Every one grumbles at his lot and at his profession; but what is man that he should ask for more? These buffeting winds, these long hours of deep breathing, these habits of quick decision and sharp movement whet your appetite; you relish your solid plain food, whilst your accustomed drink smooths over the petty worries of the day, and liberates your private musings; and what a companionable thing your pipe is! The women—dear, dogmatic, fussy angels—are not here; that is a relief; and yet you are counting the weeks before you can return to them at home. And all those tender episodes of a more fugitive sort, how merrily you think them over now! more merrily perhaps than you enacted them, since you need not call to mind the little shabby accompaniments and false notes that may have marred them in reality. Your remoter future, too, is smiling enough for an honest man who believes in God and is not a snob in the things of the spirit. You see in your mind's eye a cottage on some sunny hillside over-looking the sea; near it, from a signal-post that is a ship's mast, the flags are flapping in the breeze; your children are playing on the beach—except the eldest, perhaps, already a sailor. There is a blessed simplicity about the sea, with its vast inhumanity islanding and freeing the humanity of man.
The secret of English mastery is self-mastery. The Englishman establishes a sort of satisfaction and equilibrium in his inner man, and from that citadel of rightness he easily measures the value of everything that comes within his moral horizon. In what may lie beyond he takes but a feeble interest. Enterprising enough when in a roving mood, and fond of collecting outlandish objects and ideas, he seldom allows his wanderings and discoveries to unhinge his home loyalties or ruffle his self-possession; and he remains, after all his adventures, intellectually as indolent and secure as in the beginning. As to speculative truth, he instinctively halts short of it, as it looms in the distance and threatens to cast a contemptuous and chilling shadow across his life. He would be very severe to any who dreaded cold water and wouldn't learn to swim; yet in the moral world he is himself subject to illusions of timidity. He does not believe, there, in the overwhelming rewards of courage. His chosen life is indeed beautiful—as the shy boy's might be—ill its finitude; all the more beautiful and worth preserving because, like his country, it is an island in the sea. His domestic thermometer and barometer have sufficed to guide him to the right hygiene.
Hygiene does not require telescopes nor microscopes. It is not concerned, like medicine or psychology, with the profound hidden workings of our bodies or minds, complexities hardly less foreign to our discoursing selves than are the mysteries of the great outer world. Hygiene regards only the right regimen of man in his obvious environment, judged by his conscious well-being. If it goes afield at all, it does so in the interests of privacy. All it asks of life is that it should be comely, spontaneous, and unimpeded: all it asks of the earth is that it should be fit for sport and for habitation. Men, to be of the right hygienic sort, must love the earth, and must know how to range in it. This the Englishman knows; and just as, in spite of his insularity, he loves this whole terraqueous globe simply and genuinely, so the earth, turned into mud by the vain stampings of so many garrulous and sickly nations, would doubtless say: Let the Englishman inhabit me, and I shall be green again.
In matters of hygiene the Englishman's maxims are definite and his practice refined. He has discovered what he calls good form, and is obstinately conservative about it, not from inertia, but in the interests of pure vitality. Experience has taught him the uses to which vitality can be put, so as to preserve and refresh it. He knows the right degree of exertion normally required to do things well—to walk or to talk, for instance; he does not saunter nor scramble, he does not gesticulate nor scream. In consequence, perhaps, on extraordinary occasions he fails at first to exert himself enough; and his eloquence is not torrential nor inspired, even at those rare moments when it ought to be so. But when nothing presses, he shows abundant energy, without flurry or excess. In manners and morals, too, he has found the right mean between anarchy and servitude, and the wholesome measure of comfort. What those who dislike him call his hypocrisy is but timeliness in his instincts, and a certain modesty on their part in not intruding upon one another. Your prayers are not necessarily insincere because you pray only in church; you are not concealing a passion if for a time you forget it and slough it off. These alternations are phases of the inner man, not masks put on in turn by some insidious and calculating knave. All the Englishman's attitudes and habits—his out-of-door life, his clubs, his conventicles, his business—when they are spontaneous and truly British, are for the sake of his inner man in its privacy. Other people, unless the game calls for them, are in the way, and uninteresting. His spirit is like Wordsworth's skylark, true to the kindred points of heaven and home; and perhaps these points seem to him kindred only because they are both functions of himself. Home is the centre of his physical and moral comfort, his headquarters in the war of life, where lie his spiritual stores. Heaven is a realm of friendly inspiring breezes and setting suns, enveloping his rambles and his perplexities. The world to him is a theatre for the soliloquy of action. There is a comfortable luxuriousness in all his attitudes. He thinks the prize of life worth winning, but not worth snatching. If you snatch it, as Germans, Jews, and Americans seem inclined to do, you abdicate the sovereignty of your inner man, you miss delight, dignity, and peace; and in that case the prize of life has escaped you.
As the Englishman disdains to peer and is slow to speculate, so he resents any meddling or intrusion into his own preserves. How sedulously he plants out his garden, however tiny, from his neighbours and from the public road! If his windows look unmistakably on the street, at least he fills his window-boxes with the semblance of a hedge or a garden, and scarcely allows the dubious light to filter through his blinds and lace curtains; and the space between them, in the most dingy tenement, is blocked by an artificial plant. He is quite willing not to be able to look out, if only he can prevent other people from looking in. If they did, what would they see? Nothing shocking, surely; his attitude by his fireside is perfectly seemly. He is not throwing anything at the family; very likely they are not at home. Nor has he introduced any low-class person by the tradesman's entrance, in whose company he might blush to be spied. He is not in deshabille; if he has changed any part of his street clothes it has not been from any inclination to be slovenly in private, but on the contrary to vindicate his self-respect and domestic decorum. He does not dress to be seen of men, but of God. His elegance is an expression of comfort, and his comfort a consciousness of elegance. The eyes of men disquiet him, eminently presentable though he be, and he thinks it rude of them to stare, even in simple admiration. It takes tact and patience in strangers—perhaps at first an ostentatious indifference—to reassure him and persuade him that he would be safe in liking them. His frigid exterior is often a cuticle to protect his natural tenderness, which he forces himself not to express, lest it should seem misplaced or clumsy. There is a masculine sort of tenderness which is not fondness, but craving and premonition of things untried; and the young Englishman is full of it. His heart is quiet and full; he has not pumped it dry, like ill-bred children, in tantrums and effusive fancies. On the other hand, passions are atrophied if their expression is long suppressed, and we soon have nothing to say if we never say anything. As he grows old the Englishman may come to suspect, not without reason, that he might not reward too close a perusal. His social bristles will then protect his intellectual weakness, and he will puff himself out to disguise his vacuity.
It is intelligible that a man of deep but inarticulate character should feel more at ease in the fields and woods, at sea or in remote enterprises, than in the press of men. In the world he is obliged to maintain stiffly principles which he would prefer should be taken for granted. Therefore when he sits in silence behind his window curtains, with his newspaper, his wife, or his dog, his monumental passivity is not a real indolence. He is busily reinforcing his character, ruffled by the day's contact with hostile or indifferent things, and he is gathering new strength for the fray. After the concessions imposed upon him by necessity or courtesy, he is recovering his natural tone. To-morrow he will issue forth fresh and confident, and exactly the same as he was yesterday. His character is like his climate, gentle and passing readily from dull to glorious, and back again; variable on the surface, yet perpetually self-restored and invincibly the same.
