"Docta vel Hippolytum Veneri mollire negantem."

Even Euripides himself was so infected with the pagan view that he sees a sort of Nemesis pursuing the hero whom the slighted Aphrodite reproaches with lack of reverence—religious reverence—for her power. This primitive pagan view, crude, non-moral, but essentially sincere, animates the story of Tom Jones and gives it a character which is lacking in the popular "novel of incident."

Tom Jones was and is a popular book. But I hope I am not wronging the larger mass of mankind when I say that those (of the majority) who like Fielding do not like him for his unique excellences; they would be equally pleased if puppets instead of vital persons had passed along the same course of exciting events; and that there are others who would not read him even if he began writing to-day, because his picture of life is too consistent with his imagination, and this very tenacity would perturb and irritate the trivial. Nevertheless he would have many readers among a large minority, just as Mr. Arnold Bennett has to-day—readers who can appreciate a story which is direct, vivid, and mainly external in treatment.

But the largest public is for writers like Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne or Mr. William Le Queux. These more nearly represent the popular ideal in a "novel of incident." For the former I have some respect. He shows ingenuity in his concoction of improbable plots. In Captain Kettle there is at least some attention to character—of a freakish kind—and something of atmosphere which gives it a mock-romantic interest. It holds the multitude by reason of the thrilling sensations extracted from incidents wholly unlike anything possible in their lives, but near enough to reported facts to be able to astonish and excite them. Such improbable but ingeniously contrived events are enough to distract them, and if there be more in Mr. Hyne's stories imparted by his personal eagerness and honesty, it escapes them, or at least does not annoy them.

But this finer quality has been lacking in such of Mr. Le Queux's books as I have chanced to read. I may have been unlucky in my selection, and there may be admirable qualities in those of his novels which I have not read. But in the three or four volumes known to me I found that the persons were puppets, moving in unnatural situations, meeting sensational adventures which constituted all that there was of an improbable and slenderly connected plot. We all know the sort of book. But what is it that makes this, and others like it, popular? There were scenes of spurious passion. There were incidents in which action assumed the proportions of prodigy. There was vague sensation. In one of his novels I found an introduction by Lord Roberts warning Englishmen to prepare for the German invasion planned by Mr. Le Queux for 1910! History has not yet revealed the horror and devastation of that war; but this horror and devastation lent to Mr. Le Queux's book the interest which it required.

Yet the novel which is read mainly for the thrill of the incident may be written in a far finer spirit. Most historical novels depend mainly upon the vigour of the action. The very best historical novelists must be excepted; in Scott, for example, as in Fielding, there is so much which depends on character and atmosphere that there is always much more than thrilling incident to hold the attention. In the books of a modern writer like Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, at his best, there is an artistry of composition, a synthetic quality in the romance, a unity of pictorial effort which give to them a quality of design and exquisiteness; they are a distillation of Mr. Hueffer's romantic personality. But if we consider Mr. Stanley Weyman, we are taking a novelist in whom everything depends upon the thrill of incident. Still, he has made of his work a fine craft. He uses words conscientiously. He has exceptional skill in tracing his ingenious plots. He has read history carefully, and for the most part adheres faithfully to facts—though I believe he is not so well instructed in German as in French history. The scrupulousness which refines his work gives quality to his narrative, and he can be read with pleasure by persons of exacting taste. And, again, we might take the case of Richard Dehan, author of The Dop Doctor. That writer is not innocent of the crudest melodrama. She is diffuse, extravagant, formless. But she has imagined and created certain characters. She has at moments touched profoundly that most rudimentary of all emotions—the war-emotion—an emotion which may be experienced intensely by every member of an energetic community, and therefore affords the basis of a real popular art—just as certain universal sentiments afforded the basis of folk-songs, which were constantly taken up and moulded into fine artistic forms. The Dop Doctor is a book compounded of vulgar sensationalism on the one hand, and a strange imaginative vigour and actuality on the other.

But the sensibility of the crudest and, it is to be feared, the (at present) largest strata of society can be touched, as we have seen, by the sheer extravagance of the novel of incident, by action distorted out of the proportions of life and made astonishing, by violent assaults upon the reader calculated to arouse him like pistol-shots, since a more moderate appeal would escape his attention. Just as a donkey with a hard mouth can only be guided by violent jerks upon the reins, so a dull sensibility can only be awakened by the harshest literary appeal. Style in such cases must adapt itself to the subject. Redundant words are heaped up where one would suffice for the trained intelligence. A multitude of violent, flamboyant phrases assist to the excitement of fever. It is possible, indeed, that some rudimentary art-feeling lurks behind this pandemonium of crude literature, more probably in cases where lawlessness is the result not of indolence, but of some sort of vigour and spontaneity. But it should be remembered that the mimetic impulses in which art among primitive races is supposed to originate, are not themselves art; and continually to whet the appetite with such primitive exercises is to perpetuate the rudimentary condition and stifle the finer faculties.

II. The sentimental absurdities of Pyramus and Thisbe are the occasion of some apt criticism which Shakespeare puts into the mouths of Hippolyta and Theseus:

HIPPOLYTA. This is the silliest stuff that e'er I heard.

THESEUS. The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

HIPPOLYTA. It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.

Shakespeare is commenting on the sentimentality which is generally pleasing to Quince, Snug, Bottom, and the like. If he is mistaken it is in suggesting that this sickliness is confined to the company of carpenters and bellows-menders, and is not equally to be found among those of the high estate of Hermia, Helena, and Hippolyta herself. But it would never have done to admit so much before an audience of tinkers and tailors, splendidly patronised by a few young bloods of noble birth. Sentiment is distinguished from sentimentality precisely as Shakespeare suggests. The one is concerned with real emotions, the other with shadows. The first is informed by the imagination, the second is devoid of it, and is divorced alike from intellect and common sense. To touch the chord of sentiment justly and truly is one of the most difficult things in literature. Shakespeare himself by no means always succeeded. There is often an affectation in his lighter love-scenes which destroys the impression of sincerity. Even in life one may see how at any time the note of sentiment may be turned to absurdity by the least discordant element. The lover whose tender expressions are wholly pleasing to his lady may become an object of ridicule before an uninvited audience. Everyone can remember some occasion when a whole company of persons, wistfully alluding to a recent death, has suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter, betraying, not lack of respect for the dead, but ridicule at some falsity of expression.

Sentiment is one of the everyday emotions, fine and light in its texture, requiring the tenderest and most delicate treatment, and often it must pass off in laughter. It is something less than passion. It is not concerned with tragedies or crises, but the subtlest apprehensions of what comes and goes at every moment of life. It must never be treated as if it were passion, or the slender threads of which it consists will snap, and ridicule will justly reveal the unbalanced judgment of the sentimentalist. Nor must it ever be far from laughter, or it will collapse under its own strain, and we may be betrayed into thinking that the cynic is the best judge of life. It is the imagination exercising itself among things real, but not of the first order of importance. If you attribute to them that importance, you are guilty of false sentiment. The facts of life convict you.

See how delicately Charles Lamb could hold the balance in such an essay as Dream Children. Great-grandmother Field is just in her place, upright, graceful, and the best of dancers; and Alice's little right foot plays its involuntary movement in the nick of time; and when Uncle John died, the "children fell a-crying" at the narrative and asked about the mourning which they were wearing. It is all just important enough, just trivial enough, to carry its fragile burden of sentiment—so much, and no more. The charm is complete. Conceive what Dickens would have made of the story if he had been writing it! How sickly a fantasy of Paul Dombeys and Little Nells and garrulous "wild waves" he would have conjured up for his dream children! His dream children—the good ones, at any rate—were little old people, monstrosities, freaks. Reality rejects monstrosities, and what reality rejects is no subject for literature—strictly speaking, is no subject at all—save when, like goblins and fairies, it assumes the quasi-reality of fantasy and dreams.

