It is usual to compare Dickens with Thackeray, which is like comparing the grape with the gooseberry; there are obvious points of resemblance, and the gooseberry has some superior qualities of its own; but you can't make red wine of it. The wine of Dickens is of the richest, the purest, the sweetest, the most fortifying to the blood; there is distilled in it, with the perfection of comedy, the perfection of morals. I do not mean, of course, that Dickens appreciated all the values that human life has or might have; that is beyond any man. Even the greatest philosophers, such as Aristotle, have not always much imagination to conceive forms of happiness or folly other than those which their age or their temperament reveals to them; their insight runs only to discovering theprincipleof happiness, that it is spontaneous life of any sort harmonized with circumstances. The sympathies and imagination of Dickens, vivid in their sphere, were no less limited in range; and of course it was not his business to find philosophic formulas; nevertheless I call his the perfection of morals for two reasons: that he put the distinction between good and evil in the right place, and that he felt this distinction intensely. A moralist might have excellent judgement, he might see what sort of life is spontaneous in a given being and how far it may be harmonized with circumstances, yet his heart might remain cold, he might not suffer nor rejoice with the suffering or joy he foresaw. Humanitarians like Bentham and Mill, who talked about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, might conceivably be moral prigs in their own persons, and they might have been chilled to the bone in their theoretic love of mankind, if they had had the wit to imagine in what, as a matter of fact, the majority would place their happiness. Even if their theory had been correct (which I think it was in intention, though not in statement) they would then not have been perfect moralists, because their maxims would not have expressed their hearts. In expressing their hearts, they ought to have embraced one of those forms of "idealism" by which men fortify themselves in their bitter passions or in their helpless commitments; for they do not wish mankind to be happy in its own way, but in theirs. Dickens was not one of those moralists who summon every man to do himself the greatest violence so that he may not offend them, nor defeat their ideals. Love of the good of others is something that shines in every page of Dickens with a truly celestial splendour. How entirely limpid is his sympathy with life—a sympathy uncontaminated by dogma or pedantry or snobbery or bias of any kind! How generous is this keen, light spirit, how pure this open heart! And yet, in spite of this extreme sensibility, not the least wobbling; no deviation from a just severity of judgement, from an uncompromising distinction between white and black. And this happens as it ought to happen; sympathy is not checked by a flatly contrary prejudice or commandment, by some categorical imperative irrelevant to human nature; the check, like the cheer, comes by tracing the course of spontaneous impulse amid circumstances that inexorably lead it to success or to failure. There is a bed to this stream, freely as the water may flow; when it comes to this precipice it must leap, when it runs over these pebbles it must sing, and when it spreads into that marsh it must become livid and malarial. The very sympathy with human impulse quickens in Dickens the sense of danger; his very joy in joy makes him stem to what kills it. How admirably drawn are his surly villains! No rhetorical vilification of them, as in a sermon; no exaggeration of their qualms or fears; rather a sense of how obvious and human all their courses seem from their own point of view; and yet no sentimental apology for them, no romantic worship of rebels in their madness or crime. The pity of it, the waste of it all, are seen not by a second vision but by the same original vision which revealed the lure and the drift of the passion. Vice is a monster here of such sorry mien, that the longer we see it the more we deplore it; that other sort of vice which Pope found so seductive was perhaps only some innocent impulse artificially suppressed, and called a vice because it broke out inconveniently and displeased the company. True vice is human nature strangled by the suicide of attempting the impossible. Those so self-justified villains of Dickens never elude their fates. Bill Sikes is not let off, neither is Nancy; the oddly benevolent Magwitch does not escape from the net, nor does the unfortunate young Richard Carstone, victim of the Circumlocution Office. The horror and ugliness of their fall are rendered with the hand of a master; we see here, as in the world, that in spite of the romanticists it is not virtue to rush enthusiastically along any road. I think Dickens is one of the best friends mankind has ever had. He has held the mirror up to nature, and of its reflected fragments has composed a fresh world, where the men and women differ from real people only in that they live in a literary medium, so that all ages and places may know them. And they are worth knowing, just as one's neighbours are, for their picturesque characters and their pathetic fates. Their names should be in every child's mouth; they ought to be adopted members of every household. Their stories cause the merriest and the sweetest chimes to ring in the fancy, without confusing our moral judgement or alienating our interest from the motley commonplaces of daily life. In every English-speaking home, in the four quarters of the globe, parents and children will do well to read Dickens aloud of a winter's evening; they will love winter, and one another, and God the better for it. What a wreath that will be of ever-fresh holly, thick with bright berries, to hang to this poet's memory—the very crown he would have chosen!
Great buildings often have great doors; but great doors are heavy to swing, and if left open they may let in too much cold or glare; so that we sometimes observe a small postern cut into one leaf of the large door for more convenient entrance and exit, and it is seldom or never that the monumental gates yawn in their somnolence. Here is the modest human scale reasserting itself in the midst of a titanic structure, but it reasserts itself with an ill grace and in the interests of frailty; the patch it makes seems unintended and ignominious.
Yet the human scale is not essentially petty; when it does not slip in as a sort of interloper it has nothing to apologize for. Between the infinite and the infinitesimal all sizes are equally central. The Greeks, the Saracens, the English, the Chinese, and Japanese instinctively retain the human scale in all that part of their work which is most characteristic of them and nearest to their affections. A Greek temple or the hall of an English mansion can be spacious and dignified enough, but they do not outrun familiar uses, and they lend their spaciousness and dignity to the mind, instead of crushing it. Everything about them has an air of friendliness and sufficiency; their elegance is not pompous, and if they are noble they are certainly not vast, cold, nor gilded.
The Saracens, Chinese, and Japanese in their various ways use the human scale with even greater refinement, for they apply it also in a sensuous and psychological direction. Not only is the size of their works moderate by preference, like their brief lyrics, but they exactly meet human sensibility by a great delicacy and concentration in design and a fragrant simplicity in workmanship. Everything they make is economical in its beauty and seems to say to us: "I exist only to be enjoyed; there is nothing in me not merely delightful," Here the human scale is not drawn from the human body so much as from the human soul; its faculties are treated with deference—I mean the faculties it really has, not those, like reason, which a flattering philosophy may impute to it.
An English country house which is a cottage in appearance may turn out on examination to be almost a palace in extent and appointments; there is no parade, yet there is great profusion—too much furniture, too many ornaments, too much food, too many flowers, too many people. Everything there is on the human scale except the quantity of things, which is oppressive. The Orientals are poorer, more voluptuous, and more sensitive to calligraphy; they leave empty spaces about them and enjoy one thing at a time and enjoy it longer.
One reason for this greater subtlety and mercifulness in the art of Orientals is perhaps the fiercer assault made on their senses by nature. The Englishman lives in a country which is itself on the human scale, clement at all seasons, charming with a gently inconstant atmospheric charm. The rare humanity of nature in his island permeates his being from boyhood up with a delight that is half sentimental, half physical and sporting. In his fields and moors he grows keen and fond of exertion; there too his friendships and his estimates of men are shaped unawares, as if under some silent superior influence. There he imbibes the impressions that make him tender to poetry. He may not require great subtlety in his poets, but he insists that their sentiment shall have been felt and their images seen, and while the obvious, even the shamelessly obvious, does not irritate him, he hates cheap sublimity and false notes. He respects experience and is master of it in his own field.
