 
 is the great strike of the Quakers which 
 is more formidable than many sanguinary 
 revolutions. If human beings could only 
 succeed in achieving a real passive resistance 
 they would be strong with the appalling 
 strength of inanimate things, they would 
 be calm with the maddening calm of oak 
 or iron, which conquer without vengeance 
 and are conquered without humiliation. 
 The theory of Christian duty enunciated 
 by them is that we should never conquer 
 by force, but always, if we can, conquer 
 
 by persuasion. In their mythology St 
 153 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 George did not conquer the dragon : he 
 tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave 
 it a saucer of milk. According to them, 
 a course of consistent kindness to Nero 
 would have turned him into something only 
 faintly represented by Alfred the Great. 
 In fact, the policy recommended by this 
 school for dealing with the bovine stupidity 
 and bovine fury of this world is accurately 
 summed up in the celebrated verse of Mr 
 Edward Lear: 
 
 ' There was an old man who said, " How 
 Shall I flee from this terrible cow ? 
 I will sit on a stile and continue to smile, 
 Till I soften the heart of this cow." 
 
 Their confidence in human nature is 
 
 really honourable and magnificent ; it takes 
 
 the form of refusing to believe the over- 
 
 154 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 whelming majority of mankind, even when 
 they set out to explain their own motives. 
 But although most of us would in all 
 probability tend at first sight to consider 
 this new sect of Christians as little less out- 
 rageous than some brawling and absurd 
 sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall 
 into a singular error in doing so. The 
 Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come 
 to consider it, one of the most thrilling 
 and dramatic incidents in our modern 
 civilisation. It represents a tribute to the 
 Christian religion more sensational than the 
 breaking of seals or the falling of stars. 
 
 From the point of view of a rationalist, 
 the whole world is rendered almost irra- 
 tional by the single phenomenon of Christian 
 Socialism. It turns the scientific universe 
 
 topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially pos- 
 155 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 sible that the key of all social evolution 
 may be found in the dusty casket of some 
 discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to 
 consider this phenomenon as it really is. 
 
 The religion of Christ has, like many true 
 things, been disproved an extraordinary 
 number of times. It was disproved by the 
 Neo-Platonist philosophers at the very 
 moment when it was first starting forth 
 upon its startling and universal career. It 
 was disproved again by many of the sceptics 
 of the Renaissance only a few years before 
 its second and supremely striking embodi- 
 ment, the religion of Puritanism, was about 
 to triumph over many kings, and civilise 
 many continents. We all agree that these 
 schools of negation were only interludes in 
 its history; but we all believe naturally 
 and inevitably that the negation of our 
 
 15G 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 own day is really a breaking up of the 
 theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a 
 Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The 
 man of the nineteenth century, like a school- 
 boy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and 
 depression are symbols of the end of the 
 world. In our day the great irreligionists 
 who did nothing but dethrone God and 
 drive angels before them have been out- 
 stripped, distanced, and made to look 
 orthodox and humdrum. A newer race 
 of sceptics has found something infinitely 
 more exciting to do than nailing down the 
 lids upon a million coffins, and the body 
 upon a single cross. They have disputed 
 not only the elementary creeds, but the 
 elementary laws of mankind, property, 
 patriotism, civil obedience. They have 
 
 arraigned civilisation as openly as the 
 157 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 materialists have arraigned theology ; they 
 
 have damned all the philosophers even 
 
 lower than they have damned the saints. 
 
 Thousands of modern men move quietly 
 
 and conventionally among their fellows 
 
 while holding views of national limitation 
 
 or landed property that would have made 
 
 Voltaire shudder like a nun listening to 
 
 blasphemies. And the last and wildest 
 
 phase of this saturnalia of scepticism, the 
 
 school that goes furthest among thousands 
 
 who go so far, the school that denies the 
 
 moral validity of those ideals of courage or 
 
 obedience which are recognised even among 
 
 pirates, this school bases itself upon the 
 
 literal words of Christ, like Dr Watts or 
 
 Messrs Moody and Sankey. Never in the 
 
 whole history of the world was such a 
 
 tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of 
 158 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 an ancient creed. Compared with this, it 
 would be a small thing if the Red Sea 
 were cloven asunder, or the sun did stand 
 still at mid-day. We are faced with the 
 phenomenon that a set of revolutionists 
 whose contempt for all the ideals of family 
 and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' 
 kitchen, who can rid themselves of those 
 elementary instincts of the man and the 
 gentleman which cling to the very bones 
 of our civilisation, cannot rid themselves 
 of the influence of two or three remote 
 Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek. 
 The fact, when realised, has about it some- 
 thing stunning and hypnotic. The most 
 convinced rationalist is in its presence sud- 
 denly stricken with a strange and ancient 
 vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmo- 
 gonies of this age as dreams going the way 
 159 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 of a thousand forgotten heresies, and be- 
 lieves for a moment that the dark sayings 
 handed down through eighteen centuries 
 may, indeed, contain in themselves the 
 revolutions of which we have only begun 
 to dream. 
 