Every one can see why the Lion should be a symbol for the British nation. This noble animal loves dignified repose. He haunts by preference solitary glades and pastoral landscapes. His movements are slow, he yawns a good deal; he has small squinting eyes high up in his head, a long displeased nose, and a prodigious maw. He apparently has some difficulty in making things out at a distance, as if he had forgotten his spectacles (for he is getting to be an elderly lion now), but he snaps at the flies when they bother him too much. On the whole, he is a tame lion; he has a cage called the Constitution, and a whole parliament of keepers with high wages and a cockney accent; and he submits to all the rules they make for him, growling only when he is short of raw beef. The younger members of the nobility and gentry may ride on his back, and he obligingly lets his tail hang out of the bars, so that the little Americans and the little Irishmen and the little Bolshevists, when they come to jeer at him, may twist it. Yet when the old fellow goes for a walk, how all the domestic and foreign poultry scamper! They know he can spring; his strength when aroused proves altogether surprising and unaccountable, he never seems to mind a blow, and his courage is terrible. The cattle, seeing there is no safety in flight, herd together when he appears on the horizon, and try to look unconscious; the hyenas go to snarl at a distance; the eagles and the serpents aver afterwards that they were asleep. Even the insects that buzz about his ears, and the very vermin in his skin, know him for the king of beasts.
But why should the other supporter of the British arms be the Unicorn? What are the mystic implications of having a single horn? This can hardly be the monster spoken of in Scripture, into the reason for whose existence, whether he be the rhinoceros of natural history or a slip of an inspired pen, it would be blasphemy to inquire. This Unicorn is a creature of mediaeval fancy, a horse rampant argent, only with something queer about his head, as if a croquet-stake had been driven into it, or he wore a very high and attenuated fool's cap. It would be far-fetched to see in this ornament any allusion to deceived husbands, as if in England the alleged injury never seemed worth two horns, or divorce and damages soon removed one of them. More plausible is the view that, as the Lion obviously expresses the British character, so the Unicorn somewhat more subtly expresses the British intellect. Whereas most truths have two faces, and at least half of any solid fact escapes any single view of it, the English mind is monocular; the odd and the singular have a special charm for it. This love of the particular and the original leads the Englishman far afield in the search for it; he collects curios, and taking all the nation together, there is perhaps nothing that some Englishman has not seen, thought, or known; but who sees things as a whole, or anything in its right place? He inevitably rides some hobby. He travels through the wide world with one eye shut, hops all over it on one leg, and plays all his scales with one finger. There is fervour, there is accuracy, there is kindness in his gaze, but there is no comprehension. He will defend the silliest opinion with a mint of learning, and espouse the worst of causes on the highest principles. It is notorious elsewhere that the world is round, that nature has bulk, and three if not four dimensions; it is a truism that things cannot be seen as a whole except in imagination. But imagination, if he has it, the Englishman is too scrupulous to trust; he observes the shapes and the colours of things intently, and behold, they are quite flat, and he challenges you to show why, when every visible part of everything is flat, anything should be supposed to be round. He is a keen reformer, and certainly the world would be much simpler, right opinion would be much lighter and wrong opinion much wronger, if things had no third and no fourth dimension.
Ah, why did those early phrenologists, true and typical Englishmen as they were, denounce the innocent midwife who by a little timely pressure on the infant skull compressed, as they said, "the oval of genius into the flatness of boobyism." Let us not be cowed by a malicious epithet. What some people choose to call boobyism and flatness may be the simplest, the most British, the most scientific philosophy. Your true booby may be only he who, having perforce but a flat view of a flat world, prates of genius and rotundity. Blessed are they whose eye is single. Only when very drunk do we acknowledge our double optics; when sober we endeavour to correct and ignore this visual duplicity and to see as respectably as if we had only one eye. The Unicorn might well say the same thing of two-horned beasts. Such double and crooked weapons are wasteful and absurd. You can use only one horn effectively even if you have two, but in a sidelong and cross-eyed fashion; else your prey simply nestles between, where eye cannot see it nor horn probe it. A single straight horn, on the contrary, is like a lancet; it pierces to the heart of the enemy by a sure frontal attack: nothing like it for pricking a bubble, or pointing to a fact and scathingly asking the Government if they are aware of it. In music likewise every pure melody passes from single note to note, as do the sweet songs of nature. Away with your demoniac orchestras, and your mad pianist, tossing his mane, and banging with his ten fingers and his two feet at once I As to walking on two feet, that also is mere wobbling and, as Schopenhauer observed, a fall perpetually arrested. It is an unstable compromise between going on all fours, if you want to be safe, and standing on one leg, like the exquisite flamingo, if you aspire to be graceful and spiritually sensitive. There is really no biped in nature except ridiculous man, as if the prancing Unicorn had succeeded in always being rampant; your feathered creatures are bipeds only on occasion and in their off moments; essentially they are winged beings, and their legs serve only to prop them when at rest, like the foot-piece of a motor-cycle which you let down when it stops.
The Lion is an actual beast, the Unicorn a chimera; and is not England in fact always buoyed up on one side by some chimera, as on the other by a sense for fact? Illusions are mighty, and must be reckoned with in this world; but it is not necessary to share them or even to understand them from within, because being illusions they do not prophesy the probable consequences of their existence; they are irrelevant in aspect to what they involve in effect. The dove of peace brings new wars, the religion of love instigates crusades and lights faggots, metaphysical idealism in practice is the worship of Mammon, government by the people establishes the boss, free trade creates monopolies, fondness smothers its pet, assurance precipitates disaster, fury ends in smoke and in shaking hands. The shaggy Lion is dimly aware of all this; he is ponderous and taciturn by an instinctive philosophy. Why should he be troubled about the dreams of the Unicorn, more than about those of the nightingale or the spider? He can roughly discount these creatures' habits, in so far as they touch him at all, without deciphering their fantastic minds. That makes the strength of England in the world, the leonine fortitude that helps her, through a thousand stupidities and blunders, always to pull through. But England is also, more than any other country, the land of poetry and of the inner man. Her sunlight and mists, her fields, cliffs, and moors are full of aerial enchantment; it is a land of tenderness and dreams. The whole nation hugs its hallowed shams; there is a real happiness, a sense of safety, in agreeing not to acknowledge the obvious; there is a universal conspiracy of respect for the non-existent. English religion, English philosophy, English law, English domesticity could not get on without this "tendency to feign." And see how admissible, how almost natural this chimera is. A milk-white pony, elegantly Arabian, with a mane like sea-foam, and a tail like a little silvery comet, sensitive nostrils, eyes alight with recognition, a steed such as Phoebus might well water at those springs that lie in the chalices of flowers, a symbol at once of impetuosity and obedience, a heraldic image for the daintiness of Ariel and the purity of Galahad. If somehow we suspect that the poetical creature is light-witted, the stem Lion opposite finds him nevertheless a sprightly and tender companion, as King Lear did his exquisite Fool. Such a Pegasus cannot be a normal horse; he was hatched in a cloud, and at his birth some inexorable ironic deity drove a croquet-stake into his pate, and set an attenuated crown, very like a fool's cap, between his startled ears.
Dons are picturesque figures. Their fussy ways and their oddities, personal and intellectual, are as becoming to them as black feathers to the blackbird. Their minds are all gaunt pinnacles, closed gates, and little hidden gardens. A mediaeval tradition survives in their notion of learning and in their manner of life; they are monks flown from the dovecot, scholastics carrying their punctilious habits into the family circle. In the grander ones there may be some assimilation to a prelate, a country gentleman, or a party leader; but the rank and file are modest, industrious pedagogues, sticklers for routine, with a squinting knowledge of old books and of young men. Their politics are narrow and their religion dubious. There was always something slippery in the orthodoxy of scholastics, even in the Middle Ages; they are so eager to define, to correct, and to trace back everything, that they tend to cut the cloth on their own bias, and to make some crotchet of theirs the fulcrum of the universe. The thoughts of these men are like the Sibylline leaves, profound but lost. I should not call them pedants, because what they pursue and insist on in little things is the shadow of something great; trifles, as Michael Angelo said, make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. Yet dry learning and much chewing of the cud take the place amongst them of the two ways men have of really understanding the world—science, which explores it, and sound wit, which estimates humanly the value of science and of everything else.