Thus the empty spaces with which a delicate art likes to surround itself are supplied for the Englishman by his comradeship with nature, his ranging habits, and the reticence of his imagination. There the unexpressed dimension, the background of pregnant silence, exists for him in all its power. For the Saracen, on the contrary, nature is an abyss: parched deserts, hard mountains, night with its overwhelming moon. Here the human scale is altogether transgressed; nature is cruel, alien, excessive, to be fled from with a veiled face. For a relief and solace he builds his house without windows; he makes his life simple, his religion a single phrase, his art exquisite and slight, like the jet of his fountain. It is sweet and necessary that the works of man should respect the human scale when everything in nature so infinitely transcends it.
Why the Egyptians loved things colossal I do not know, but the taste of the Romans for the grandiose is easier to understand. It seems to have been part and parcel of that yearning for the super-human which filled late antiquity. This yearning took two distinct directions. Among the worldly it fostered imperialism, organization, rhetoric, portentous works, belief in the universality and eternity of Rome, and actual deification of emperors. Among the spiritually-minded it led to a violent abstraction from the world, so that the soul in its inward solitude might feel itself inviolate and divine. The Christians at first belonged of course to the latter party; they detested the inflation of the empire, with its cold veneer of marble and of optimism; they were nothing if not humble and dead to the world. Their catacombs were perforce on the human scale, as a coffin is; but even when they emerged to the surface, they reduced rather than enlarged the temples and basilicas bequeathed to them by the pagans. Apart from a few imperial structures at Constantinople or Ravenna their churches for a thousand years kept to the human scale; often they were diminutive; when necessary they were spread out to hold multitudes, but remained low and in the nature of avenues to a tomb or a shrine. The centre was some sombre precinct, often subterranean, where the inward man might commune with the other world. The sacraments were received with a bowed head; they did not call for architectural vistas. The sumptuousness that in time encrusted these sanctuaries was that of a jewel—the Oriental, interior, concentrated sumptuousness of the cloistered arts. Yet the open-air pagan tradition was not dead. Roman works were everywhere, and not all in ruins, and love of display and of plastic grandiloquence lay hardly dormant in the breast of many. It required only a little prosperity to dispel the mystical humility and detachment which Christianity had brought with it at first; and the human scale of the Christian Greeks yielded at the first opportunity to the gigantic scale of the Romans. Spaces were cleared, vaults were raised, arches were made pointed in order that they might be wider and be poised higher, towers and spires were aimed at the clouds, usually getting only half way, porches became immense caverns. Brunelleschi accomplished atour de forcein his dome and Michelangelo another in his, even more stupendous. These various strained models, straining in divergent directions, have kept artists uneasy and impotent ever since, except when under some benign influence they have recovered the human scale, and in domestic architecture or portrait painting have forgotten to be grand and have become felicitous.
The same movement is perhaps easier to survey in philosophy than in architecture. Scarcely had Socrates brought investigation down from the heavens and limited it to morals—a realm essentially on the human scale—when his pupils hastened to undo his work by projecting their moral system again into the sky, denaturalizing both morals and nature. They imagined a universe circling about man, tempering the light for his eyes and making absolute his childlike wishes and judgements. This was humanism out of scale and out of place, an attempt to cut not the works of man but the universe to human measure. It was the nemesis that overtook the Greeks for having become too complacently human. Earlier the monstrous had played a great part in their religion; henceforth that surrounding immensity having been falsely humanized, their modest humanity itself had to be made monstrous to fill its place.
Hence we see the temples growing larger and larger, the dome introduced, things on the human scale piled on one another to make a sublime fabric, like Saint Sophia, triumphal arches on pedestals not to be passed through, vain columns like towers, with a statue poised on the summit like a weathercock, and finally doors so large that they could not be opened and little doors had to be cut in them for men to use. So the human scale turned up again irrepressibly, but for the moment without its native dignity, because it had been stretched to compass a lifeless dignity quite other than its own.
Nests were the first buildings; I suppose the birds built them long before man ceased to be four-footed or four-handed, and to swing by his tail from trees. The nests of man were coverts, something between a hole in the ground and an arbour; a retreat easily turned into a wig-warn, a hut, or a tent, when once man had begun to flay animals and to weave mats. From the tent we can imagine the cart developing—one of the earliest of human habitations—and from the cart the boat: tents, boats, and carts (as the Englishman knows so well) are in a manner more human than houses; they are the shelters of freemen. Some men, those destined to higher things, are migratory; they have imagination, being haunted by absent things, and distance of itself allures them, even if dearth or danger does not drive them on; indeed, dearth and danger would not of themselves act as incentives to migration, if some safer and greener paradise were not present to the fancy. Ranging into varied climates, these men feel the need of that portable shelter which we call clothes; and at a slightly greater distance from their skins, they surround themselves with a second integument, also portable, the tent, cart, or boat. The first home of man is appropriately without foundations, except in the instincts of his soul; and it is only by a slight anchorage to the earth, in some tempting glen or by some flowing river, that the cart, boat, or tent becomes a dwelling-house. Here I see the secret of that paradox, that the English people who have invented the word home, should be such travellers and colonists, and should live so largely and so contentedly abroad. Home is essentially portable; it has no terrene foundation, like a tomb, a well, or an altar; it is an integument of the living man, as the body itself is; and as the body is more than the raiment, and determines its form, so the inner man is more than his dwelling, and causes it to mould and to harden itself round him like a shell, wherever he may be. Home is built round his bed, his cupboard, and his chimney-corner; and such a nest, if it fits his habits, is home all the world over, from Hudson's Bay to Malacca; at least, it becomes home when the inner man, as he is prompted inwardly to do, surrounds himself there with a family; for a home is a nest, and somehow incomplete without an egg to sit on.
This seems to me to be the true genealogy of English architecture, in so far as it is English. Strictly speaking, there is no English architecture at all, only foreign architecture adapted and domesticated in England. But how thoroughly and admirably domesticated I How entirely transmuted inwardly from the classic tragic monumental thing it was, into something which, even if in abstract design it seems unchanged, has a new expression, a new scale, a new subordination of part to part, and as it were a new circulation of the blood within it! It has all been made to bend and to cling like ivy round the inner man; it has all been rendered domestic and converted into a home. Far other was the character proper to nobler architecture in its foreign seats. There it had been essentially military, religious, or civic: it had begun perhaps with a slight modification or rearrangement of great stones lying on the ground, perhaps infinitely rooted in its depths. Its centre was no living person, but some spot with a magic and compulsive influence, or with a communal function; it came to glorify three slabs—the tomb, the hearth, and the altar—and to render them monumental. The tribe or the king had a treasure to be roofed over and walled in; the mound where the dead lay buried was marked with a heap of stones; pillars were set up to the right and to the left of the presiding deity, to dignify the place where he delivered true oracles, and dispensed magic powers. This deity himself was a pillar, scarcely humanized in form, or fantastically named after some animal; and as he grew colossal, and his features took form and colour, his sacred head had to be arched over with more labour and art; and the approach to him was impressively delayed through pylons, courts, narthex, or nave, into the sepulchral darkness of the holy of holies. Similarly defences grew into citadels, and judgement-seats into palaces; and as for individual men, if they did not sleep in the embrasure of some temple gate, or under some public stair, they found cubicles in the galleries of the king's court, or built themselves huts to breed in under the lee of the fortifications.