I remember a story by a popular modern writer, Mr. E. Temple Thurston. It appeared in a volume entitled Thirteen. The author arranged his story with skill. He led up to his denouement with admirable stage-management. The story was about a little boy who understood that his father wanted a shop and fifty pounds to buy it with. This amiable child sallies forth from his poor quarter of the city and tramps to the distant regions where rich people live. Nothing doubting, he asks for fifty pounds. He receives sixpence. He exchanges it for a pair of braces and an insurance ticket. He drowns himself with exquisite deliberation, and on the merits of his death and the insurance ticket the fifty pounds are forthcoming.

The defects of the story are obvious. The little boy has no proper place in this world, and his drowning, so far from being pathetic, was the best thing that could happen to him. For he was a freak, a monstrosity. Even those who may not accept this view must at least agree that he ought to have known better, and deserved a whipping rather than the reward of martyrdom and sentimental praise. But even if we assume that the boy is a possible creature, and that his act in begging for the money was beautiful and moving, we cannot escape the objection that the fatal ending is pitched in a discordant note of tragedy. The tragic conclusion is appropriate to a tale of passion, or to a tale which arouses a sense of the most urgent things in life. But to turn a slender sentiment into a thing of tragedy is to pass the limits of sentiment; it cannot carry the burden. The conclusion is not true enough to be even shocking. It is merely disgusting.

How is it that this mimicry of sentiment proves effective in moving the multitude, when the real thing so often fails to please? The answer, I think, is, that the artistic imagination can neither express itself through distorted objects, nor can it confuse in one blurred series of images the trivial and the urgent; its business being to see life with such sense of proportion as the concentrated artistic vision of the artist ensures. But careless readers do not see objects until they are exaggerated out of resemblance to life; the adjustments of the artistic vision are too delicate to reach their perceptions. Mr. Thurston's little boy is seen to be very good, and to the sentimentalist his mere goodness is "beautiful." When he tramps across London his fatigue is sad, and the sadness of it is beautiful. When the rich gentleman gives him sixpence instead of fifty pounds, the reader sheds happy, thoughtless tears, and his beautiful death at the end is all that he requires as the final "assault upon his feelings." The phrase, of course, is Stevenson's, and it can hardly be avoided. Popularity rewards the writer who can assault the feelings of his readers, and anyone who uses a more delicate method must be content with a smaller circle of readers.

It is in this manner, amiably enough, that Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox can conquer America with sentimental poems, as Ian Maclaren once conquered England with sentimental stories. They touch us where the intellect and the common sense are in abeyance, and the moral sense is steeped in false sentiment. Thus it was that when a sort of torpor came upon the intellect and the common sense of Mr. A.C. Benson, he, who had been formerly a scholar and a friend of literature, became merely a sentimentalist. The author of The Sick-a-bed Lady (Eleanor Halliwell Abbott) is for the same reason esteemed as highly in America as the author of Letters to My Son is esteemed in England. The trowel is the instrument with which these honours—and these fortunes—are won.

III. It might seem that the popular literature of love ought to have been treated under the same head as that of sentimental literature. But it will become clear not only that there can be a popular erotic literature of a quite different order, but that I might have subdivided this class into two: one concerned with the popular literature of passion, the other with that of sensualism. There is, of course, a sentiment of love which is sufficiently considered in the last section. But I have made a distinction between sentiment and passion, which for my view is important; and I must add the further and more obvious distinction between the love passion, which is an intense emotional experience affecting the imagination no less than the senses, and that sex feeling, which in essence is merely sensual. Leaving out of count, then, the "sentiment" of love, we have an obvious distinction between the literature which deals with the love passion and the literature which deals with sensual desire. But I do not propose any grandmotherly legislation which permits one subject to the artist and relegates the other to the pornographer. For it is clear that an author may deal well or ill with a subject intended to yield genuine passion (though in the latter case the popular interest will attach to the sensational character of the incidents rather than to the treatment of passion as such, and a book of this kind may be considered as I have already considered the "novel of incident"). And, again, an author may deal well or ill with the sensations of sex; those sensations can provide material for fine art. It is a matter of treatment. Upon feelings of this sort Maupassant based some of his most felicitous stories. But Maupassant did not use sexual incidents for the sake of sex feeling; for him such incidents were various symbols, flickering images, of life, incarnations of the brooding spirit of cynicism and scorn. We have already seen that to Fielding, for whom they were of less special significance on their own account, they were presented as assertions of boisterous physical eagerness, of delight in energetic life for its own sake.

It has already become obvious that the tendency of the most popular literature is to substitute the cruder sensations for the higher emotions and sentiments. We have seen how incident is liked for the mere sensation it can afford; how sentiment is turned into sentimentality. As a rule, in discussing inferior literature the higher emotions need be taken little into account. But in the case of love it is different. The average man, by reason of his pre-occupation and his averageness, is little affected by a variety of fine emotions; the hard facts of life smother them. But everyone can observe that the emotion of love is not only an emotion to which most men at a certain age are susceptible, but that it seems to present itself, at some time or another, in a form finer than that of any other feeling entertained by average men. I believe that all observers would agree that innumerable men and women who cannot be touched in a subtle way by any other emotion—unless we except, especially in primitive men, the emotion of war; and then it is rather intense than subtle—can be and are so touched by the emotion of love.

Here, then, we might expect to find the basis for a literature which may be both widely popular and at the same time finely imagined. Within certain limits I believe the love passion does afford such a basis. If we can imagine an artist confining himself to this single issue, relying on no finenesses outside it, then we might have a work of art which men and women, representing in other respects any degree of imagination and dullness, might all almost equally enjoy. In practice it is seldom that an artist is content to confine himself so exclusively to this issue; it is not in the nature of the imaginative temperament to limit itself in that way. But I think we have an example approximating to the supposed type in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The strenuousness of the love emotion is in this book rendered with consummate power, and hence the hold it has over men of intelligence and over fools. But in almost every other respect the novel is sheer rhetoric, crudeness, and unshapeliness.

The novel (or popular biography) which deals not with the emotion of love but the sex sensation, requires little discussion. If the object of the writer is to treat such a theme with imaginative criticism, well and good. If he intends only to reproduce the sensation, he is a pornographer.

IV. It is extraordinary that there should be so little humorous literature distributed among the English-speaking peoples, for a sense of humour is a boon which has been allotted to a very large minority of the human race, and some sense of the ridiculous to the majority. It is through his sense of what is ridiculous in life, and his power of presenting it imaginatively, that Dickens seems to have acquired not only a permanent place in English literature, but a popularity quite unique among standard English novelists. The jocularity of Mark Twain is equally dexterous, but it is not so completely imagined as the humour of Dickens; it springs more often from situation than from character, and to that extent belongs more to the accidents than to the essentials of life. Mr. W.W. Jacobs deserves a higher place than is usually accorded to him in contemporary literature. His short stories are excellently contrived within their limits; the humour springs from situation and character conjoined. When a clever writer is content to confine himself primarily to the ridiculous in life, it is possible for him to make his effect both for the million and the more exacting few. As Wuthering Heights was popular because it was little more than a brilliant presentation of the love passion, so Many Cargoes and Light Freights are popular as well as excellent because they aim at nothing but the broad effect of laughter. Mr. Jacobs is inferior to Dickens because he is a humorist and nothing more, and also because he has an infinitely narrower range. His art is one which presents but a single aspect of life, and suggests no ambition to exhibit a large grasp upon life as a whole. But he succeeded exactly in what he set out to do.