The function of dons is to expound a few classic documents, and to hand down as large and as pleasant a store as possible of academic habits, maxims, and anecdotes. They peruse with distrust the new books published on the subject of their teaching; they refer to them sometimes sarcastically, but their teaching remains the same. Their conversation with outsiders is painfully amiable for a while; lassitude soon puts the damper on it, unless they can lapse into the academic question of the day, or take up the circle of their good old stories. Their originality runs to interpreting some old text afresh, wearing some odd garment, or frequenting in the holidays some unfrequented spot. When they are bachelors, as properly they should be, their pupils are their chief link with the world of affection, with mischievous and merry things; and in exchange for this whiff of life, which they receive with each yearly invasion of flowering youth, like the fresh scent of hay every summer from the meadows, they furnish those empty minds with some humorous memories, and some shreds of knowledge. It does not matter very much whether what a don says is right or wrong, provided it is quotable; nobody considers his opinions for the matter they convey; the point is that by hearing them the pupils and the public may discover what opinions, and on what subjects, it is possible for mortals to devise. Their maxims are like those of the early Greek philosophers, a proper introduction to the good society of the intellectual world. So are the general systems to which the dons may be addicted, probably some revision of Christian theology, of Platonic mysticism, or of German philosophy. Such foreign doctrines do very well for the dons of successive epochs, native British philosophy not being fitted to edify the minds of the young: those vaster constructions appeal more to the imagination, and their very artificiality and ticklish architecture, like that of a house of cards, are part of their function, calling for paradoxical faith and—what youth loves quite as much—for captious and sophistical argument. They lie in the fourth dimension of human belief, amongst the epicycles which ingenious error describes about the unknown orbit of truth; for the truth is not itself luminous, as wit is; the truth travels silently in the night and requires to be caught by the searchlight of wit to become visible. Meantime the mind plays innocently with its own phosphorescence, which is what we call culture and what dons are created to keep alive. Wit the dons often have, of an oblique kind, in the midst of their much-indulged prejudices and foibles; and what with glints of wit and scraps of learning, the soul is not sent away empty from their door: better fed and healthier, indeed, for these rich crumbs from the banquet of antiquity, when thought was fresh, than if it had been reared on a stuffy diet of useful knowledge, or on some single dogmatic system, to which life-slavery is attached. Poor, brusque, comic, venerable dons! You watched over us tenderly once, whilst you blew your long noses at us and scolded; then we thought only of the roses in your garden, of your succulent dinners, or perhaps of your daughters; but now we understand that you had hearts yourselves, that you were song-birds grown old in your cages, having preferred fidelity to adventure. We catch again the sweet inflection of your cracked notes, and we bless you. You have washed your hands among the innocent; you have loved the beauty of the Lord's house.
British satirists are very scornful of snobbery; they seem oppressed by the thought that wealth, rank, and finery are hideously inane and that they are hideously powerful. Are these moralists really overcome by a sense of the vanity of human wishes? It would hardly seem so; for they often breathe a sentimental adoration for romantic love or philanthropy or adventure or mystic piety or good cheer or ruthless will—all of them passions as little likely as any snobbish impulse to arise without some illusion or to end without some disappointment. Why this exclusive hostility to the vanities dear to the snob? Have birth, money, and fashion no value whatever? Do they not dazzle the innocent and unsophisticated with a distant image of happiness? Are they not actually, when enjoyed, very comforting and delightful things in their way? What else than this sensitiveness to better social example—which we may call snobbery if we please—lends English life in particular its most characteristic excellences—order without constraint, leisure without apathy, seclusion without solitude, good manners without punctilio, emulation without intrigue, splendour without hollowness? Why such bitterness about the harmless absurdities that may fringe this national discipline? Are these moralists in fact only envious and sulky? Is it sour grapes? It would sometimes seem as if, in England, the less representative a man was the more eagerly he took to literature, and thought that by hating his fellow-men and despising their prevalent feelings he rendered himself eminently fit to be their guide and redeemer.
In fact, there is a philosophical principle implied in snobbery, a principle which is certainly false if made absolute, but which fairly expresses the moral relations of things in a certain perspective. If we all really stood on different steps in a single ladder of progress, then to admire and imitate those above us and to identify ourselves with them by hook or by crook would be simply to accelerate our natural development, to expand into our higher self, and to avoid fatal abysses to the right and to the left of the path marked out for us by our innate vocation. Life would then be like the simple game which children call Follow the Leader; and this scrupulous discipleship would be perfect freedom, since the soul of our leader and our own soul that chooses him would be the same. This principle is precisely that of the transcendental philosophy where it maintains that there is but one spirit in all men, and one logical moral evolution for the world. In fact, it is the Germans rather than the English that are solemn, convinced, and universal snobs. If they do not seem so much snobs in particular, it is because they are snobsüberhaupt. It is not only from the nobility that grateful dews descend on their sensitive hearts, as upon open flowers; they yearn also after the professors and the artists, and assiduously dress their domestic mind, so far as the cloth will go, in the latest intellectual fashion. Their respect for what holds the official stage, and holds it for the moment, is beautiful in its completeness. They can change their front without changing their formation. And the occasional pricks and heartburnings of snobbery are entirely drowned, in their case, in its voluminous vicarious joys.
On the whole, however, snobbish sentiment and transcendental philosophy do not express the facts of nature. Men and nations do not really march in single file, as if they were being shepherded into some Noah's Ark. They have perhaps a common root and similar beginnings, but they branch out at every step into forms of life between which there is no further interchange of sap, and no common destiny. Their several fruits become incommensurable in beauty and in value, like the poetry of different languages, and more disparate the more each is perfected after its kind. The whale is not a first sketch for the butterfly, nor its culmination; the mind of an ox is not a fuller expression of that of a rabbit. The poet does not evolve into the general, norvice versa; nor does a man, in growing further, become a woman, superior as she may be in her own way. That is why snobbery is really a vice: it tempts us to neglect and despise our proper virtues in aping those of other people. If an angel appeared to me displaying his iridescent wings and treble voice and heart fluttering with eternal love, I should say, "Certainly, I congratulate you, but I do not wish to resemble you." Snobbery haunts those who are not reconciled with themselves; evolution is the hope of the immature. You cannot be everything. Why not be what you are?
This contentment with oneself, in its rational mixture of pride with humility, and its infinite indifference to possibilities which to us are impossible, is well understood in the great East—which is a moral as well as a geographical climate. There every one feels that circumstances have not made and cannot unmake the soul. Variations of fortune do not move a man from his inborn centre of gravity. Whatever happens and whatever people say he puts up with as he would with bad weather. He lets them thunder and rage, and continues to sit on his heels in his corner, in the shade or in the sun according to the season, munching his crust of bread, meditating on heaven and earth, and publishing on occasion to the passers-by, or to the wilderness, the revelations he receives from the spirit; and if these are particularly vivid, he will not hesitate to cry, "So saith the Lord," with an equal dignity or assurance whether he be sage, king, or beggar. Such firmness and independence of character are admirable, so long as the expression of them remains merely poetical or moral. It is enough if confessions are sincere, and aspirations true to the heart that utters them. In the heights and the depths we are all solitary, and we are deceived if we think otherwise, even when people say they agree with us, or form a sect under our name. As our radical bodily functions are incorrigibly selfish and persistent, so our ultimate ideals, if they are sincere, must for ever deviate from those of others and find their zenith in a different star. The moral world is round like the heavens, and the directions which life can take are infinitely divergent and unreturning.
