Chapter VII: Preface (7)

One asks oneself if such a condition of things is fatally necessary. If that were so, then indeed the outlook of the world is dark. If the ideal of quantity before quality, of brute energy, of complacent self-righteousness, is for ever to dominate a large part of the world through the English-speaking peoples, then indeed we may die happy that the memory and the vision of better things were yet extant in our time.

Yet surely it is not necessary. If civilisation is a tradition then we may mould that tradition. We are no longer fatally damned into the world. If our fathers ate sour grapes our teeth are not on edge. And even so far as the influence of race counts, there is yet to be set against it the influence of climate. In sunnier English-speaking lands we may already trace a new foreign element of grace and suavity, a deeper insight into the art of living, clearly due in large measure to sky alone. When races change their sky, unlike individuals, they change their dispositions also.

But if we put aside this factor--though it is one of much significance when we recall the accumulating evidence that under proper conditions the white races can live and flourish in hot climes--are there no reasons for thinking that even the English in England may acquire those aptitudes which make not only for the grosser virtues of civilisation, but also for those finer qualities which alone make life truly worth living? I think there are.

It is common for pessimists of the baser sort to lament the relative decay of English supremacy in manufacturing and commercial energy, and to look enviously at the development in these directions of other and younger lands. Such an attitude is in any case inhuman, since these younger countries, especially Germany, are undertaking the cruder tasks of civilisation in at once a more scientific and a more humane spirit than we have ever been able to achieve. But it is also uncalled for. As a civilisation declines in brutal material energy it gains in spiritual refinement, thus winning more subtle and permanent influence. Egypt in her old age helped to mould young Greece, which in turn as she fell civilised her barbarian Roman conquerors. Of early vigorous Rome nothing remains save the empty echo of heroic virtue; but on the magnificent compost of Roman, Alexandrian, and Byzantine decay we northerners are flourishing even to-day. France has not taken a leading part in the grosser work of modern civilisation, but her laboratories of ideas, her workshops of beauty, above all her skill in the fine art of living, have given her an influence over men’s minds which swarming millions of pale factory hands and an inconceivable tonnage of mercantile shipping have not so far given to us. But in the very dying down of these grosser energies there is hope, for we may be sure that the forces of life are not yet extinct, and that worthier and subtler ends will float before our eyes as the sculleries and outhouse offices of life are gradually removed elsewhere. England, there can be little doubt, is peculiarly fitted to exercise the finer functions of civilisation, if not indeed for the world generally, at all events for those peoples of the globe which are allied to her wholly by language and largely by race. In new countries, in the hurry of cities, in the barren solitude of plains and hills, men have no time or no chance to elaborate the ideals and visions for which they yet thirst; they are not in touch with those great traditions on which alone all worthy and abiding effort must finally rest. The little group of islands hidden in this far corner of the Atlantic, bathed in their everlasting halo of iridescent mist, will be a sacred shrine for fully half the world. It was the womb in which the world’s most energetic race was elaborated; we may be sure that the mother feeling will never die out. Every great name and episode in the slow incubation of the race has its place and association there. Nothing there which is not visibly bathed in that glory which for ever touches us in the far past. In the light of a newer civilisation every aspect of it will claim the picturesque beauty of the past. And if, as Ribot has lately asserted, the factories of this century will haunt the minds of future men with the same picturesque suggestion as the ruins of thirteenth century abbeys to-day haunt us, how rich a treasure England will possess here! Men will come from afar to wander among the ruined factories and furnaces of Lancashire and the Midlands, to gaze at the crumbling charm of those structures once mortared by tears and blood. They will seek the massive whirr of vanished mills at dawn, the prolonged clatter of clogs along the pavement, the flutter of shawls down dark alleys, the echo of brutal forgotten oaths. Their eyes will vainly try to recall the men and women of the Victorian era, huddled together in pathetic self-satisfaction beneath a black pall of smoke and disease and death, playing out the tragedy they called life. A tender melancholy mightier than beauty will cling to the decay of that vanished past.

