Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Unless people are near in soul they had better not be near in neighbourhood. The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people. And there is a real human reason for this. You think of a remote man merely as a man; that is, you think of him in the right way. Suppose I say to you suddenly--“Oblige me by brooding on the soul of the man who lives at 351 High Street, Islington.” Perhaps (now I come to think of it) you _are_ the man who lives at 351 High Street, Islington. In that case substitute some other unknown address and pursue the intellectual sport. Now you will probably be broadly right about the man in Islington whom you have never seen or heard of, because you will begin at the right end--the human end. The man in Islington is at least a man. The soul of the man in Islington is certainly a soul. He also has been bewildered and broadened by youth; he also has been tortured and intoxicated by love; he also is sublimely doubtful about death. You can think about the soul of that nameless man who is a mere number in Islington High Street. But you do not think about the soul of your next-door neighbour. He is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours. Now, all these are the wrong ends of a man; and a man, like many other things in this world, such as a cat-o’-nine-tails, has a large number of wrong ends, and only one right one. These adjuncts are all tails, so to speak. A dog is a sort of curly tail to a man; a substitute for that which man so tragically lost at an early stage of evolution. And though I would rather myself go about trailing a dog behind me than tugging a pianola or towing a rose-garden, yet this is a matter of taste, and they are all alike appendages or things dependent upon man. But besides his twenty tails, every man really has a head, a centre of identity, a soul. And the head of a man is even harder to find than the head of a Skye terrier, for man has nine hundred and ninety-nine wrong ends instead of one. It is no question of getting hold of the sow by the right ear; it is a question of getting hold of the hedgehog by the right quill, of the bird by the right feather, of the forest by the right leaf. If we have never known the forest we shall know at least that it is a forest, a thing grown grandly out of the earth; we shall realize the roots toiling in the terrestrial darkness, the trunks reared in the sylvan twilight.

But to find the forest is to find the fringe of the forest. To approach it from without is to see its mere accidental outline ragged against the sky. It is to come close enough to be superficial. The remote man, therefore, may stand for manhood; for the glory of birth or the dignity of death. But it is difficult to get Mr. Brown next door (with whom you have quarrelled about the creepers) to stand for these things in any satisfactorily symbolic attitude. You do not feel the glory of his birth; you are more likely to hint heatedly at its ingloriousness. You do not, on purple and silver evenings, dwell on the dignity and quietude of his death; you think of it, if at all, rather as sudden. And the same is true of historical separation and proximity. I look forward to the same death as a Chinaman; barring one or two Chinese tortures, perhaps. I look back to the same babyhood as an ancient Phoenician; unless, indeed, it were one of that special Confirmation class of Sunday-school babies who were passed through the fire to Moloch. But these distant or antique terrors seem merely tied on to the life: they are not part of its texture. Babylonian mothers (however they yielded to etiquette) probably loved their children; and Chinamen unquestionably reverenced their dead. It is far different when two peoples are close enough to each other to mistake all the acts and gestures of everyday life. It is far different when the Baptist baker in Islington thinks of Irish infancy, passed amid Popish priests and impossible fairies. It is far different when the tramp from Tipperary thinks of Irish death, coming often in dying hamlets, in distant colonies, in English prisons or on English gibbets. There childhood and death have lost all their reconciling qualities; the very details of them do not unite, but divide. Hence England and Ireland see the facts of each other without guessing the meaning of the facts. For instance, we may see the fact that an Irish housewife is careless. But we fancy falsely that this is because she is scatter-brained; whereas it is, on the contrary, because she is concentrated--on religion, or conspiracy, or tea. You may call her inefficient, but you certainly must not call her weak. In the same way, the Irish see the fact that the Englishman is unsociable; they do not see the reason, which is that he is romantic.

This seems to me the real value of such striking national sketches as those by Lady Gregory and Mr. Synge, which I saw last week. Here is a case where mere accidental realism, the thing written on the spot, the “slice of life,” may, for once in a way, do some good. All the signals, all the flags, all the declaratory externals of Ireland we are almost certain to mistake. If the Irishman speaks to us, we are sure to misunderstand him. But if we hear the Irishman talking to himself, it may begin to dawn on us that he is a man.