But in the world of circumstances, in matters of politics and business, information, and thrift, civilized men move together: their interests, if not identical, are parallel, and their very conflicts and rivalries arise out of this contact and relevance in their aims. Eminence in this worldly sphere is unmistakable. One fortune in money can be measured against another and may be increased to equal it; and in government, fashion, and notoriety some people are unmistakably at the top of the tree, and doubtless deserve to be there, having found the right method of climbing. It is only natural that those who wish to climb too should study and imitate them. Awe and respect for such persons is an honest expression of social idealism: it is an admiration mixed with curiosity and with the desire for propinquity, because their achievements are in our own line of business and a prospective partnership is not out of the question. Their life is the ideal of ours. Yet all such conventional values and instrumentalities, in which we are perhaps absorbed, in the end say nothing to the heart. If by chance, in the shifts of this world, we pop up near the people whom we distantly admired, and reach the crest of the wave in their company, we discover how great an illusion it was that it would be good or possible for us to resemble them; conventional friends, we have no instincts, joys, or memories in common. It is, perhaps, from quite another age or race, from an utterly different setting of worldly tasks and ambitions, that some hint of true friendship and understanding reaches us in our hermitage; and even this hint is probably a hollow reverberation of our own soliloquy. In this slippery competitive earth snobbery is not unreasonable; but in heaven and hell there are no snobs. There every despised demon hugs his favourite vice for ever, and even the smallest of the stars shines with a singular glory.
To call an attitude snobbish, when the great and good recommend it as the only right attitude, would be to condemn it without trial; yet I do not know how else to name the sentiment that happiness of one sort is better than happiness of another sort, and that perfection in one animal is more admirable than perfection in another. I wish there was a word for this arrangement of excellences in higher and lower classes which did not imply approval or disapproval of such an arrangement. But language is terribly moralistic, and I do not blame the logicians for wishing to invent another which shall convey nothing to the mind with which it has any previous acquaintance. The Psyche, who is the mother of language as well as of intellect, feels things to be good or evil before she notices what other qualities they may have: and she never gets much beyond the first dichotomy of her feminine logic: wretch and darling, nasty and nice. This is perhaps the true reason why Plato, who in some respects had a feminine mind and whose metaphysics follows the lines of language, tells us in one place that the good is the highest of the Ideas, and the source of both essence and existence. Good and bad are certainly the first qualities fixed by words: so that to call a man a snob, for instance, is a very vague description but a very clear insult. Suppose we found on examination that the person in question had a retiring and discriminating disposition, that he shunned the unwashed, that he resembled persons of distinction, and recognized the superiority of those who were really his superiors; we should conclude without hesitation that he was no snob at all, but a respectable, right-minded person. If he had been really a snob, he would have looked up stupidly to what has no true sublimity, like birth without money, would have imitated what was not becoming to his station, and would have shunned company, such as our own, which though perhaps not the most fashionable is undoubtedly the best. As I can see no scientific difference between this snob and that no-snob, I am constrained in my own thoughts to class them together; but in order to remind myself that the same principle may be approved in one case and condemned in the other, I call snobbery, when people approve of it, the higher snobbery.
An interesting advocate of the higher snobbery is Nietzsche. Although his admiring eye is fixed on the superman, who is to supersede our common or garden humanity, the unique excellence of that future being does not seem to lie merely in that he is future, or is destined to be dominant in his day: after all, everything was once future, everything was once the coming thing, and destined to prevail in its day. It is only human to admire and copy the fashion of to-day, whether in clothes, or politics, or literature, or speculation; but I have not yet heard of any snob so far ahead of his times as to love the fashions of doomsday. The worship of evolution, which counts for so much with many higher snobs, does not seem essential in Nietzsche. The superman no doubt is coming, but he is not coming to stay, since the world repeats its evolution in perpetual cycles; and whilst he will give its highest expression to the love of power, it does not appear that he will care very much about controlling external things, or will be able to control them. His superiority is to be intrinsic, and chiefly composed of freedom. It was freedom, I think, that Nietzsche sighed for in his heart, whilst in his cavalierly speculations he talked of power. At least, unless by power he meant power to be oneself, the notion that all nature was animated by the lust of power would lose its plausibility; the ambition which we may poetically attribute to all animals is rather to appropriate such things as serve their use, perfection, or fancy, and to leave all else alone. There are indications that the superman was to be a mystic and a wanderer, like a god visiting the earth, and that what spell he exercised was to flow from him almost unawares, whilst he mused about himself and about higher things. So little was his power to involve subjection to what he worked upon (which is the counterpart of all material power) that he was to disregard the interests of others in a Spartan mood; he was to ride ruthlessly through this nether world, half a poet, half a scourge, with his breast uncovered to every treacherous shaft, and his head high in the air.
Now I will not say whether such a romantic and Byronic life is worth living in itself; there may be creatures whose only happiness is to be like that, although I suspect that Byron and Nietzsche, Lohengrin and Zarathustra, had not mastered the art of Socrates, and did not know what they wanted. In any case, such a Dionysiac career would be good only as the humblest human existence may be so; its excellence would lie in its harmony with the nature of him who follows it, not in its bombast, inflation, or superhumanity. Nietzsche was far from ungenerous or unsympathetic towards the people. He wished them (somewhat contemptuously) to be happy, whilst he and his superman remained poetically wretched; he even said sometimes that in their own sphere they might be perfect, and added—with that sincerity which, in him, redeems so many follies—that nothing could be better than such perfection. But if this admission is to be taken seriously, the superman would be no better than the good slave. The whole principle of the higher snobbery would be abandoned, and Nietzsche in the end would only lead us back to Epictetus.
No, the higher snob will reply, the perfect superman may be no better than the perfect slave, but he ishigher. What does this word mean? For the zealous evolutionist it seems to mean later, more complicated, requiring a longer incubation and a more special environment. Therefore what is higher is more expensive, and has a more precarious existence than what is lower; so the lady is higher than the woman, fine art is higher than useful art, and the height of the fashion in fine art is the highest point in it. The higher is the more inclusive, requiring everything else to produce it, and itself producing nothing, or something higher still. Of course the higher is not merely the better; because the standard of excellence itself changes as we proceed, and according to the standard of the lower morality the higher state which abolishes it will be worse. An orchid may not be more beautiful than a lily, but it is higher; philosophy may not be truer than science, nor true at all, but it is higher, because so much more comprehensive; faith may not be more trustworthy than reason, but it is higher; insatiable will may not be more beneficent than contentment in oneself and respect for others, but it is higher; war is higher, though more painful, than peace; perpetual motion is not more reasonable than movement towards an end, and stilts are not more convenient than shoes, but they are higher. In everything the higher, when not the better, means what folly or vanity cannot bear to abandon. Higher is a word by which we defend the indefensible; it is a declaration of impenitence on the part of unreason, a cry to create prejudice in favour of all that tyrannizes over mankind. It is the watchword of the higher snob. The first to use it was Satan, when he declared that he was not satisfied to be anything but the highest; whereas the highest thinks it no derogation to take the form of the lowest since the lowest, too, has its proper perfection, and there is nothingbetterthan that.
