Chapter XL: On Dropping Anchor 344 (6)

Incidentally it is worthy of remark that this man was one of those charlatans who are found out in time. Common sense revolted and in revolting managed to expose its enemy very effectively while that enemy was still alive. A hundred tricks were played upon the fellow: it is sufficient to quote two.

After a peculiarly repulsive trial for murder in Paris, a wag sent the photograph of two hands, a right hand and a left hand, to the great criminologist, telling him they were those of the murderer, and asking for his opinion. He replied in a document crammed with the pompous terms of the scientific cheap-jack, hybrid Greek and Latin, and barbarous in the extreme. He discovered malformations in the fingers and twenty other mysteries of his craft, which exactly proved why these hands were necessarily and by the predestination of blind Nature the hands of a murderer. Then it was that the wag published his letter and the reply with the grave annotation that the left hand was his own (he was a man of letters) and the right hand that of an honest fellow who washed down his carriage.

The other anecdote is as follows: Lombroso produced a piece of fatuous nonsense about the Political Criminal Woman. He based it upon "the skull of Charlotte Corday"--which skull he duly analysed, measured, and labelled with the usual regiment of long and incomprehensible words. Upon the first examination of the evidence it turned out that the skull was no more Charlotte Corday's than Queen Anne's--a medical student had sold it to a humble Curiosity Shop, and the dealer, who seems to have had some intellectual affinity with the Lombroso tribe, had labelled it for purposes of sale, "The Skull of Charlotte Corday." Lombroso swallowed it.

The Ass!

XXXII

THE BARBARIANS

The use of analogy, which is so wise and necessary a thing in historical judgment, has a knack of slipping into the falsest forms.

When ancient civilisation broke down its breakdown was accompanied by the infiltration of barbaric auxiliaries into the Roman armies, by the settlement of Barbarians (probably in small numbers), upon Roman land, and, in some provinces, by devastating, though not usually permanent, irruptions of barbaric hordes.

The presence of these foreign elements, coupled with the gradual loss of so many arts, led men to speak of "the Barbarian invasions" as though these were a principal cause of what was in reality no more than the old age and fatigue of an antique society.

Upon the model of this conception men, watching the dissolution of our own civilisation to-day, or at least its corruption, have asked themselves whence those Barbarians would come that should complete its final ruin. The first, the least scholarly and the most obvious idea was that of the swamping of Europe by the East. It was a conception which required no learning, nor even any humour. It was widely adopted and it was ridiculous. Others, with somewhat more grasp of reality, coined the phrase "that the barbarians which should destroy the civilisation of Europe were already breeding under the terrible conditions of our great cities." This guess contained, indeed, a half-truth, for though the degradation of human life in the great industrial cities of England and the United States was not a cause of our decline it was very certainly a symptom of it. Moreover, industrial society, notably in this country and in Germany, while increasing rapidly in numbers, is breeding steadily from the worst and most degraded types.

But the truth is that no such mechanical explanation will suffice to set forth the causes of a civilisation's decay. Before the barbarian in any form can appear in it, it must already have weakened. If it cannot absorb or reject an alien element it is because its organism has grown enfeebled, and its powers of digestion and excretion are lost or deteriorated; and whoever would restore any society which menaces to fall, must busy himself about the inward nature of that society much more than about its external dangers or the merely mechanical and numerical factors of peril to be discovered within it.

Whenever we look for "the barbarian," whether in the decline of our own society or that of some past one whose historical fate we may be studying, we are looking rather for a visible effect of disease than for its source.

None the less to mark those visible effects is instructive, and without some conspectus of them it will be impossible to diagnose the disease. A modern man may, therefore, well ask where the barbarians are that shall enter into our inheritance, or whose triumphs shall, if it be permitted, at least accompany, even if they cannot effect, the destruction of Christendom.

With that word "Christendom" a chief part of the curious speculation is at once suggested. Whether the scholar hates or loves, rejects or adopts, ridicules or admires, the religious creed of Europe, he must, in any case, recognise two prime historical truths. The first is that that creed which we call the Christian religion was the soul and meaning of European civilisation during the period of its active and united existence. The second is that wherever the religion characteristic of a people has failed to react against its own decay and has in some last catastrophe perished, then that people has lost soon after its corporate existence.

So much has passion taken the place of reason in matters of scholarship that plain truths of this kind, to which all history bears witness, are accepted or rejected rather by the appetite of the reader than by his rational recognition of them, or his rational disagreement. If we will forget for a moment what we may _desire_ in the matter and merely consider what we _know_, we shall without hesitation admit both the propositions I have laid down. Christendom was Christian, not by accident or superficially, but in a formative connection, just as an Englishman is English or as a poem is informed by a definite scheme of rhythm. It is equally true that a sign and probably a cause of a society's end is the dissolution of that causative moral thing, its philosophy or creed.

