V - THE FLAG OF THE WORLD
When I was a boy there were two curious men
running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used
the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special
idea of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was
that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation
was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist
thought it as bad as it could be. Both these statements being obviously raving
nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations. An optimist could not
mean a man who thought everything right and nothing wrong. For that is
meaningless; it is like calling everything right and nothing left. Upon the
whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good
except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except
himself. It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but
suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl, "An
optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks
after your feet." I am not sure that this is not the best definition of
all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it. For there might, perhaps,
be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks
merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier
thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road.
But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of
the optimist and the pessimist. The assumption of it is that a man criticises
this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new
suite of apartments. If a man came to this world from some other world in full
possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of midsummer
woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for
lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea
view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he
begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and
often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To
put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he
has any admiration.
In the last chapter it has been said that the
primary feeling that this world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed
in fairy tales. The reader may, if he likes, put down the next stage to that
bellicose and even jingo literature which commonly comes next in the history of
a boy. We all owe much sound morality to the penny dreadfuls. Whatever the
reason, it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude towards life can be
better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of
criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is
more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a
lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is
the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more
miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is
too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a
thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for
loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic
thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly,
optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.
Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate
thing—say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find
the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It
is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely
cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to
approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The
only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a
transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who
loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles;
Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration
is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable.
A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A
lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as
mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or
two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere
fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact,
is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and
you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred
well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had
loved her.
The eighteenth-century theories of the social
contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as
they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of
content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were
wrong, in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics
directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by one
man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me";
there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having
said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place." They gained their
morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They
fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not
cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that
they were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document known to
most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten
Commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely
military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark
across a certain desert. Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity.
And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a
holiday for men.
If it be granted that this primary devotion to a
place or thing is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very
peculiar fact. Let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is
a sort of universal patriotism. What is the matter with the pessimist? I think
it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the
matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated, without undue
bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend. And what is the matter with
the candid friend? There we strike the rock of real life and immutable human
nature.
I venture to say that what is bad in the candid
friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back— his own
gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt,
not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of
anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the
anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing
actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no
patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering
intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff
until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers
honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he
is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are
ruined," and is not sorry at all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to
be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to
strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it. Because he is
allowed to be pessimistic as a military adviser he is being pessimistic as a
recruiting sergeant. Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic
anti-patriot) uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away
the people from her flag. Granted that he states only facts, it is still
essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that
twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know
whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods,
or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men.
The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he
chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises—he has not
this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil of the man
commonly called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt that the optimist, wishing
to defend the honour of this world, will defend the indefensible. He is the
jingo of the universe; he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong." He
will be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of
front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances.
He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. All this (which is true of
a type of optimist) leads us to the one really interesting point of psychology,
which could not be explained without it.
We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the
only question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? If you like
to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? Now, the
extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak
defence of everything) comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism
leads to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform. Let me
explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism. The man who is most
likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a
reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a
reason. If a man loves some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may
find himself defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply
loves Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem. I
do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the mystic
patriot who reforms. Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest among those who
have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The worst jingoes do not love
England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we
may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only
for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if
the Hindoos ruled us. Thus also only those will permit their patriotism to
falsify history whose patriotism depends on history. A man who loves England
for being English will not mind how she arose. But a man who loves England for
being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like
Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon
Conquest. He may end in utter unreason—because he has a reason. A man who loves
France for being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves
France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the
French have done, and France is a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere
else is patriotism more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is
reform more drastic and sweeping. The more transcendental is your patriotism,
the more practical are your politics.
Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point
is in the case of women; and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid
people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people
through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can
hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men
through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost
morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head.
A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is
always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are utter mystics in
their creed are utter cynics in their criticism. Thackeray expressed this well
when he made Pendennis' mother, who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume
that he would go wrong as a man. She underrated his virtue, though she
overrated his value. The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can
safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love
is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
This at least had come to be my position about all
that was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of
reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. A man must be interested in
life, then he could be disinterested in his views of it. "My son give me
thy heart"; the heart must be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have
a fixed heart we have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious
criticism. It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed of
good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance. But this is
exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective. It is, I know, very
common in this age; it was perfectly put in those quiet lines of Matthew Arnold
which are more piercingly blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer—
"Enough we live:—and if a life, With large
results so little rife, Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds,
this pain of birth."
I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think
it freezes our epoch. For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we
need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in
which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger
to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer
delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an
ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can
return at evening.
No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with
this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength
enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough
to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once
feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling
despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but
a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die
for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I
maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who
succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.
I put these things not in their mature logical
sequence, but as they came: and this view was cleared and sharpened by an
accident of the time. Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose
whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told
us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown
his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out
because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that
in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man
could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to
many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is
the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest
in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who
kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as
he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically
considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings:
it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is
not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the
Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of
them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He
defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny
creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs
himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in
fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic
emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost
always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent
meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in
the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in
Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the
suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes—for it makes even
crimes impossible.
About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by
some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The
open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the
opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside
him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so
little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.
One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other
words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or
execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his
heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble
because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually,
he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads,
and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the
suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying
martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early
Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed
the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of
flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is
the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.
This was the first of the long train of enigmas
with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a
peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all
Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian
attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in
modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be
drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line,
the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was
not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian
feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things
that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man
flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in
pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would
pollute his brethren's. I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was
it so fierce?