England has been rich in poets, in novelists, in inventors, in philosophers making new beginnings, in intrepid travellers, in learned men whose researches are a hobby and almost a secret. The land was once rich in saints, and is still rich in enthusiasts. But the official leaders of the English people, the kings, prelates, professors, and politicians, have usually been secondary men; and even they have been far more distinguished in their private capacity than in their official action and mind. English genius is anti-professional; its affinities are with amateurs, and there is something of the amateur in the best English artists, actors, and generals. Delicacy of conscience, mental haze, care not to outrun the impulse of the soul, hold the Englishman back midway in his achievements; there is in him a vague respect for the unknown, a tacit diffidence in his own powers, which dissuade him from venturing on the greatest things or from carrying them out in a comprehensive manner. The truth is the British do not wish to be well led. They are all individualistic and aristocratic at heart, and want no leaders in ultimate things; the inner man must be his own guide. If they had to live under the shadow of a splendid monarch, or a masterful statesman, or an authoritative religion, or a deified state they would not feel free. They wish to peck at their institutions, and tolerate only such institutions as they can peck at. A certain ineptitude thus comes to be amongst them an aptitude for office: it keeps the official from acquiring too great an ascendancy. There is a sort of ostracism by anticipation, to prevent men who are too good from coming forward and upsetting the balance of British liberties; very like the vacuum which is created in America around distinction, and which keeps the national character there so true to type, so much on one lively level. But in England distinction exists, because it escapes into privacy. It is reserved for his Grace in his library and her Ladyship at her tea-table; it fills the nursery with lisping sweetness and intrepid singleness of will; it dwells with the poets in their solitary rambles and midnight questionings; it bends with the scholar over immortal texts; it is shut off from the profane by the high barriers of school and college and hunting-field, by the sanctity and silence of dubs, by the unspoken secrets of church and home.
The greatest distinction of English people, however, is one which, whilst quite personal and private in its scope, is widely diffused and strikingly characteristic of the better part of the nation; I mean, distinction in the way of living. The Englishman does in a distinguished way the simple things that other men might slur over as unimportant or essentially gross or irremediable; he is distinguished—he is disciplined, skilful, and calm—in eating, in sport, in public gatherings, in hardship, in danger, in extremities. It is in physical and rudimentary behaviour that the Englishman is an artist; he is the ideal sailor, the ideal explorer, the ideal comrade in a tight place; he knows how to be clean without fussiness, well-dressed without show, and pleasure-loving without loudness. This is why, although he is the most disliked of men the world over (except where people need some one they can trust) he is also the most imitated. What ferocious Anglophobe, whether a white man or a black man, is not immensely flattered if you pretend to have mistaken him for an Englishman? After all, this imitation of the physical distinction of Englishmen is not absurd; here is something thatcanbe imitated: it is really the easiest way of doing easy things, which only bad education and bad habits have made difficult for most people. There is nothing impossible in adopting afternoon tea, football, and boy scouts; what is impossible, and if possible very foolish, is to adopt English religion, philosophy, or political institutions. But why should any one wish to adopt them? They have their merits, of course, and their propriety at home; but they are blind compromises, and it is not in their principles that the English are distinguished, but only in their practice. Their accents are more choice than their words, and their words more choice than their ideas. This, which might sound like a gibe, is to my mind a ground for great hope and for some envy. Refinement, like charity, should begin at home. First the body ought to be made fit and decent, then speech and manners, and habits justly combining personal initiative with the power of co-operating with others; and then, as this healthy life extends, the world will begin to open out to the mind in the right perspectives: not at first, perhaps never, in its total truth and its real proportions, but with an ever-enlarging appreciation of what, for us, it can contain. The mind of the Englishman, starting in this proud and—humble and profound way from the inner man, pierces very often, in single directions, to the limit of human faculty; and it seems to me to add to his humanity, without injury to his speculation, that he instinctively withdraws again into himself, as he might return home to marry and settle after tempting fortune at the antipodes. His curious knowledge and his personal opinions then become, as it were, mementos of his distant adventures; but his sterling worth lies in himself. He is at his best when free impulse or familiar habit takes an unquestioned lead, and when the mind, not being expected to intervene, beats in easy unison with the scene and the occasion, like a rider at home in the saddle and one with his galloping horse. Then grace returns to him, so angular often in his forced acts and his express tenets; the smile comes unaffectedly, and the blithe quick words flow as they should; arm is linked spontaneously in arm, laughter points the bull's-eye of truth, the whole world and its mysteries, not being pressed, become amiable, and the soul shines happy, and beautiful, and absolute mistress in her comely house. Nothing in him then is gross; all is harmonized, all is touched with natural life. His simplicity becomes wholeness, and he no longer seems dull in any direction, but in all things sound, sensitive, tender, watchful, and brave.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots. Friendship sometimes rests on sharing early memories, as do brothers and schoolfellows, who often, but for that now affectionate familiarity with the same old days, would dislike and irritate one another extremely. Sometimes it hangs on passing pleasures and amusements, or on special pursuits; sometimes on mere convenience and comparative lack of friction in living together. One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human. But there are youthful friendships of quite another quality, which I seem to have discovered flourishing more often and more frankly in England than in other countries; brief echoes, as it were, of that love of comrades so much celebrated in antiquity. I do not refer to the "friendship of virtue" mentioned by Aristotle, which means, I suppose, community in allegiance or in ideals. It may come to that in the end, considered externally; but community in allegiance or in ideals, if genuine, expresses a common disposition, and its roots are deeper and more physical than itself. The friendship I have in mind is a sense of this initial harmony between two natures, a union of one whole man with another whole man, a sympathy between the centres of their being, radiating from those centres on occasion in unanimous thoughts, but not essentially needing to radiate. Trust here is inwardly grounded; likes and dislikes run together without harness, like the steeds of Aurora; you may take agreement for granted without words; affection is generously independent of all tests or external bonds; it can even bear not to be mutual, not to be recognized; and in any case it shrinks from the blatancy of open vows. In such friendships there is a touch of passion and of shyness; an understanding which does not need to become explicit or complete. There is wine in the cup; it is not to be spilled nor gulped down unrelished, but to be sipped slowly, soberly, in the long summer evening, with the window open to the college garden, and the mind full of all that is sweetest to the mind.
Now there is a mystery here—though it need be no mystery—which some people find strange and distressing and would like to hush up. This profound physical sympathy may sometimes, for a moment, spread to the senses; that is one of its possible radiations, though fugitive; and there is a fashionable psychology at hand to explain all friendship, for that reason, as an aberration of sex. Of course it is such in some people, and in many people it may seem to be such at rare moments; but it would be a plain abuse of language to call a mother's love for her children sexual, even when they are boys, although certainly she could not have that love, nor those children, if she had no sex. Perhaps if we had no sex we should be incapable of tenderness of any sort; but this fact does not make all forms of affection similar in quality nor in tendency. The love of friends is not, like the love of woman, a lyrical prologue to nest—building. Engaging, no doubt, the same radical instincts, in a different environment and at another phase of their development, it turns them, whilst still plastic, in other directions. Human nature is still plastic, especially in the region of emotion, as is proved by the ever-changing forms of religion and art; and it is not a question of right and wrong, nor even, except in extreme cases, of health and disease, but only a question of alternative development, whether the human capacity to love is absorbed in the family cycle, or extends to individual friendships, or to communion with nature or with God. The love of friends in youth, in the cases where it is love rather than friendship, has a mystical tendency. In character, though seldom in intensity, it resembles the dart which, in an ecstatic vision, pierced the heart of Saint Theresa, bursting the normal integument by which the blood is kept coursing through generation after generation, in the closed channel of human existence and human slavery. Love then escapes from that round; it is, in one sense, wasted and sterilized; but in being diverted from its earthly labours it suffuses the whole universe with light; it casts its glowing colours on the sunset, upon the altar, upon the past, upon the truth. The anguished futility of love corrects its own selfishness, its own illusion; gradually the whole world becomes beautiful in its inhuman immensity; our very defeats are transfigured, and we see that it was good for us to have gone up into that mountain.