So far we have been developing the modern applications of that spirit of _simplicity_--of sincere and natural asceticism--which was a chief part of the secret of the Umbrian saint’s charm. Francis--as in an earlier age the great Cynics of Greece, and in a later age the New England transcendentalists--enables us to see that asceticism is a natural instinct; he knew that so far from being an effort to crush the body it was an effort to give elation and freedom to the body--_Gaude, frater corpus!_--and that so far from being an appeal to sorrow it was a perpetual appeal to joy. Let us throw aside the useless burdens of life, he seems to say, the things that oppress body and mind,--care and wealth and learning and books,--that thus we may become free to concentrate ourselves on the natural things of the world, attaining therein the joy of living. That was the simplicity of Francis. There is another vaguer and subtler aspect of his personality which may be expressed by the allied word _purity_. I mean that clearness and perfect crystalline transparency symbolised by water, in which it has its source. That Francis, with all his fine natural instincts, fully realised all the implications of purity, either on its physical or its spiritual sides, one may well doubt. Purity has never been a great Christian virtue, though ever greatly talked about in Christendom; and while the reliance of Francis on instinct carried him far beyond the age and the faith in which he lived, his indifference to the intellectual grip of things which was part of that natural instinct caused him to be often swayed by the conventions and traditions around him.

It has been well said that purity--which in the last analysis is physical cleanness--is the final result of evolution after which Nature is ever striving. When she had attained to the production of naked savage man, a creature no longer encumbered with the care of his fur but freely and constantly bathed by the elements, the perfection of purity was attained. With the wearing of clothes dirt was again brought into the world; and so-called civilised man--except when he possesses leisure for prolonged attention to his person and his clothes--is once more brought to the level of the lower animals, indeed below them, for few animals spend so little time and trouble in attaining cleanliness as garmented man. Pagan classic times, no doubt, cherished a cult of the body which involved a high regard for physical purity. That is the very reason why such purity has never been a Christian or modern virtue. The early Church, feeling profound antagonism to the vices which in classic times were associated with the bath, from the outset frequently denied that there was any need for cleanliness at all. Even so cultured a Christian as Clement of Alexandria would only admit that women should be clean; it was not necessary for men; “the bath is to be taken by women for cleanliness and health, by men for health alone;” in later days the hatred of cleanliness often became quite whole-hearted. Thus it happens that throughout Europe and wherever the influence of Christianity has spread there has been on the whole an indifference to dirt, which is indeed not uncommonly found among degraded peoples untouched by Christianity, but is certainly nowhere else found in association with a grade of culture in most other matters so high. To the Roman the rites of the bath formed one of the very chief occupations of life, and to this race it has happened, as probably to no other ancient race, that their baths have often survived their temples; Rome holds no more memorable relic than the Baths of Caracalla. For the Mohammedan the love of water is part of religion, and the energy and skill with which in its prime Islamic civilisation exploited the free and beautiful use of water, are still to be traced throughout southern Spain. In the fine civilisation of Japan, again, the pursuit of physical purity has ever been a simple and unashamed public duty, and “a Japanese crowd,” says Professor Chamberlain, “is the sweetest in the world.” How different things are in Christendom one need not insist.

It is, however, impossible to overrate the magnitude of the issues which are directly and indirectly enfolded in this question of physical purity. Christianity, with its studied indifference to cleanliness, is, after all, a force from the outside so far as we are concerned; every spontaneous reflective movement of progress involves a reaction against it. On the physical side it is the mark of the better social classes that they are clean, and any striving for betterment among the masses is on the physical side a striving for greater cleanliness. Personal dirtiness is the real and permanent dividing line of classes. The instinctive physical shrinking of the clean person from the dirty person--except at the rare moments when some stronger emotion comes into play--is profound and inevitable. Nearly every form of honest natural vulgarity it is possible to find tolerable and sometimes even charming, but personal physical unwholesomeness remains an impossible barrier. There is no social equality between the clean and the dirty. The question of physical purity lies at the root of the real democratic problem.

Our attitude towards physical purity inevitably determines our attitude towards the body generally. Without the ideal of cleanliness the body becomes impure. It cannot be shown. Complete concealment becomes the ideal of the impure. And however pure and excellent the body may actually be among ourselves, the traditions of the past remain. The Greeks considered the dislike to nakedness as a mark of Persian and other barbarians; the Japanese--the Greeks of another age and clime--had not conceived the reasons for avoiding nakedness until taught by the lustful and shame-faced eyes of western barbarians. Among ourselves it is “disgusting” even to-day to show so much as the foot.[10] We certainly could not imitate St. Francis, who broke with his old life by abandoning his father’s house and all that he owned, absolutely naked.