This sort of architecture has a tragic character; it dominates the soul rather than expresses it, and embodies stabilities and powers far older than any one man, and far more lasting. It confronts each generation like an inexorable deity, like death and war and labour; life is passed, thoughtlessly but not happily, under that awful shadow. Of course, there are acolytes in the temple and pages in the palace that scamper all over the most hallowed precincts, tittering and larking; and the same retreats may seem luminous and friendly afterwards to the poet, the lover, or the mind bereaved; yet in their essential function these monuments are arresting, serious, silent, overwhelming; they are a source of terror and compunction, like tragedy; they are favourable to prayer, ecstasy, and meditation. At other times they become the scene of enormous gatherings, of parades and thrilling celebrations; but always it is a vast affair, like a court ball, in which one insinuates one's littleness into what corner one can, to see and feel the movement of the whole, without playing any great part in it. Even the most amiable forms of classic architecture have this public character. There is the theatre and the circus, into which one must squeeze one's person uncomfortably, in order to subject one's mind to contagious emotions, and the judgements of the crowd; and even the public fountain, at which the housemaids and water-boys wait for their turn, plays for ever far above the heads of the people; as if that Neptune and those dolphins were spouting for their own pleasure, cooling the sunshine for their own bronze limbs, and never caring whether they soused the passing mortal, or quenched his thirst.
All these forms and habits are intensely un-English, and yet England is full of vestiges of them, not only because its fine arts are derived from abroad, but because, however disguised, the same tragic themes must appear everywhere. The tomb, the temple, the fortress are obligatory things; but they become properly English in character only when their public function recedes into the background, and they become interesting to the inner man by virtue of associations or accidents which harmonize them with his sentimental experience. They grow English in growing picturesque. These castles and abbeys were Norman when they were built, they were expressions of domination and fear, hard, crude, practical, and foreign. But now the moat is grass-grown, the cloister in ruins, the headless saints are posts for the roses to creep over, the frowning keep has lost its battlements and become a comfortable mansion mantled with ivy; before it the well-dressed young people play croquet on the lawn; and the chapel, whitewashed within, politely furnished with pews, and politely frequented on Sundays, is embowered in a pretty garden of a graveyard, which the yew seems to sanctify more than the cross, and the flowers to suit better than the inscriptions; there is a bench there round the great tree, where the old villagers sit of an evening, and its branches, far overtopping the church spire with its restored sun-dial, seem to dispense a surer grace and protection than the church itself: they seem more unequivocally the symbol and the work of God. So everything, in its ruin, seems in England to live a new life; and it is only this second life, this cottage built in the fallen stronghold, that is English.
If great architecture has a tragic character, it does not exclude, in the execution, a certain play of fancy, a sportive use of the forms which the needful structure imposes; and these decorative frills or arbitrary variations of theme might be called comic architecture. This is the side of the art which is subject to fashion, and changes under the same influences, with the same swiftness and the same unanimity. But as fashions among peasants sometimes last for ages, so certain decorative themes, although quite arbitrary, sometimes linger on because of the inertia of the eye, which demands what it is used to, or the poverty of invention in the designer. The worst taste and the best taste revel in decoration; but the motive here is play and there display. The Englishman deprecates both; he abominates the tawdry, the theatrical, the unnecessarily elaborate; and at the same time he is shy of novelty and playfulness; give him comfortable old grey clothes, good for all weathers, and comfortable, pleasing, inconspicuous houses, where he can live without feeling a fool or being the victim of his possessions. The comic poses of architecture, which come to him from abroad, together with its tragic structure, he accordingly tones down and neutralizes as far as possible. How gently, for instance, how pleasantly the wave of Italian architecture broke on these grassy shores! The classic line, which is tragic in its simple veracity and fixity, had already been submerged in attempts to vary it; in England, as in France, the Gothic habit of letting each part of a building have its own roof and its own symmetry, at once introduced the picturesque into the most "classic" designs. The Italian scale, too, was at once reduced, and the Italian rhetoric in stone, the baroque and the spectacular, was obliterated. How pleasantly the Palladian forms were fitted to their English setting; how the windows were widened and subdivided, the show pediments forgotten, the wreathed urns shaved into modest globes, the pilasters sensibly broadened into panels, and the classical detail applied to the native Gothic framework, with its gables, chimneys, and high roofs; whence the delightful brood of Jacobean and Queen Anne houses; and in the next generation the so genteel, so judicious Georgian mansion, with its ruddy brick, its broad windows, and its delicate mouldings and accessories of stone. The tragic and the comic were spirited away together, and only the domestic remained.
Nevertheless, at one of the greatest moments in its history, England had seemed to revel in comic art, and to have made it thoroughly its own. Domestic taste had reduced Gothic too, in England, to the human scale; prodigies of height and width in vaulting were not attempted, doors remained modest, hooded, perhaps, with an almost rustic porch; the vast spaces were subdivided, they were encrusted with ornament; the lines became playful, fan-tracery was invented, and floral pendants of stone; the walls became all glass, the ceilings carved bowers, and Gothic seemed on the point of smothering its rational skeleton altogether in luxurious trappings and the millinery of fashion. All England seemed to become one field of the cloth of gold; rooms looked like gilded palanquins or silken tents, roofs were forests of bannerets, pinnacles, and weathercocks; heraldry (a comic art) overspread every garment and utensil. Poetry, too, became euphuistic and labyrinthine and nevertheless friendly and familiar and full of a luscious humour, like the wit of the people. Even prose was a maze of metaphors and conceits, every phrase was embroidered, and no self-respecting person could say yea or nay without some artful circumlocution. It was this outburst of universal comedy that made Shakespeare possible—an exuberant genius in some respects not like a modern Englishman; he rose on the crest of a somewhat exotic wave of passion and vivacity, which at once subsided. Some vestiges of that spirit seem to linger in American manners; but for the most part puritanism killed it; and I do not think we need regret its loss. What could England have been but for the triumph of Protestantism there? Only a coarser France, or a cockney Ireland. The puritan stiffening was essential to raise England to its external dignity and greatness; and it was needed to fortify the inner man, to sober him, and persuade him to be worthy of himself. As for comic art, there is enough of it elsewhere, in the oriental and the French schools, and in painting and drawing, if not in architecture, all the younger artists are experimenting with it. The sort of aestheticism which was the fashion in London at the end of the nineteenth century tried to be playful, and to dote on art for its own sake; but in reality it was full of a perverted moralism; the aesthetes were simply Ruskin's pupils running away from school; they thought it immensely important to be choice, and quite disgraceful to think of morals. The architecture of that time was certainly not comic in my sense of the word, it did not give a free rein to exuberant fancy: it was only railway Gothic. But in England the mists and the ivy and the green sward and the dark screening trees can make endurable even that abortion of the ethics of Ruskin: and with better models, and less wilfulness, I see the fresh building of to-day recovering a national charm: the scale small, the detail polyglot, the arrangement gracious and convenient, the marriage with the green earth and the luminous air, foreseen and prepared for. Domestic architecture in England follows to the letter the advice of Polonius:
Costly thy garment as thy purse can buy,But not expressed in fancy: rich, not gaudy.