Now here we discover the first mark of the Barbarian.

Note that in the peril of English society to-day there is no positive alternative to the ancient philosophic tradition of Christian Europe. It has to meet nothing more substantive than a series of negations, often contradictory, but all allied in their repugnance to a fixed certitude in morals.

So far has this process gone that to be writing as I am here in public, not even defending the creed of Christendom, but postulating its historic place, and pointing out that the considerable attack now carried on against it is symptomatic of the dissolution of our society, has about it something temerarious and odd.

Next look at secondary effects and consider how certain root institutions native to the long development of Europe and to her individuality are the subject of attack and note the nature of the attack.

A fool will maintain that change, which is the law of life, can be presented merely as a matter of degree, and that, because our institutions have always been subject to change, therefore their very disappearance can proceed without the loss of all that has in the past been ourselves.

But an argument of this sort has no weight with the serious observer. It is certain that if the fundamental institutions of a polity are no longer regarded as fundamental by its citizens, that polity is about to pass through the total change which in a living organism we call death.

Now the modern attack upon property and upon marriage (to take but two fundamental institutions of the European) is precisely of this nature. Our peril is not that certain men attack the one or the other and deny their moral right to exist. Our peril rather is that, quite as much as those who attack, those who defend seem to take for granted the relativeness, the artificiality, the non-fundamental character of the institution which they are apparently concerned to support.

See how marriage is defended. To those who would destroy it under the plea of its inconveniences and tragedies, the answer is no longer made that, good or ill, it is an absolute and is intangible. The answer made is that it is convenient, or useful, or necessary, or merely traditional.

Most significant of all, the terminology of the attack is on the lips of the defence, but the contrary is never the case. Those opponents of marriage who abound in modern England will never use the term "a sacrament," yet how many for whom marriage is still a sacrament will forego the pseudo-scientific jargon of their opponents?

The threat against property is upon the same lines. That property should be restored that most citizens should enjoy it, that it is normal to the European family in its healthy state--all this we hear less and less. More and more do we hear it defended, however morbid in form or unjust in use, as a necessity, a trick which secures a greater stability for the State or a mere power which threatens and will break its opponents tyrannously.

The spirit is abroad in many another minor matter. In its most grotesque form it challenges the accuracy of mathematics: in its most vicious, the clear processes of the human reason. The Barbarian is as proud as a savage in a top hat when he talks of the elliptical or the hyperbolic universe and tries to picture parallel straight lines converging or diverging--but never doing anything so vulgarly old-fashioned as to remain parallel.

The Barbarian when he has graduated to be a "pragmatist," struts like a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to the gift of reason, or free to maintain that definition, limit, quantity and contradiction are little childish things which he has outgrown.

The Barbarian is very certain that the exact reproduction in line or colour of a thing seen is beneath him, and that a drunken blur for line, a green sky, a red tree and a purple cow for colour, are the mark of great painting.

The Barbarian hopes--and that is the very mark of him--that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.

The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth, "_Sine Auctoritate nulla vita_."

In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot _make_; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.

We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last.

Yet there is one real interest in watching the Barbarian and one that is profitable.

The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom. It is not he in his impotence that can discover the power to disintegrate the great and ancient body of Christendom, but if we come to see him triumphant we may be certain that that body, from causes much vaster than such as he could control, is furnishing him with sustenance and forming for him a congenial soil--and that is as much as to say that we are dying.

XXXIII

ON KNOWING THE PAST

An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information.

First, the mind must grasp the nature of historic change and must be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought in each successive period, as also with the general aspect of its revolution and progression.

Secondly, the actions of men, the times, that is the dates and hours of such actions, must be strictly and accurately acquired.

Neither of these two foundations upon which repose both the teaching and the learning of history is more important than the other. Each is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the establishment of truth.

History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor, the object lesson of political science; or it may be called the great story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the manifestation of God.

But whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the value of history to men, that formula still remains an imperative formula for them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the establishment of truth.

A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours, the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a particular event. But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he knows their due sequence and proportion; he knows not what to omit, nor what to enlarge upon, among so many, or rather a potentially infinite number of facts, and his picture will not be (as some would put it) distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use history for its end, which is the establishment of truth. All that he establishes by his action, all that he confirms and makes stronger, is untruth. And so far as truth is concerned, it would be far better that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be possessed of history ill-stated as to the factor of human motive.