There is no real line of demarcation between physical purity and spiritual purity, and the spiritual impurity which marks our civilisation is certainly related to the physical impurity which has so long been a tradition of Christendom. Both alike are a consciousness of uncleanness involving a cloak of hypocrisy. We may well recall that _sincerity_, if we carry its history sufficiently far back, is one with physical purity. In some districts of Italy a girl shows that she is chaste by joining in a certain procession and bearing the symbols of purity in her hand. At all events so it was once. All women now walk in the procession of the chaste. In civilised modern life everywhere, indeed, we all walk in that procession, and bright lustful eyes mingled with faint starved eyes both look out incongruously from behind the same monotonously chaste masks. We have forgotten, if we ever knew, that the filthy rags of our righteousness have alike robbed desire of its purity and restraint of its beauty.

How far Francis had instinctively divined the meaning and significance of purity, either on the physical or the moral side, it would be idle to attempt to inquire too precisely. But this delicate and admirable saint brings us into an atmosphere in which the true grace of purity may at least be discerned. His indifference to nakedness, his affection for animals and interest in their loves, his audacious banding together of men and women in one order, his gospel of joy and his everlasting delight in all natural and elementary things, make up a whole inconceivably different from that vision of the world which the great mediæval monks, from St. Bernard downwards, spent their lives in maintaining. He brings us to a point at which we are enabled to go beyond his own insight, a point at which we may not only see that asceticism is a simple and natural instinct, not alone recognise the beauty of sex in flowers and birds, but in human creatures also, and learn at last that the finest secrets of purity are known only to the man and woman who have mingled the scent of their sweat with the wild thyme.

At the present moment it may indeed be said that the purity which is one with sincerity presents itself to us more broadly and more clearly in the road of our evolution than it ever has before. Even on the physical side secrecy is becoming impossible, and as the progress of physical science makes matter more and more transparent to our eyes, sincerity must ever become a more stringent and inevitable virtue. And on the psychic side, also, purity--if you will, sincerity--is even more surely imposing itself. Within our own time we have been privileged to see psychology taken from the study into the laboratory and into the market-place. There is no recess of the soul--however intimate, however, as we have been taught to think, disgusting--that is not now opened to the childlike, all-scrutinising curiosity of science. We may perhaps rebel, but so it is. There are no mysteries left, no noisome abysses of ignorance veiled by the pretty mists of innocence. In the face of this tendency private vice must ever become more difficult; we are learning to detect the whole man in the slightest quiver of his muscles. Thus, again, purity becomes yet more stringent and inevitable. We gaze at all facts now, and find none too mean or too sacred for study. But it is fatal to gaze at certain facts if you cannot gaze purely. In that lies the final triumph of purity. We may rebel, I repeat, but so it is, so it must remain.

I do not wish to insist here on the moral aspects of purity--grave and profound as these are--for I am dealing less with the social aspects of simplicity and purity than with what I would call their religious aspects, their power to win our personal peace and joy. How far we are to-day, at all events in England, from the simplicity and purity of Francis in the search for peace and joy is brought home very clearly to those who have ever made it their business to observe the masses of our population in their finest moments of would-be peace and joy. Many years ago a curious fascination drew me every Bank Holiday to haunt the structure and grounds of the Crystal Palace, near which I then lived. The vision of humanity in the mass, when it has lost the interest which individuals possess, and taken on the more abstract interest belonging to the species, has for me at least always had a certain attraction. But these Bank Holiday crowds had a more special interest. They summed up and wrote large the characteristics of a nation. These thirty thousand persons belonging to the class which by virtue of greater fertility furnishes the ultimate substance of all classes, seemed to reveal to me the heart of my own people. The perpetual, violent movement, the meaningless shouts and yells, the haggard bands of young women standing in the corridors to tramp wearily a treadmill variation of the Irish jig until they fell into an almost hypnotic state, the wistful, weary looks in the dull eyes of these seekers, rushing on among the plaster images of old serene gods, seeing nothing but always moving, moving they knew not whither, faint, yet pursuing they knew not what,--the whole of the northern soul, the English soul above all, was there. On! on! never mind how or where: that seemed the perpetual cry of these pale, lean, awkward youths and women. And I would think of the bands of boys and girls in the mediæval crusading epidemics, starting from the north with the same eyes, asking for Jerusalem at every town, soon to be slain or drowned in unknown obscure ways. Or sometimes I recalled the bas-reliefs in the museum at Naples--that most fascinating of museums--which show how the failing Greek genius concentrated its now spiritualised energy in the forms of Dionysus and his mænads. With eager face grown languid he leans on the great thyrsus, which bends beneath his weight, and in front his mænads, upheld by the ardour of the search, with heads thrown back and flying hair, still beat their cymbals desperately, seeking, until they have grown almost unconscious of search, a far-away joy, an ever-fleeting ideal, of which they have at last forgotten the name. And so for hours my gaze would be fixed on the pathetic vulgarity of those terrible crowds.