Compromise is odious to passionate natures because it seems a surrender, and to intellectual natures because it seems a confusion; but to the inner man, to the profound Psyche within us, whose life is warm, nebulous, and plastic, compromise seems the path of profit and justice. Health has many conditions; life is a resultant of many forces. Are there not several impulses in us at every moment? Are there not several sides to every question? Has not every party caught sight of something veritably right and good? Is not the greatest practicable harmony, or the least dissension, the highest good? And if by the word "truth" we designate not the actual order of the facts, nor the exact description of them, but some inner symbol of reconciliation with reality on our own part, bringing comfort, safety, and assurance, then truth also will lie in compromise: truth will be partly truth to oneself, partly workable convention and plausibility. A man's life as it flows is not a theorem to which there is any one rigid solution. It is composed of many strands and looks to divers issues. There is the love of home and the lure of adventure; there is chastity which is a good, and there is love which is a good also; work must leave room for sport, science for poetry, and reason for prejudice. Can it be a man's duty to annul any of the elements that make up his moral being and, because he possesses a religious tradition, shall he refuse the gifts of his senses, of his affections, of his country and its history, of the ruling science, morality, and taste of his day? Far from it: religion, says the inner man, ought rather to be the highest synthesis of our nature, and make room for all these things. It should not succumb to any dead or foreign authority that ignores or dishonours them. The Englishman finds that he was born a Christian, and therefore wishes to remain a Christian; but his Christianity must be his own, no less plastic and adaptable than his inner man; and it is an axiom with him that nothing can be obligatory for a Christian which is unpalatable to an Englishman.
Only a few years ago, if a traveller landing in England on a Sunday and entering an Anglican church, had been told that the country was Catholic and its church a branch of the Catholic church, his astonishment would have been extreme. "Catholic" is opposed in the first place to national and in the second place to Protestant; how then, he would have asked himself, can a church be Catholic that is so obviously and dismally Protestant, and so narrowly and primly national? Why then this abuse of language? And why this silly provincialism of insisting on always calling Catholics Roman Catholics, as if there were any others, and they were not known by that name all the world over? Nevertheless, the restoration of an elder Anglicanism in our day has somewhat softened these paradoxes; and when we remember how fondly the English screen their instincts in legal fictions and in genteel shams, the paradoxes vanish altogether.
What is Protestantism? It is all things to all men, if they are Protestants: but I see in it three leadingmotifs: to revert to primitive Christianity, to inspire moral and political reform, and to accept the religious witness of the inner man. Now the Church of England, intensely Protestant as it seemed until the other day, is not Protestant in any of these respects. No established national church could possibly be so. The subjection to Parliament which renders the English church not Catholic, renders it also not Protestant. To a primitive Christian, to a puritan reformer or to a transcendental mystic, a religion established by lay authority is a contradiction in terms; a lay government may be more or less inspired by righteousness, but it cannot mediate salvation. A Protestant is essentially a nonconformist. Moreover, if we examine the theology of the English church, we see that whilst incidentally very heretical, it is still fundamentally Catholic; it admits only a single deposit of faith and one apostolic fountain of grace for all mankind. But in its view heresy in any branch of the church does not cut it off from the tree. Heresy is something to which all churches are liable; the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople fall into it hardly less often or less desperately than the archbishop of Canterbury himself. Heresy is to be conceived as eccentricity within the fold, not as separation from it; it is the tacking of the ship on its voyage. Saint Peter or Saint Paul or both of them must have been heretical in their little controversies; and Christ himself must have had at times, if not always, but a partial view of the truth; for instance, in respect to the date and the material nature of his second coming. Accordingly, although it may be a little trying to the nerves, it is no essential scandal that a curate should be addicted to Mariolatry, or that a dean should be unfortunately ambiguous on the subject of the Incarnation: such rapids and backwaters in the stream of Christian thought only prove how broad and full it is capable of being.
That many Catholic bodies, if not all, should be constantly schismatic or heretical, is therefore no paradox with this conception of the church; and it is obvious that Rome itself is heretical and schismatic on this theory, since it has laid an exaggerated weight on the text about Peter and the keys, and has claimed a jurisdiction Over the eastern patriarchates which was certainly not primitive, and which these patriarchates have never honestly acknowledged. On the other hand, the Church of England belonged to the Western Empire and its Christianity has always been Latin. It broke away from the patriarchate of Rome not at all in sympathy with the claims of Antioch or Constantinople, but notoriously in sympathy with German Protestantism. This revolt was based on the same anti-Catholic and inconsistent motives as the German Reformation—namely, greed and desire for absolute power in princes, zeal in puritan reformers, and impatience of moral and intellectual constraint in the body of the clergy and laity. Nationalism, faith, learning, and licence were curiously mingled in those turbid minds, and the Church of England inherits all that indescribable spiritual confusion. It is national in its morals and manners, mincing in its scholarship, snobbish in its sympathies, sentimental in its emotions. Spiritual minds in the church—of which there are many—suffer under this heredity incubus of worldliness; but what can they avail? Some join the socialists; a few escape to Rome; there at least the worldliness, however conspicuous, is regarded as a vice and not as a virtue. The convert will find no dearth of petty passions, machinations, vanities, tricks, and shameless disbelief; but all this will be, like debauchery, a crust of corruption, avowedly corrupt. It is dirt on the skin, not cancer at the heart. But then the true Catholic has made the great surrender; he has renounced, or never thought of maintaining, the authority of his inner man. He is a catechumen; his teachers will read for him the symptoms of health or disease visible in his thoughts and dispositions; by their discipline—which is an ancient science—they will help him to save his soul; a totally different thing from obeying the impulses or extending the adventures of the transcendental self. The inner man, for the Catholic as for the materialist, is only a pathological phenomenon. Therefore the Englishman, as I conceive him, living in and by his inner man, can never be really a Catholic, either Anglican or Roman; if he likes to call himself by either name, it is equally a masquerade, a fad like a thousand others to which the inner man, so seriously playful, is prone to lend itself. He may go over to Rome on a spiritual tour, as he might abscond for a year and live in Japan with a Japanese wife; but if he is converted really, and becomes a Catholic at heart, for good, and in all simplicity, then he is no longer the man he was. Words cannot measure the chasm that must henceforth separate him from everything at home. I am not surprised that he recoils from so desperate a step. It is not only the outward coarseness and laxity of Catholic manners that offend him; these vices are not universal, and he would not need to share them. But for him, a modern Englishman, with freedom and experiment and reserve in his blood, always nursing within himself the silent love of nature and of rebellion, to go over to Rome is an essential suicide: the inner man must succumb first. Such an Englishman might become a saint, but only by becoming a foreigner.
There is another sense altogether in which the English church might be catholic if it chose. Suppose we lay it down as an axiom that whatever is acceptable to the inner man is good and true, and that whatever is good and true is Christian—Christianity would then be open to every influence which, whilst apparently denaturalizing it, might help to manifest its fulness. It would cast off husk after husk of doctrine, developing the living spirit and feeding it with every substance which it was fitted to absorb. There is nothing new in this process. Christianity was born of such a marriage between the Jewish soul and the Greek. Greek philosophy was absorbed with magnificent results; the restoration of Pauline theology, and the other insights of Protestantism, led to German philosophy, which has been absorbed too; the sloughing off of monasticism and ecclesiasticism have put Christianity in a position to understand and express the modern world; the reduction of revelation, by the higher criticism of the Bible, to its true place in human history, will involve a new change of front; and the absorption of modern science and of democracy would complete the transformation.