A living man has to aid his judgment and to guide him in the establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their acts and of his own are fully within his grasp.

If a man is rightly informed of all the past motive and determining mind from which the present has sprung, his information will illumine and expand and confirm his use of that present experience. If he know nothing of the past his personal observation and the testimony of his own senses are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if he brings in aid of contemporary experience an appreciation of the past which is false because it gives to the past a mind which was not its own, then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will tend to be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will for ever read into the plain facts before him origins and predetermining forces which do not explain them and which are not connected with them in the way he imagines. And he will easily come to regard his own society, which as a wholly uninstructed man he might fairly though insufficiently have grasped, through a veil of illusion and of false philosophy, until at last he cannot even see the things before his eyes. In a word, it is better to have no history at all than to have history which misconceives the general direction and the large lines of thought in the immediate and the remote past.

This being evidently the case one is tempted to say that a just estimate of the revolution and the progression of human motive in the past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the details of the chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly inferior importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in history, that is an acquaintance with the largest possible number of facts, and an accurate retention of them in the memory, is as essential to this study as of that other background of motive which has just been examined.

The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man were wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence, he could not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the past, for we only obtain communion with that which is within and that which is foundational in human action by an observation of its external effect.

A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines if he have but a vague and general sentiment of the old Pagan civilisation of the Mediterranean so long as that sentiment corresponds to the very large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the affair. But he cannot possess so much as an impression of the truth if he has not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly unacquainted with the conception of a City State, and if the names of Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexandria, and of Jerusalem have never been mentioned to him.

Nor will a knowledge of facts, however slight, be valuable; contrariwise it will be detrimental and of negative value to his judgment if accuracy in his knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably inaccurate, thinking that red which was blue, inverting the order of any two events and putting without fail in the summer what happened in winter, or in the Germanies what took place in Gaul, his facts would never correspond with the human motive of them, and his errors upon externals would at once close his avenues of access towards internal motive and suggest other and non-existent motive in its place.

It is, of course, a childish error to imagine that the knowledge of a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation. External things do not produce ideas, they only reveal them. And to imagine that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put one's self on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics, for instance, ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the "working" of institutions--as though it were possible to judge whether an institution were working ill or not when one had no ideal that institutions might be designed to attain. But though scholarship is not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the necessary accompaniment of it. Facts, which (to repeat) do not produce ideas but only reveal or suggest them, do none the less reveal and suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and revelation.

Scholarship, accurate and widespread, has this further function: that it lends stuff to general apprehension of the past, which, however just, is the firmer, the larger and the more intense as the range of knowledge and its fixity increase. And scholarship has one more function, which is that it connects, and it connects with more and more precision in proportion as it is more and more detailed, the tendency of the mind to develop a general and perhaps justly apprehended idea into imaginary regions: for the mind is creative; it will still make and spin, and if you do not feed it with material it will spin dreams out of emptiness.

Thus a man will have a just appreciation of the thirteenth century in England; he will perhaps admire or will perhaps be repelled by its whole spirit according to his temperament or his acquired philosophy; but in either case, though his general impression was just, he will tend to add to it excrescences of judgment which, as the process continued, would at last destroy the true image were not scholarship there to come in perpetually and check him in his conclusions. He admires it, he will tend to make it more national than it was, to forget its cruelties because what is good in our own age is not accompanied by cruelty. He will tend to lend it a science it did not possess because physical science is in our own time an accompaniment of greatness. But if he reads and reads continually, these vagaries will not oppress or warp his vision. More and more body will be added to that spirit, which he does justly but only vaguely know. And he will at last have with the English thirteenth century something of that acquaintance which one has with a human face and voice: these also are external things, and these also are the product of a soul.

Indeed--though metaphors are dangerous in such a matter--a metaphor may with reservation be used to describe the effect of the chronicle, of research and of accurate scholarship in the science of history. A man ill provided with such material is like one who sees a friend at a distance; a man well provided with it is like a man who sees a friend close at hand. Both are certain of the identity of the person seen, both are well founded in that certitude; but there are errors possible to the first which are not possible to the second, and close and intimate acquaintance lends to every part of judgment a surety which distant and general acquaintance wholly lacks. The one can say something true and say it briefly: there is no more to say. The other can fill in and fill in the picture, until though perhaps never complete, it is asymptotic to completion.