But have any of Mr. Jacobs' books, or any of Dickens', enjoyed greater popularity than fell to Mr. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat? In this book the humour sprang in no sense out of character; nor did it even spring out of situations contrived with especial skill. It consisted of a series of ludicrous impressions such as that of a man sitting on a pat of butter. Well, a man sitting on a pat of butter is a funny thing—when it happens naturally in life. But a collection of incidents, each of which might be funny if it happened among the accidents of life, are a poor source of entertainment when strung together without the life which makes them real. It should be remembered that what is an accident in life ceases to be an accident when it is invented in a story. A writer must needs supply from the imagination something which may give the artistic effect of accident. Even farce misses its true effects if it contains no verisimilitude. To see your friend sitting on a pat of butter is amusing; to listen to an invented account of besmeared garments is not amusing; for it misses the amusing point—which was the fact of its happening. But the admirers of Three Men in a Boat see only trousers and butter, trousers and butter; and they find nothing offensive in the manner in which this incongruity has been thrust upon their sight. Their complacent minds receive this funny visual impression because they do not perceive the glaring artifice which for another banishes the humour.

V. Morality among the Anglo-Saxon races is a popular theme. It can cover a multitude of artistic sins. Religion is popular in all countries, and is not always associated with good morals; but in England and the United States good religion and good morals fall under the same hierarchy. Both have their corresponding sensations and emotions. We may see them violently operative at revival meetings, distracting agents which are sometimes indeed so powerful as to lead to extraordinary reactions. It is difficult to attain the same violence with the written as with the spoken word, but if any living novelist has succeeded in attaining the effect of pandemonium through the use of religious and moral subjects, it is Miss Marie Corelli. As proxime accessit I might name Mr. Hall Caine. By the same methods Mr. Guy Thorne (alias Ranger Gull) attained, with the pulpit assistance of the Bishop of London, a sensational popular success in When it was Dark. There have also been many fine writers who did not aim at spurious effects, but received praise by reason of their "moral tone" in circles where they would never have received it on the grounds of literary excellence. If George Eliot had not been a moralist she would not have been so popular in England. If Ruskin had not been primarily a preacher he could never have wielded his vast influence. Tennyson was beloved as much for his moralism as for his sweetness; and to-day so admirable a writer as Mr. John Galsworthy is, even in "serious" circles, regarded as a serious novelist mainly because he is a critic of morals. Mr. John Masefield wrote many novels and plays in which he showed singular fineness of feeling and beauty of style. But when he wrote a poem called The Everlasting Mercy—a story of thrilling incident with an admirable moral—lo! his popular reputation was made! People could understand a story of sensational incident. They could understand the moral. They flattered themselves that they were enjoying poetry!

* * * * *

If anyone should reproach me with adopting the tone of that odious thing the "superior person," and should declare that I underestimate the intelligence and good sense of the majority of readers, my reply is that the finest literature is not that which is most read, and I am compelled to conclude that the finest ideas are not those which are most often embraced. To assert this is not to disparage the common sense and the practical intelligence of the mass of mankind. I believe that they are capable of vast activity and eagerness, much of which runs to waste through the fatigues of excessive labour; much, through lack of training and mental stimulus, can find no congenial outlet through the mysterious processes of art. The outlet which the majority of men find for their superfluous energy is not through the channel of fine ideas. Such literature as they read is for distraction and not for the vigorous use of their faculties. It cannot be otherwise. That is the condition imposed by the fragmentary education alone vouchsafed to the majority of men and women, giving them no more than that modicum of learning which is a dangerous thing. And it is a matter of supreme importance because this new reading habit of the million has turned the energies of authors and publishers from the few to the many. It has introduced into the literary profession a demagogic habit, and has set up a quantitative instead of a qualitative standard.



PART TWO

LITERATURE AND MODERN LIFE



I.

TO-DAY AND YESTERDAY

1.

"We must read what the world reads at the moment," said Dr. Johnson, giving the remark an ironical meaning when he added, "A man will have more gratification for his vanity in conversation from having read modern books than from having read the best works of antiquity." Nevertheless, one great difference between the time of Dr. Johnson and the world of to-day is, that whilst the former lived in perpetual admiration of antiquity, we live in perpetual admiration of ourselves. Though Johnson agreed that Pope's poetry was not talked of so much after his death as in his lifetime, he declared that it had "been as much admired since his death as during his life.... Virgil is less talked of than Pope, and Homer is less talked of than Virgil; but they are not less admired."

But in the intellectual circle which is most before the public to-day there is a tendency to despise the traditions of English literature and to worship only the idol of originality. In a paper largely devoted to literary matters I recently read a statement to the effect that many authors, indifferent to books, neither buy nor read them, whilst others positively dislike them. Mr. Shaw's quarrel with Shakespeare has been of long standing, but at least Mr. Shaw has done his old-fashioned rival the honour of reading him. Mr. Arnold Bennett, on the other hand, who is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant contemporary novelists, has declared, not without pride, that the only novel of Dickens that he had ever read was Little Dorrit, and this but recently, and that he considered him a greatly overrated novelist. The conclusion is not surprising, and the living author is no doubt confirmed in his opinion that the works of Mr. Bennett are of vastly superior merit.

This modern self-confidence is undoubtedly a healthy sign of intellectual activity and eagerness. It goes to show that authors are scrutinising keenly the life that is going on around them; that they are interested in facts and things, and seeking to give them a larger reality in terms of ideas; and we see that they are finding a similar response from the reading public. It was not without significance that all through the period of the great Coal Strike publishers reduced their output of books to the smallest possible dimensions, and especially refrained from issuing books of the highest class. I do not believe that this was merely due to the fact that in times of economic crisis there is a lack of pocket-money with which to purchase literature. The fact surely was that much of the attention which in many circles is given to modern books was drawn away by the stirring events that were happening in our midst. The study and contemplation of the Coal Strike were of precisely the same nature as the study and contemplation of original contemporary literature. For that literature in its most characteristic forms is concerned with the problems and the structure of modern society.

If at the time of the Coal Strike we had inquired what English plays had recently called forth the most criticism and interest in intellectual circles, we should probably have named, first, Mr. Galsworthy's Justice, and secondly, his Strife. The latter was concerned with a situation exactly similar to that developed by the Coal Strike. The action of the drama took place in the middle of a great strike. Mr. Galsworthy presented typical characters representing owners and men, both acting on principle, both determined and irreconcilable, stubborn and loyal, both betraying human qualities fundamentally the same. I am not for the moment concerned with the conclusion drawn by the dramatist, but with the fact that the serious attention which is given to modern literature and drama is the same sort of attention as that given to the great social questions of our time.

2.

To search for hidden unities in the literature of an age is often to distort facts in the interest of theory. But there may come a point—and I think the most notable literature of the year preceding the Coal Strike marks such a point—when certain salient facts emerge so violently and so repeatedly from the written page that no one but the blindest can ignore or deny them. If one should take six books written in that period by six authors who are fairly representative of contemporary English literature—E.M. Forster, Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Granville Barker, Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy—there would be found one truth about them so obvious that it has been remarked by dozens of reviewers. It is that they are concerned with the same social problems as those which fall under the science of sociology; that they advocate, criticise, or imply reforms scarcely less directly than do those for whom social reform is a profession.