Ireland and the Domestic Drama

In a sense so gigantic that it would have staggered the statesman who once used the phrase, we have called in the new world to redress the balance of the old. The new world has found new worlds to conquer; it has new tasks not only drastic but delicate, not only political but psychological. Among the things which America may yet help us to achieve is one about which I feel strongly and even painfully--the reconciliation, a thousand times thwarted but now a thousand times more necessary, between the English and the Irish. The triangular table of such a peace conference need not, and perhaps had better not, be found in any public building. Rather it should be found in every public house and even in every private house. The change should come through something which is far nobler and more eternal than diplomacy or politics; talk. It should come through the only real public opinion, which is always uttered in private; the public opinion that is a mass of private opinions. A famous Irishman said of the Irish that they were too poetical to be poets, but that they were the greatest talkers since the Greeks. My personal memory does not stretch back to the greatest period of Greece; and perhaps the best talker I ever knew was an Irishman, who is now living in America and (I will confidently affirm) talking in America. It may be true that he is too poetical to be a poet; anyhow, he is not too poetical to be the father of a poet. He is Mr. J. B. Yeats, the father of Mr. W. B. Yeats; and he has lately been persuaded to write and print some of the good things he has said all his life--first in the form of a book of letters, and later of a book of essays, _Essays Irish and American_, published by Mr. Fisher Unwin. But my real satisfaction, in the social and political sense, is to know not that he has written a little, but that he has spoken much; for out of such seemingly lost and wasted words come the real international understandings.

There was a type of detachment during the late war, not to be confused with what I can only call the view of the vulgar peacemonger. It was not the patronizing pacifism of the gentleman who took a holiday in the Alps and said he was “above the struggle”; as if there were any Alp from which the soul can look down on Calvary. There is, indeed, one mountain among them that might be very appropriate to so detached an observer--the mountain named after Pilate, the man who washed his hands. The isolation I mean is far removed from such impudence. The defence of this detachment is that it is not really detached; it was not indifference, but indignation. It was not without foundation; it was only without proportion. Indeed, the real case against it was that while its expression was largely cynical, its motive was largely sentimental. Such was the irritation of Mr. Bernard Shaw; such was the irritation of many Irishmen much more national than Mr. Bernard Shaw. Their irritation can be analysed in a simple phrase; it annoyed them that the men who were wrong should be right. It annoyed them that all the snobs and sneaks of our corrupt parliamentarianism should free the world by accident. In the quarrel with Prussia, they could not really doubt--they did not really doubt--that England was right. But they did doubt whether England had any right to be right.

It is a view I think self-stultifying and even suicidal. For the great work will be remembered and the meaner workers forgotten; and it is madness to praise the Persians on the eve of Marathon because one has quarrelled with some silly archon at Athens, whose very name will be lost in a few years. But it is not a treasonable, far less a treacherous view; and its anger is the same as the popular anger it arouses. This is the Irish mood which common sense and common sympathy must deal with; and this is the peculiar value of real Irish intellectual detachment like that of Mr. Yeats. First of all, a man like Mr. Yeats is so genuinely detached that he can be definite and clear in his sympathy with the Allies. He would be capable of the supreme impartiality of seeing that England could be right although she had been wrong; and even that Ireland could be wrong although she had been wronged. But all the time he would play with a perennial fount of satire and insight on the fundamental spiritual facts that falsify the English position in Ireland. He would make us feel that we were only right in one thing because we were so wrong in many things. There are many examples of this in his little book of essays; but the one I would emphasize here especially is his very vital point about the domestic nature of the whole sociology of Ireland. Here again he is all the more impressive for being in a sense impartial, or even what some would call indifferent. He is not what is called orthodox; he might well be called sceptical. He has cultivated rather Continental æsthetics than Catholic apologetics. It is solely by a serene insight into what his French teachers would call the _vraie verité_ that he sees the way the world ought to go; and pauses upon the phrase, “the return to the home.”

Irish education, he declares, must always depend on the fact that the child’s mind is full of “the drama of the home.” It marks his judicial emancipation that he contrasts this domestic drama favourably with two other types of teaching, one of which would be called conventional and conservative, while the other would be called unconventional and advanced. He criticizes the old English public-school boy; he also criticizes (I grieve to state) the new American woman. The two things called in England the “public school” and the “high school” are counted almost contraries, merely because one is old and the other new. But the critic sees them to be essentially the same; because in both cases the school overshadows the home. Here is a profound practical instance of the root realities of the Irish national claim. Here is a case in which Home Rule literally means the rule of the home. It will never be possible to establish the English fashion in Ireland, and I for one should not pretend to be sorry if it were possible to spread the Irish fashion to England.

For the drama of the home is really very dramatic. It is one of those facts that are confused and hidden by the modern fuss about social machinery, which is the mere scene-shifting and stage-carpentering of the domestic drama. The household is the lighted stage, on which the actors appeal literally to the gods. It is in private life that things happen. A human being is born at home; he generally dies at home, and the social philosophy that can deal with nothing but his coffin carried out of the house is merely a philosophy of boxes and parcels, a philosophy of luggage and labels. Half our human effort is now wasted on mere transit, transport, and exchange; the commonwealth is a clearing-house of cases we never open and presents we never enjoy. Rulers and reformers are a race of rather pedantic porters, always carrying an unknown present to an unknown person, not unfrequently (I fancy) the wrong present to the wrong person. Some of our strenuous social organizers may be content to spend Christmas at Charing Cross Station for the pride of controlling the traffic and the luggage. But I confess I find it more exciting to be at the end of the journey where the Christmas gifts can be seen.