 This value which we have above sug- 
 gested, unquestionably belongs to the 
 Tolstoians, who may roughly be described 
 as the new Quakers. With their strange 
 optimism, and their almost appalling logical 
 courage, they offer a tribute to Christianity 
 which no orthodoxies could offer. It can- 
 not but be remarkable to watch a revolu- 
 tion in which both the rulers and the 
 rebels march under the same symbol. But 
 the actual theory of non-resistance itself, 
 with all its kindred theories, is not, I 
 
 think, characterised by that intellectual 
 
 1G0 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 obviousness and necessity which its sup- 
 porters claim for it. A pamphlet before 
 us shows us an extraordinary number of 
 statements about the New Testament, of 
 which the accuracy is by no means so 
 striking as the confidence. To begin with, 
 we must protest against a habit of quoting 
 and paraphrasing at the same time. When 
 a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let 
 him state first of all what He said, not 
 what the man thinks He would have said 
 if he had expressed Himself more clearly. 
 Here is an instance of question and answer : 
 
 Q. 'How did our Master Himself sum 
 up the law in a few words ? ' 
 
 A. 'Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even 
 
 as your Father; your Father in the spirit 
 
 world is merciful, is perfect.' 
 
 There is nothing in this, perhaps, which 
 l 161 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 Christ might not have said except the 
 abominable metaphysical modernism of 
 ' the spirit world ' ; but to say that it is 
 recorded that He did say it, is like saying 
 it is recorded that He preferred palm trees 
 to sycamores. It is a simple and unadul- 
 terated untruth. The author should know 
 that these words have meant a thousand 
 things to a thousand people, and that if 
 more ancient sects had paraphrased them 
 as cheerfully as he, he would never have 
 had the text upon which he founds his 
 theory. In a pamphlet in which plain 
 printed words cannot be left alone, it is 
 not surprising if there are mis-statements 
 upon larger matters. Here is a statement 
 clearly and philosophically laid down which 
 we can only content ourselves with flatly 
 
 denying : * The fifth rule of our Lord is 
 
 162 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 that we should take special pains to culti- 
 vate the same kind of regard for people of 
 foreign countries, and for those generally 
 who do not belong to us, or even have an 
 antipathy to us, which we already enter- 
 tain towards our own people, and those 
 who are in sympathy with us.' I should 
 very much like to know where in the whole 
 of the New Testament the author finds 
 this violent, unnatural, and immoral pro- 
 position. Christ did not have the same 
 kind of regard for one person as for another. 
 We are specifically told that there were 
 certain persons whom He specially loved. 
 It is most improbable that He thought of 
 other nations as He thought of His own. 
 The sight of His national city moved Him 
 to tears, and the highest compliment He 
 
 paid was, * Behold an Israelite indeed.' 
 
 163 
 
TOLSTOY AND THE 
 
 The author has simply confused two en- 
 tirely distinct things. Christ commanded 
 us to have love for all men, but even if 
 we had equal love for all men, to speak 
 of having the same love for all men 
 is merely bewildering nonsense. If we 
 love a man at all, the impression he pro- 
 duces on us must be vitally different 
 to the impression produced by another 
 man whom we love. To speak of having 
 the same kind of regard for both is 
 about as sensible as asking a man whether 
 he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards. 
 Christ did not love humanity ; He never 
 said He loved humanity : He loved men. 
 Neither He nor anyone else can love hu- 
 manity ; it is like loving a gigantic centi- 
 pede. And the reason that the Tolstoians 
 
 can even endure to think of an equally 
 1<34 
 
CULT OF SIMPLICITY 
 
 distributed affection is that their love of 
 humanity is a logical love, a love into 
 which they are coerced by their own 
 theories, a love which would be an insult 
 to a tom-cat. 
 