But this, I think, is scarcely the most satisfactory way of putting the matter. The same truth may perhaps be expressed in wider and more significant terms by saying that the characteristic literature of to-day is the literature of change. The most vigorous writers are generally those who respond most to their environment, in the same sense that to such men everything must be full of suggestion, interesting, and matter for the interpretative mind; though the greatest of all are those who nourish themselves at all the sources of inspiration, in the past and the present, in the seen and the unseen. The latter are in consequence not so purely representative of their own special time as are those vigorous, active minds which fill a secondary place in the world's literature, but bulk largest to their contemporaries. Shakespeare is not so representative of the Elizabethans as is Marlowe or Chapman. Probably if a greater number of Greek plays survived we should find that Sophocles is less characteristically Athenian than Euripides. And in the same way Mr. Joseph Conrad is not so representative of the contemporary world as is Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Wells. But it is in men of the latter type that we shall find the qualities by which their epoch is differentiated from others, the qualities which to some extent appear in the greatest, which appear far more abundantly in those biggest only in contemporary estimation—which in any case mark the trend of thought and the peculiar contribution of the time. The literature produced by men of this type is most profoundly impressed by what may be called the spirit of change.

The briefest consideration of contemporary literature is sufficient to prove how powerfully these minds have been moulded, either by observing this fact of change or contemplating its possibility. The fact itself may perhaps best be illustrated by the case of Mr. Edmund Gosse and the story told in his memorable book, Father and Son. As a piece of biography alone that book stands high, for the fine drawing of the mind and character of the father. But the noticeable point lies in the vivid contrast between the father and son, the transition from the hard-headed, scrupulous, rigid, narrow-minded Puritan, who is so typical of the Victorian age, to the broad-minded, cultured litterateur of to-day. There is the fact of change—the Rev. Philip Gosse of forty years ago has become the Mr. Edmund Gosse of to-day.

If we would see how this actual change in the outward and inward order of the world has affected novelists we may turn to Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Wells, or Mr. E.M. Forster. In Clayhanger, as in Old Wives' Tales, Mr. Bennett traces the progression of the English world from the generation of our grandfathers to our own generation; he shows this change creeping upon us at an accelerated pace, catching the older inhabitants unawares, a visible change in bricks and mortar, in widening streets, in enlarged factories, in the introduction of trams which in due course became electric trams; and a change no less decisive in customs and habits, the older folk marvelling at the new-fangled independence of the young; the whole being nothing less than a revolution which has descended with the sure but imperceptible advance of a glacier, so that within living memory the face and character of England have been altered. In Milestones he has more recently given us another account of the same historic progression.

And an exactly similar idea has captured the imagination of Mr. Wells. In The New Machiavelli, as in Tono-Bungay and other books, he tells the story of the rapidly evolving world in which his heroes have grown up; of the ever-spreading suburbs stretching out their tentacles north and south and east and west, of the mushroom houses which arose without order or system, of the changing system of education, the changing ideas towards parents—everything spasmodic, growing, muddled. Similarly, Mr. E.M. Forster, in Howard's End, shows the old house so dear to the heart of Mrs. Wilcox, as the symbol of permanence in an unfixed society which is homeless, restless, changing. Even if we look abroad we shall find something of this same sense of the transformation in the order of things; in America, Mr. Winston Churchill has written a series of novels to illustrate the successive phases in the American character; and in France authors like M. Paul Bourget and M. Rene Bazin emphasise respectively the change from aristocracy to democracy, and from the reverence of orthodoxy to the revolutionary secular spirit.

In a somewhat different way Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Shaw, and Mr. Granville Barker are affected by the fluidity of their environment. Of Mr. Galsworthy I shall have something more to say, and need merely point out for the moment that in Fraternity, Strife, and especially Justice, the author is not merely indicating but advocating changes which, instead of being left to accident, are to be guided in accordance with a definite human purpose. Mr. Shaw is so minded that he preaches against change wherever he perceives it, and clamours for it when he perceives it not. Thus in The Doctor's Dilemma and the Preface to it, finding himself confronted with great changes in medical science, he denounces medical progress and its pretensions as a superstition and a fraud. In Getting Married, on the other hand, finding that the public is still often content with old-fashioned ideas of sex relations and home life, he ridicules "home life as we understand it," on the ground that it is "no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo." I am not accusing him of any real inconsistency in thus alternating between conservative and revolutionary dogmas. He would doubtless hold that changes ought to have been made where there have been none, and that those which have occurred have not followed the course which he, or men gifted with similar foresight, would have prescribed.

It may be objected that the influence of change upon literature is not only felt by our contemporaries, but has affected the literature of all times; that it is the function of men of letters to be ahead of their contemporaries and to initiate ideas which are productive of change; that the history of literature is the history of the progress of thought and imagination; and that therefore the present age does not differ in this respect from others. To which I would reply that whilst other literatures have represented or initiated change, there has never been a time when so many of the best creative intellects have consciously concerned themselves with this process, making change of conditions either their artistic subject or their deliberate practical object. The reason, of course, is obvious; there never has been a time when the world was undergoing such a startling and rapid transformation. It is true, the economic, material, scientific, and moral changes in the Athens of the fifth century came about quickly and drastically, and the reconstitution of intellectual and moral ideas mooted by the Sophists found a profound expression in the dialectic of the drama. How far the Elizabethans were influenced by the revival of learning and science, the discovery of the new world and the expansion of commerce, is a question I need not embark upon. But it will not be disputed that the face of the world has never in any known period of history been so changed out of all recognition as it has been by the scientific and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. The barbarian invasions which put an end to Imperial Rome can have had no outward and visible effect comparable to that of the invasion of the machine. What wonder that the superficial, hurried reader of to-day finds little to satisfy him in the literature of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, the former so much concerned either with religion or pleasure, the latter with the moral virtues or their opposites!

The Renaissance did not reach its moral consummation till the time of the French Revolution, its intellectual consummation till the nineteenth century, its material consummation till the twentieth century and thereafter. The growth of science first affected the imagination, for it was an emancipating idea; its first offspring was Romanticism and the idea of liberty and democracy. But science as it progressed in the nineteenth century came, first with the machine and the whip, then with the machine and the moralist, at its elbow. But wherever and however it came, it transformed with lightning rapidity, just in that way in which Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Forster, and Mr. Winston Churchill, the American, have indicated; till the mere fact of its transforming became so remarkable and absorbing that that fact has almost exhausted the attention of three-fourths of the artists and intellectuals of our age.

So habituated then have we become to rapid change in the conditions of life that the first thing we postulate is further change. The rustic accustomed to the same food every day of his life does not criticise his fare; it is the epicure, accustomed to variety, who is critical of the menu. The active mind which witnesses perpetual variety must be perpetually critical. To be aware that the conditions of to-day are different from the conditions of yesterday and of to-morrow is, according to the temperament of the beholder, to lament the past or to hasten the future. In this respect the Radical and the Conservative are alike, that it is the perception of change which determines them, though it determines them in different ways, the one being affected by hope, the other by fear. Both are discontented with the present, the one because it falls short of the future, which he imagines, the other because it has departed from the security of the past, which he idealises. And, as we have seen, even the creative artist cannot escape from the fascination of this ever-changing environment, where the unsystematised present obtrudes its fresh discontents, and the unknown future is pregnant with possibilities of good and the alternative of unimaginable evil. All perceive that something must be done to direct the plunging course of this hydra-headed democracy which, as its onrush is in any case irresistible, may at any moment deviate from the path and fling itself headlong to perdition. When the guns are firing and the battle is joined and the cries of the wounded fill the air, there are not many who can sit down in the midst, like the German philosopher at the battle of Austerlitz, to contemplate the Absolute. Most of them, even though their function is art, rush out to join the melee; and this is why they incur the censure of the reviewers, making fiction and drama a branch of sociology.

