CHESTERTON-VARIED TYPES - THOMAS CARLYLE
The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not
deliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false
innocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution,
who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peasantry for the enormous
expenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life of
peasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the
necessary outcome of all our systems and speculations and of our deep
and continuous contemplation of things. For the universe is like
everything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually before
we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that
we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are
contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to
simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always
sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as
if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and,
suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and
staring face.
Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are
upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more
fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to
undermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man,
classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist,
who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with
colourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, going
yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical eye, which alone is
certain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey face. Then comes
the Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is certain, man is
a creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great writers of
our time represent in one form or another this attempt to reestablish
communication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more roughly
and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the
return to nature consists in drinking no wine; some think that it
consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think
that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into
ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into
very ineffectual British War Office bayonets. It is natural, according
to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself
with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionist, to
kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would
be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the
claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is
interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of
paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth
of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike
in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the
return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of
fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to
nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he
can reject.
Now, this heroic desire to return to nature, is, of course, in some
respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own
tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and
soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but
characteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It is
impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if
attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail in
the sense that it vitally important, if it is to discharge its real
duty, that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see
nature, especially our own nature, face to face, is a folly; it is even
a blasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy-tale, who
should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would
find his tail growing like a tree in the meadows at the end of the
world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search
of nature, when seen from the outside, looks very like the gyrations of
the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity,
much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is
omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think
that she is heeding us least. "Thou art a God that hidest Thyself," said
the Hebrew poet. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a
man's back that the spirit of nature hides.
It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to
all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We
feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on
complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments, that a man cannot
make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far
more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of
the pomp and sumptuousness of the world's history was simple in the
truest sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the
work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.
"King Solomon brought merchant men
Because of his desire
With peacocks, apes, and ivory,
From Tarshish unto Tyre."
But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a
part of his folly--I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoy, we feel,
would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at "Solomon in
all his glory." With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step
further. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the
shameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field.
The new collection of "Tales from Tolstoy," translated and edited by Mr.
R. Nisbet Bain, is calculated to draw particular attention to this
ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy's work. In one sense, and that the
deepest sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and noble
appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is
pretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is, that an
artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his
landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique--all the part of his
work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by
the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his
opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the
ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the
bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real
moral of Tolstoy comes out constantly in these stories, the great moral
which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably
unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently
disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all
the tales, the folklore simplicity with which "a man or a woman" are
spoken of without further identification, the love--one might almost say
the lust--for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood,
and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient
kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man--these
influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and
tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene
purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small
sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect
to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan
and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy
has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist
who is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man.
It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with
Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a
man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of
humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that
dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a
man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending
emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of
their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to
believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the
earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the
landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that
which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is
difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable
insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay
the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search
after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more
natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it
would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest
kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done,
accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called,
the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.
The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance. It
represents the re-assertion of a certain awful common sense which
characterised the most extreme utterances of Christ. It is true that we
cannot turn the cheek to the smiter; it is true that we cannot give our
cloak to the robber; civilisation is too complicated, too vain-glorious,
too emotional. The robber would brag, and we should blush; in other
words, the robber and we are alike sentimentalists. The command of
Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached
to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was suddenly stricken with a
sense of humour it would find itself mechanically fulfilling the Sermon
on the Mount. It is not the plain facts of the world which stand in the
way of that consummation, but its passions of vanity and
self-advertisement and morbid sensibility. It is true that we cannot
turn the cheek to the smiter, and the sole and sufficient reason is that
we have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his followers have shown that they
have the pluck, and even if we think they are mistaken, by this sign
they conquer. Their theory has the strength of an utterly consistent
thing. It represents that doctrine of mildness and non-resistance which
is the last and most audacious of all the forms of resistance to every
existing authority. It is the great strike of the Quakers which is more
formidable than many sanguinary revolutions. If human beings could only
succeed in achieving a real passive resistance they would be strong with
the appalling strength of inanimate things, they would be calm with the
maddening calm of oak or iron, which conquer without vengeance and are
conquered without humiliation. The theory of Christian duty enunciated
by them is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can,
conquer by persuasion. In their mythology St. George did not conquer the
dragon: he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of
milk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero would
have turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred the
Great. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing with
the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summed
up in the celebrated verse of Mr. Edward Lear:
"There was an old man who said, 'How
Shall I flee from this terrible cow?
I will sit on a stile and continue to smile
Till I soften the heart of this cow.'"