The Japanese

Is it not time that we western people protested against being perpetually browbeaten with the high morality of the Orient--especially of Japan? I remember a curious occasion some years ago when certain able journalists on a Socialist paper in Fleet Street suddenly burst into a blazing excitement about King Asoka. Their relations with this prince could not be called intimate; in point of fact, he died some thousands of years ago somewhere in the middle of Asia. But it seemed that in him we had lost our only reliable moral guide. Religion was a failure, and human life, on the whole, a tragedy; but King Asoka was all right. He was faultlessly just, infinitely merciful, the mirror of the virtues, the prop of the poor. Outsiders were naturally interested in the sources of this revelation. And after some discussion it was discovered and mildly pointed out that this description of the King’s virtues is only found on a few of the King’s own official inscriptions. Old Asoka may have been a very nice man, but we have only his own word for it that he was so nice as all that. And even in the benighted West it might not be impossible to find monarchs who were very just and mighty according to their own proclamations; and courts that were quite exemplary in the _Court Circular_. It had never struck these simple Asokites in Fleet Street that the pompous enunciation of ideals probably meant no more in Bengal than in Birmingham, in the ancient East than in the modern West. It is as if a Hindoo should say that under the sublime French monarchy every King had to be a good Christian; for he was called on coins and parchments “the most Christian King.” It is as if an Arab said that honour was so high and sensitive among English M.P.’s that they constantly called each other, with a burst of admiration, “The Honourable Member for Tooting.” It could hardly be more absurd if the Japanese declared that an English Duke must have an elegant figure, for they had seen an allusion to “His Grace.” And yet it is with just this comic solemnity that we are asked to accept the moral pretensions of the East to-day, and especially the moral pretensions of Japan. My eye has just fallen upon two newspaper paragraphs, each of which exclaimed mournfully what a pity it was that we had not the high conception of chivalric devotion which the Japanese call “Bushido,” or some such name. As if we had no chivalrous principles in Europe! And as if they had no unchivalrous practices in the Far East! If we see no beauty in Excalibur, are we likely to take more seriously the two swords of some outlandish Daimio? If we are truly dumb after the death of Roland, are we likely to shout with enthusiasm at the sight of a _hara-kiri_?

Here is, perhaps, the queerest case of all. Many of these Orientalists have lately been filled with horror at finding that Young Turks still propose to be Turkish, and that advanced Japan is still unaccountably Japanese. Dr. Parker damned Abdul Hamid. These modern humanitarians cannot understand any people wishing to get rid of Abdul Hamid without also wishing to become exactly like Dr. Parker. In the same way they are horrified that the Japanese Government has very abruptly condemned some criminals said to be conspiring against the sacred person of the Mikado. It never seems to occur to them that you can take off a Turk’s turban without taking off his head; and that, under a Brixton bowler, the head would go on thinking the same thoughts. It never seems to strike them that the man of the Far East still has a yellow skin, even when you have also given him a yellow press. But the most astounding version of the thing I found in the following paragraph, the opening paragraph of an article on the Japanese condemnations in an influential weekly paper:

“Japan has followed Western ways in a great many respects, but it is saddening to learn that she is adopting the most reprehensible methods of Russia and Spain in dealing with men and women who have the intelligence to be ahead of their time and have the courage to avow their opinions.”

This really strikes me as colossal. I quite agree that Japan has imitated many Western things; I also think that Japan has mostly imitated the worst Western things. That is the cause of my very defective sympathy with Japan. If the Japanese had imitated Dante or mediæval architecture, if they had imitated Michelangelo or Italian painting, if they had imitated Rousseau and the French Revolution--then I, as a European, should have felt at least flattered. But the Japanese have only imitated the worst things of our worst period: the inhuman commercialism of Birmingham; the inhuman militarism of Berlin. I feel as if I had looked in a mirror and seen a monkey. Or, if this metaphor be counted uncharitable, I feel just as some coarse but kindly man might feel if a little brother began to imitate only his vices. I say this to show how easily I embrace the idea that Japan might borrow from us bad things as well as good; and then I turn with astonishment--nay, consternation--to the paragraph I have quoted. Japan (it seems) has borrowed from Russia and Spain the reprehensible habit of executing people without adequate trial. Trial by jury, with complete reports in the newspapers next day, was the common practice all over the Far East until the dreadful example of Spain somehow crept across two continents and destroyed it. Such a thing as autocratic execution was unknown in the East. Such a notion as that of despotism had never occurred to the Japanese. Up to that last lost moment when they heard of Russia, County Councils had been buzzing in every town, republics established in every island of the East. Before the European came, polling-booths were at the end of every street and ballot-boxes rattled over all Asia. But, alas! they heard of Spain. They heard that in Spain the trials of rebels in arms had occasionally been conducted in secret; and this was enough to destroy the long and famous tradition of free democracy in the Far East.