But one seems to hear, distinguishable occasionally amidst the din, a low, faint murmur. This way madness lies. Is man, the master of his soul, to be thus enslaved to his conditions? Is he to be tossed hither and thither by changes which he did not create, by ideas to which he did not subscribe, by a tempest he never wished to combat? Is there no quiet place of refuge wherein he may be at peace to live as his ancestors lived, and to cherish the humble ambitions which they cherished? The answer, in a certain sense, is "No." The conventions which served their purpose have in many cases lost their meaning; the duties our ancestors performed have lost their usefulness; the old bottles will not hold the new wine which our generation serves to us. And this is one reason why so many people rate and gibe at what they call the "muddle-headed British public; "because it cannot change its ideas so quickly as it is forced to change its conditions of life.

But is there not an important significance in the very fact which makes our intellectuals desperate with indignation, the fact that you cannot change the "public mind" so rapidly as you can change its tramway services, its government, or the place—the cellar, the crust of the earth, or the sky—in which it is to be housed? It is easier to take a man up in an aeroplane than it is to make him agree that his neighbour ought to run away with his wife, or that his sons ought not to read Thucydides. Even amongst those writers whom I have named there is beginning to arise a half-formed consciousness that amid all these changes in circumstances we must be careful how we admit changes in character and in mental calibre; a consciousness that we are in need of some fixed point by which the world may be enabled to retain its sanity. Now there are two classes of people who believe in permanence: those who think that the world is the same always because they are too silly to open their eyes; and the very small class of those who have felt profoundly that all things are changing in something more than the Heraclitean sense, who have yet penetrated to the necessity of a permanence, of an organic human continuity, underlying the multiplex circumstances and ideas of our life.

And this brings me back to Mr. Forster and Mr. Galsworthy. "Howard's End," the old-fashioned house which gives its name to Mr. Forster's novel, is contrasted with the new buildings which are occupied and vacated, which spring up on all sides and are vicariously inhabited, which draw nearer and nearer to the garden and the wych-elm of "Howard's End." It is the symbol of permanence, of the old order which "connects" the past with the present, the personal and individual with the cosmopolitan and indifferent; it is the something sacred which neither an individual nor a nation can afford to neglect. Mr. Forster, impressed as he is with the need of change, directed instead of haphazard, nevertheless perceives that there are permanent elements, belonging to character, in our blood and our tradition, which cannot be ignored without peril.

Mr. Galsworthy, in The Patrician, is no longer the mere antagonist of the established order of things. He seems to have attained a sort of optimism strangely at variance with his earlier views; to have declared that running through all these conflicts, revolutions, and evolutions there is and has been a certain national sense, a sort of collective reasonableness, which is constantly making itself felt, and being expressed in its best form by the leaders of opinion, the aristocrats of nature; that the torrent runs, as it were, between solid banks; that in the long run character triumphs over confusion.

3.

It would be folly to regret that the drama of modern life, of our swiftly evolving modern society, has become absorbingly interesting to so many of the best brains of the time. Although we may detect a serious limitation to literature, a didacticism alien to the disinterested spirit of art, still we cannot fail to see that a new sort of vitality, belonging rather to the moral sense than the intellect or the perceptions, has been infused into imaginative literature. Something, at least, which is fresh and real and vital has been introduced, exclusive of much that we have been accustomed to regard as excellent, but serving surely to give a distinctive and far from negligible character to the typical literature of our time. That typical literature, in its most important manifestations, is concerned with the events that are happening around us here and now—with ideas, largely partisan, that give meaning to them—with the purposes that direct and determine them. Criticism, if it is to be vital criticism, cannot dissociate itself from those ideas, nor look on with sublime indifference to opinions as to the true and the false, the desirable and the undesirable.

But when we have said that, we are also bound to recognise the drawbacks and serious limitations of the modern tendency. It includes—and we come back to the point at which we started—a tendency to dissociate modern writing from the continuous stream of English and world literature. Incidentally the didacticism of modern writers, and their absorption in the affairs of the moment, have not only served to make a breach between themselves and English literature as a whole, to the detriment of their perspective, but have also set a gulf between themselves and those of another school, for whom world literature is more important than the literature of to-day, for whom erudition and interest in the past are not to be lightly dismissed as academicism. I can imagine no greater disaster to letters than a breach between the literary originator and the man of learning. Such a breach can only mean that learning is cast back upon itself, loses humanity, and becomes academic; and that the author who despises or ignores erudition, and with it the sense of human continuity and permanence for which it ought to stand, tends to become opinionative and shallow. His work must lack the imaginative range, the mellowness, the beauty which cannot take form through instinct alone, which cannot be expressed by those who have not lovingly studied the models of antiquity and our own literature, who have not sought contact with the life of other times as well as with the life of to-day.

The great gain to literature in recent years is that it is more closely related to action and those general ideas which lead to action. Its great corresponding defect—and this is immeasurable—is its loss in form, in universality, in that disinterestedness which is essential to art. Erudition, when it is humane, and even when it is merely academic, has, at any rate, always that disinterestedness which is essential alike to science and art. If it is humane—as it was, on the whole, in the Elizabethan age—its whole moral support, vast in this age of idol-worshippers, will be on the side of disinterested art and literature. We do not hope, or wish, that all authors should be men of learning—they should be of all sorts. But if authors and men of learning continue to be removed in sympathy, interests, and ideals, it is a sign that both are in a bad way.



II

PROFESSIONAL POLITICS

"Take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you wish: that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition." These words were written by an irresponsible fellow before the days of "responsibility" were inaugurated; before politicians had become a race apart, admired or execrated according to the temperament of the beholder; before writers were solemnly divided into men-of-letters, novelists, litterateurs, journalists, hacks, and professors; before physicians had become a close corporation of certificated benefactors; not, indeed, before lawyers had learnt to trade on human litigiousness, but before they had won the respect of the public for the disinterested exercise of their talents. The days of specialism have added to the sum-total of human knowledge; but they have diminished intercourse, they have made men more inaccessible to one another, they have promoted new groupings, new atmospheres, new officialdoms, new barriers and water-tight compartments.

The professional spirit has affected and infected the whole of modern society; we see its results in what we call the "disappearance of wit," or the "loss of the conversational faculty," or the "didactic habit," or anything else implying regret for the individualism of the past. It means that our several callings have separated us, have made us into creatures of our profession, have established us on our own particular pedestals on which, as good statues, we must remain, and that our common humanity is an insufficient link between us. Our special knowledge, our special habit, our special highly-esteemed reputation, sets up a barrier which cuts us off from our fellows and destroys community of feeling.

The politician of mediocre capacity may know enough to cut a figure among his political associates only by judicious silence, or by talkativeness on those subjects of which others are ignorant. But put him among his non-political friends, and he is an oracle of wisdom upon the law and the Constitution. The doctor, who has forgotten his scientific principles but has picked up some empirical knowledge, has the advantage of experience and authority as against the layman for whom he prescribes. The lawyer, the civil servant, the professional theologian, and the diplomat are in the same position. They all know enough of their subject to be superior to those who know next to nothing of it. They know enough to have pedestals of their own; to be on their guard; to have a reputation to maintain; to conceal the "dram of folly;" to be, to that extent, artificial in their relations with men. They dare not betray the "laughable blunder," which, said Charles Lamb, is the test your neighbour giveth you "that he will not betray or over-reach you."

In the case of the chartered accountant, or the stockbroker, or the pedlar, this special knowledge is not so damning a thing. No accountant, be he ever so limited, can be wholly contented with accountancy as an explanation or sum-total of life; nor can the broker, however absorbed in his business, admit to his friends that the manipulating of stocks and shares is the only matter which should consume the interest of mortals. It is otherwise with the politician, the priest, the man of letters, the professional philosopher, and even the lawyer and the soldier. There is nothing human which may not enter into politics, religion or philosophy, or become the subject of literature; the human complexion of the State may be transformed by the professional prejudice of the lawyer or the soldier.

