IV - THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND
When the business man rebukes the idealism of his
office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one
is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air;
but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief
in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the
world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now
in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I
have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling
lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would
happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the
methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least;
my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my
old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever
about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the
General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention
of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a
fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than
I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence
when I believed in Liberals.
I take this instance of one of the enduring faiths
because, having now to trace the roots of my personal speculation, this may be
counted, I think, as the only positive bias. I was brought up a Liberal, and
have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a
self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can
only pause for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I mean
it, can be stated in two propositions. The first is this: that the things
common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men.
Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more
extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange.
The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us
than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two
legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music
and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by
starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.
This is the first principle of democracy: that the
essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they
hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political
instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in
love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is
that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love,
and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to
playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that
insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For
these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is,
on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing
one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does
them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know
that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they
may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I
merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and
that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is
this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men
themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the
state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.
But there is one thing that I have never from my
youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where
people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is
obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting
to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary
record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the
Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is
appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a
mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated,
more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the
majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written
by the one man in the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that
men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along
with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for
us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great
unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we
should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be
defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the
most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who
merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being
disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being
disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good
man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good
man's opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the
two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the
same idea. We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by
stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official,
for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.
I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had
a bias, it was always a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of
tradition. Before we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content
to allow for that personal equation; I have always been more inclined to
believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and
troublesome literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and
prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest
demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. I would always
trust the old wives' fables against the old maids' facts. As long as wit is
mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases.
Now, I have to put together a general position,
and I pretend to no training in such things. I propose to do it, therefore, by
writing down one after another the three or four fundamental ideas which I have
found for myself, pretty much in the way that I found them. Then I shall
roughly synthesise them, summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion;
then I shall describe my startling discovery that the whole thing had been
discovered before. It had been discovered by Christianity. But of these
profound persuasions which I have to recount in order, the earliest was concerned
with this element of popular tradition. And without the foregoing explanation
touching tradition and democracy I could hardly make my mental experience
clear. As it is, I do not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose
to try.
My first and last philosophy, that which I believe
in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from
a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of
democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe
most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely
reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are
fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal,
though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland
is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges
heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that
criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic
beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I
was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular tradition. Modern
minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the
singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the
gods of brook and bush. That is what the moderns mean when they say that the
ancients did not "appreciate Nature," because they said that Nature
was divine. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the
fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for
the dryads.
But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy
come from being fed on fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could
note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the
chivalrous lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants should be
killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such.
For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more
tradition than the Jacobite. There is the lesson of "Cinderella,"
which is the same as that of the Magnificat— EXALTAVIT HUMILES. There is the
great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved
BEFORE it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the "Sleeping
Beauty," which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday
gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a
sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but
with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak, and
shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a certain way of looking
at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly
ratified by the mere facts.
It might be stated this way. There are certain
sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in
the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the
word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in
fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and
that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it
is (in an iron and awful sense) NECESSARY that Cinderella is younger than the
Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism
about that fact as he pleases: it really must be. If Jack is the son of a
miller, a miller is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful
throne: and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses,
there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and
fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and
began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I
observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that
happened— dawn and death and so on—as if THEY were rational and inevitable.
They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the
fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous
difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You
cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees
not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers
hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named
Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not
be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere
fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the
apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring
without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his
nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose,
of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept
this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there
really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws,
but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental
impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that
does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how
many beans make five.
Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth
in the nursery tales. The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the
apple will fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up
to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the
ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were something
in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the
advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose
either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines
a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the
scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental
connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground.
They do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvellous facts,
but a truth connecting those facts. They do talk as if the connection of two
strange things physically connected them philosophically. They feel that
because one incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible
thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black
riddles make a white answer.
In fairyland we avoid the word "law";
but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call
some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet,
Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales.
The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law
implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely
that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets
shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection
between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what
the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But
we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a
bear could turn into a fairy prince. As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are
further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself
suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears. Granted, then, that
certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them
in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of
science and the "Laws of Nature." When we are asked why eggs turn to
birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother
would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes
fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC. It is not a
"law," for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a
necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no
right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for unalterable law
(as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not
count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do
that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of
account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but
because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the
science books, "law," "necessity," "order,"
"tendency," and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume
an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied
me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books,
"charm," "spell," "enchantment." They express the
arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC
tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is
bewitched.