Their confidence in human nature is really honourable and magnificent;
it takes the form of refusing to believe the overwhelming majority of
mankind, even when they set out to explain their own motives. But
although most of us would in all probability tend at first sight to
consider this new sect of Christians as little less outrageous than some
brawling and absurd sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall into a
singular error in doing so. The Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come
to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our
modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion
more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars.
From the point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered
almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It
turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially
possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty
casket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider this
phenomenon as it realty is.
The religion of Christ has, like many true things, been disproved an
extraordinary number of times. It was disproved by the Neo-Platonist
philosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth upon
its startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many of
the sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second and
supremely striking embodiment, the religion of Puritanism, was about to
triumph over many kings and civilise many continents. We all agree that
these schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but we
all believe naturally and inevitably that the negation of our own day
is really a breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a
Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century,
like a schoolboy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression are
symbols of the end of the world. In our day the great irreligionists who
did nothing but dethrone God and drive angels before them have been
outstripped, distanced, and made to look orthodox and humdrum. A newer
race of sceptics has found something infinitely more exciting to do than
nailing down the lids upon a million coffins, and the body upon a single
cross. They have disputed not only the elementary creeds, but the
elementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience. They
have arraigned civilisation as openly as the materialists have arraigned
theology; they have damned all the philosophers even lower than they
have damned the saints. Thousands of modern men move quietly and
conventionally among their fellows while holding views of national
limitation or landed property that would have made Voltaire shudder like
a nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and wildest phase of this
saturnalia of scepticism, the school that goes furthest among thousands
who go so far, the school that denies the moral validity of those ideals
of courage or obedience which are recognised even among pirates, this
school bases itself upon the literal words of Christ, like Dr. Watts or
Messrs. Moody and Sankey. Never in the whole history of the world was
such a tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of an ancient creed.
Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven
asunder, or the sun did stand still at midday. We are faced with the
phenomenon that a set of revolutionists whose contempt for all the
ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen,
who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the
gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot rid
themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes
written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it
something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in
its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees
the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of
a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark
sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, contain in
themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.
This value which we have above suggested unquestionably belongs to the
Tolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With their
strange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offer
a tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It cannot
but be remarkable to watch a revolution in which both the rulers and the
rebels march under the same symbol. But the actual theory of
non-resistance itself, with all its kindred theories, is not, I think,
characterised by that intellectual obviousness and necessity which its
supporters claim for it. A pamphlet before us shows us an extraordinary
number of statements about the new Testament, of which the accuracy is
by no means so striking as the confidence. To begin with, we must
protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time.
When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all
what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had
expressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of question and
answer:
Q. "How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words?"
A. "Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even as your Father; your Father in
the spirit world is merciful, is perfect."
There is nothing in this, perhaps, which Christ might not have said
except the abominable metaphysical modernism of "the spirit world"; but
to say that it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it is
recorded that He preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple and
unadulterated untruth. The author should know that these words have
meant a thousand things to a thousand people, and that if more ancient
sects had paraphrased them as cheerfully as he, he would never have had
the text upon which he founds his theory. In a pamphlet in which plain
printed words cannot be left alone, it is not surprising if there are
mis-statements upon larger matters. Here is a statement clearly and
philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with
flatly denying: "The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should take
special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign
countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have
an antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people,
and those who are in sympathy with us." I should very much like to know
where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent,
unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of
regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that
there were certain persons whom He specially loved. It is most
improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own.
The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest
compliment He paid was, "Behold an Israelite indeed." The author has
simply confused two entirely distinct things. Christ commanded us to
have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to
speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering
nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us must
be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we
love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as
sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards.
Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity; He loved
men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a
gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure
to think of an equally distributed affection is that their love of
humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their
own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.
But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up the
teaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and
ingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching--its
absolute spontaneity. The abyss between Christ and all His modern
interpreters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, except
with His finger in the sand. The whole is the history of one continuous
and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it
before these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deduced
afterwards. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any
elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle
words that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the
sun was darkened at noonday.
Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we
know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall not
know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may
never understand Savonarola.
The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from
calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the
ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy:
the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers saved
us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil compared
with which all these are fleabites, the most desolating curse that can
fall upon men or nations, and it has no name except we call it
satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order;
not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but from
luxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous
psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name
has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and
civilisation potentially the end of man.
For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his
day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern
rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards,
dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of
Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the
crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not
be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely
picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish
enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate
the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is
precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist.
He saw, that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen
jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms;
that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and
pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics
and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not
always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist
would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred
of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are
sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.
Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making
war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless
quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which
all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the
sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that
clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as
to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has
truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally
anti-aesthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli,
and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity
are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than
for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently
the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires
a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.
The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a
civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads
to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old
with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The
monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of
imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of
imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as
it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be
surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the
stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist.
Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that
of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learnt
to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is the
doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which
Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is
nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings.
Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical with democracy, is the
hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as
the saying that they are all the sons of God.
Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered
to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the
present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for
mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an
improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men
as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to
fear. We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those
which awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola--a hedonism that is
more sick of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense
that seeks the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In
many modern works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly
Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The
bankrupt and depraved imagination does not see that a living man is far
more dramatic than a dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the
Medici, goes the falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for
the strong man which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is
worshipped as he is worshipped by the readers of the "Bow Bells
Novelettes," and for the same reason--a profound sense of personal
weakness. That tendency to devolve our duties descends on us, which is
the soul of slavery, alike whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs
or emperors. Against all this the great clerical republican stands in
everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival's success. The
issue is still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of
liberty and the license of slavery, between the perils of truth and the
security of silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of
pleasure. The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among
us, men for whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the
moment, men to whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp
and wintry spring. They have an art, a literature, a political
philosophy, which are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon
the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their
statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while "Macbeth" is in
comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their
campaigns and battles are always called triumphant, while Caesar and
Cromwell wept for many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell
of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole
nature recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer
merely a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.
This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent
his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.
Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a
charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have
understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them
from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and
sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent
danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also
are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.
Mr. M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works
of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much
exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of
incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment
more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael
Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other,
and burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow
transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.
Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own
high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now
dwindling, schools of severely technical and aesthetic criticism have
been unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if
there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is
in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquire
whether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott,
is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any
case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects
carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the
incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange.
It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter
could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are
neglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it
exists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like
the beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thing
that in literature alone a house should be despised because it is too
large, or a host impugned because he is too generous. If romance be
really a pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader's
consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is
difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, it
seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some
disproportion. If some of Scott's stories are dull and dilatory, it is
not because they are giants, but because they are hunchbacks or
cripples. Scott was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I
do not think that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan on
which his stories are built was by any means an imperfection. He
arranged his endless prefaces and his colossal introductions just as an
architect plans great gates and long approaches to a really large
house. He did not share the latter-day desire to get quickly through a
story. He enjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a
story like a pill, that it should do him good afterwards. He desired to
taste it like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time.
The reader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air of
immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. We should not
be surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heart
of hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without
either beginning or close.
Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will never
be understood until Romance is understood, and that will be only when
Time, Man, and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott had more than
any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these
days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises
from one fundamental mistake--the idea that romance is in some way a
plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the
outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have
grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life, but
absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man's existence is a
dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like
toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege
and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
The boast of the realist (applying what the reviewers call his scalpel)
is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow
incision, if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins.
Deeper than all these lies a man's vision of himself, as swaggering and
sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of can-dour unearths
innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called
romance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but
it does not perceive the deepest of sins--the sin of vanity--vanity
which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that
is not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.
In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romance
we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or adventure
are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a plot or the
multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is, like tragedy
or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and elemental
reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul is evoked
in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation of certain
human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered wooden
bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber. In the
selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance as in a
net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. His finest scenes
affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream. They have the same
quality which is often possessed by those nocturnal comedies--that of
seeming more human than our waking life--even while they are less
possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the old beggar
crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the tide closes
around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of practical
situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only be called
boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible sunset. Rob
Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie,
draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the dazzling
external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that plain
and humourous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of romance
which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhaps the most
profoundly thrilling of all Scott's situations is that in which the
family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which may or
may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princely
possession. Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of a
ridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolous
old lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say nothing about what makes
these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that
here the wind blows strong.
It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousness
that Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of the
contemporary crop of romancers who have followed the leadership of
Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival of
romance in our time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every case by
this rooted conception that romance consists in the vast multiplication
of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative. The heroes of
Mr. Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out of their hands;
the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when the sword is at
the hip ready for innumerable adventures too terrible to be pictured.
The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supper except in
the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand is employed in
lunging with a rapier. In Scott's heroes, on the other hand, there is no
characteristic so typical or so worthy of humour as their disposition to
linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk of Copmanhurst
or of Mr. Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they are described
as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott's poetic touches. In
short, Mr. Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction that the sole
essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from incident to
incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of the sentiment
of "Oh! still delay, thou art so fair"! more of a certain patriarchal
enjoyment of things as they are--of the sword by the side and the
wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by any means so
much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. How little
the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools and weapons
may be tested by the fact that the most popular story of adventure is
concerned with a man who lived for years on a desert island with two
guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.
Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought
against Scott, particularly in his own day--the charge of a fanciful
and monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The
critic in the Edinburgh Review said indignantly that he could tolerate
a somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it
came to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and
yeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about
that critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly
imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion's
sake. Not being himself romantic, he could not understand that Scott
valued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was a
dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love,
as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the
profound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants is
this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own
inherent characteristics, the child's love of the toughness of wood, the
wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was with
Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhaps
the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not the
only characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had a
character and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in the
matter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the
animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a
menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably
fascinating--it was a two-handed sword.
There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which is
little appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost in
recent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is
compounded of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and
Scott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature
had failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudal
heroes in the "Waverley Novels" retort upon each other with a passionate
dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, which can hardly be
paralleled in political eloquence except in "Julius Caesar." With a
certain fiery impartiality which stirs the blood, Scott distributes his
noble orations equally among saints and villains. He may deny a villain
every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling
word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of
Scott's most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity,
for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting
miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Though
his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king.
This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of the
passing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of
putting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man's head, but even where
the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems
frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the
scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then
compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing
bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself,
or Athelstane's defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion
upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just
now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating
ourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom.
In politics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence
in the first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders
purely intellectual, like those of an omnibus conductor. In discussing
questions like the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the war
uses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps exaggeratively) would
have used it--the speaker is content with facts and expositions of
facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song in
prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilies
hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: "Ride your ways. Laird
of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram--this day have ye
quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour
burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar
houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may
stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare
does not couch on the hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey
Bertram."
The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott
was not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just
as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object
of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls,
to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have
any chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside
it. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detached criticisms,
but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated with roars of
popular applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shouting any
central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible to think
of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter of eloquence,
the whole question is one of the immediate effect of greatness, such as
is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd to call it merely
superficial; here there is no question of superficiality; we might as
well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely superficial.
The very word "superficial" is founded on a fundamental mistake about
life, the idea that second thoughts are best. The superficial impression
of the world is by far the deepest. What we really feel, naturally and
casually, about the look of skies and trees and the face of friends,
that and that alone will almost certainly remain our vital philosophy to
our dying day.
Scott's bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who
approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child.
We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring
melodramas and adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admit
that it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyond
all question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable to
simplify one's mind at the first signal of the advance of romance. "You
do me wrong," said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. "Many a law, many
a commandment have I broken, but my word, never." "Die," cries Balfour
of Burley to the villain in "Old Mortality." "Die, hoping nothing,
believing nothing--" "And fearing nothing," replies the other. This is
the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the
great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along
with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with
children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves,
and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly
effected.
Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction
by this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of
the modern novelist (such as the work of Mr. Henry James) is primarily
concerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper
and deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which
mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration.
Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is
Mr. Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of "Candida" it is clearly a
part of the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be
eloquent, but he is not eloquent because the whole "G.B.S." condition of
mind renders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires.
Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, the
way that heroes and villains take themselves--especially villains. It is
the custom to call these old romantic poses artificial; but the word
artificial is the last and silliest evasion of criticism. There was
never anything in the world that was really artificial. It had some
motive or ideal behind it, and generally a much better one than we
think.
Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak,
for faults are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet no
adequate valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We have
compiled a complete botanical classification of the weeds in the
poetical garden, but the flowers still flourish, neglected and nameless.
It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff and
pedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl of
eighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr. Johnson. To him, as to
most men of his time, woman was not an individual, but an institution--a
toast that was drunk some time after that of Church and King. But it is
far better to consider the difference rather as a special merit, in that
he stood for all those clean and bracing shocks of incident which are
untouched by passion or weakness, for a certain breezy bachelorhood,
which is almost essential to the literature of adventure. With all his
faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for the great mass of natural
manliness which must be absorbed into art unless art is to be a mere
luxury and freak. An appreciation of Scott might be made almost a test
of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one most reckless and
defective writer, it will be a proof to us that we have erected round
ourselves a false cosmos, a world of lying and horrible perfection,
leaving outside of it Walter Scott and that strange old world which is
as confused and as indefensible and as inspiring and as healthy as he.
CHESTERTON-VARIED TYPES - THOMAS CARLYLE