Of late I have been able to see how the other vigorous and reproductive race--the race that chiefly shares with England the partition of the uncivilised world--comports itself at its great festivals. The Russians are a profoundly and consciously religious race, and I recall above all the unforgettable scene at the ancient monastery of Troitsa, near Moscow, as it appeared on the festival of the Assumption, when pilgrims, women mostly, in every variety of gay costume, crowded thither on foot from all parts of Russia. There, at length within the walls of that monastery-fortress on the hill at Sergievo, they fervently kiss the sacred relics, and having been served by the dark-robed, long-haired monks with soup and black bread, they lie down and fall asleep, placid and motionless, on all sides. Young women, grasping the pilgrim’s staff, a little droop sometimes in the lips, yet with large brawny thighs beneath the short skirts, stolid great-breasted women of middle age, wrinkled old women decked in their ancient traditional adornments--all this gay-coloured multitude fling themselves down to sleep on the church steps, around its walls, over the silent graves, heaped up anywhere that the march of on-coming pilgrims leaves a little space, tired mænads filled for once with the wine their souls craved, colossal images of immense appeasement. It is the orgy of a strong, silent, much-suffering race, with all the charm of childhood yet upon it, too humane to be ferocious in its energy.

We English subordinate the sensory to the motor side of life, and even find our virtue in so doing. To live in the present, to suffer and to enjoy our actual evil and good, facing it squarely and making our account with it--that we cannot do: that was the way of the Greeks and Romans; it is not our way. We are ever poets and idealists, down to the dregs of life’s cup. We must strive and push, using our muscles to narcotise our senses, ever contemptuous of the people who more fully exercise their senses to grasp the world around them. For the sake of this muscular auto-intoxication we miss the finest moments life has to give. The Japanese masses, who fix their popular festival for the day when the cherry-tree is in finest bloom, and take their families into the woods to sip tea and pass the day deliciously with the flowers, are born to a knowledge of that mystery which Francis painfully conquered. The people to whom such an art of enjoyment is the common practice of the common people may possibly not succeed in sending ugly and shoddy goods to clothe and kill the beautiful skins of every savage tribe under heaven, but we need not fear to affirm that they have learnt secrets of civilisation which are yet hidden from us in England.

The worth of a civilisation, we may be very sure, is more surely measured by its power to multiply among the common people the possibility of having and enjoying such moments than by the mileage of cotton goods its factories can yield, or even by the output of Bibles its weary factory hands can stitch. We can know no moments of finer or purer exhilaration, whether we breathe the bright air of Australian solitudes and watch the virgin hills lie fold within fold beneath the stainless sunlight, or in the dimmer and damper air of this old country recline on Surrey heights by the great beeches of the old deserted Pilgrim’s Way and meditate of the past. There are few things sweeter or more profitable than to lie on the velvety floor of a little pine wood on a forgotten southern height in May, where tall clumps of full-flowered rhododendra blend with the fragrant gorse which spreads down to the sparkling sea, and to throw aside everything and dream. In such moments at such spots we reach the summits of life, learning those secrets of asceticism which Francis knew so well.

Thus by his words and by his deeds Francis still has his significance for us. He brought asceticism from the cell into the fields, and became the monk of Nature. One may doubt whether, as Renan thought, the Song to the Sun is the supreme modern expression of the religious spirit, but without doubt it gathers up vaguely and broadly the things that most surely belong to our eternal peace in this world. That it is the simplest and naturalest things to which eternal joy belongs is the divine secret which makes Francis a prince among saints, and it was by a true inspiration that he dedicated the chief utterance of his worship of joy in life to the sun.