 But the greatest error of all lies in the 
 mere act of cutting up the teaching of 
 the New Testament into five rules. It 
 precisely and ingeniously misses the most 
 dominant characteristic of the teaching — 
 its absolute spontaneity. The abyss be- 
 tween Christ and all His modern inter- 
 preters is that we have no record that He 
 ever wrote a word, except with His finger 
 in the sand. The whole is the history of 
 one continuous and sublime conversation. 
 Thousands of rules have been deduced 
 from it before these Tolstoian rules were 
 
 made, and thousands will be deduced 
 165 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 afterwards. It was not for any pompous 
 proclamation, it was not for any elaborate 
 output of printed volumes ; it was for a 
 few splendid and idle words that the cross 
 was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, 
 and the sun was darkened at noonday. 
 
 166 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 Savonarola is a man whom we shall 
 probably never understand until we know 
 what horror may lie at the heart of civilisa- 
 tion. This we shall not know until we 
 are civilised. It may be hoped, in one 
 sense, that we may never understand 
 Savonarola. 
 
 The great deliverers of men have, for 
 the most part, saved them from calamities 
 which we all recognise as evil, from calami- 
 ties which are the ancient enemies of 
 humanity. The great law - givers saved 
 
 us from anarchy : the great physicians 
 167 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 saved us from pestilence : the great re- 
 formers saved us from starvation. But 
 there is a huge and bottomless evil com- 
 pared with which all these are flea-bites, 
 the most desolating curse that can fall 
 upon men or nations, and it has no name, 
 except we call it satisfaction. Savonarola 
 did not save men from anarchy, but from 
 order ; not from pestilence, but from 
 paralysis ; not from starvation, but from 
 luxury. Men like Savonarola are the wit- 
 nesses to the tremendous psychological fact 
 at the back of all our brains, but for which 
 no name has ever been found, that ease 
 is the worst enemy of happiness, and 
 civ ilisatio n potentially the end of man. 
 
 For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling 
 challenge to the luxury of his day went 
 far deeper than the mere question of 
 
 168 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 sin. The modern rationalistic admirers 
 of Savonarola, from George Eliot down- 
 wards, dwell, truly enough, upon the sound 
 ethical justification of Savonarola's anger, 
 upon the hideous and extravagant char- 
 acter of the crimes which polluted the 
 palaces of the Renaissance. But they need 
 not be so anxious to show that Savonarola 
 was no ascetic, that he merely picked out 
 the black specks of wickedness with the 
 priggish enlightenment of a member of 
 an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate 
 the civilisation of his time, and not merely 
 its sins ; and that is precisely where he 
 was infinitely more profound than a modern 
 moralist. He saw that the actual crimes 
 were not the only evils ; that stolen jewels 
 and poisoned wine and obscene pictures 
 were merely the symptoms ; that the dis- 
 
 169 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 ease was the complete dependence upon 
 jewels and wine and pictures. This is a 
 thing constantly forgotten in judging of 
 ascetics and Puritans in old times. A 
 denunciation of harmless sports did not 
 always mean an ignorant hatred of what 
 no one but a narrow moralist would call 
 harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceed- 
 ingly enlightened hatred of what no one 
 but a narrow moralist would call harmless. 
 Ascetics are sometimes more advanced than 
 the average man, as well as less. 
 
 Such, at least, was the hatred in the 
 heart of Savonarola. He was making war 
 against no trivial human sins, but against 
 godless and thankless quiescence, against 
 getting used to happiness, the mystic sin 
 by which all creation fell. He was preach- 
 ing that severity which is the sign-manual 
 170 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 of youth and hope. He was preaching 
 that alertness, that clean agility and 
 vigilance, which is as necessary to gain 
 pleasure as to gain holiness, as indis- 
 pensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic 
 has truly pointed out that Savonarola 
 could not have been fundamentally anti- 
 aesthetic, since he had such friends as 
 Michael Angelo, Botticelli, and Luca della 
 Robbia. The fact is that this purification 
 and austerity are even more necessary for 
 the appreciation of life and laughter than 
 for anything else. To let no bird fly past 
 unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones 
 and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse 
 of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure, 
 and an education in gratitude. 
 