That such mystic emotions, whether in religion or in friendship, are erotic was well known before the day's of Freud. They have always expressed themselves in erotic language. And why should they not be erotic? Sexual passion is itself an incident in the life of the Psyche, a transitive phase in the great cycle by which life on earth is kept going. It grows insensibly out of bodily self-love, childish play, and love of sensation; it merges in the end, after its midsummer night's dream, into parental and kingly purposes. How casual, how comic, the purely erotic impulse is, and how lightly nature plays with it, may be seen in the passion of jealousy. Jealousy is inseparable from sexual love, and yet jealousy is not itself erotic either in quality or in effect, since it poisons pleasure, turns sympathy into suspicion, love into hate, all in the interests of proprietorship. Why should we be jealous, if we were simply merry? Nature weaves with a wide loom, and crosses the threads; and erotic passion may be as easily provoked peripherally by deeper impulses as be itself the root of other propensities. Lovers sometimes pretend at first to be only friends, and friends have sometimes fancied, at first blush, that they were lovers; it is as easy for one habit or sentiment as for the other to prove the radical one, and to prevail in the end. As for Englishmen, the last thing they would do would be to disguise some base prompting in high-flown language; they would call a spade a spade, if there were occasion. They are shy of words, as of all manifestations; and this very shyness, if it proves that there is at bottom a vital instinct concerned, also proves that it is not intrinsically more erotic than social, nor more social than intellectual. It is each of these things potentially, for such faculties are not divided in nature as they are in language; it may turn into any one of them if accident leads it that way; but it reverts from every casual expression to its central seat, which is the felt harmony of life with life, and of life with nature, with everything that in the pulses of this world beats our own measure, and swells the music of our thoughts.
If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages of Dickens. Who could not be happy in his world? Yet there is nothing essential to it which the most destructive revolution would be able to destroy. People would still be as different, as absurd, and as charming as are his characters; the springs of kindness and folly in their lives would not be dried up. Indeed, there is much in Dickens which communism, if it came, would only emphasize and render universal. Those schools, those poorhouses, those prisons, with those surviving shreds of family life in them, show us what in the coming age (with some sanitary improvements) would be the nursery and home of everybody. Everybody would be a waif, like Oliver Twist, like Smike, like Pip, and like David Copperfield; and amongst the agents and underlings of social government, to whom all these waifs would be entrusted, there would surely be a goodly sprinkling of Pecksniffs, Squeers's, and Fangs; whilst the Fagins would be everywhere commissioners of the people. Nor would there fail to be, in high places and in low, the occasional sparkle of some Pickwick or Cheeryble Brothers or Sam Weller or Mark Tapley; and the voluble Flora Finchings would be everywhere in evidence, and the strong-minded Betsey Trotwoods in office. There would also be, among the inefficient, many a Dora and Agnes and Little Emily—with her charm but without her tragedy, since this is one of the things which the promised social reform would happily render impossible; I mean, by removing all the disgrace of it. The only element in the world of Dickens which would become obsolete would be the setting, the atmosphere of material instrumentalities and arrangements, as travelling by coach is obsolete; but travelling by rail, by motor, or by airship will emotionally be much the same thing. It is worth noting how such instrumentalities, which absorb modern life, are admired and enjoyed by Dickens, as they were by Homer. The poets ought not to be afraid of them; they exercise the mind congenially, and can be played with joyfully. Consider the black ships and the chariots of Homer, the coaches and river-boats of Dickens, and the aeroplanes of to-day; to what would an unspoiled young mind turn with more interest? Dickens tells us little of English sports, but he shares the sporting nature of the Englishman, to whom the whole material world is a playing—field, the scene giving ample scope to his love of action, legality, and pleasant achievement. His art is to sport according to the rules of the game, and to do things for the sake of doing them, rather than for any ulterior motive.
It is remarkable, in spite of his ardent simplicity and openness of heart, how insensible Dickens was to the greater themes of the human imagination—religion, science, politics, art. He was a waif himself, and utterly disinherited. For example, the terrible heritage of contentious religions which fills the world seems not to exist for him. In this matter he was like a sensitive child, with a most religious disposition, but no religious ideas. Perhaps, properly speaking, he had noideason any subject; what he had was a vast sympathetic participation in the daily life of mankind; and what he saw of ancient institutions made him hate them, as needless sources of oppression, misery, selfishness, and rancour. His one political passion was philanthropy, genuine but felt only on its negative, reforming side; of positive utopias or enthusiasms we hear nothing. The political background of Christendom is only, so to speak, an old faded back-drop for his stage; a castle, a frigate, a gallows, and a large female angel with white wings standing above an orphan by an open grave—a decoration which has to serve for all the melodramas in his theatre, intellectually so provincial and poor. Common life as it is lived was varied and lovable enough for Dickens, if only the pests and cruelties could be removed from it. Suffering wounded him, but not vulgarity; whatever pleased his senses and whatever shocked them filled his mind alike with romantic wonder, with the endless delight of observation. Vulgarity—and what can we relish, if we recoil at vulgarity?—was innocent and amusing; in fact, for the humorist, it was the spice of life. There was more piety in being human than in being pious. In reviving Christmas, Dickens transformed it from the celebration of a metaphysical mystery into a feast of overflowing simple kindness and good cheer; the church bells were still there—in the orchestra; and the angels of Bethlehem were still there—painted on the back-curtain. Churches, in his novels, are vague, desolate places where one has ghastly experiences, and where only the pew-opener is human; and such religious and political conflicts as he depicts inBarnaby Rudgeand inA Tale of Two Citiesare street brawls and prison scenes and conspiracies in taverns, without any indication of the contrasts in mind or interests between the opposed parties. Nor had Dickens any lively sense for fine art, classical tradition, science, or even the manners and feelings of the upper classes in his own time and country: in his novels we may almost say there is no army, no navy, no church, no sport, no distant travel, no daring adventure, no feeling for the watery wastes and the motley nations of the planet, and—luckily, with his notion of them—no lords and ladies. Even love of the traditional sort is hardly in Dickens's sphere—I mean the soldierly passion in which a rather rakish gallantry was sobered by devotion, and loyalty rested on pride. In Dickens love is sentimental or benevolent or merry or sneaking or canine; in his last book he was going to describe a love that was passionate and criminal; but love for him was never chivalrous, never poetical. What he paints most tragically is a quasi-paternal devotion in the old to the young, the love of Mr. Peggotty for Little Emily, or of Solomon Gills for Walter Gay, A series of shabby little adventures, such as might absorb the interest of an average youth, were romantic enough for Dickens.