To justify this method the church might appeal to an archbishop of Canterbury who—this was in the old days—was also a saint and a great philosopher. Saint Anselm has a famous proof of the existence of God which runs as follows: God exists, because God is, by definition, the most real of beings. According to this argument, if it should turn out that the most real of beings was matter, it would follow that matter was God. This might be thought a consequence drawn in mockery; but I do not mean to deride Saint Anselm, whom I revere, but on the contrary to lay bare the nerve of his argument which if the age had given him scope, and he had not been Arch-bishop of Canterbury, he might have followed to its sublime conclusion, as Spinoza did after him. There is a dignity in existence, in fact, in truth which to some speculative and rapt natures absorbs and cancels every other dignity: and on this principle the English church might, without any sudden or distressing negation, gradually turn its worship to the most real of beings, wheresoever it may be found; and I presume the most real of beings will be the whole of what is found everywhere. A narrower conception of God might at each step give place to a wider one; and the church, instead of embodying one particular revelation and striving to impose it universally through propaganda, might become hospitable to all revelations, and find a place for the inspirations of all ages and countries under the aegis of its own progressive traditions. So the religion of ancient Rome domesticated all the gods; and so the English language, if it should become the medium of international intercourse, might by translation or imitation of other literatures or by the infiltration into it of foreign words and styles, really become a vehicle for all human ideas.
I am not sure whether one party in the English church might not welcome such a destiny; but at present, so far as I can see, the tenderer and more poetical spirits in it take quite another direction. They are trying to recover the insights and practices of mediaeval piety; they are archaistic in devotion. There is a certain romance in their decision to believe greatly, to feel mystically, to pray perpetually. They study their attitudes, as they kneel in some correctly restored church, hearing or intoning some revived early chant, and wondering why they should not choose a divine lady in heaven to be their love and their advocate, as did the troubadours, or why they should not have recumbent effigies of themselves carved on their tombs, with their legs crossed, like the crusaders. "Things" cried the rapturous young priest who showed me the beautiful chapel of Pusey House, "what we need isThings!"
Protestant faith does not vanish into the sunlight as Catholic faith does, but leaves a shadowy ghost haunting the night of the soul. Faith, in the two cases, was not faith in the same sense; for the Catholic it was belief in a report or an argument; for the Protestant it was confidence in an allegiance. When Catholics leave the church they do so by the south door, into the glare of the market-place, where their eye is at once attracted by the wares displayed in the booths, by the flower-stalls with their bright awnings, by the fountain with its baroque Tritons blowing the spray into the air, and the children laughing and playing round it, by the concourse of townspeople and strangers, and by the soldiers, perhaps, marching past; and if they cast a look back at the church at all, it is only to admire its antique architecture, that crumbling filigree of stone so poetically surviving in its incongruous setting. It is astonishing sometimes with what contempt, with what a complete absence of understanding, unbelievers in Catholic countries look back on their religion. For one cultivated mind that sees in that religion a monument to his racial genius, a heritage of poetry and aft almost as precious as the classical heritage, which indeed it incorporated in a hybrid form, there are twenty ignorant radicals who pass it by apologetically, as they might the broken toys or dusty schoolbooks of childhood. Their political animosity, legitimate in itself, blinds their imagination, and renders them even politically foolish; because in their injustice to human nature and to their national history they discredit their own cause, and provoke reaction.
Protestants, on the contrary, leave the church by the north door, into the damp solitude of a green churchyard, amid yews and weeping willows and overgrown mounds and fallen illegible gravestones. They feel a terrible chill; the few weedy flowers that may struggle through that long grass do not console them; it was far brighter and warmer and more decent inside. The church—boring as the platitudes and insincerities were which you listened to there for hours—was an edifice, something protective, social, and human; whereas here, in this vague unhomely wilderness, nothing seems to await you but discouragement and melancholy. Better the church than the madhouse. And yet the Protestant can hardly go back, as the Catholic does easily on occasion, out of habit, or fatigue, or disappointment in life, or metaphysical delusion, or the emotional weakness of the death-bed. No, the Protestant is more in earnest, he carries his problem and his religion within him. In his very desolation he will find God. This has often been a cause of wonder to me: the Protestant pious economy is so repressive and morose and the Catholic so charitable and pagan, that I should have expected the Catholic sometimes to sigh a little for his Virgin and his saints, and the Protestant to shout for joy at having got rid of his God. But the trouble is that the poor Protestant can't get rid of his God; for his idea of God is a vague symbol that stands not essentially, as with the Catholic, for a particular legendary or theological personage, but rather for that unfathomable influence which, if it does not make for righteousness, at least has so far made for existence and has imposed it upon us; so that go through what doors you will and discard what dogmas you choose, God will confront you still whichever way you may turn. In this sense the enlightened Catholic, too, in leaving the church, has merely rediscovered God, finding him now not in the church alone, but in the church only as an expression of human fancy, and in human life itself only as in one out of a myriad forms of natural existence. But the Protestant is less dear in his gropings, the atmosphere of his inner man is more charged with vapours, and it takes longer for the light dubiously to break through; and often in his wintry day the sun sets without shining.
In all Protestant countries I have noticed a certain hush about death, an uncomfortable secrecy, and a fear as if of blasphemy whenever the subject threatens to come up. Is it that hell is still felt to lie, for the vast majority, immediately behind the curtain? Or is it that people have encouraged themselves to live and love as if they were immortal, and to this lifelong bluff of theirs death brings a contradiction which they have not the courage to face? Or is it simply that death is too painful, too sacred, or too unseemly for polite ears? That a desire to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to Brighton. "Oh yes, our two sons went down in theBlack Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them, of course; but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quiteinstantly, so that we don't mind half so much as if they had had any of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn't have liked it at all being crippled, you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it is. Justblown to atoms! It issucha blessing!"
Of course, the poor parents feel their hearts sink within them in private; but their affectation of cheerfulness has its logic. Death is a fact; and we had better accept it as such as we do the weather; perhaps, if we pretend not to care, we really shan't care so much. The men in the trenches and hospitals have often been bitterly unreconciled and rebellious, and haunted by the cruel futility of their sufferings: but the nursing everywhere has been devoted and heroic: and my impression of the mourning at home is, that it has been philosophical.
English manners are sensible and conducive to comfort even at a death-bed. No summoning of priests, no great concourse of friends and relations, no loud grief, no passionate embraces and poignant farewells; no endless confabulations in the antechamber, no gossip about the symptoms, the remedies, or the doctors' quarrels and blunders; no breathless enumeration of distinguished visitors, letters, and telegrams; no tearful reconciliation of old family feuds nor whisperings about the division of the property. Instead, either silence and closed doors, if there is real sorrow, or more commonly only a little physical weariness in the mourners, a little sigh or glance at one another, as if to say: We are simply waiting for events; the doctors and nurses, are attending to everything, and no doubt, when the end comes, it will be for the best. In the departing soul, too, probably dulness and indifference. No repentance, no anxiety, no definite hopes or desires either for this life or for the next. Perhaps old memories returning, old loves automatically reviving; possibly a vision, by anticipation, of some reunion in the other world: but how pale, how ghostly, how impotent this death-dream is! I seem to overhear the last words, the last thoughts of a mother: "Dear children, you know I love you. Provision has been made. I should be of little use to you any longer. How pleasant to look out of that window into the park! Be sure they don't forget to give Pup some meat with his dog-biscuit." It is all very simple, very much repressed, the pattering echo of daily words. Death, it is felt, is not important. What matters is the part we have played in the world, or may still play there by our influence. We are not going to a melodramatic Last Judgement. We are shrinking into ourselves, into the seed we came from, into a long winter's sleep. Perhaps in another springtime we may revive and come again to the light somewhere, among those sweet flowers, those dear ones we have lost. That is God's secret. We have tried to do right here. If there is any Beyond, we shall try to do right there also.