To increase one's knowledge by research, to train one's self to an accurate memory of it, does not mean that one's view of the past is continually changing. Only a fool can think, for instance, that some document somewhere will be discovered to show that the mass of the people of London had for James II an ardent veneration, or that the national defence organised by the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution was due to the unpopular tyranny of a secret society. But research in either of these cases, and a minute and increasing acquaintance with detail, does show one London largely apathetic in the first place, and does show one large sections of rebellious feeling in the armies of the Terror. It permits one to appreciate what energy and what initiative were needed for the overthrow of the Stuarts, and to see from how small a body of wealthy and determined men that policy proceeded. It permits one to understand how the battles of '93 could never have been fought upon the basis of popular enthusiasm alone; it permits one to assert without exaggeration that the autocratic power of the Committee of Public Safety and the secrecy of its action was a necessary condition of the National defence during the French Revolution.

One might conclude by saying what might seem too good to be true: namely, that minute and accurate information upon details (the characteristic of our time in the science of history) must of its own nature so corroborate just and general judgments of the past, that through it, when the modern phase of wilful distortion is over, mere blind scholarship will restore tradition.

I say it sounds too good to be true. But three or four examples of such action are already before us. Consider the Gospel of St. John, for instance, or what is called "the Higher Criticism" of the old Hebrew literature, and ask yourselves whether modern scholarship has not tended to restore the long and sane judgment of men, which, when that scholarship was still imperfect, seemed to imperil.

XXXIV

THE HIGHER CRITICISM

I have long desired to make some protest against the attitude which the Very Learned take towards literary evidence. I know that the Very Learned chop and change. I know that they are in this country about fifty years behind the Continent. I know that their devotion to the extraordinary unintelligent German methods will soon be shaken by their discovery that new methods are abroad--in both senses of the word "abroad": for new methods have been abroad, thank Heaven, for a very long time.

But I also know that a mere appeal to reason will be of very little use, so I propose here to give a concrete instance, and I submit it to the judgment of the Very Learned.

The Very Learned when they desire to fix the date or the authenticity or both of a piece of literature, adopt among other postulates, these:

(1) That tradition doesn't count.

(2) That common sense, one's general knowledge of the time, and all that multiplex integration which the same mind effects from a million tiny data to a general judgment, is too tiny to be worthy of their august consideration.

(3) That the title "Very Learned" (which gives them their authority) is tarnished by any form of general knowledge and can only be acquired by confining oneself to a narrow field in which any fool could become an absolute master in about two years.

These are their negative postulates in dealing with a document.

As to their positive methods, of one hundred insufficient tricks I choose in particular these:

(1) The establishment of the date of the document against tradition and general air, by allusion discovered within it.

(2) The conception that all unusual events recorded in it are mythical, and therefore necessarily anterior to the document.

(3) The supposition that religious emotion, or indeed emotion of any kind, vitiates record.

(4) The admission of a single piece of correlative documentary evidence to destroy the reader's general judgment.

(5) The fixed dogma that most writers of the past have spent most of their time in forging.

Now to test these nincompoops I will consider a contemporary document which I know a good deal about, called _The Path to Rome_. It professes to be the record of a journey by one H. Belloc in the year 1901 from Toul in Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose that opus to have survived through some accident into a time which preserved few contemporary documents, but which had, through tradition and through a knowledge of surrounding circumstance, a popular idea of what the opening of the twentieth century was like, and a pathetic belief that Belloc had taken this journey in the year 1901.

This is how the Very Learned would proceed to teach the vulgar a lesson in scepticism.

"A critical examination of the document has confirmed me in the conclusion that the so-called _Path to Rome_ is composed of three distinct elements, which I will call A, W, and [Greek: theta]." (See my article E.H.R., September 3, 113, pp. 233 _et seq._ for [Greek: theta]. For W, see Furth in Die Quellen Critik, 2nd Semestre, 3117.)

Of these three documents A is certainly much earlier than the rather loose criticism of Polter in England and Bergmann upon the Continent decided some years ago in the Monograph of the one, and the Discursions which the other has incorporated in his _Neo-Catholicism in the Twenty-Second Century_.

The English scholar advances a certain inferior limit of A.D. 2208, and a doubtful superior limit of A.D. 2236. The German is more precise and fixes the date of A in a year certainly lying between 2211 and 2217. I need not here recapitulate the well-known arguments with which this view is supported (See Z.M. fs. (Mk. 2) Arch., and the very interesting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in the Pursuits of the A.S.) I may say generally that their argument reposes upon two considerations:

(1) The _Centime_, a coin which is mentioned several times in the book, went out of circulation before the middle of the twenty-first century, as we know from the only extant letter (undoubtedly genuine) of Henri Perro to the Prefect of Aude.