I say he was disinherited, but he inherited the most terrible negations. Religion lay on him like the weight of the atmosphere, sixteen pounds to the square inch, yet never noticed nor mentioned. He lived and wrote in the shadow of the most awful prohibitions. Hearts petrified by legality and falsified by worldliness offered, indeed, a good subject for a novelist, and Dickens availed himself of it to the extent of always contrasting natural goodness and happiness with whatever is morose; but his morose people were wicked, not virtuous in their own way; so that the protest of his temperament against his environment never took a radical form nor went back to first principles. He needed to feel, in his writing, that he was carrying the sympathies of every man with him. In him conscience was single, and he could not conceive how it could ever be divided in other men. He denounced scandals without exposing shams, and conformed willingly and scrupulously to the proprieties. Lady Dedlock's secret, for instance, he treats as if it were the sin of Adam, remote, mysterious, inexpiable. Mrs. Dombey is not allowed to deceive her husband except by pretending to deceive him. The seduction of Little Emily is left out altogether, with the whole character of Steerforth, the development of which would have been so important in the moral experience of David Copperfield himself. But it is not public prejudice alone that plays the censor over Dickens's art; his own kindness and even weakness of heart act sometimes as marplots. The character of Miss Mowcher, for example, so brilliantly introduced, was evidently intended to be shady, and to play a very important part in the story; but its original in real life, which was recognized, had to be conciliated, and the sequel was omitted and patched up with an apology—itself admirable—for the poor dwarf. Such a sacrifice does honour to Dickens's heart; but artists should meditate on their works in time, and it is easy to remove any too great likeness in a portrait by a few touches making it more consistent than real people are apt to be; and in this case, if the little creature had been really guilty, how much more subtle and tragic her apology for herself might have been, like that of the bastard Edmund inKing Lear! So, too, inDombey and Son, Dickens could not bear to let Walter Gay turn out badly, as he had been meant to do, and to break his uncle's heart as well as the heroine's; he was accordingly transformed into a stage hero miraculously saved from shipwreck, and Florence was not allowed to reward the admirable Toots, as she should have done, with her trembling hand. But Dickens was no free artist; he had more genius than taste, a warm fancy not aided by a thorough understanding of complex characters. He worked under pressure, for money and applause, and often had to cheapen in execution what his inspiration had so vividly conceived.
What, then, is there left, if Dickens has all these limitations? In our romantic disgust we might be tempted to say, Nothing. But in fact almost everything is left, almost everything that counts in the daily life of mankind, or that by its presence or absence can determine whether life shall be worth living or not; because a simple good life is worth-living, and an elaborate bad life is not. There remains in the first place eating and drinking; relished not bestially, but humanly, jovially, as the sane and exhilarating basis for everything else. This is a sound English beginning; but the immediate sequel, as the England of that day presented it to Dickens, is no less delightful. There is the ruddy glow of the hearth; the sparkle of glasses and brasses and well-scrubbed pewter; the savoury fumes of the hot punch, after the tingle of the wintry air; the coaching-scenes, the motley figures and absurd incidents of travel; the changing sights and joys of the road. And then, to balance this, the traffic of ports and cities, the hubbub of crowded streets, the luxury of shop-windows and of palaces not to be entered; the procession of the passers-by, shabby or ludicrously genteel; the dingy look and musty smell of their lodgings; the labyrinth of back-alleys, courts, and mews, with their crying children, and scolding old women, and listless, half-drunken loiterers. These sights, like fables, have a sort of moral in them to which Dickens was very sensitive; the important airs of nobodies on great occasions, the sadness and preoccupation of the great as they hasten by in their mourning or on their pressing affairs; the sadly comic characters of the tavern; the diligence of shopkeepers, like squirrels turning in their cages; the children peeping out everywhere like grass in an untrodden street; the charm of humble things, the nobleness of humble people, the horror of crime, the ghastliness of vice, the deft hand and shining face of virtue passing through the midst of it all; and finally a fresh wind of indifference and change blowing across our troubles and clearing the most lurid sky.
I do not know whether it was Christian charity or naturalistic insight, or a mixture of both (for they are closely akin) that attracted Dickens particularly to the deformed, the half-witted, the abandoned, or those impeded or misunderstood by virtue of some singular inner consecration. The visible moral of these things, when brutal prejudice does not blind us to it, comes very near to true philosophy; one turn of the screw, one flash of reflection, and we have understood nature and human morality and the relation between them.
In his love of roads and wayfarers, of river-ports and wharves and the idle or sinister figures that lounge about them, Dickens was like Walt Whitman; and I think a second Dickens may any day appear in America, when it is possible in that land of hurry to reach the same degree of saturation, the same unquestioning pleasure in the familiar facts. The spirit of Dickens would be better able to do justice to America than was that of Walt Whitman; because America, although it may seem nothing but a noisy nebula to the impressionist, is not a nebula but a concourse of very distinct individual bodies, natural and social, each with its definite interests and story. Walt Whitman had a sort of transcendental philosophy which swallowed the universe whole, supposing there was a universal spirit in things identical with the absolute spirit that observed them; but Dickens was innocent of any such clap-trap, and remained a true spirit in his own person. Kindly and clear-sighted, but self-identical and unequivocally human, he glided through the slums like one of his own little heroes, uncontaminated by their squalor and confusion, courageous and firm in his clear allegiances amid the flux of things, a pale angel at the Carnival, his heart aflame, his voice always flute-like in its tenderness and warning. This is the true relation of spirit to existence, not the other which confuses them; for this earth (I cannot speak for the universe at large) has no spirit of its own, but brings forth spirits only at certain points, in the hearts and brains of frail living creatures, who like insects flit through it, buzzing and gathering what sweets they can; and it is the spaces they traverse in this career, charged with their own moral burden, that they can report on or describe, not things rolling on to infinity in their vain tides. To be hypnotized by that flood would be a heathen idolatry. Accordingly Walt Whitman, in his comprehensive democratic vistas, could never see the trees for the wood, and remained incapable, for all his diffuse love of the human herd, of ever painting a character or telling a story; the very things in which Dickens was a master. It is this life of the individual, as it may be lived in a given nation, that determines the whole value of that nation to the poet, to the moralist, and to the judicious historian. But for the excellence of the typical single life, no nation deserves to be remembered more than the sands of the sea; and America will not be a success, if every American is a failure.
Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the shabby little adventures of the actors in their private capacity replace for him the mock tragedies which they enact before a dreaming public. Mediocrity of circumstances and mediocrity of soul for ever return to the centre of his stage; a more wretched or a grander existence is sometimes broached, but the pendulum soon swings back, and we return, with the relief with which we put on our slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden mediocrity—to mutton and beer, and to love and babies in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid. Dickens is the poet of those acres of yellow brick streets which the traveller sees from the railway viaducts as he approaches London; they need a poet, and they deserve one, since a complete human life may very well be lived there. Their little excitements and sorrows, their hopes and humours are like those of the Wooden Midshipman inDombey and Son; but the sea is not far off, and the sky—Dickens never forgets it—is above all those brief troubles. He had a sentiment in the presence of this vast flatness of human fates, in spite of their individual pungency, which I think might well be the dominant sentiment of mankind in the future; a sense of happy freedom in littleness, an open-eyed reverence and religion without words. This universal human anonymity is like a sea, an infinitive democratic desert, chock-full and yet the very image of emptiness, with nothing in it for the mind, except, as the Moslems say, the presence of Allah. Awe is the counterpart of humility—and this is perhaps religion enough. The atom in the universal vortex ought to be humble; he ought to see that, materially, he doesn't much matter, and that morally his loves are merely his own, without authority over the universe. He can admit without obloquy that he is what he is; and he can rejoice in his own being, and in that of all other things in so far as he can share it sympathetically. The apportionment of existence and of fortune is in Other Hands; his own portion is contentment, vision, love, and laughter.