Now I do think that, compared with this amazing bosh, Gilbert’s _Mikado_, with his punishment “lingering, with boiling oil in it,” might be called a good, solid, sensible picture of Japan. Eastern despotism has many advantages; and I do not doubt that many of its decisions were not “lingering,” but as rough and rapid as they were just. But to what mental state have people come if they cannot see that Europe has been, upon the whole, the home of democracy, and Asia, upon the whole, the home of despotism? Really, Japan is not so barren of resource as this writer supposes. The Far East really has no need to go to Russia for autocracy, or to Spain for torture. It has done very artistic things in that way itself. And if Spain and Russia have indeed terrorized and tortured, it is much more historically likely that they got it from Asia than that Asia ever had the slightest need to borrow it from them.

The plain facts, of course, are perfectly simple. Japan has borrowed our guns and telephones, but she has not borrowed our morality; and, morally speaking, I really do not see why she should. Under all Japan’s elaborate armour-plating she is still the same strange, heathen, sinister, and heroic thing: she has still the two deep Oriental habits, prostration before despotism and ferocity of punishment. She still thinks, in the Eastern style, that a king is infinitely sublime: the brother of the sun and moon. She still thinks, in the Eastern style, that a criminal is infinitely punishable; “something with boiling oil in it.” Why on earth should Japan abandon the adoration of the Mikado and the destruction of his enemies, merely because a scientific apparatus has made the Mikado more victorious and the destruction of his enemies more easy?

Christian Science

I have read recently, within a short period of each other, two books that stand in an odd relation, and illustrate the two ways of dealing with the same truth. The first was Mrs. Eddy’s _Science and Health_, and the other a very interesting collection of medical and ecclesiastical opinion called _Medicine and the Church_. It is edited by Mr. Geoffrey Rhodes, and published by Kegan Paul. Of the first work, the Christian Science Bible, my recollections are somewhat wild and whirling. My most vivid impression is of one appalling passage to the effect that the continued perusal of this book through the crisis of an illness had always been followed by recovery. The idea of reading any book “through the crisis of an illness” is rather alarming. But I incline to agree that anyone who could read _Science and Health_ through the crisis of an illness must be made of an adamant which no malady could dissolve. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to oppose Christian Science on the impossibility or even the improbability of its cures. There is always this tendency for normal men to attack abnormalities on the wrong ground; their arguments are as wrong as their antagonism is right. Thus the only sensible argument against Female Suffrage is that, with her social and domestic powers, woman is as strong as man. But silly people will attack Female Suffrage on the ground that she is weaker than man. Or, again, the only sensible argument against Socialism is that every man ought to have private property. But the wretched Anti-Socialists will give themselves away by trying to maintain that only a few people ought to have property, and even that only in the shape of monstrous American trusts. In the same way, there is great danger that the modern world may give battle to Mrs. Eddy upon the wrong _terrain_, and give her the opportunity (or, rather, her more clear-headed lieutenants) of claiming some popular success. There is such a thing as spiritual healing. No one has ever doubted it except one dingy generation of materialists in chimney-pot hats. If we seem to stand with the materialists, and Mrs. Eddy seems to stand for the healing, she will have a chance of success. A man whose toothache has left off will think with gratitude of the healer, and with some indifference of the scientist explaining the difference between functional and organic toothaches. I will grant what Mrs. Eddy does to people’s bodies. It is what she does to their souls that I object to.

Mrs. Eddy summarizes the substance of her creed in the characteristic sentence: “But in order to enter into the kingdom, the anchor of Hope must be cast beyond the veil of matter into the Shekinah into which Jesus has passed before us.” Now personally I should prefer to sow the anchor of Hope in the furrows of primeval earth; or to fill the anchor to the brim with the wine of human passion; or to urge the anchor of hope to a gallop with the spurs of moral energy; or simply to pluck the anchor, petal by petal, or spell it out letter by letter. But whatever slightly entangled metaphor we take to express our meaning, the essential difference between Mrs. Eddy’s creed and mine is that she anchors in the air, while I put an anchor where the groping race of men have generally put it, in the ground. And this very fact, that we have always thought of hope under so rooted and realistic a figure, is a good working example of how the popular religious sense of mankind has always flowed in the opposite direction to Christian Science. It has flowed from spirit to flesh, and not from flesh to spirit. Hope has not been thought of as something light and fanciful, but as something wrought in iron and fixed in rock.