I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even
mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language
about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express
in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from
another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It
is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the
mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a
sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by
mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as
if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas
there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost
love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In
both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A
sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a
dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist
professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a
dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool
rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree
should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.
This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere
fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy
tales is derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an
instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of
the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we
are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere
life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that
Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being
told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like
realistic tales—because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the
only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read
without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost
pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were
golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green.
They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment,
that they run with water. I have said that this is wholly reasonable and even
agnostic. And, indeed, on this point I am all for the higher agnosticism; its
better name is Ignorance. We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in
all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks
about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot
remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has
forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self
is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt
not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten
our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common
sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for
certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we
call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we
remember that we forget.
But though (like the man without memory in the
novel) we walk the streets with a sort of half-witted admiration, still it is
admiration. It is admiration in English and not only admiration in Latin. The
wonder has a positive element of praise. This is the next milestone to be
definitely marked on our road through fairyland. I shall speak in the next
chapter about optimists and pessimists in their intellectual aspect, so far as they
have one. Here I am only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot
be described. And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was
puzzling. It was an ecstasy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure
because it was an opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected
by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be
in a fairy tale. The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful,
though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in
their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus
when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people
for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the
birthday present of birth?
There were, then, these two first feelings,
indefensible and indisputable. The world was a shock, but it was not merely
shocking; existence was a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise. In fact,
all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from
boyhood. The question was, "What did the first frog say?" And the
answer was, "Lord, how you made me jump!" That says succinctly all
that I am saying. God made the frog jump; but the frog prefers jumping. But
when these things are settled there enters the second great principle of the
fairy philosophy.
Any one can see it who will simply read
"Grimm's Fairy Tales" or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang. For
the pleasure of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy.
Touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin
ethics all virtue is in an "if." The note of the fairy utterance
always is, "You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not
say the word `cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's
daughter, if you do not show her an onion." The vision always hangs upon a
veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing
withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one
thing that is forbidden. Mr. W.B.Yeats, in his exquisite and piercing elfin
poetry, describes the elves as lawless; they plunge in innocent anarchy on the
unbridled horses of the air—
"Ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame."
It is a dreadful thing to say that Mr. W.B.Yeats
does not understand fairyland. But I do say it. He is an ironical Irishman,
full of intellectual reactions. He is not stupid enough to understand
fairyland. Fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people who gape
and grin and do as they are told. Mr. Yeats reads into elfland all the
righteous insurrection of his own race. But the lawlessness of Ireland is a
Christian lawlessness, founded on reason and justice. The Fenian is rebelling
against something he understands only too well; but the true citizen of
fairyland is obeying something that he does not understand at all. In the fairy
tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A
box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A
lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are
forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.
This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is
certainly not lawlessness or even liberty, though men under a mean modern
tyranny may think it liberty by comparison. People out of Portland Gaol might
think Fleet Street free; but closer study will prove that both fairies and
journalists are the slaves of duty. Fairy godmothers seem at least as strict as
other godmothers. Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman
out of nowhere, but she received a command—which might have come out of
Brixton—that she should be back by twelve. Also, she had a glass slipper; and
it cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore.
This princess lives in a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one
sees all things in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not
throw stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of
the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most
easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat. And this fairy-tale sentiment also sank
into me and became my sentiment towards the whole world. I felt and feel that
life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane; and
when the heavens were compared to the terrible crystal I can remember a
shudder. I was afraid that God would drop the cosmos with a crash.
Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the
same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant;
simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed,
was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on
NOT DOING SOMETHING which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it
was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is that to ME this
did not seem unjust. If the miller's third son said to the fairy, "Explain
why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace," the other might
fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace."
If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?"
her godmother might answer, "How is it that you are going there till
twelve?" If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred
winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight
eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth. And it
seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could
not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not
understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture.
The veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the
sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.
For this reason (we may call it the fairy
godmother philosophy) I never could join the young men of my time in feeling
what they called the general sentiment of REVOLT. I should have resisted, let
us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their definition I shall
deal in another chapter. But I did not feel disposed to resist any rule merely
because it was mysterious. Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the
breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn: I was willing to hold the
huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy. It could not well
be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all. At this stage I
give only one ethical instance to show my meaning. I could never mix in the
common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no
restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed,
like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept
his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a
vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing
one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining
that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible
excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility
to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that
he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the
realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of
mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy
on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought
them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for
this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort
of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of
hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet
these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would
not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip.
Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said
that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar
Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar
Wilde.
Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of
the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse
guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so
sanely radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment
was here: that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern
world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my
nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long time to find out that
the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. The really curious thing was
this: that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its
two most essential doctrines. I have explained that the fairy tales founded in
me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which
might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that
before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the
queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world
running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that
collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever
since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.
First, I found the whole modern world talking
scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been,
being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green
because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher
is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He
feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is
pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have
been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of
garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He
feels that something has been DONE. But the great determinists of the
nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had
happened an instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had
happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since
existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very
sure.
The modern world as I found it was solid for
modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I
came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable
repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the
mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It
was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it
as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape.
I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society.
So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked
like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once
stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an
excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing
over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at
once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make
me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to
the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.
All the towering materialism which dominates the
modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is
supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece
of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if
the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known
fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by
life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or
desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or
fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks
because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic
that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as
regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his
life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not
rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my
inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the
sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be
due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be
seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they
specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not
absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in
spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They
always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again
until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in
monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible
that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every
evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity
that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately,
but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal
appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is
younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may
be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the
human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth
a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an
animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has
touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at
the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.
Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant
it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet
each birth be his positively last appearance.
This was my first conviction; made by the shock of
my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always
vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I
began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were WILFUL. I
mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I
had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps
it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and
sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a
purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if
there is a story there is a story-teller.
But modern thought also hit my second human
tradition. It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and
conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness.
Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an
imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was
an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that
the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why
should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a
whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may
be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an
impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared
to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But
Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some
way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men
and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish
and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his evil
influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later
scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H.G.Wells. Many
moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked. But Mr.
Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift up our eyes to the
stars from whence would come our ruin.
But the expansion of which I speak was much more
evil than all this. I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is
in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly
inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this
scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for
ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really
interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The
grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was
like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the
gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man
except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of
all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us
except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty
of all that is divine.
In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that
could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken.
But the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken;
for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either unable to do
things or we were destined to do them. The idea of the mystical condition quite
disappeared; one can neither have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of
breaking them. The largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and
airy outbreak which we have praised in the universe of the poet. This modern
universe is literally an empire; that is, it was vast, but it is not free. One
went into larger and larger windowless rooms, rooms big with Babylonian
perspective; but one never found the smallest window or a whisper of outer air.
Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with
distance; but for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance. So
finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my emotions I began to
argue about it a little; and I soon found that the whole attitude was even
shallower than could have been expected. According to these people the cosmos
was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only (they would say) while it is
one thing, it is also the only thing there is. Why, then, should one worry
particularly to call it large? There is nothing to compare it with. It would be
just as sensible to call it small. A man may say, "I like this vast cosmos,
with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures." But if it
comes to that why should not a man say, "I like this cosy little cosmos,
with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish
to see"? One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments. It is
mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth; it is quite as
sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger than it is. A man chooses
to have an emotion about the largeness of the world; why should he not choose
to have an emotion about its smallness?
It happened that I had that emotion. When one is
fond of anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or
a life-guardsman. The reason is, that anything, however huge, that can be
conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small. If military moustaches
did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object would be vast because
it would be immeasurable. But the moment you can imagine a guardsman you can
imagine a small guardsman. The moment you really see an elephant you can call
it "Tiny." If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a
statuette of it. These people professed that the universe was one coherent
thing; but they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond of
the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it
never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of
vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it
large. For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the
reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness
and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of
sacred thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them
stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun and
the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling.
These subconscious convictions are best hit off by
the colour and tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic
alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of
eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by
allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "Robinson Crusoe,"
which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact
that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of
prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched
from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved
from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool
becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good
exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the
coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought
it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better
exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape:
everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible
adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never
see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius:
and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it
is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great
Might-Not-Have-Been.
But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as
if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's
ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were
two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but
somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets
seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was
glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. I felt economical about
the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I
hoarded the hills. For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a
natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is
literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there
cannot be another one.
Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt
to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life;
the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I
could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more easily
afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first,
that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a
supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation.
But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have
to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic,
true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and
meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the
world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I
thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such
as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of
humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not
drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And
last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that
in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some
primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved
them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel
it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.