Having humility, that most liberating of sentiments, having a true vision of human existence and joy in that vision, Dickens had in a superlative degree the gift of humour, of mimicry, of unrestrained farce. He was the perfect comedian. When people say Dickens exaggerates, it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably have onlynotionsof what things and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value. Their minds run on in the region of discourse, where there are masks only and no faces, ideas and no facts; they have little sense for those living grimaces that play from moment to moment upon the countenance of the world. The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it nevertheless intends all the time to be something different and highly dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world, a world of masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humour is the perception of this illusion, the fact allowed to pierce here and there through the convention, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity. Pure comedy is more radical, cruder, in a certain sense less human; because comedy throws the convention over altogether, revels for a moment in the fact, and brutally says to the notions of mankind, as if it slapped them in the face, There, take that! That's what you really are I At this the polite world pretends to laugh, not tolerantly as it does at humour, but a little angrily. It does not like to see itself by chance in the glass, without having had time to compose its features for demure self-contemplation. "What a bad mirror," it exclaims; "it must be concave or convex; for surely I never looked like that. Mere caricature, farce, and horse play. Dickens exaggerates;Inever was so sentimental as that;Inever saw anything so dreadful;Idon't believe there were ever any people like Quilp, or Squeers, or Serjeant Buzfuz." But the polite world is lying; therearesuch people; we are such people ourselves in our true moments, in our veritable impulses; but we are careful to stifle and to hide those moments from ourselves and from the world; to purse and pucker ourselves into the mask of our conventional personality; and so simpering, we profess that it is very coarse and inartistic of Dickens to undo our life's work for us in an instant, and remind us of what we are. And as to other people, though we may allow that considered superficially they are often absurd, we do not wish to dwell on their eccentricities, nor to mimic them. On the contrary, it is good manners to look away quickly, to suppress a smile, and to say to ourselves that the ludicrous figure in the street is not at all comic, but a dull ordinary Christian, and that it is foolish to give any importance to the fact that its hat has blown off, that it has slipped on an orange-peel and unintentionally sat on the pavement, that it has a pimple on its nose, that its one tooth projects over its lower lip, that it is angry with things in general, and that it is looking everywhere for the penny which it holds tightly in its hand. That may fairly represent the moral condition of most of us at most times; but we do not want to think of it; we do not want to see; we gloss the fact over; we console ourselves before we are grieved, and reassert our composure before we have laughed. We are afraid, ashamed, anxious to be spared. What displeases us in Dickens is that he does not spare us; he mimics things to the full; he dilates and exhausts and repeats; he wallows. He is too intent on the passing experience to look over his shoulder, and consider whether we have not already understood, and had enough. He is not thinking of us; he is obeying the impulse of the passion, the person, or the story he is enacting. This faculty, which renders him a consummate comedian, is just what alienated from him a later generation in which people of taste were aesthetes and virtuous people were higher snobs; they wanted a mincing art, and he gave them copious improvization, they wanted analysis and development, and he gave them absolute comedy. I must confess, though the fault is mine and not his, that sometimes his absoluteness is too much for me. When I come to the death of Little Nell, or to What the Waves were always Saying, or even to the incorrigible perversities of the pretty Dora, I skip. I can't take my liquor neat in such draughts, and my inner man says to Dickens, Please don't. But then I am a coward in so many ways! There are so many things in this world that I skip, as I skip the undiluted Dickens! When I reach Dover on a rough day, I wait there until the Channel is smoother; am I not travelling for pleasure? But my prudence does not blind me to the admirable virtue of the sailors that cross in all weathers, nor even to the automatic determination of the sea-sick ladies, who might so easily have followed my example, if they were not the slaves of their railway tickets and of their labelled luggage. They are loyal to their tour, and I to my philosophy. Yet as wrapped in my great-coat and sure of a good dinner, I pace the windy pier and soliloquize, I feel the superiority of the bluff tar, glad of breeze, stretching a firm arm to the unsteady passenger, and watching with a masterful thrill of emotion the home cliffs receding and the foreign coasts ahead. It is only courage (which Dickens had without knowing it) and universal kindness (which he knew he had) that are requisite to nerve us for a true vision of this world. And as some of us are cowards about crossing the Channel, and others about "crossing the bar," so almost everybody is a coward about his own humanity. We do not consent to be absurd, though absurd we are. We have no fundamental humility. We do not wish the moments of our lives to be caught by a quick eye in their grotesque initiative, and to be pilloried in this way before our own eyes. For that reason we don't like Dickens, and don't like comedy, and don't like the truth. Dickens could don the comic mask with innocent courage; he could wear it with a grace, ease, and irresistible vivacity seldom given to men. We must go back for anything like it to the very greatest comic poets, to Shakespeare or to Aristophanes. Who else, for instance, could have penned this:
"It was all Mrs. Bumble. Shewoulddo it," urged Mr. Bumble; first looking found to ascertain that his partner had left the room."That is no excuse," replied Air. Brownlow. "You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.""If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass, a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience."Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words, Mr. Bumble fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his hands in his pockets, followed his helpmate downstairs.
"It was all Mrs. Bumble. Shewoulddo it," urged Mr. Bumble; first looking found to ascertain that his partner had left the room.
"That is no excuse," replied Air. Brownlow. "You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction."
"If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass, a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience."
Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words, Mr. Bumble fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his hands in his pockets, followed his helpmate downstairs.
This is high comedy; the irresistible, absurd, intense dream of the old fool, personifying the law in order to convince and to punish it. I can understand that this sort of thing should not be common in English literature, nor much relished; because pure comedy is scornful, merciless, devastating, holding no door open to anything beyond. Cultivated English feeling winces at this brutality, although the common people love it in clowns and in puppet shows; and I think they are right. Dickens, who surely was tender enough, had so irresistible a comic genius that it carried him beyond the gentle humour which most Englishmen possess to the absolute grotesque reality. Squeers, for instance, when he sips the wretched dilution which he has prepared for his starved and shivering little pupils, smacks his lips and cries: "Here's richness!" It is savage comedy; humour would come in if we understood (what Dickens does not tell us) that the little creatures were duly impressed and thought the thin liquid truly delicious. I suspect that English sensibility prefers the humour and wit of Hamlet to the pure comedy of Falstaff; and that even in Aristophanes it seeks consolation in the lyrical poetry for the flaying of human life in the comedy itself. Tastes are free; but we should not deny that in merciless and rollicking comedy life is caught in the act. The most grotesque creatures of Dickens are not exaggerations or mockeries of something other than themselves; they arise because nature generates them, like toadstools; they exist because they can't help it, as we all do. The fact that these perfectly self-justified beings are absurd appears only by comparison, and from outside; circumstances, or the expectations of other people, make them ridiculous and force them to contradict themselves; but in nature it is no crime to be exceptional. Often, but for the savagery of the average man, it would not even be a misfortune. The sleepy fat boy inPickwicklooks foolish; but in himself he is no more foolish, nor less solidly self-justified, than a pumpkin lying on the ground. Toots seems ridiculous; and we laugh heartily at his incoherence, his beautiful waistcoats, and his extreme modesty; but when did anybody more obviously grow into what he is because he couldn't grow otherwise? So with Mr. Pickwick, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Micawber, and all the rest of this wonderful gallery; they are ridiculous only by accident, and in a context in which they never intended to appear. If Oedipus and Lear and Cleopatra do not seem ridiculous, it is only because tragic reflection has taken them out of the context in which, in real life, they would have figured. If we saw them as facts, and not as emanations of a poet's dream, we should laugh at them till doomsday; what grotesque presumption, what silly whims, what mad contradiction of the simplest realities! Yet we should not laugh at them without feeling how real their griefs were; as real and terrible as the griefs of children and of dreams. But facts, however serious inwardly, are always absurd outwardly; and the just critic of life sees both truths at once, as Cervantes did inDon Quixote. A pompous idealist who does not see the ridiculous inallthings is the dupe of his sympathy and abstraction; and a clown, who does not see that these ridiculous creatures are living quite in earnest, is the dupe of his egotism. Dickens saw the absurdity, and understood the life; I think he was a good philosopher.