In short, the first and last blunder of Christian Science is that it is a religion claiming to be purely spiritual. Now, being purely spiritual is opposed to the very essence of religion. All religions, high and low, true and false, have always had one enemy, which is the purely spiritual. Faith-healing has existed from the beginning of the world; but faith-healing without a material act or sacrament--never. It may be the ancient priest, curing with holy water, or the modern doctor curing with coloured water. In either case you cannot do without the water. It may be the upper religion with its bread and wine, or the under religion with its eye of newt and toe of frog: in both cases what is essential is the right materials. Savages may invoke their demons over the dying, but they do something else as well. To do them justice, they dance round the dying, or yell, or do something with their bodies. The Quakers (I mean the really admirable, old-fashioned Quakers) were far more ritualistic than any Ritualists. The only difference between a Ritualist curate and a Quaker was that the Quaker wore his queer vestments all the time. The Peculiar People do without doctors; but they do not do without oil. They are not so peculiar as all that.

The book which Mr. Geoffrey Rhodes has edited is just what was wanted for the fixing of these facts of flesh and spirit. When I was a boy, people used to talk about something which they called the quarrel between religion and science. It would be very tedious to recount the quarrel now; the rough upshot of it was something like this: that some traditions too old to be traced came in vague conflict with some theories much too new to be tested. Many things three thousand years old had forgotten their reason for existing; many things a few years old had not yet discovered theirs. To this day this remains roughly true of all the relations between science and religion. The truths of religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved.

It really looks just now as if a reconciliation would be made between religion and science, a reconciliation well embodied in Mr. Rhodes’s work. I will not any longer dispute the divine mission of Mrs. Eddy. I think she was supernaturally sent on earth to reconcile all the parsons and all the doctors in a healthy hatred of herself. Here _is_ the reconciliation of science and religion; you will find it in _Medicine and the Church_. In this interesting book all the clerics become as medical as they can, and all the doctors become as clerical as they can, with the one honourable object of keeping out the healer. The chaplain sits on one side of the bed and the physician on the other, while the healer hovers around, baffled and furious. And they do well; for there really is a great link between them. It is the link of the union of flesh and spirit, which the heresy of the healer blasphemes. The priest may have taken his spirit with a little flesh, or the doctor his flesh with a little spirit; but the union was essential to both. With the religious there might be much prayer and a little oil; with the scientific there might be much oil (castor oil) and precious little prayer. But no religion disowned sacraments and no doctors disowned sympathy. And they are right to combine together against the great and horrible heresy--the horrible heresy that there can be such a thing as a purely spiritual religion.

The Lawlessness of Lawyers

Judge Parry is one of the men who have done mountains of good merely by being alive; while many judges act as if they were already dead, not to say ... but Judge Parry might misunderstand a misuse of theological imagery. He is somewhat anti-clerical; which seems a waste of talent in a country where there is no clericalism. In his last book, _Law and the Woman_, I find much with which I do not agree, yet nothing which is not agreeable. Not only does he say everything with a disarming humour and candour; but even in error he never loses sight of the large fact: that sex relations do not depend on the exceptional action of law, but on the normal action of creed and custom. Alone among such lawyers he understands that the poor live on laughter as on a fairy-tale; and can be more scientifically studied in the fictions of Jacobs than the facts of Webb. I might pursue the view further than he on some points; as when he would infer the mere enslavement of women from some stories about the selling of wives. He is doubtless correct in detail; but the rhyme he gives to prove his point may almost be said to disprove it. He quotes a jolly ballad about a man who tried to sell his wife with a halter round her neck and, failing to do so, tried to hang himself in the halter rather than go on living with her. Obviously this is simply the fable of the grey mare; and does not mean that the man ruled his wife, but rather that she ruled him. I do not agree about divorce; but I am not going to argue about it here, or about any such problem of the sexes. This is partly because I should have to begin about the nature of a vow, and it feels like talking to a judge about the nature of an oath, and might almost be contempt of court. But it is more, I hope, for the manlier reason that I do want to argue about something else.