Consider how, for democratic purposes, the Member of Parliament is made. There is no need to pay undue attention to the amusing exaggerations and distortions of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Cecil Chesterton. The Member of Parliament has been supported in his constituency by a group of local politicals who have a healthy enthusiasm for the party war-cry. The serious candidate is too experienced, too professional, to share those enthusiasms in precisely that form which they assume, at election time, in the minds of his supporters. I do not mean that he is less enthusiastic than they, a less whole-hearted backer of his party, but that, from the nature of his political experience, politics presents itself to him under a perspective which cannot be theirs. He leaves his constituency a specially ordained champion of political truth; he arrives at Westminster a unit in the crowd.

If we follow our member to Westminster we shall soon find that he has fallen into the Parliamentary manner; that his ideas are grouped around the ideas familiar to the House of Commons; that he has taken its tone, and that his habits are becoming gradually assimilated to the habits of those few with whom he especially associates himself. Let us attend a meeting of some propagandist committee comprising a number of expert politicians—Members of Parliament, or others. We shall find there the bond of a common knowledge, a common sympathy, a common approach towards a given subject, a common jargon. We shall be aware of the fact that we have come into a particular, highly-specialised atmosphere, where the familiar language of ordinary life, the familiar ideas, would be intrusions, meriting nothing but frowns or compassionate smiles.

And the same thing is true of most corporate journalism and most corporate religion. The atmosphere is highly specialised; it is binding; and those who live in it believe it to be co-extensive with the whole of life. Let us bind ourselves by Tolstoy; let us agree to loosen ourselves by Nietzsche; but, in any case let us agree to love our neighbour on the principle of a close corporation. The main influences which shape the modern world operate, for the most part, through intellectual groups; each group can only be appealed to in a language familiar to it; it can only act on principles (consciously accepted or presupposed) which are its very special property; you can never touch it to the quick, in its corporate and active capacity, without accepting or appearing to accept its collective prejudices. Its differentia is that which separates it from the unit of common humanity.

Thus we come to something more difficult to analyse than specialisation of work—a specialisation of sentiment, habits and morals, which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere which they have appropriated, and so limited as to be blind in the broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken. And yet it is through these groups, keen-eyed in one direction, blind in others, that the intellect, the reforming zeal, the earnestness, the idealism of the age, have to pass before ideas and vague aspiration can be transformed into action or effective influence. These groups are the main-drainage-system of modern life; they are the ordinary channels through which the business of the world has to pass, and its organised thought be directed. Take any one of these groups, and consider its differential character, its mode of apperception, its ethos, and you find it something deformed, twisted, strained in one direction, like a tree by the sea-shore. But take a few score of them, and imagine their qualities fused together, and the result would accord with the ideals of common humanity—ideals vaguely conceived, perhaps, but generous. It is just because the qualities of these groups, in politics, religion, social work, and to a lesser extent in literature, are not and cannot be fused together, but on the contrary, stand apart in water-tight compartments, so that the whole is like an elaborate system of checks to make each part inoperative, that, at a time when the whole community is strangely alive with good will, the actual social achievement is beyond measure disappointing.

The test of success or failure is the degree of satisfaction afforded to the common man. By the "common man" I do not mean the inferior man, but the man who has not specialised himself out of his common humanity. If there is any interest which an honest lawyer can share with an honest fisherman, a decent cockney with a decent Bedouin Arab, he does it in virtue of this nobler "commonness;" it may include the interests of good fellowship, of delight in song or nature, of a belief in God, and a host of indescribable interests which do not belong to the mechanism and compulsory organisation of life; it includes some "dram of folly," some capacity for "laughable blunder" in intercourse between men. Culture may break in upon this "commonness" and destroy it. But it need not be so. Shakespeare has this commonness in a high degree; so have Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Lamb; all great artists have had it when their culture has not crazed them, or when they have not lifted themselves into an almost mystical absorption in exercising some gift of austere, monumental expression; in which case, like Milton, they scarcely belong to the category of humans; their food is ambrosial, and their wine is nectar.

The task of the inspired politician has become harder in proportion as the problem of government has become more intricate and more specialised. He must work through his machinery, which includes not only the administrative machine, but all those groups, in and out of Parliament, limited by their ethical and sentimental specialities. He must be professional enough to appreciate the ground of their excellences, and "common" enough to discard their limitations. It is only when there are several such men, powerful enough to leaven politics and lead politicians, that modern democracy can have any shadow of reality—men who understand the rank and file of humanity, conversant also with the complicated machine and the contending groups of narrowly defined ideals, men fired with that constructive imagination which crystallises in common sense.



III

SPECIALISM IN RELIGION

It is significant that the name "Religion of Humanity" was given to a set of tenets which strictly speaking contained no religion at all. Positivism gained ground in middle-Victorian England not merely because Science and the theory of Evolution were in the ascendant, but still more because it was recognised that the orthodox Churches were out of harmony with modern life; that they were ministering neither to modern humanitarian feeling nor to humanity. Positivism survives to this day in the person of Mr. Frederic Harrison and a few others (including several of the leaders of the Young Turkish party); but it would by this time have been a powerful creed if it had been really a creed, if it had anything spiritual and credible to offer to those who are outraged by the professional neglect, self-absorption, and intellectual insincerity of the Churches. Everyone is aware of the failure of the Churches to touch modern life; to escape from their grooves; to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations of old-fashioned formulae instead of finding vital, human, developing expressions of the spiritual craving of man. Even Mr. George Cadbury is aware of this failure, as he showed by his zeal for the inquiry into church attendance some years ago, an inquiry which has been repeated this year with results unsatisfactory to the Churches. The question has been debated again and again, and inquirers have been unable to make up their minds whether it is the Churches that are not good enough for the people, or the people who are not good enough for the Churches. It is a question of the priority of the chicken or the egg. It is not known whether public sentiment is depraved because it is alienated from the Churches, or whether the Churches are depraved because they have excluded so many of the most powerful moral forces of the time. Certain it is that they have offended by their exclusiveness; by the narrowing down of interest; by the cliquishness of those who are specialists in piety or ritual. We may observe their habit of mind in that narrow Victorian sect which converted Mr. Gosse's strong-willed and in many ways lovable father into an intolerant tyrant (as set forth in Father and Son); that lax and snobbish branch of the Anglican Church which failed to capture Mr. Bernard Shaw in his youth, because it stood only for a "class prejudice;" and those strange types of Christianity which, as Mr. Lowes Dickinson expresses it, find no disharmony between belief in a "Power that is supposed to have created the stars and the tiger" and "the sentimental, almost erotic character of many Christian hymns:

Jesu, lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly."

The evidence of those who have been estranged from the Churches is worth considering. We see that Mr. Gosse was driven from them in his youth by their sectarian narrowness and unwillingness to face intellectual inquiry; Mr. Shaw by the flippancy of the Irish Church, its class prejudice, its false respectability; Mr. Lowes Dickinson, among other reasons, because at a time when men are learning to adapt the processes of Nature to their ends, when it becomes them to "dwell less and less upon their weaknesses and more and more upon their strength," the orthodox Christians assert that we are "miserable sinners," that "there is no health in us," when they "ought to be too busy demonstrating in fact the contrary." Members of the general public in one way and another have become accustomed to regard religion with an uneasy constraint; there are harmless things which must not be said in the presence of a priest; there is a pastorality about the minister which implies a flock and a coterie; and Englishmen seldom mention the name of God without an appearance of apology or secret shame. Religion has become largely a matter of cliques, coteries, associations—of specialism in codes and casuistry.