This gives them their superior limit. But it is the Inferior Limit which concerns us most, and here the argument reposes upon one phrase. (Perkins' edition, p..) This phrase is printed in italics, and runs, "_Deleted by the Censor_."

It is advanced that we know that a censorship of books was first established in America (where, as I shall show, _The Path to Rome_ was written) in the year 2208, and there is ample evidence of the fact that no such institution was in actual existence before the twenty-second century in the English-speaking countries, though there is mention of it elsewhere in the twenty-first, and a fragment of the twentieth appears to allude to something of the kind in Russia at that time. (Baker has confused the Censorship of _Books_ with that of _Plays_, and an unknown form of art called "Morum"; probably a species of private recitation.)

Now Dr. Blick has conclusively shown in his critical edition of the mass of ancient literature, commonly known as _The Statute Book_, that the use of italics is common to distinguish _later_ interpolation.

This discovery is here of the first importance. Not only does it destroy the case for the phrase, "_Deleted by the Censor_," as a proof of an Inferior Limit, 2208, but in this particular instance it is conclusive evidence that we have interpolation here, for it is obvious that _after_ the establishment of a Censorship the right would exist to delete a name in the text, and a contemporary Editor would warn the reader in the fashion which he has, as a fact, employed.

So much for the negative argument. We can be certain after Dr. Blick's epoch-making discovery that even the year 2208 is not our Inferior Limit for A, but we have what is much better, conclusive evidence of a much earlier _Superior_ Limit, to which I must claim the modest title of discoverer.

There is a passage in A (pp. 170-171) notoriously corrupt, in which a dramatic dialogue between three characters, the Duchess, Major Charles and Clara, is no longer readable. All attempts to reconstitute it have failed, and on that account scholars have too much tended to neglect it.

Now I submit that though the passage is hopelessly corrupt its very corruption affords us a valuable indication.

The Duchess, in a stage indication, is made to address "Major Charles." It is notorious that the term "Major" applied to a certain functionary in a religious body probably affiliated to the Jesuits, known to modern scholars under a title drawn from the only contemporary fragment concerning it, as "Old Booth's Ramp." This society was suppressed in America in the year 2012, _and the United States were the last country in which it survived_.

No matter how correct, therefore, the text is in this passage, we may be certain that even the careless scribe took the contemporary existence of a "major" for granted. And we may be equally certain that even our existing version of A incorporated in the only text we possess, was not written later than the first years of the twenty-first century. We have here, therefore, a new superior limit of capital importance, but, what is even more important, we can fix with fair accuracy a new inferior limit as well.

In the Preface (whose original attachment to A is undoubted) we have the title "Captain Monologue," p. XII (note again the word "Captain," an allusion to "Booth's Ramp,") and in an anonymous fragment (B.M. m.s.s., 336 N., (60)), bearing the title, "Club Gossip," I have found the following conclusive sentence: "He used to bore us stiff, and old Burton invented a brand new title for him, 'Captain Monologue,' about a year before he died, which the old chap did an hour or two after dinner on Derby Day."

Now this phrase is decisive. We have several allusions to "dinner" (in all, eight, and a doubtful ninth, tabulated by Ziethen in his _Corpus. Ins. Am._). They all refer to some great public function the exact nature of which is lost, but which undoubtedly held a great place in political life. At what intervals this function occurred we cannot tell, but the coincident allusion to Derby Day settles it.

The only Lord Derby canonized by the Church died in 1960 and the promulgation of Beatification (the earliest date that would permit the use of the word "day" for this Saint) was issued by Pope Urban XV in May, 2003. It is, therefore, absolutely certain that A was written at some time between the years 2003 to 2012. Nearer than that I do not profess to fix it; but I confess that the allusion (p. 226) to drinking coffee coupled with the corresponding allusion to drinking coffee in a license issued for a Lockhart's Restaurant in 2006 inclines me to that precise year as the year in which A appeared, or at any rate was written.

I think in the above I have established the date of A beyond dispute.

I have no case to bring forward of general conclusions, and I know that many scholars will find my argument, however irrefutable, disturbing, for it is universally admitted that excluding the manifestly miraculous _Episodes of the Oracle_, _The Ointment of Epinal_, _The View of the Alps over a Hundred Miles_, etc., which are all of them properly referred to in W. and [Greek: theta] respectively, A itself contains numerous passages too closely connected with the text to be regarded as additions, yet manifestly legendary--such as the perpetual allusions to spirits, and in particular to a spirit called "Devil," the inordinate consumption of wine, the gift of tongues, etc. etc. But I submit that a whole century, especially in a time which pullulated with examples of credulity, such as the "Flying Men," "The Telephone," "Wireless Telegraphy," etc., is ample to allow for the growth of these mythical features.