I think this delightful book might really mislead by a view of progress which over-simplifies history: the view that “the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns”--a monotonous process which cannot even widen itself. He begins his story of the subjection of women from the Bible story of Adam and Eve. He then proceeds at once to quote, not the Bible, but John Milton, and says it is almost exactly in the form “in which mediæval man was wont to explain to mediæval woman the kind of thing she really was.” Now whatever Milton was, he was not mediæval. He was, in his own opinion and in real though relative truth, highly modern and rationalistic. And he would have regarded his somewhat contemptuous view of woman as part of his emancipation from mediævalism. Probably the very same attitude made him approve of divorce; and makes the difference between woman’s place in his epic and her place in Dante’s. On either side of that Gothic gateway of the Middle Ages out of which he had emerged (as he would have said) into the daylight, there had stood two symbolic statues of women, at least of equal importance in the scheme. One represented the weak woman by whom Satan had entered the world; the other the strong woman by whom God had entered the world. Milton and his Puritans deliberately battered and obliterated the image of the good woman and carefully preserved the bad woman, to be a standing reproach to womanhood. But they unquestionably thought their anti-feminist iconoclasm was a great step in progress; and the fact illustrates what an uncommonly crooked and even backward path the path called progress has really been. Nor is it difficult to discover, even in the writer’s own account, whence this anti-feminism iconoclasm drew its force; which was certainly not merely from the Book of Genesis. Judge Parry says, perhaps disputably, that the rude Saxons had more legal regard for women than the Romans. But assuming for the sake of argument that the heathen Romans did give a low status to woman, they clearly cannot have got it either from the Hebrew Scriptures or the mediæval Church. If he will ask where they did get it, he will probably also find where Milton got it. The truth is that there was an element of intellectual brutality in the Renaissance and revival of the pagan world. The very worship of power and reason embodied itself in a preference for the sex that was supposed superior in them. New tyrannies as well as new liberties were encouraged by the New Learning; and Cervantes was laughing at the unreal adventurer who fancied he was unchaining captives, at the very time when Hawkins, the real adventurer, was first leading negroes in chains.

Those chains may be linked up again presently in the chain of my own argument: here I use the matter merely to show the danger of trusting each ethical fashion as it comes. There is one matter on which I would respectfully and seriously differ from Judge Parry; and that does not concern laws about women, but rather law itself. In praising the judgment in the Jackson Case, despite its technical irregularity, he speaks of a fine example of our judge-made law, and says: “But that is one of the sane and healthy attributes of our judicial system. There comes a breaking-point where a great judge recognizes that the precedents in the books are obsolete, and what has to be stated is the justice of the case according to the now existing standard of human righteousness.” Now it is surely as plain as a pikestaff that this doctrine makes a small number of very wealthy old gentlemen in wigs absolute despots over the whole commonwealth. The Emperor of China was supposed to state the justice of the case. The Sultan of the Indies was supposed to judge by the existing standard of human righteousness. If the judges are not restrained by the law, what are they restrained by, which every autocrat on earth has not claimed to be restrained by?

Now there is certainly a case for personal and arbitrary government; and as there are good sultans, so there are good judges. I should not be afraid to appear before Judge Parry (if I may presume to imagine myself innocent) though he were surrounded with janissaries in a secret divan, or delivering dooms under an oak tree in a wild, prehistoric forest. I should not mind his having the power to skin me or boil me in oil; for I feel sure he would “recognize that these precedents were obsolete” and not do it. But it is by no means true that the confidence I should feel in Judge Parry would be extended to any judge who talked about obsolete precedents and human righteousness. Quite the contrary, if anything. I trust him because he often takes the side of the under-dog. I should not trust a man who always took the side of the opinion which happened to be top-dog. He understood, for instance, the case for “Pro-Boers”; but in the mafficking time a dozen great judges would have strained any law to make a case against Pro-Boers. Feminism was the fashion and may have produced some acts of justice; but Imperialism was also the fashion and might have produced any acts of any injustice. There is, let us suppose, an old statute that certain prisoners may be tortured for evidence; but the judges disregard it, and Judge Parry is satisfied. But there are three very vital reasons why he should not be satisfied. First, it encourages legislators to be lazy and leave a bad statute they ought to repeal. Second, they leave it so that it can be resharpened in some reaction or panic against particular people, who _will_ be tortured. And third, and most important of all, the same judge who has said that prisoners must not be tortured for evidence may say some fine morning that prisoners may be vivisected for scientific inquiry; and he may have the same reason for saying the one as the other, the simple reason that such talk is fashionable in his set. And the set is very small and very rich; we are dealing strictly with fashion and not even, in any large sense, with public opinion. The standards of that world are often special and sometimes rather secretive. Judge Parry even quotes a “paradox” of Lord Reading to the effect that persons like himself should administer justice and not law. Law is narrow and national, and might possibly lead a British Minister to look no further than the British Parliament as an appropriate place for telling the truth. But justice, being international and surveying the world from China to Peru, perceives without difficulty the office of the one particular Parisian newspaper which has the right to insist on an explanation.