If it should ever chance that a sane instinct of worship is born again on earth among civilised men, let us be sure that nothing will seem more worthy of worship than the sun, the source of that energy out of which we and all our ideals ultimately spring. Some day, again, perhaps, men will greet the rising of the sun at the summer solstice on the hills with music and song and dance, framing their most exquisite liturgical art to the honour of that supreme source of all earthly life. It was natural, doubtless, that at some stage of human progress new-found moral conceptions should intrude themselves as worthier of human worship. But even the cross itself--if not its great rival the lunar Mohammedan crescent--was first the symbol of sun-worship, of the source of life. We may yet rescue that sacred symbol, now fallen to such sorrowful uses, bearing it onwards to sunnier heights of wholeness and joy.

Religions are many, and in the mass they seem to us--blinded to the social functions that religions originally subserved--endlessly harsh and cruel. But in their summits, in their finest personalities, they are simple and natural enough, and alike lovely. Look at the Jesus of the Gospels, the friend of publicans and sinners, the marriage guest at Cana, so tender-hearted in the house of Simon, the author of those sayings of quintessential natural wisdom preserved to us in that string of adorable pearls men call the Sermon on the Mount. Look at the prophet of Islam, when gazing back at the earth as it seemed to recede into the distance at the end of his long career, he counted as first among its claims the simple natural joys: “I love your world because of its women and its perfumes.” And we remember the depths to which Christianity and Mohammedanism have alike fallen. Look, again, at Francis, who in no prim academical sense may be called the first modern apostle of sweetness and light, a man who found joy unspeakable in inhaling the fragrance of flowers, in watching the limpid waters of mountain streams, and whose most characteristic symbol is the soaring lark he loved so well. And we remember that a century later even Chaucer, that sweetest and most sympathetic of poets, can only speak of his friar in words that seem to be of inevitable and unconscious irony. For every religion begins as the glorious living flame of a lovely human personality,--or so it seems,--and continues as a barren cinder-heap. As such, as a Church, whether pagan or Christian, it can scarcely afford us either light or heat.

Why, one asks oneself, is it necessary for me to choose between Paul and Petronius? Why pester me on the one hand with the breastplate of faith and the helmet of salvation, on the other with the feast of Trimalchio and the kisses of Giton? “A plague of both your houses!” We are not barbarians, tortured by a moral law, neither are we all pagans with unmixed instincts of luxury. We are the outcome of a civilisation in which not only has what we are pleased to regard as the sensual fury of the ape and tiger become somewhat chastened, but the ascetic fury of the monk and priest also. Let the child of the south feast still in the house of Trimalchio with unwounded conscience, if he can; we will not forbid him. And let the barbarian still flagellate his tense rebellious nerves with knotted spiritual scourges, if only so can he draw out the best music they yield; we will be the first to applaud. But most of us have little to do with the one or the other. The palmiest days of both ended a thousand years ere we were born. Before the threshold of our modern world was reached Francis sang in the sun and smiled away the spectres that squatted on the beautiful things of the earth. On the threshold of our world Rabelais built his Abbey of Thelème, in whose rule was but one clause, _Fay ce que vouldras_, a rule which no pagan or Christian had ever set up before, because never before except as involved in the abstract conceptions of philosophers, had the thought of voluntary co-operation, of the unsolicited freedom to do well, appeared before European men.

What have we to do also, it may be added, with modernity, with the fashions of an hour? It is well, indeed, to live in the present, whatever that present may be, but sooner or later we are pushed back, weary or disillusioned, on the inspiration of our own personality. All the activity of Francis only wrought a plague of grey friars, scattered like dust on the highways of Europe. But Francis still remains, and all things wither into nothingness in the presence of one natural man who dared to be himself. The best of us can scarcely hope to be more successful than Francis. But at least we may be ourselves. “Whatever happens I must be emerald:” that, Antoninus said, is the emerald’s morality; that must remain our finest affirmation.

Our feet cling to the earth, and it is well that we should learn to grip it closely and nakedly. But the earth beneath us is not all of Nature; there are instincts within us that lead elsewhere, and it is part of the art of living to use naturally all those instincts. In so doing the spiritual burdens which the ages have laid upon us glide away into thin air.

And for us, as for him who wrote _De Imitatione Christi_--however far differently--there are still two wings by which we may raise ourselves above the earth, simplicity, that is to say, and purity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: Thus one learns from the newspapers that the offence of wearing sandals has involved ejection even from so great a centre of enlightenment as the Reading Room of the British Museum, while the mere assertion that an actress appeared on the stage with bare legs was so damaging that it involved an action for slander, a public apology, and the payment of “a substantial sum” in compensation.]

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