 The civilisation which surrounded Savon- 
 arola on every side was a civilisation which 
 171 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 had already taken the wrong turn, the 
 turn that leads to endless inventions and 
 no discoveries, in which new things grow 
 old with confounding rapidity, but in which 
 no old things ever grow new. The mon- 
 strosity of the crimes of the Renaissance 
 was not a mark of imagination ; it was 
 a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss 
 of imagination. It is only when a man 
 has really ceased to see a horse as it is, 
 that he invents a centaur, only when he 
 can no longer be surprised at an ox, that 
 he worships the devil. Diablerie is the 
 stimulant of the jaded fancy ; it is the 
 dram-drinking of the artist. Savonarola 
 addressed himself to the hardest of all 
 earthly tasks, that of making men turn 
 back and wonder at the simplicities they 
 
 had learnt to ignore. It is strange that 
 
 172 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 the most unpopular of all doctrines is the 
 
 doctrine which declares the common life 
 
 divine. Democracy, of which Savonarola 
 
 was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of 
 
 gospels ; there is nothing that so terrifies 
 
 men as the decree that they are all kings. 
 
 Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical 
 
 with democracy, is the hardest of gospels ; 
 
 there is nothing that so strikes men with 
 
 fear as the saying that they are all the sons 
 
 of God. 
 
 Savonarola and his republic fell. The 
 
 drug of despotism was administered to the 
 
 people, and they forgot what they had 
 
 been. There are some at the present day 
 
 who have so strange a respect for art and 
 
 letters, and for mere men of genius, that 
 
 they conceive the reign of the Medici to 
 
 be an improvement on that of the great 
 173 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 Florentine republican. It is such men as 
 these and their civilisation that we have 
 at the present day to fear. We are sur- 
 rounded on many sides by the same 
 symptoms as those which awoke the un- 
 quenchable wrath of Savonarola — a hedon- 
 ism that is more sick of happiness than an 
 invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that 
 seeks the assistance of crime since it has 
 exhausted nature. In many modern works 
 we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly 
 Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, 
 and poetry of murder. The bankrupt and 
 depraved imagination does not see that 
 a living man is far more dramatic than a 
 dead one. Along with this, as in the 
 time of the Medici, goes the falling back 
 into the arms of despotism, the hunger 
 
 for the strong man which is unknown 
 
 174 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 among strong men. The masterful hero 
 is worshipped as he is worshipped by the 
 readers of the * Bow Bells Novelettes,' and 
 for the same reason — a profound sense of 
 personal weakness. That tendency to de- 
 volve our duties descends on us, which 
 is the soul of slavery, alike whether for 
 its menial tasks it employs serfs or em- 
 perors. Against all this the great clerical 
 republican stands in everlasting protest, 
 preferring his failure to his rival's success. 
 The issue is still between him and Lorenzo, 
 between the responsibilities of liberty and 
 the licence of slavery, between the perils of 
 truth and the security of silence, between 
 the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. 
 The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent 
 are assuredly among us, men for whom 
 
 even nations and empires only exist to 
 175 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 satisfy the moment, men to whom the 
 last hot hour of summer is better than a 
 sharp and wintry spring. They have an 
 art, a literature, a political philosophy, 
 which are all alike valued for their im- 
 mediate effect upon the taste, not for 
 what they promise of the destiny of the 
 spirit. Their statuettes and sonnets are 
 rounded and perfect, while ' Macbeth ' is 
 in comparison a fragment, and the Moses 
 of Michael Angelo a hint. Their cam- 
 paigns and battles are always called trium- 
 phant, while Csesar and Cromwell wept 
 for many humiliations. And the end of 
 it all is the hell of no resistance, the hell 
 of an unfathomable softness, until the 
 whole nature recoils into madness and the 
 chamber of civilisation is no longer merely 
 a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell. 
 
 176 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 This last and worst of human miseries 
 Savonarola saw afar off, and bent his whole 
 gigantic energies to turning the chariot into 
 another course. Few men understood his 
 object ; some called him a madman, some 
 a charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. 
 They would not even have understood if 
 he had told them, if he had said that he 
 was saving them from a calamity of con- 
 tentment which should be the end of joys 
 and sorrows alike. But there are those 
 to-day who feel the same silent danger, 
 and who bend themselves to the same 
 silent resistance. They also are supposed 
 to be contending for some trivial political 
 scruple. 
 
 Mr M' Hardy says, in defending Savon- 
 arola, that the number of fine works of 
 
 art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities 
 m 177 
 
SAVONAROLA 
 
 has been much exaggerated. I confess 
 that I hope the pile contained stacks of 
 incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice 
 made that one real moment more real. 
 Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's 
 friend Michael Angelo would have piled all 
 his own statues one on top of the other, 
 and burnt them to ashes, if only he had 
 been certain that the glow transfiguring 
 the sky was the dawn of a younger and 
 wiser world. 
 