In many an English village there is nowadays a calvary. The novel object merges with wonderful ease into the landscape, and one would almost think it had always been there. The protecting wooden eaves have already lost their rigidity and their varnish; the crucifix no longer reminds one of the shop-window from which it came; it does not suggest popish aggression nor the affectations of ritualism. Flecks of sunlight play upon it familiarly, as upon the wayside stones, and it casts its shadow across the common like any natural tree. The flowers in the pots before it have withered, they droop half hidden in the ivy that has overgrown them. Even the scroll of names has modified its official ghastliness—all those newly dead obscure souls starkly ticketed and numbered; the tragic page has got somewhat weather-stained and illegible, and is curling up at the edges; it has become a dead leaf. Decidedly the war-shrine is at home in the scene. It is a portion of that unspoken truth which every one carries about with him, and the people seem again to breathe freely under the shadow of the cross.
What does the cross signify? We are told that Christ died to save us, and various analogies, legal, sentimental, or chivalrous, are put forward to make that notion acceptable. I respect the sentiments of duty and devotion which this doctrine of legal redemption can inspire; they express readiness to do well, and in a certain moral sense, as Hamlet says, the readiness is all; yet it is a conception of religion borrowed from ancient lawyers and rhetoricians, a sort of celestial diplomacy. The cross can mean something else; it can symbolize poetically a general truth about existence and experience. This truth is the same which the Indians express more philosophically by saying that life is an illusion—an expression which is itself figurative and poetical. It is certainly not an illusion that I have now the experience of being alive and of finding myself surrounded, at least in appearance, by a tolerably tractable world, material and social. It is not an illusion that this experience is now filling me with mixed and trooping feelings. In calling existence an illusion, the Indian sages meant that it is fugitive and treacherous: the images and persons that diversify it are unsubstantial, and myself the most shifting and unsubstantial of all. The substance and fine mechanism which I do not doubt underlie this changing apparition are out of scale with my imagined units, and (beyond a certain point) out of sympathy with my interests. Life is an illusion if we trust it, but it is a truth if we do not trust it; and this discovery is perhaps better symbolized by the cross than by the Indian doctrine of illusion. I will not say that not to exist would not be better; existence may be condemned by the very respectable criterion of excellence or "reality" which demands in all things permanence and safety; but so long as we exist, however precariously or "unreally," I think it the part of wisdom to find a way of living well, rather than merely to deprecate living. The cross is certainly a most violent image, putting suffering and death before us with a rude emphasis; and I can understand the preference of many for the serene Buddha, lifting the finger of meditation and profound counsel, and freeing the soul by the sheer force of knowledge and of sweet reason. Nevertheless, I am not sorry to have been born a Christian: for the soul cannot be really freed except by ceasing to live; and it is whilst we still exist, not after we are dead to existence, that we need counsel It is therefore the crucified spirit, not the liberated spirit, that is our true master.
Certainly the spirit is crucified, first by being incarcerated in the flesh at all, and then again, after it has identified itself with the will of the flesh, by being compelled to renounce it. Yet both this painful incarnation and this painful redemption have something marvellously sweet about them. The world which torments us is truly beautiful; indeed, that is one of its ways of tormenting us; and we are not wrong in loving, but only in appropriating it. The surrender of this untenable claim to exist and to possess the beautiful, is in its turn beautiful and good. Christ loved the world, in an erotic sense in which Buddha did not love it: and the world has loved the cross as it can never love the Bo-tree. So that out of the very entanglements of the spirit come marvellous compensations to the spirit, which in its liberation leave it still human and friendly to all that it gives up. I do not at all accept the morality of the Indians in so far as it denies the values of illusion; the only evil in illusion is that it deceives; there is beauty in its being. True insight, true mercy, is tender and sensitive to the infinite pulsations of ignorance and passion: it is not deceived by the prattle of the child, but is not offended by it. The knowledge that existence can manifest but cannot retain the good reconciles us at once to living and to dying. That, I think, is the wisdom of the cross.
There is a folly of the cross also, when the knowledge or half-knowledge that life must be suffering, until it is cleared of the love of life, erects suffering into an end in itself, which is insane and monstrous. I suspect, however, that in asceticism as actually preached and practised there is less of this idolatry of suffering than the outsider imagines, who lying amid his cushions severely reproves those who indulge in a penance. There is an asceticism which may be loved for its simplicity, its clean poverty and cold water, hygienic like mountain air; but flagellations and blood and night-long wailings are not an end in themselves; no saint expects to carry them with him into heaven; at best they are a homoeopathic cure for the lusts of the flesh. Their purpose, if not their effect, is freedom and peace. I wish Protestants, who find their ascetic discipline in hard work, were equally clear about its object. From the worship of instrumentalities, whether penitential or worldly, the cross redeems us: in draining the cup of suffering it transcends suffering, and in being raised above the earth it lifts us out of it. My instinct is to go and stand under the cross, with the monks and the crusaders, far away from these Jews and Protestants who adore the world and who govern it.
There is a mystical folly also among the Indians, when they assign a positive bliss to pure Being; this, too, is substance-worship. Identity with substance is deemed blessed because beneath the vicissitudes of illusion, substance remains always solid, safe, and real. Certainly substance, if there is such a thing, must be safe, real, and solid; for we understand by substance whatever is constant in change. Hence the desire to escape from illusion and from suffering hails a return to the indistinction of substance as a positive salvation; remember that you are dust, return to the infinite from which you came, and nothing ominous can threaten you any more, the dust and the infinite are safe. But changeless substance, being unconscious, cannot be blissful; the attribution of divine bliss to it is an illusion of contrast, and, like so much philosophy, mere rhetoric turned into a revelation. What verbal mirage is this, to see happiness in fixity? Substance may be conceived logically, and then it means pure Being; or it may be conceived psychologically, and then it means absorption in the sense of pure Being; or it may be conceived physically as matter, a name for the constant quantities in things that are traceably transformed into one another. Pure Being and the contemplation of pure Being seem at first sight very different from matter; but they may be a dramatic impersonation of matter, viewed from the inside, and felt as blind intensity and solidified ignorance. No one calls matter blessed when viewed externally, although it is then that its best qualities, its fertility and order, come into view: yet half mankind have fallen to worshipping matter in envy of its internal condition, and to trying to fall back into it, because it is the negation (and yet the cause!) of all their troubles. The idea of an intense nothing hypnotizes them, it is the sovereign anaesthetic; and they forget that this intense nothing, by its fruitfulness in the realm of illusion, has generated all their desires, including this desperate desire to be nothing, which turns that nothingness, by a last illusion, into a good.
If to be saved were merely to cease, we should all be saved by a little waiting: and I say this advisedly, without forgetting that the Indians threaten us with reincarnation. It is a myth to which I have no objection, because only selfishness persuades me that if I am safe, all is well. What difference does it make in reality whether the suffering and ignominy of life fall to what I call myself or to what I call another man? The only trouble is that the moral redemption which is proposed to us as a means of safety instead of death, touches the individual only, just as death does. Christ and Buddha are called saviours of the world; I think it must be in irony, for the world is just as much in need of salvation as ever. Death and insight and salvation are personal. The world springs up unregenerate every morning in spite of all the Tabors and Calvaries of yesterday. What can save the world, without destroying it, is self-knowledge on the part of the world, not of course reflective self-knowledge (for the world is not an animal that can think) but such a regimen and such a philosophy established in society as shall recognize truly what the world is, and what happiness is possible in it. The force that has launched me into this dream of life does not care what turns my dream takes nor how long it troubles me. Nature denies at every moment, not indeed that I am troubled and dreaming, but that there are any natural units like my visions, or anything anomalous in what I hate, or final in what I love. Under these circumstances, what is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detached from the world without hostility to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are; and not to lay up treasures, except in heaven.