But the vital point is this. Judge Parry gives the instance of a judgment in which Mansfield, overriding certain remote precedents and quaint survivals, declared that there cannot be slaves in England. I am sorry to mention such a detail, but the fact is that the same judge made law is now declaring in the same way that there _can_ be slaves in England. A magistrate has forbidden men to leave an employer, though the contract had admittedly terminated. Practical courts are overriding the obsolete and remote precedent of some man, far in the mists of mediævalism, who is said to have made a free contract with a wealthier fellow-creature. They are disregarding the quaint survivals in our language, whereby the hand holding the tool is described as “his” hand. Our more vivid modern speech calls the man himself a hand; merely one of the many hands of his Briarean master. “There comes a breaking-point”; and it is liberty that is broken.

Whether the silent millions approve this judgment, or the other judgments, liberal or servile, feminist or anti-feminist, which Judge Parry quotes, I will not debate, but I leave the query to his very fair consideration. For if those silent millions spoke, I fancy they would surprise us in many matters, but most of all in the discovery of how little they think of all of us, judges, lawyers, literary fellows, and the rest. But I am very certain that Judge Parry would be found among the few, among the very few, who amid all the insolence of our inconsistencies have never lost that rare and even awful thing, the respect of the poor.

Our Latin Relations

It is odd how often one may hear, in the middle of a very old and genuine English town, the remark, that it looks like a foreign town. I heard it only yesterday, standing on the ramparts of the noble hill of Rye, which overlooks the flats like a Mount of St. Michael left inland. Most people know that Rye contains a mediæval monument which might almost be called a mediæval prophecy--a prophecy of modern things more awful than anything mediæval. It is an ancient tower, which has not only always been marked on maps with the name of Ypres, but has always been actually pronounced by the name of Wipers. Nothing could mark a thing as more continuously national than that Englishmen sundered by vast centuries should actually make the same mistake and should mispronounce the same word in the same way.

There is in this small point a paradox we must understand, especially just now, if we are to have a really patriotic foreign policy. It is very unlucky that for some time our teaching of history has been rather the unteaching of history, because it has been the unteaching of tradition. Our histories told us we were Teuton; our legends told us we were Roman--and, as usual, the legends were right. It is not only true that England is nowhere more really English than where she is Roman--it is even true that she is nowhere more really English than where she is French. To take only the chance example, with which I began above, you could find nothing more national, more typical, more traditional, as a real piece of English history, than the very phrase “The Cinq Ports.” And it is all the more English because the word “cinq” is French and the word “port” is Latin. A Teutonist professor, full of some folly about “folk-speech,” might insist on our calling them “The Five Harbours,” or (for all I know) “The Five Holes.” But his version would be less popular, and only more pedantic. The Latin was always the popular element, which may not sound so odd if we happen to remember that the very word “popular” is Latin.

Thus our alliance with the French and the Italians is not something to be supported for the sake of the last five years. It is something to be solidified for the sake of more than a thousand. The fact has been hidden by the historical accident that we have often been the antagonists of the French in particular rivalries for particular things. But we were always much nearer to the French when we were their antagonists than to the Germans when we were their Allies. There was much more resemblance between a knight like the Black Prince and a knight like Bertrand du Guesclin than there ever was between a sailor like Nelson and a soldier like Blücher. A town like Rye is full of memories of fighting with the French, especially in the Middle Ages; of raids to and fro across the narrow seas, in which the bells of the coast-town churches were captured and recaptured; and there are spirited stories about the Abbot of Battle, worthy to be turned into ballads. But the very fact of these coast-town raids suggests that it was coast against coast, and even seaman against seaman. But the whole point of Prussian war was that it was an inland thing; the whole point of English war that it was an island thing. The alliance with Prussia was never either popular or natural; it was wholly aristocratic and artificial. Compared with that, the mediæval war was as friendly as a mediæval tournament. Nor was it peculiar to the case of France; it was true of all we call Latin--all that remains of the Roman Empire. The Latins, even when treated as foes in politics, were treated almost as friends in popular tradition. The English sailors sang in their idle moments “Farewell and adieu to you, fine Spanish ladies,” even when they had devoted their working hours to singeing the beards of the fine Spanish gentlemen. The children in the nurseries sang in imaginative triumph “The King of Spain’s daughter came to visit me,” though their Elizabethan parents might have been lighting the beacons and calling out the train-bands to prevent the King of Spain’s son, the noble Don John of Austria, from paying them such a visit. A thousand nursery rhymes and nonsense tags testify to a vast popular tradition that Southern Europe was the world to which we belonged. We belonged to a system of which Rome was the sun, and of which the old Roman provinces were planets. We were never meant to pursue a meteor out of empty space, the comet of Teutonism. Our place was in an order and a watch of stars, though one star might differ from another in glory. Our place was with that red star of Gaul which might well bear the name of Mars; or that morning and evening star which the Latins themselves named Lucifer, last to fade and first to return in every twilight of history; Italy, the light of the world.