 178 
 
THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER 
 SCOTT 
 
 Walter Scott is a writer who should 
 just now be re-emerging into his own 
 high place in letters, for unquestionably 
 the recent, though now dwindling, schools 
 of severely technical and aesthetic criticism 
 have been uufavourable to him. He was 
 a chaotic and unequal writer, and if there 
 is one thing in which artists have im- 
 proved since his time, it is in consistency 
 and equality. It would perhaps be un- 
 kind to inquire whether the level of the 
 
 modern man of letters, as compared with 
 179 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 Scott, is due to the absence of valleys or 
 the absence of mountains. But in any 
 case, we have learnt in our day to arrange 
 our literary effects carefully, and the only 
 point in which we fall short of Scott is 
 in the incidental misfortune that we have 
 nothing particular to arrange. 
 
 It is said that Scott is neglected by 
 modern readers ; if so, the matter could be 
 more appropriately described by saying that 
 modern readers are neglected by Provi- 
 dence. The ground of this neglect, in so 
 far as it exists, must be found, I suppose, 
 in the general sentiment that, like the 
 beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it 
 is surely a peculiar thing that in literature 
 alone a house should be despised because 
 it is too large, or a host impugned be- 
 cause he is too generous. If romance be 
 180 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 really a pleasure, it is difficult to under- 
 stand the modern reader's consuming desire 
 to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, 
 it is difficult to understand his desire to 
 have it at all. Mere size, it seems to me, 
 cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in 
 some disproportion. If some of Scott's 
 stories are dull and dilatory, it is not be- 
 cause they are giants but because they are 
 hunchbacks or cripples. Scott was very 
 far indeed from being a perfect writer, but 
 I do not think that it can be shown that 
 the large and elaborate plan on which his 
 stories are built was by any means an 
 imperfection. He arranged his endless 
 prefaces, and his colossal introductions just 
 as an architect plans great gates and long 
 approaches to a really large house. He 
 
 did not share the latter-day desire to get 
 181 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 quickly through a story. He enjoyed 
 narrative as a sensation ; he did not wish 
 to swallow a story like a pill that it 
 should do him good afterwards. He de- 
 sired to taste it like a glass of port, that 
 it might do him good at the time. The 
 reader sits late at his banquets. His 
 characters have that air of immortality 
 which belongs to those of Dumas and 
 Dickens. We should not be surprised to 
 meet them in any number of sequels. 
 Scott, in his heart of hearts, probably would 
 have liked to write an endless story without 
 either beginning or close. 
 
 Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, 
 mysterious man. He will never be under- 
 stood until Romance is understood, and 
 that will be only when Time, Man, and 
 
 Eternity are understood. To say that Scott 
 182 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 had more than any other man that ever 
 lived a sense of the romantic seems, in 
 these days, a slight and superficial tribute. 
 The whole modern theory arises from one 
 fundamental mistake — the idea that ro- 
 mance is in some way a plaything with 
 life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing 
 upon the outside. No genuine criticism 
 of romance will ever arise until we have 
 grasped the fact that romance lies not 
 upon the outside of life but absolutely in 
 the centre of it. The centre of every 
 man's existence is a dream. Death, dis- 
 ease, insanity, are merely material acci- 
 dents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. 
 That these brutal forces always besiege and 
 often capture the citadel does not prove 
 that they are the citadel. The boast of 
 the realist (applying what the reviewers 
 183 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 call his scalpel) is that he cuts into the 
 heart of life ; but he makes a very shallow 
 incision if he only reaches as deep as 
 habits and calamities and sins. Deeper 
 than all these lies a man's vision of him- 
 self, as swaggering and sentimental as a 
 penny novelette. The literature of can- 
 dour unearths innumerable weaknesses and 
 elements of lawlessness which is called 
 romance. It perceives superficial habits 
 like murder and dipsomania, but it does 
 not perceive the deepest of sins — the sin 
 of vanity — vanity which is the mother of 
 all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin 
 that is not shared with any boon com- 
 panion, or whispered to any priest. 
 