I will not press the question whether the history of the Christian Church has not been the history of the perversions of Christianity. A distinguished Chinese author not long ago indicted the alleged un-Christian methods of our missionaries in China; Dr. Halil Halid, a Turk, has pointed out that it is in the Christian countries that the Christian virtues of humility and disdain of wealth are least in evidence. What concerns us now is the feeling in formally Christian countries that in spite of Christianity the Christian Churches have not taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is on earth; they have not taught toleration and love; they have urged us to ignore the present world in the interests of the next; and because their own followers have refused to do anything of the kind they have isolated religion from practical life. I agree that many Churches, seeking to adapt themselves to modern needs, have organised social clubs, carried on political crusades, and rendered useful service in "rescue work;" but even so they have rather tended to distinguish between themselves in their spiritual capacity and themselves in their secular capacity. The majority of people do not seem to find in the religious services of the Churches a note that touches their practical needs or their spiritual ideals. The most successful popular appeal has been made by those organisations which have endeavoured to add to the zest of life by exciting music, tuneful hymns, and buoyant rhetoric.

In our unprecedented age of incessant change, continuous revolution, and swift innovation, we have become accustomed to the idea that the social order can and must be altered, that men must take things into their own hands. The fatalism of the old orthodoxy is not for a people who see that things are accomplished by the human will; such people are naturally impatient with those who entreat the Deity to do for them what they can very well do for themselves. The last of the great fatalists in English literature is Mr. Thomas Hardy. He was moved by the downfall of the old settled civilisation and the purposeless, vexing changes which swept like a hurricane on a nation now suddenly made conscious of its evil lot. He was aware of the "modern vice of unrest" at a time when the human will had not yet set itself to direct and organise change. Thus it was that he came to pronounce the last word about Fatalism, and, in so doing, to reduce it to absurdity. "The First Cause," as Sue Fawley perceived it, "worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage;" she blamed "things in general, because they are so horrid and cruel!"

Whatever one's theological views may be, no one to-day tolerates in the drama of life any god-of-the-machine. In Greece, art and religion went hand in hand, and this was possible because gods were like men and manifested themselves through Nature, not in a sphere outside Nature. No civilisation prior to our own experienced so rapid an evolution as Athens in the fifth century B.C.; but when that century was over, it was still possible for a philosopher to draw robust symbolical illustrations from the old mythology. The Modernists to-day are only applying a law of history when they say that religion must evolve with the evolution of human culture. In the first thirteen centuries, the Christian Church did in practice change and adapt itself to civilisation. As long as the world was conservative, a conservative Church could keep pace with it. The first cataclysm came at the time when civilisation was again rapidly changing, and Christianity only emerged torn and divided by the Reformation. But the world to-day is being altered far more rapidly than at the time of the Renaissance. It turns from the Churches, not because it is tired of the spiritual life, or of other-worldliness, but because, just as it demands of literature and art that they should appeal to the modern mind and heart, so it can be content with nothing less from religion. And it is just because the Churches have been too conservative, because they tend to tradition, formulae, conventions, and manners which, retained beyond their time, assume the garb of unreality, that they are abandoned or slighted by the people—as they must continue to be slighted—until new prophets arise to present universal truths in a new and practical form; to endeavour to preach religion as the great man of letters endeavours to represent beauty and truth.



IV

SPECIALISM IN WAR

England is very near to the Continent of Europe, and we are accustomed to thinking of Western civilisation as one. Yet every time we cross the Channel we are reminded in some fresh way of the foreignness of foreign countries. The dwelling-houses of France, for instance, are different from the dwelling-houses of England in respect of the important fact that they are all to some extent fortified houses. Great and small houses alike are evidently built with a view to defence from within. If you take a country walk anywhere in Normandy you find that the gardens of the country houses have massive gates and high walls, the front door is like a portcullis, and the window shutters are barricades. The smallest cottages have great doors and window shutters, and if there is a garden, it is two to one that the wall is a real wall. And not only in the country districts, but in the towns, pre-eminently in Paris itself, each house or block of flats is so constructed as to defy the violent intruder.

It strikes us strangely, as we walk through the cities of France and reflect upon the reasons for these square doors and these guarded windows. We have suffered no recent invasion, we have had no bloody revolution. During the whole of the nineteenth century our island has known nothing more violent than the Peterloo massacre or the Chartist riots. We have constantly had wars, but they have been distant wars, a matter for the hireling soldier, and not often dragging in the volunteer civilian. If we were disgusted when we heard the true story of the Crimea, we soon forgot the story. We were shocked again by the facts of the Boer War; we had not thought that so many men could be so quickly killed, so many millions of money whittled away. But even the South African War never remotely seemed to threaten the security of our own islands. For the most part, the policeman has been enough. A light bolt and a key guard us against petty burglars; we walk abroad unarmed—at the worst, we comment on the fact that it is well to carry a stick if we walk alone in Epping Forest. We have abolished duelling. We have forbidden prize-fights. Even the horse-whip has ceased to be the patrician's mode of redressing wrong. For assault, libel, slander, we have a remedy in the law courts. Even in our punishment of criminals, if occasionally we have to put a man out of the way by discreetly hanging him, we never subject him to the degradation of a whipping. Youthful barbarians at public schools still roll about and pummel one another, but the organised, stand-up fight, such as was fought in Tom Brown's schooldays, is discouraged; public opinion is against it. From infancy we are taught to be peaceful, law-abiding citizens.

Most of us, then, know very little about physical violence. The shedding of blood is an unfamiliar spectacle. If a man is knocked down by a motor-bus, we may or we may not feel human sympathy, but certainly we are physically shocked by the gruesome sight. We send men to the gallows, but we no longer watch their agony on Tyburn Hill. We despatch men to a frontier war, but we know little about their wounds. And yet, as of old, our martial ardour is aroused and we glow with patriotic pride when a regiment of soldiers marches past to the sound of music. As of old, the thought of any great European war excites us, even fascinates us. We know enough, indeed, to assure ourselves that a great war would mean economic ruin, that even a distant war between two foreign countries, such as Turkey and Italy, or Turkey and Bulgaria, will probably react unfavourably on our own trade. Yet the thought of a great war still profoundly interests the mass of Englishmen; they are fascinated; they almost long for news of the great, decisive, bloody battle which means a sensation, a spectacle, an acquaintance with something doing, a something strange, gruesome, violent, and vast.

I am not saying that the people of this country approved of the war which Italy thought good to wage against Turkey, or were pleased at the horrible slaughter in the Balkans. It is obvious, on the contrary, that they strongly disapproved. The "Great Illusion," so effectively exposed by Norman Angell, is no longer universally entertained. Capital has learnt the horrors of war, and organised labour has emphatically declared against it. And yet, though there were few English people who would not have stopped the Turco-Italian war and mitigated the horrors of the Balkan war if they could have done so, it is manifest that there were few who did not revel in the sensation, just as some years ago even our most philanthropic classes deplored and revelled in the spectacle of Macedonian atrocities. A fire at a theatre, an appalling railway accident, and especially murder on a vast, heroic scale, attracts, in these peaceful days, certainly not less than in the days when barbarism was customary.