A Latin alliance is founded on our history, though not on our historians. The French and English who fought each other round these southern harbours were also ready to help each other, and often did help each other. Not only did they frequently go crusading together against the Turks, but they would have been ready at any moment to go crusading against the Prussians. Chaucer was exceedingly English, and therefore partly French; and he sends his ideal knight to fight the heathen in Prussia. Froissart was highly French, and therefore respectful to the English; and he says that the French and English always do courtesy, but the Germans never. The truth is that all the old English traditions, scholarly and legendary, chivalric and vulgar, were at one in referring back to Roman culture, until we come to a new crop of very crude pedants in the nineteenth century.

Most of them were prigs, and many of them were snobs--for it was largely a Court fashion, spread by Court poets and Court chaplains. It was like a huge, hideous, gilded German monument; and, fortunately, it has already fallen down. But I think it undesirable that the mere discredited litter and lumber of it, left lying about, should for ever prevent us from building anything else.

Even after the ghastly enlightenment of the war there are people who cannot clear their minds of the notion that the Prussian is the Progressive. They think he is progressing now, because he is picking up new things. Picking up new things is not the way to progress, any more than picking up grass by the roots is the way to make it grow. The northern barbarian always has picked up new things, especially when they were other people’s things. It was still only picking up new things, whether it was picking pockets or picking brains. And there was always one other note about the new things--that they never lived to be old. The barbarians followed the creed of Arius as they followed the ensign of Attila. But nobody remembers Attila as everybody remembered Alfred; and, though some modern people object to hearing the Athanasian Creed, they have no opportunity of objecting to hearing the Arian Creed. The enthusiasms of semi-savages do not last.

On Pigs as Pets

A dream of my pure and aspiring boyhood has been realized in the following paragraph, which I quote exactly as it stands:

A complaint by the Epping Rural District Council against a spinster keeping a pig in her house has evoked the following reply: “I received your letter, and felt very much cut up, as I am laying in the pig’s room. I have not been able to stand up or get on my legs; when I can, I will get him in his own room, that was built for him. As to getting him off the premises, I shall do no such thing, as he is no nuisance to anyone. We have had to be in the pig’s room now for three years. I am not going to get rid of my pet. We must all live together. I will move him as soon as God gives me strength to do so.”

The Rev. T. C. Spurgin observed: “The lady will require a good deal of strength to move her pet, which weighs forty stone.”

It appears to me that the Rev. T. C. Spurgin ought, as a matter of chivalry, to assist the lady to move the pig, if it is indeed too heavy for her strength; no gentleman should permit a lady, who is already very much cut up, to lift forty stone of still animated and recalcitrant pork; he should himself escort the animal downstairs. It is an unusual situation, I admit. In the normal life of humanity the gentleman gives his arm to the lady, and not to the pig; and it is the pig who is very much cut up. But the situation seems to be exceptional in every way. It is all very well for the lady to say that the pig is no nuisance to anyone: as it seems that she has established herself in the pig’s private suite of apartments, the question rather is whether she is a nuisance to the pig. But indeed I do not think that this poor woman’s fad is an inch more fantastic than many such oddities indulged in by rich and reputable people; and, as I say, I have from my boyhood entertained the dream. I never could imagine why pigs should not be kept as pets. To begin with, pigs are very beautiful animals. Those who think otherwise are those who do not look at anything with their own eyes, but only through other people’s eyeglasses. The actual lines of a pig (I mean of a really fat pig) are among the loveliest and most luxuriant in nature; the pig has the same great curves, swift and yet heavy, which we see in rushing water or in rolling cloud. Compared to him, the horse, for instance, is a bony, angular, and abrupt animal. I remember that Mr. H. G. Wells, in arguing for the relativity of things (a subject over which even the Greek philosophers went to sleep until Christianity woke them up), pointed out that, while a horse is commonly beautiful if seen in profile, he is excessively ugly if seen from the top of a dogcart, having a long, lean neck, and a body like a fiddle. Now, there is no point of view from which a really corpulent pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves. You can look down on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dogcart; you can (if not pressed for time) allow the pig to draw the dogcart; and I suppose a dogcart has as much to do with pigs as it has with dogs. You can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the Monument, from a balloon, or an airship; and as long as he is visible he will be beautiful. In short, he has that fuller, subtler, and more universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking (gazing at pigs and distinguished journalists) mistake for a mere absence of shape. For fatness itself is a valuable quality. While it creates admiration in the onlookers, it creates modesty in the possessor. If there is anything on which I differ from the monastic institutions of the past, it is that they sometimes sought to achieve humility by means of emaciation. It may be that the thin monks were holy, but I am sure it was the fat monks who were humble. Falstaff said that to be fat is not to be hated; but it certainly is to be laughed at, and that is a more wholesome experience for the soul of man.