 In estimating, therefore, the ground of 
 Scott's pre-eminence in romance we must 
 absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that 
 
 184 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 romance or adventure are merely material- 
 istic things involved in the tangle of a 
 plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords. 
 We must remember that it is, like tragedy 
 or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for 
 some dark and elemental reason which we 
 can never understand, this state of the 
 soul is evoked in us by the sight of cer- 
 tain places or the contemplation of certain 
 human crises, by a stream rushing under 
 a heavy and covered wooden bridge, or 
 by a man plunging a knife or sword 
 into tough timber. In the selection of 
 these situations which catch the spirit of 
 romance as in a net, Scott has never been 
 equalled or even approached. His finest 
 scenes effect us like fragments of a hilari- 
 ous dream. They have the same quality 
 
 which is often possessed by those nocturnal 
 185 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 comedies — that of seeming more human 
 than our waking life — even while they are 
 less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his 
 daughter and the old beggar crouching in 
 a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the 
 tide closes around them, are actually in the 
 coldest and bitterest of practical situations. 
 Yet the whole incident has a quality that 
 can only be called boyish. It is warmed 
 with all the colours of an incredible sun- 
 set. Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, 
 and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie, 
 draws no sword, leaps from no window, 
 affects none of the dazzling external acts 
 upon which contemporary romance depends, 
 yet that plain and humorous dialogue is 
 full of the essential philosophy of romance 
 which is an almost equal betting upon man 
 
 and destiny. Perhaps the most profoundly 
 186 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 thrilling of all Scott's situations is that in 
 which the family of Colonel Mannering are 
 waiting for the carriage which may or may 
 not arrive by night to bring an unknown 
 man into a princely possession. Yet almost 
 the whole of that thrilling scene consists 
 of a ridiculous conversation about food, and 
 flirtation between a frivolous old lawyer and 
 a fashionable girl. We can say nothing 
 about what makes these scenes, except that 
 the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that 
 here the wind blows strong. 
 
 It is in this quality of what may be 
 called spiritual adventurousness that Scott 
 stands at so different an elevation to the 
 whole of the contemporary crop of roman- 
 cers who have followed the leadership of 
 Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great 
 and inspiriting revival of romance in our 
 187 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 time, but it is partly frustrated in almost 
 every ease by this rooted conception that 
 romance consists in the vast multiplication 
 of incidents and the violent acceleration 
 of narrative. The heroes of Mr Stanley 
 Weyman scarcely ever have their swords 
 out of their hands ; the deeper presence of 
 romance is far better felt when the sword 
 is at the hip ready for innumerable adven- 
 tures too terrible to be pictured. The 
 Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time 
 to eat his supper except in the act of 
 leaping from a window or whilst his other 
 hand is employed in lunging with a rapier. 
 In Scott's heroes, on the other hand, there 
 is no characteristic so typical or so worthy 
 of honour as their disposition to linger 
 over their meals. The conviviality of the 
 
 Clerk of Copmanhurst or of Mr Pleydell, 
 
 188 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 and the thoroughly solid things they are 
 described as eating, is one of the most 
 perfect of Scott's poetic touches. In short, 
 Mr Stanley Weyman is filled with the con- 
 viction that the sole essence of romance 
 is to move with insatiable rapidity from 
 incident to incident. In the truer romance 
 of Scott there is more of the sentiment 
 of ' Oh ! still delay, thou art so fair ' ; 
 more of a certain patriarchal enjoyment 
 of things as they are — of the sword by 
 the side and the wine-cup in the hand. 
 Romance, indeed, does not consist by any 
 means so much in experiencing adventures 
 as in being ready for them. How little the 
 actual boy cares for incidents in compari- 
 son to tools and weapons may be tested 
 by the fact that the most popular story 
 
 of adventure is concerned with a man who 
 189 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 lived for years on a desert island with two 
 guns and a sword, which he never had to 
 use on an enemy. 
 
 Closely connected with this is one of the 
 charges most commonly brought against 
 Scott, particularly in his own day — the 
 charge of a fanciful and monotonous in- 
 sistence upon the details of armour and 
 costume. The critic in the * Edinburgh Re- 
 view ' said indignantly that he could toler- 
 ate a somewhat detailed description of the 
 apparel of Marmion, but when it came to 
 an equally detailed account of the apparel 
 of his pages and yeomen the mind could 
 bear it no longer. The only thing to be 
 said about that critic is that he had never 
 been a little boy. He foolishly imagined 
 that Scott valued the plume and dagger of 
 
 Marmion for Marmion's sake. Not being 
 190 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 himself romantic, he could not understand 
 that Scott valued the plume because it was 
 a plume, and the dagger because it was a 
 dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons 
 with a manual materialistic love, as one 
 loves the softness of fur or the coolness 
 of marble. One of the profound philo- 
 sophical truths which are almost confined 
 to infants is this love of things, not for 
 their use or origin, but for their own 
 inherent characteristics, the child's love of 
 the toughness of wood, the wetness of 
 water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. 
 So it was with Scott, who had so much 
 of the child in him. Human beings were 
 perhaps the principal characters in his 
 stories, but they were certainly not the 
 only characters. A battle-axe was a per- 
 son of importance, a castle had a character 
 191 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 and ways of its own. A church bell had 
 
 a word to say in the matter. Like a true 
 
 child, he almost ignored the distinction 
 
 between the animate and inanimate. A 
 
 two-handed sword might be carried only 
 
 by a menial in a procession, but it was 
 
 something important and immeasurably 
 
 fascinating — it was a two-handed sword. 
 