I take it, therefore, as now established, that A in its entirety is not later than 2012 and probably as early as 2006. Upon W I cannot yet profess to have arrived at a decision, but I incline to put it at about forty years later, while [Greek: theta] (which includes most of the doggerel and is manifestly in another style, and from another hand) is admitted to be at least a generation later than "W" itself.

In a further paper I shall discuss the much-disputed point of authorship, and I shall attempt to show that Belloc, though the subject of numerous accretions, was a real historical figure, and that the author of A may even have worked upon fragments preserved by oral tradition from the actual conversation of that character.

That is how the damned fools write: and with brains of that standard Germans ask me to deny my God.

XXXV

THE FANATIC

"I asked Old Biggs (as the Duke of Racton used to be called) what
he thought of Charlie Wilson. Old Biggs answered, 'Man like that's
one of two things: a _Fan_atic or a Fa_nat_ic.' I thought this
very funny."--_St. Germans Sporting Memoirs_, Vol. II, p. 186.

This is a kind of man whom we all love and yet all desire to moderate. He is excessive only in good, but his excess therein is dangerous. He proceeds from less to more; first irritated, then exasperated, then mad. He will not tolerate the necessary foibles of mankind. No, nor even their misunderstandings. He himself commonly takes refuge in some vice or other, but a small one, and from this bastion defends himself against all comers.

The Fanatic will exaggerate the operations of war. If it be necessary in the conquest of a province to murder certain women, he will cry shame blindly, without consideration of martial conditions or remembrance that what we do in war is absolved by indemnities thereafter following. It is the same with the death of children in warfare, whether these be starved to death in concentration camps or more humanely spitted, or thrown down wells, or dealt with in some other fashion, such as the braining of them against walls and gateposts: nothing will suit the Fanatic in these matters but a complete and absolute abstention from them, without regard to strategy or tactics or any other part of military science. Now many a man shall argue against practices of one sort or another, as against excesses. But the Fanatic is nothing so reasonable, being bound by a law of his nature or rather a lack of law, to violent outburst with no restraint upon it, and to impotent gnashings.

It is so also in affairs of State when peace reigns, for the Fanatic is for ever denouncing what all men know must be and making of common happenings an uncommon crime. Thus, when a minister shall borrow of a money-lender certain sums which this last generously puts before him without condition or expense, what must your Fanatic do, but poke and pry into the whole circumstance, and when the usurer has his just reward, and is made a Peer to settle our laws for us, the Fanatic will go vainly about from one newspaper to another seeking which shall print his foolish "protest" (as he calls it). Mark you also that the Fanatic is quite indifferent to this: that his foolishness is of no effect. He will roar in an empty field as loud as any bull and challenge all men to meet him, and seems well pleased whether they come or no.

It is of the fanatical temper to regard some few men as heroes, or demigods, and then again, these having failed in something, to revile them damnably. Thus by the old religious sort you will find the Twelve Apostles in the Gospel very foolishly revered and made much of as though they were so many Idols, but let one of these (Judas to wit) show statesmanship and a manly sense, and Lord! how the Fanatic does rail at him!

So it is also with foreign nations. The Fanatic has no measure there and speaks of them as though they were his province, seeing that it is of his essence never to comprehend diversity of circumstance or measure. Thus our cousins oversea will very properly burn alive the negroes that infest them in those parts, and their children and young people will, when the negro has been thus despatched, collect his bones or charred clothing to keep the same in their collections, which later they compare one with another. This is their business not ours, and has proved in the effect of great value to their commonwealth. But the Fanatic will have none of it. To hear him talk you might imagine himself a negro or one that had in his own flesh tasted the fire, and in his rage he will blame one man and another quite indiscriminately: now the good President of these people (Mr. Roosevelt as he once was), now the humble instrument of justice who should have put a match to the African. And all this without the least consideration of those surrounding things and haps which made such dealing with negroes a very necessary thing.

There is nothing workable or of purpose in what this man does. He is for ever quarrelling with other men for their lack of time or memory or even courtesy to himself, for on this point he is very tender. He wearies men with repeating to them their own negotiations, as though these were in some way disgraceful. Thus if a man has taken a sum of money in order to write of the less pleasing characters of his mother; or if he has sold his vote in Parliament, or if he has become for his own good reasons the servant of some one wealthier than he, or if he has seen fit to deal with the enemies of his country, the Fanatic will blurt out and blare such a man's considered action, hoping, it would seem, to have some support in his mere raving at it. But this he never gets, for mankind in the lump is too weighty and reasonable to accept any such wildness.