Here it was that I first found that my wandering
feet were in some beaten track. Christianity had also felt this opposition of
the martyr to the suicide: had it perhaps felt it for the same reason? Had
Christianity felt what I felt, but could not (and cannot) express—this need for
a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous reform of things? Then I
remembered that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it
combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine. Christianity
was accused, at one and the same time, of being too optimistic about the
universe and of being too pessimistic about the world. The coincidence made me
suddenly stand still.
An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy
of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held
in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but
is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain
philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You
might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past
three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon
his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in
unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man
believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic
healing. A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more
than a materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian Scientist of the
twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century.
It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in dealing with
any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but
whether it was given in answer to our question. And the more I thought about
when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt that it had
actually come to answer this question.
It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian
Christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as
if there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on
which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them. They represent that
the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach
simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. They will think me
very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the remarkable thing about
Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity
was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar, but
obvious ideals for all mankind. Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not
the last truism uttered after a long talk. Only the other day I saw in an
excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when
stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his
armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner
Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to
destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration. But it
would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius,
were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity,
their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal
care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that
dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective
moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not
hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the
morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the
morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the
amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is
the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish
egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable
forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of
all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any
one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from
the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the
god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let
Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones
worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god
within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with
violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to
behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.
The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the
Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear
as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not
worship the sun and moon. If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate
them; to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn insects
alive. He thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke, he may give his
neighbour measles. He thinks that because the moon is said to drive men mad, he
may drive his wife mad. This ugly side of mere external optimism had also shown
itself in the ancient world. About the time when the Stoic idealism had begun
to show the weaknesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had
begun to show the enormous weaknesses of optimism. Nature worship is natural
enough while the society is young, or, in other words, Pantheism is all right
as long as it is the worship of Pan. But Nature has another side which
experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say
of the god Pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to
Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves
Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he
is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn
in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end
of the day, he is bathing in hot bull's blood, as did Julian the Apostate. The
mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature
must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not
worshipped. Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously. If they are, we
end where the pagan nature worship ended. Because the earth is kind, we can
imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about
sexuality. Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination.
The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything that was
bad.
On the other side our idealist pessimists were
represented by the old remnant of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius and his friends
had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the
god within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature, and hardly any hope of
any virtue in society. They had not enough interest in the outer world really
to wreck or revolutionise it. They did not love the city enough to set fire to
it. Thus the ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma. The only
people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up; and the virtuous
people did not care enough about them to knock them down. In this dilemma (the
same as ours) Christianity suddenly stepped in and offered a singular answer,
which the world eventually accepted as THE answer. It was the answer then, and
I think it is the answer now.
This answer was like the slash of a sword; it
sundered; it did not in any sense sentimentally unite. Briefly, it divided God
from the cosmos. That transcendence and distinctness of the deity which some
Christians now want to remove from Christianity, was really the only reason why
any one wanted to be a Christian. It was the whole point of the Christian
answer to the unhappy pessimist and the still more unhappy optimist. As I am
here only concerned with their particular problem, I shall indicate only
briefly this great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of the creating or
sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they must be
verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God in all things as if he
were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has, in his very name, the idea of being
unrolled like a carpet. All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this
charge. The only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can,
with such a phrase, cover a distinct IDEA about the origin of things. I think
one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk about
evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian theism was this, that God was
a creator, as an artist is a creator. A poet is so separate from his poem that
he himself speaks of it as a little thing he has "thrown off." Even
in giving it forth he has flung it away. This principle that all creation and
procreation is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as
the evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman loses a
child even in having a child. All creation is separation. Birth is as solemn a
parting as death.
It was the prime philosophic principle of
Christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the
poet from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true
description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world. According to
most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to
Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a
poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had
necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a
great mess of it. I will discuss the truth of this theorem later. Here I have
only to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma we
have discussed in this chapter. In this way at least one could be both happy
and indignant without degrading one's self to be either a pessimist or an
optimist. On this system one could fight all the forces of existence without
deserting the flag of existence. One could be at peace with the universe and
yet be at war with the world. St. George could still fight the dragon, however
big the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the mighty
cities or bigger than the everlasting hills. If he were as big as the world he
could yet be killed in the name of the world. St. George had not to consider
any obvious odds or proportions in the scale of things, but only the original
secret of their design. He can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is
everything; even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of
its open jaws.
And then followed an experience impossible to
describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge
and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent
connection—the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the
world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without
trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found
this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the
dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from
Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world—it had
evidently been meant to go there— and then the strange thing began to happen.
When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after
another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I
could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a
kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were
repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after
instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I
was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress.
And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid
behind me. The whole land was lit up, as it were, back to the first fields of
my childhood. All those blind fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I
have tried in vain to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and
sane. I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it
was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say
that grass was the wrong colour than say it must by necessity have been that
colour: it might verily have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on
the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant
the whole doctrine of the Fall. Even those dim and shapeless monsters of
notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped
quietly into their places like colossal caryatides of the creed. The fancy that
the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cosy, had a fulfilled
significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight
of the artist; to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used,
but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship— even that had
been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to
Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden
ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.
But the important matter was this, that it
entirely reversed the reason for optimism. And the instant the reversal was
made it felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket. I had
often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of
pessimism. But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for
this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the
world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do NOT fit in to the
world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like
any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had
learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as
odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's
pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the
Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything
in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and
again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in
acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the WRONG place, and my soul sang
for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated
forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had
always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could
feel homesick at home.
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