 There is one quality which is supreme 
 
 and continuous in Scott which is little 
 
 appreciated at present. One of the values 
 
 we have really lost in recent fiction is the 
 
 value of eloquence. The modern literary 
 
 artist is compounded of almost every man 
 
 except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and 
 
 Scott are certainly alike in this, that they 
 
 could both, if literature had failed, have 
 
 earned a living as professional demagogues. 
 
 The feudal heroes in the ' Waverley Novels ' 
 192 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 retort upon each other with a passionate 
 dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, 
 which can hardly be paralleled in political 
 eloquence except in * Julius Caesar.' With 
 a certain fiery impartiality which stirs the 
 blood, Scott distributes his noble orations 
 equally among saints and villains. He may 
 deny a villain every virtue or triumph, but 
 he cannot endure to deny him a telling 
 word ; he will ruin a man, but he will 
 not silence him. In truth, one of Scott's 
 most splendid traits is his difficulty, or 
 rather incapacity, for despising any of his 
 characters. He did not scorn the most 
 revolting miscreant as the realist of to-day 
 commonly scorns his own hero. Though 
 his soul may be in rags, every man of 
 Scott can speak like a king. 
 
 This quality, as I have said, is sadly to 
 N 193 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 seek in the fiction of the passing hour. 
 The realist would, of course, repudiate the 
 bare idea of putting a bold and brilliant 
 tongue in every man's head, but even where 
 the moment of the story naturally demands 
 eloquence the eloquence seems frozen in 
 the tap. Take any contemporary work of 
 fiction and turn to the scene where the 
 young Socialist denounces the millionaire, 
 and then compare the stilted sociological 
 lecture given by that self-sacrificing bore 
 with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's 
 declaration of himself, or Athelstane's de- 
 fiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of 
 human passion upon which high words and 
 great phrases are the resplendent foam is 
 just now at a low ebb. We have even 
 gone the length of congratulating ourselves 
 
 because we can see the mud and the 
 194 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 monsters at the bottom. In politics there 
 is not a single man whose position is due 
 to eloquence in the first degree ; its place 
 is taken by repartees and rejoinders purely 
 intellectual, like those of an omnibus con- 
 ductor. In discussing questions like the 
 farm-burning in South Africa no critic of 
 the war uses his material as Burke or Grat- 
 tan (perhaps exaggeratively) would have 
 used it — the speaker is content with facts 
 and expositions of facts. In another age 
 he might have risen and hurled that great 
 song in prose, perfect as prose and yet 
 rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilees 
 hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of 
 Britain : ' Ride your ways, Laird of Ellan- 
 gowan ; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram 
 — this day have ye quenched seven smok- 
 ing hearths. See if the fire in your ain 
 195 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 parlour burns the blyther for that. Ye 
 have riven the thack of seven cottar houses. 
 Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster 
 for that. Ye may stable your stirks in 
 the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the 
 hare does not couch on the hearthstane 
 of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey 
 Bertram.' 
 
 The reason is, of course, that these men 
 are afraid of bombast and Scott was not. 
 A man will not reach eloquence if he is 
 afraid of bombast, just as a man will not 
 jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. 
 As the object of all eloquence is to find 
 the least common denominator of men's 
 souls, to fall just within the natural com- 
 prehension, it cannot obviously have any 
 chance with a literary ambition which aims 
 
 at falling just outside it. It is quite right 
 19G 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 to invent subtle analyses and detached 
 criticisms, but it is unreasonable to expect 
 them to be punctuated with roars of popu- 
 lar applause. It is possible to conceive of 
 a mob shouting any central and simple 
 sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible 
 to think of a mob shouting a distinction 
 in terms. In the matter of eloquence, the 
 whole question is one of the immediate 
 effect of greatness, such as is produced 
 even by fine bombast. It is absurd to 
 call it merely superficial ; here there is no 
 question of superficiality ; we might as well 
 call a stone that strikes us between the 
 eyes merely superficial. The very word 
 'superficial' is founded on a fundamental 
 mistake about life, the idea that second 
 thoughts are best. The superficial impres- 
 sion of the world is by far the deepest. 
 197 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 What we really feel, naturally and casually, 
 about the look of skies and trees and the 
 face of friends, that and that alone will 
 almost certainly remain our vital philosophy 
 to our dying day. 
 