There is no curing the Fanatic, neither with offers of Money nor with blows, nor is there any method whatsoever of silencing him, save imprisonment, which, in this country, is the method most commonly taken. But in the main there is no need to act so violently by him, seeing that all men laugh at him for a fool and that he will have no man at his side. Commonly, he is of no effect at all, and we may remain his friend though much contemptuous of him, since contempt troubles him not at all. But there are moments, and notably in the doubt of a war, when the Fanatic may do great ill indeed. Then it is men's business to have him out at once and if necessary to put him to death, but whether by beheading, by hanging, or by crucifixion it is for sober judges to decide.

The Irish are very fanatical, and have driven from their country many landlords formerly wealthy who were the support and mainstay of all the island. It may be seen in Ireland how fanaticism can impoverish. Upon the other hand, the people of the Mile End Road and round by the north into Hackney Downs and so southward and westward into the City of London by Houndsditch are not fanatical at all, and enjoy for their reward an abounding prosperity.

XXXVI

A LEADING ARTICLE

After the failure of the numerous conferences which have been held between Charles Stuart and the Commissioners of Parliament, and after a trial in Westminster Hall the incidents of which it would be painful to recall, the Court appointed for the purpose has reached a conclusion with which we think the mass of Englishmen will, however reluctantly, agree. The courtesy and good feeling upon which we pride ourselves in our political life seem to have been strangely forgotten during the controversies of the last few months. It would be invidious to name particular instances, and we readily admit that the circumstances were abnormal. Feeling ran high, and with Englishmen at least, who are accustomed to call a spade a spade, strong words will follow upon strong emotions; but we can hope that the final decision of the Court will have put behind us for ever one of the most critical periods of discussion, with all its deplorable excesses and wild and whirling words, which we can remember in modern times.

Upon the principle of the conclusion to which the Court has come there is a virtual unanimity. Men as different as Colonel Harrison on the one hand and Mr. Justice Bradshaw on the other, Mr. Cromwell--whom surely all agree in regarding as a representative Englishman--and that very different character, Mr. Ireton, whom we do not always agree with, but who certainly stands for a great section of opinion, are at one upon a policy which has received no serious criticism, and recommends itself even to such various social types as the blunt soldier, Colonel Pride, and the refined aristocrat, Lord Grey of Groby.

But though a matter of such supreme importance to the mass of the people, a measure which it is acknowledged will bring joy to the joyless, light to those who sit in darkness, and a new hope in their old age to fifteen millions of British working men and women, may be unanimously agreed to in principle, it is unfortunately possible to defeat even so beneficent a measure by tactics of delay and by a prolonged criticism upon detail. The Government have therefore, in our opinion, acted wisely in determining to proceed with due expedition to the execution of Charles Stuart, and we do not anticipate any such resistance, even partial and sporadic, as certain rash freelances of politics have prophesied. There was indeed some time ago some doubt as to the success of a policy to which the Government was pledged, and in spite of the strong and disciplined majority which they commanded in the House, in spite of the fact that the House was actually unanimous upon the general lines of that policy, many people up and down the country, who did not fully comprehend it, had been led to act rashly and even riotously against its proposals. All that we may fairly say is now over, and we trust that the Government will have the firmness to go forward with a piece of work in which it now undoubtedly has the support of every class of society.

We should be the last to deny the importance of meeting any serious objection in detail that still remains. Thus the inhabitants of Charing Cross have a legitimate grievance when they say that the scene of the execution will be hidden from them by the brick building which stands at the northern end of Whitehall, but they must remember that all practical measures involve compromise and that if their point of view alone had been considered and the scaffold were to be erected upon the north of that annex, the crowd for which the Home Secretary has made such wise provision by the erection of strong temporary barriers in the Court of the Palace would have no chance of attending at the ceremony.

We confess that the more serious point seems to us to arise on the Bishop of London's suggestion that only the clergy of the Established Church should be present upon the platform, and we very much fear that this pretension--in our view a very narrow and contemptible one--will receive the support of that large number of our fellow citizens which is still attached to the Episcopal forms of Christianity. But we take leave to remind them, and the Bishop of London himself, that the present moment, when the Free Churches have so fully vindicated their rights to public recognition, is hardly one in which it is decent to press these old-fashioned claims of privilege.