How charming is divine philosophy, when it is really divine, when it descends to earth from a higher sphere, and loves the things of earth without needing or collecting them I What the gay Aristippus said of his mistress: I possess, I am not possessed, every spirit should say of an experience that ruffles it like a breeze playing on the summer sea. A thousand ships sail over it in vain, and the worst of tempests is in a teapot. This once acknowledged and inwardly digested, life and happiness can honestly begin. Nature is innocently fond of puffing herself out, spreading her peacock feathers, and saying, What a fine bird am I! And so she is; to rave against this vanity would be to imitate it. On the contrary, the secret of a merry carnival is that Lent is at hand. Having virtually renounced our follies, we are for the first time able to enjoy them with a free heart in their ephemeral purity. When laughter is humble, when it is not based on self-esteem, it is wiser than tears. Conformity is wiser than hot denials, tolerance wiser than priggishness and puritanism. It is not what earnest people renounce that makes me pity them, it is what they work for. No possible reform will make existence adorable or fundamentally just. Modern England has worked too hard and cared too much; so much tension is hysterical and degrading; nothing is ever gained by it worth half what it spoils. Wealth is dismal and poverty cruel unless both are festive. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The easier attitudes which seem more frivolous are at bottom infinitely more spiritual and profound than the tense attitudes; they are nearer to understanding and to renunciation; they are nearer to the cross. Perhaps if England had remained Catholic it might have remained merry; it might still dare, as Shakespeare dared, to be utterly tragic and also frankly and humbly gay. The world has been too much with it; Hebraic religion and German philosophy have confirmed it in a deliberate and agonized worldliness. They have sanctioned, in the hard-working and reforming part of the middle classes, an unqualified respect for prosperity and success; life is judged with all the blindness of life itself. There is no moral freedom. In so far as minds are absorbed in business or in science they all inevitably circle about the same objects, and take part in the same events, combining their thoughts and efforts in the same "worlds work." The world, therefore, invades and dominates them; they lose their independence and almost their distinction from one another. Their philosophy accordingly only exaggerates a little when it maintains that their individual souls are all manifestation of a single spirit, the Earth-spirit. They hardly have any souls they can call their own, that may be saved out of the world, or that may see and judge the world from above.
Death is the background of life much as empty space is that of the stars; it is a deeper thing always lying behind, like the black sky behind the blue. In the realm of existence death is indeed nothing; only a word for something negative and merely notional—the fact that each life has limits in time and is absent beyond them. But in the realm of truth, as things are eternally, life is a little luminous meteor in an infinite abyss of nothingness, a rocket fired on a dark night; and to see life, and to value it, from the point of view of death is to see and to value it truly. The foot of the cross—I dare not say the cross itself—is a good station from which to survey existence. In the greatest griefs there is a tragic calm; the fury of the will is exhausted, and our thoughts rise to another level; as the shrill delights and the black sorrows of childhood are impossible in old age. People sometimes make crosses of flowers or of gold; and I like to see the enamelled crucifix richly surrounded with scrolls, and encrusted with jewels; without a touch of this pagan instinct the religion of the cross would not be healthy nor just. In the skirts of Mount Calvary lies the garden of the resurrection: I do not refer to any melodramatic resurrection, such as is pictured in Jewish and Christian legend, but to one which actually followed quietly, sweetly, in the light of a purer day, in the cloister, in the home, in the regenerate mind. After renouncing the world, the soul may find the world more amiable, and may live in it with a smile and a mystic doubt and one foot in eternity. Vanity is innocent when recognized to be vain, and is no longer a disgrace to the spirit. The happiness of wisdom may at first seem autumnal, and the shadow of the cross the shadow of death; but it is healing slow; and presently, in the hollow where the cross was set, the scent of violets surprises us, and the crocuses peep out amongst the thorns. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity. Far be it from me to suggest that existence is the better because non-existence precedes and follows it; certainly, if man was immortal his experience could not include tradition, parentage, childhood, love, nor old age; nevertheless, from the point of view of both bodily and intellectual instincts immortality would be far better. But since, as a matter of fact, birth and death actually occur, and our brief career is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in the light of the tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny it, and build everything on a fundamental lie. Death does not say to life that life is nothing, or does not exist, or is an illusion; that would be wild talk, and would show that the inspiration we had drawn from death was as little capable of doing justice to life, as life itself is when mindless, of discovering death, or learning anything from it. What the environing presence of death teaches is merely that life has such and such limits and such and such a course, whether it reflects on its course or not, whether it recognizes its limits or ignores them. Death can do nothing to our lives except to frame them in, to show them off with a broad margin of darkness and silence; so that to live in the shadow of death and of the cross is to spread a large nimbus of peace around our littleness.
What a strange pleasure there is sometimes in seeing what we expected, or hearing what we knew was a fact! The dream then seems really to hold together and truth to be positively true. The bells that announced the Armistice brought me no news; a week sooner or a week later they had to ring. Certainly if the purpose of the war had been conquest or victory, nobody had achieved it; but the purposes of things, and especially of wars, are imputed to them rhetorically, the impulses at work being too complicated and changeful to be easily surveyed; and in this case, for the French and the English, the moving impulse had been defence; they had been sustained through incredible trials by the awful necessity of not yielding. That strain had now been relaxed; and as the conduct of men is determined by present forces and not by future advantages, they could have no heart to fight on. It seemed enough to them that the wanton blow had been parried, that the bully had begged for mercy. It was amusing to hear him now. He said that further bloodshed this time would be horrible; his tender soul longed to get home safely, to call it quits, and to take a long breath and plan a new combination before the next bout. His collapse had been evident for days and months; yet these bells that confirmed the fact were pleasant to hear. Those mean little flags, hung out here and there by private initiative in the streets of Oxford, had almost put on a look of triumph; the very sunlight and brisk autumnal air seemed to have heard the tidings, and to invite the world to begin to live again at ease. Certainly many a sad figure and many a broken soul must slink henceforth on crutches, a mere survival; but they, too, will die off gradually. The grass soon grows over a grave.
So musing, I suddenly heard a once familiar strain, now long despised and out of favour, the old tune ofTipperary. In a coffee-house frequented at that hour some wounded officers from the hospital at Somerville were singing it, standing near the bar; they were breaking all rules, both of surgeons and of epicures, and were having champagne in the morning. And good reason they had for it. They were reprieved, they should never have to go back to the front, their friends—such as were left—would all come home alive. Instinctively the old grumbling, good-natured, sentimental song, which they used to sing when they first joined, came again into their minds. It had been indeed a long, long way to Tipperary. But they had trudged on and had come round full circle; they were in Tipperary at last.
I wonder what they thinkTipperarymeans—for this is a mystical song. Probably they are willing to leave it vague, as they do their notions of honour or happiness or heaven. Their soldiering is over; they remember, with a strange proud grief, their comrades who died to make this day possible, hardly believing that it ever would come; they are overjoyed, yet half ashamed, to be safe themselves; they forget their wounds; they see a green vista before them, a jolly, busy, sporting, loving life in the old familiar places. Everything will go on, they fancy, as if nothing had happened.