 Scott's bombast, therefore, will always 
 be stirring to anyone who approaches it, 
 as he should approach all literature, as a 
 little child. We could easily excuse the 
 contemporary critic for not admiring melo- 
 dramas and adventure stories, and Punch 
 and Judy, if he would admit that it was 
 a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibili- 
 ties. Beyond all question, it marks a lack 
 of literary instinct to be unable to simplify 
 one's mind at the first signal of the ad- 
 vance of romance. 'You do me wrong,' 
 said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. 
 1 Many a law, many a commandment have I 
 198 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 broken, but my word, never.' 'Die,' cries 
 Balfour of Burley to the villain in ' Old 
 Mortality.' 'Die, hoping nothing, believ- 
 ing nothing ' 'And fearing nothing,' 
 
 replies the other. This is the old and 
 honourable fine art of bragging, as it was 
 practised by the great worthies of antiquity. 
 The man who cannot appreciate it goes 
 along with the man who cannot appreciate 
 beef or claret or a game with children or 
 a brass band. They are afraid of mak- 
 ing fools of themselves, and are unaware 
 that that transformation has already been 
 triumphantly effected. 
 
 Scott is separated, then, from much of the 
 later conception of fiction by this quality 
 of eloquence. The whole of the best and 
 finest work of the modern novelist (such 
 
 as the work of Mr Henry James) is prim- 
 199 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 arily concerned with that delicate and fas- 
 cinating speech which burrows deeper and 
 deeper like a mole ; but we have wholly for- 
 gotten that speech which mounts higher and 
 higher like a wave and falls in a crashing 
 peroration. Perhaps the most thoroughly 
 brilliant and typical man of this decade is 
 Mr Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play 
 of ' Candida ' it is clearly a part of the 
 character of the Socialist clergyman that 
 he should be eloquent, but he is not elo- 
 quent, because the whole ' G. B. S.' con- 
 dition of mind renders impossible that poetic 
 simplicity which eloquence requires. Scott 
 takes his heroes and villains seriously, which 
 is, after all, the way that heroes and villains 
 take themselves — especially villains, It is 
 the custom to call these old romantic poses 
 
 artificial ; but the word artificial is the last 
 200 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 and silliest evasion of criticism. There was 
 never anything in the world that was really 
 artificial. It had some motive or ideal be- 
 hind it, and generally a much better one 
 than we think. 
 
 Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is 
 not very necessary to speak, for faults are 
 generally and easily pointed out, while there 
 is yet no adequate valuation of the varieties 
 and contrasts of virtue. We have com- 
 piled a complete botanical classification of 
 the weeds in the poetical garden, but the 
 flowers still flourish neglected and name- 
 less. It is true, for example, that Scott 
 had an incomparably stiff and pedantic way 
 of dealing with his heroines : he made a 
 lively girl of eighteen refuse an offer in 
 the language of Dr Johnson. To him, as 
 
 to most men of his time, woman was not 
 201 
 
THE POSITION OF 
 
 an individual, but an institution — a toast 
 
 that was drunk some time after that of 
 
 Church and King. But it is far better to 
 
 consider the difference rather as a special 
 
 merit, in that he stood for all those clean 
 
 and bracing shocks of incident which are 
 
 untouched by passion or weakness, for a 
 
 certain breezy bachelorhood, which is almost 
 
 essential to the literature of adventure. 
 
 With all his faults, and all his triumphs, 
 
 he stands for the great mass of natural 
 
 manliness which must be absorbed into art 
 
 unless art is to be a mere luxury and 
 
 freak. An appreciation of Scott might be 
 
 made almost a test of decadence. If ever 
 
 we lose touch with this one most reckless 
 
 and defective writer, it will be a proof to 
 
 us that we have erected round ourselves a 
 
 false cosmos, a world of lying and horrible 
 
 202 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 perfection, leaving outside of it Walter 
 Scott and that strange old world which is 
 as confused and as indefensible and as in- 
 spiring and as healthy as he. 
 
 203 
 
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