There is a third matter which we cannot conclude without mentioning: we refer to the attitude of Charles Stuart himself. While the matter was still _sub judice_ we purposely refrained from making any comment, as is the laudable custom, we are glad to say, in the country. But now the sentence has been pronounced we think it our duty to protest against the attitude of Charles Stuart during the last scene of this momentous political controversy. He is too much of an English gentleman and statesman to exaggerate the significance of our criticism, or to fail to understand the spirit in which it is offered, for that is entirely friendly, but he must surely recognise by this time, that such petty ebullitions of temper as he exhibited in refusing to plead and in wearing his hat in the presence of men of such eminence as Mr. Justice Bradshaw were unworthy of him and of the great cause which he represents. He would have done well to take a lesson from the humble tipstaff of the Court, who, though not required to do so by the Judges, instantly removed his cap when they appeared and only put it on again when he was conducting the prisoner back after the rising of Court.

Finally, we hope that all those who have been permitted by the Home Secretary to be present at Whitehall upon next Tuesday will remember our national reputation for sobriety and judgment in great affairs of the State, and will be guilty of nothing that might make it necessary for the Government to use severe measures utterly repugnant to the spirit of English liberty.

XXXVII

THE OBITUARY NOTICE

Mr. Herod, whose death has just been announced by a telegram from Lyons, was one of the most striking and forceful personalities of our time.

By birth he was a Syrian Jew, suffering from the prejudice attaching to such an origin, and apparently with little prospect of achieving the great place which he did achieve in the eager life of our generation.

But his indomitable energy and his vast comprehension of men permitted him before the close of his long and useful life to impress himself upon his contemporaries as very few even of the greatest have done.

Our late beloved sovereign, Tiberius, perhaps the keenest judge of men in the whole Empire, is said to have remarked one evening in the smoking-room to his guests, when Herod had but recently left the apartment: "Gentlemen, that man is the corner-stone of my Eastern policy," and the tone in which His Majesty expressed this opinion was, we may be sure, that not only of considered judgment, but of equally considered reverence and praise.

It is a striking testimony to Mr. Herod's character that while he was still quite unknown (save, of course, as the heir of his father) he mastered the Greek and Latin tongues, and we find in his diary the shrewd remark that as the first was necessary to culture, so was the second to statesmanship.

It would have been impossible to choose a more difficult moment than that in which the then unknown Oriental lad was entrusted by the Imperial Government with the task which he has so triumphantly accomplished. The Levant, as our readers know, presents problems of peculiar difficulty, and though we can hardly doubt that the free and democratic genius of our country would at last have solved them, we owe it to the memory of this remarkable personality that the solution of them should have been so triumphantly successful.

We will not here recapitulate the obscure and often petty intrigues which have combined to give the politics of Judæa and its neighbourhood a character of anarchy. It is enough to point out that when Mr. Herod was first entrusted with his mission the gravest doubts were entertained as to whether the cause of order could prevail. The finances of the province were in chaos, and that detestable masquerade of enthusiasm to which the Levantines are so deplorably addicted, especially on their "religious" side, had baffled every attempt to re-establish order.

Mr. Herod's father (to whom it will be remembered the Empire had entrusted the beginnings of this difficult business), though undoubtedly a great man, had incurred the hatred of all the worst and too powerful forces of disorder in the district. His stern sense of justice and his unflinching resolution in one of the last affairs of his life, when he had promulgated his epoch-making edict to regulate the infantile death-rate--a scientific measure grossly misunderstood and unfortunately resented by the populace--had left a peculiarly difficult inheritance to the son. The women of the lower classes (as is nearly always the case in these social reforms) proved the chief obstacle, and legends of the most fantastic character were--and still are--current in the slums of Tiberias with regard to Mr. Herod Senior. When, some years later, he was struggling with a painful disease which it needed all his magnificent strength of character to master, no sympathy was shown him by the provincials of the Tetrarchy, and, to their shame be it said, the professional and landed classes treasonably lent the weight of their influence to the disloyal side.

It was therefore under difficulties of no common order that Mr. A. Herod, the son, took over the administration of that far border province which, we fear, will cause more trouble before its unruly inhabitants are absorbed in the mass of our beneficent and tolerant imperial system.

As though his public functions were not burden enough for such young shoulders to bear, the statesman's private life was assailed in the meanest and most despicable fashion. His marriage with Mrs. Herodias Philip--to whose lifelong devotion and support Mr. Herod bore such beautiful witness in his dedication of _Stray Leaves from Galilee_--was dragged into the glare of publicity by the less reputable demagogues of the region, causing infinite pain and doing irreparable injury to a most united and sensitive family circle. The hand of the law fell heavily upon more than one of the slanderers, but the evil was done, and Mr. Herod's authority, in the remote country districts, especially, was grievously affected for some years.