Good honest unguided creatures! They are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace. If experience could teach mankind anything, how different our morals and our politics would be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady I If we knew ourselves, our conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect all our passions, if we knew the world. As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in the dark; each generation breaks its egg-shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions, and rushes down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or become wise too late and to no purpose. These young men are no rustics, they are no fools; and yet they have passed through the most terrible ordeal, they have seen the mad heart of this world riven and unmasked, they have had long vigils before battle, long nights tossing with pain, in which to meditate on the spectacle; and yet they have learned nothing. The young barbarians want to be again at play. If it were to be only cricket or boating, it would be innocent enough; but they are going to gamble away their lives and their country, taking their chances in the lottery of love and of business and of politics, with a sporting chance thrown in, perhaps, of heaven. They are going to shut out from view everything except their topmost instincts and easy habits, and to trust to luck. Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war—perhaps the last of all wars—is over!
Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war. Not that non-existence deserves to be called peace; it is only by an illusion of contrast and a pathetic fallacy that we are tempted to call it so. The church has a poetical and melancholy prayer, that the souls of the faithful departed may rest in peace. If in that sigh there lingers any fear that, when a tomb is disturbed, the unhappy ghost is doomed to walk more often abroad, the fear is mad; and if it merely expresses the hope that dead men's troubles are over, the wish is superfluous; but perhaps we may gloss the old superstition, and read into it the rational aspiration that all souls in other spheres, or in the world to come upon earth, might learn to live at peace with God and with things. That would be something worth praying for, but I am afraid it is asking too much. God—I mean the sum of all possible good—is immutable; to make our peace with him it is we, not he, that must change. We should need to discover, and to pursue singly, the happiness proper to our nature, including the accidents of race and sex and the very real advantages of growing old and of not living for ever; and we should need to respect without envying all other forms of the good. As to the world of existence, it is certainly fluid, and by judicious pressure we may coax some parts of it into greater conformity with our wills; yet it is so vast, and crawls through such ponderous, insidious revolutions, all so blind and so inimical to one another, that in order to live at peace with things we should need to acquire a marvellous plasticity, or a splendid indifference. We should have to make peace with the fact of war. It is the stupid obstinacy of our self-love that produces tragedy, and makes us angry with the world. Free life has the spirit of comedy. It rejoices in the seasonable beauty of each new thing, and laughs at its decay, covets no possessions, demands no agreement, and strives to sustain nothing in being except a gallant spirit of courage and truth, as each fresh adventure may renew it.
This gallant spirit of courage and truth, you young men had it in those early days when you first sangTipperary; have you it still, I wonder, when you repeat the song? Some of you, no doubt. I have seen in some of you the smile that makes light of pain, the sturdy humility that accepts mutilation and faces disability without repining or shame; armless and legless men are still God's creatures, and even if you cannot see the sun you can bask in it, and there is joy on earth—perhaps the deepest and most primitive joy—even in that. But others of you, though you were driven to the war by contagious example, or by force, are natural cowards; you are perhaps superior persons, intellectual snobs, and are indignant at having been interrupted in your important studies and made to do useless work. You are disgusted at the stupidity of all the generals, and whatever the Government does is an outrage to your moral sense. You were made sick at the thought of the war before you went to it, and you are sicker of it now. You are pacifists, and you suspect that the Germans, who were not pacifists, were right after all. I notice you are not singingTipperarythis morning; you are too angry to be glad, and you wish it to be understood that you can't endure such a vulgar air. You are willing, however, to sip your champagne with the rest; in hospital you seem to have come forward a little socially; but you find the wine too dry or too sweet, and you are making a wry face at it.
Ah, my delicate friends, if the soul of a philosopher may venture to address you, let me whisper this counsel in your ears: Reserve a part of your wrath; you have not seen the worst yet. You suppose that this war has been a criminal blunder and an exceptional horror; you imagine that before long reason will prevail, and all these inferior people that govern the world will be swept aside, and your own party will reform everything and remain always in office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first taste of reality. It should teach you to dismiss all your philosophies of progress or of a governing reason as the babble of dreamers who walk through one world mentally beholding another. I don't mean that you or they are fools; heaven forbid. You have too much mind. It is easy to behave very much like other people and yet be possessed inwardly by a narcotic dream. I am sure the flowers—and you resemble flowers yourselves, though a bit wilted—if they speculate at all, construct idealisms which, like your own, express their inner sensibility and their experience of the weather, without much resemblance to the world at large. Their thoughts, like yours, are all positings and deductions and asseverations of what ought to be, whilst the calm truth is marching on unheeded outside. No great harm ensues, because the flowers are rooted in their places and adjusted to the prevailing climate. It doesn't matter what they think. You, too, in your lodgings in Chelsea, quite as in Lhassa or in Mount Athos, may live and die happy in your painted cells. It is the primitive and the ultimate office of the mind to supply such a sanctuary. But if you are ever driven again into the open, if the course of events should be so rapid, that you could catch the drift of it in your short life (since you despise tradition), then you must prepare for a ruder shock. There is eternal war in nature, a war in which every cause is ultimately lost and every nation destroyed. War is but resisted change; and change must needs be resisted so long as the organism it would destroy retains any vitality. Peace itself means discipline at home and invulnerability abroad—two forms of permanent virtual war; peace requires so vigorous an internal regimen that every germ of dissolution or infection shall be repelled before it reaches the public soul. This war has been a short one, and its ravages slight in comparison with what remains standing: a severe war is one in which the entire manhood of a nation is destroyed, its cities razed, and its women and children driven into slavery. In this instance the slaughter has been greater, perhaps, only because modern populations are so enormous; the disturbance has been acute only because the modern industrial system is so dangerously complex and unstable; and the expense seems prodigious because we were so extravagantly rich. Our society was a sleepy glutton who thought himself immortal and squealed inexpressibly, like a stuck pig, at the first prick of the sword. An ancient city would have thought this war, or one relatively as costly, only a normal incident; and certainly the Germans will not regard it otherwise.
Existence, being a perpetual generation, involves aspiration, and its aspiration envelops it in an atmosphere of light, the joy and the beauty of being, which is the living heaven; but for the same reason existence, in its texture, involves a perpetual and a living hell—the conflict and mutual hatred of its parts, each endeavouring to devour its neighbour's substance in the vain effort to live for ever. Now, the greater part of most men's souls dwells in this hell, and ends there. One of their chief torments is the desire to live without dying—continual death being a part of the only possible and happy life. We wish to exist materially, and yet resent the plastic stress, the very force of material being, which is daily creating and destroying us. Certainly war is hell, as you, my fair friends, are fond of repeating; but so is rebellion against war. To live well you must be victorious. It is with war as with the passion of love, which is a war of another kind: war at first against the beloved for favour and possession; war afterwards against the rest of the world for the beloved's sake. Often love, too, is a torment and shameful; but it has its laughing triumphs, and the attempt to eliminate it is a worse torture, and more degrading. When was a coward at peace? Homer, who was a poet of war, did not disguise its horrors nor its havoc, but he knew it was the shield of such happiness as is possible on earth. If Hector had not scoured the plain in his chariot, Paris could not have piped upon the slopes of Ida, nor sported with his sheep and his goddesses upon the green. The merchants of Crete or Phoenicia could not have drawn up their black keels upon the beach, if the high walls of Ilium had not cast their protecting shadow on their bales of merchandise, their bags of coin, and their noisy bargaining. When Hector was no more and the walls were a heap of dust, all the uses of peace vanished also: ruin and utter meanness came to inhabit that land, and still inhabit it. Nor is war, which makes peace possible, without occasions in which a free spirit, not too much attached to existence, may come into its own. Homer shows us how his heroes could gather even from battle a certain harvest of tenderness and nobility, and how above their heads, half seen through the clouds of dust and of pain, flew the winged chariots of the gods, and music mingled with their banquet.