Now, violence and brutality are obviously one thing to a peaceful people and a very different thing to people accustomed to violence in their daily lives. Upon a man of sedentary occupation a prize-fight must have a very different effect from that which it will have upon men accustomed to the use of their fists. It is worth asking: What is this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace? What is this emotion which leads men to be heroic by proxy? Is it surviving physical excellence which reveals itself in this way, or is it a cumbrous atavistic relic like the appendix which the doctors remove? We see, for instance, enormous crowds gathering at the football matches where professional players show their prowess, and muscles trained and hardened for the fray. We know that there was a crowd looking forward to the Wells-Johnson contest. Contrast these events with a cricket match, where there is practically no violence. Whatever be the reason, any sportsman will testify to the fact that the crowd which goes to see cricket is generally a cricketing crowd, but that the crowd which goes to a cup-tie football match is by no means in the same way a footballing crowd. In other words, so far as the onlookers are concerned, the cricket match is more truly a sporting event than is the professional football match or the Wells-Johnson contest.

Whatever the answer be, it is certain that when we beat the big drum of patriotism and set the guns firing, the thrill which it arouses in the vocal populace is different from the thrill in a people accustomed to violence and blood. We say the "vocal" populace, remembering that there is a portion of the population, very important to the community and growing in power, which is not facile in the art of self-expression. That portion of the population was in evidence at the time of the great Coal Strike, when it seemed actually on the verge of rebellion, when it actually committed violence to the horror and surprise of our peaceful middle classes. The fact is that the very poor are never so far from the violent life as are members of other classes. Violent deaths are not infrequent in factories, in coal-mines, in great building-works, in dockyards. The life of deprivation makes the passion of anger frequent; among the poor blows are often exchanged, and the police are seldom called upon to interfere. Necessarily, from the nature of the case, the poor are more familiar with violence than are their richer and more conventional neighbours; it is a natural thing for the more ignorant of them to fall back upon physical force, as they did at Liverpool. And so, too, just as they are more accustomed to petty war, they are less interested in war between nations. In Italy it was the working-men who protested against the war with Turkey.

But it seems that the more educated and the more organised we become, the more we leave our affairs to be managed by professionals. When a nation declares for war, it declares for a war to be waged by its professionals, and it turns them on to do a job which, according to civilised practices, is a dirty job. And when it is fired with patriotic pride for achievements won in the field it is exercising its emotions on something it cannot understand or realise, for the simple reason that the violence of war is strange, distantly horrible, fascinating, but unfamiliar. It has never directly entered into our experience.



V

SPECIALISM IN LITERATURE

Some time ago Mr. Brander Matthews made the original suggestion in the North American Review that books should be written for the benefit of the reader. The suggestion is not on the face of it paradoxical, but it will be rank heresy to those who blame the public for not bowing down before the sacrosanctity of the "serious" author. He admits that "a book ought to be rich with the full flavour of the author's personality;" primarily it ought to express him; but secondarily—and this is Mr. Brander Matthews' point—"it is for the sole benefit of the reader."

I think we may go a little further than Mr. Matthews, and find a second reason why certain authors fail to find favour with the general reader. In the case which Mr. Matthews seemed to be considering there are authors who have every qualification for writing except that they cannot write. Secondly, there are authors who, in the ordinary literary sense of the term, can write, who have gathered knowledge and formed seriously-grounded opinions about life, who are nevertheless so out of touch with the broad, common interests of men that they invariably fail to make a strong emotional or imaginative appeal.

Every reader is acquainted with the tiresome writer who has a great deal to say but labours infinitely in the saying of it. In a crude, energetic, excessively eulogised novel published in America a few years ago—Queed—we were introduced to an economist engaged upon a work so learned that he knew there were only three persons in America capable of understanding it. There is, doubtless, something to be said for an appreciative audience of three; but it is safe to assert that even the exact sciences might be made more widely intelligible. I am, however, thinking primarily of those studies which have some claim to rank as literary studies. It is through literature that the historian, the biographer, the sociologist, and the philosopher must make their contributions to knowledge. Yet how much research and how much acute thinking are wasted because the student has not the means of making his subject alive for others, has not the reconstructive imagination by means of which truth is communicated! It is because he cannot write.

But this being able to write is not a matter of putting words and clauses together with correctness and elegance. That much the mere scholar generally understands, and it is because he thinks it sufficient that he fails. What is wanted is a quality of mind which is too often excluded from the specialist by his habit of thought. "A few years of journalism," said Mr. W.B. Yeats on one occasion, "is an invaluable discipline for the man of letters." No one is more fully alive to the defects of journalism than Mr. Yeats—its frequent looseness, prejudice, obviousness, and dissipation of interest. But, in spite of that, he saw that the good journalist's faculty of addressing himself directly to the subject in hand, of stating it clearly and in its essentials without waste of words, of so escaping his own particular mould of thought that he may be easily intelligible to a variety of minds, required a discipline and a broadening invaluable to the man who really has something to say. The specialist is inclined to lack the broad outlook of one who is interested in many things; he acquires a jargon of his own; his mind runs in the narrow channel to which that jargon corresponds; the language he uses becomes stilted and dead. There is no tonic in the truths he tries to proclaim, no relevance to the rest of knowledge. In other words, what he has to say may be scientifically valuable, but he fails to convey it to any but his fellow-specialists.

Mr. Brander Matthews points out that the great students are those who have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense, than the romantic or transcendental tradition, with its mysticism and obscurity. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the most lucid of philosophers, are scarcely easier to follow than John Stuart Mill, Huxley, and Leslie Stephen. But it is hardly necessary to enter a caveat against supposing that lucidity of expression is precisely proportional to clearness of thought. The philosophy of Kant did not admit of the simple language of Hume, and T.H. Green and Mr. Bradley are not to be blamed if they are more difficult to understand than Sir Leslie Stephen.

The second aspect of the question is more important, especially at a time when we are constantly reminded that the public is indifferent to the finest creative literature now produced. The fault may be with the public, and it may also be with the authors. It is worth remembering that this is a time when special forms of expression are being made to do work which once belonged to other forms. Fiction, for example, is being made to carry the load of philosophic psychology, of poetry, of the economic, moral, or political treatise. Drama is often used as a vehicle for truths which were once left to the pulpit, the political platform, or the lecture hall. Both of them, in the case of the extreme realists, are being used as the store-room or the dissecting chamber of the experimental scientist. Supposing that an author's facts are supremely important, his discernment most acute, his ideas significant, still, before we condemn the public unheard, we are compelled to ask of him: Have you given to this material a form which it will accept? Have you addressed the public in a language which has a wide human appeal? Are you, in fact, a master of that higher technique which implies an understanding, not only of the fine essences of truth, but the broad, common facts of human nature? It is just because they are not masters of this higher technique that many exponents of so-called "intellectual fiction" and "intellectual drama" are doomed to failure.

I am well aware that such arguments as this must be qualified. For I have not forgotten that what are now the commonplaces of culture were once the unintelligible obscurities of a sage. Much that we now apprehend at a glance, all that makes our cultural birthright, was only acquired by slow and arduous processes, in which the pioneers were laughed to scorn. The original mind sees things in a new light, and his language is to us strange and unfamiliar, and we do not learn it till our eyes and ears have become accustomed. And there are others who do not stand conspicuously in the main stream of mental progress, who, nevertheless, remote and perhaps secluded as they are, have a vision rarefied, subtle, strange not only in their own times, but for all times. Those men have their own communication to make to those anxious to add to the fineness of their perception, or merely perhaps to the oddness of experience. If some sting of truth reaches the mind through writing obscure to the general, through language which may be barbarous in form, an author has justified himself; and it would be idle to follow Mr. Brander Matthews in his quotation from the ever-pleasing Lord Chesterfield: "Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely and unloaded with any other." For, after all, is it not open to the author to choose his company? If his receptions are ill-attended, that may not reflect ill on those who accept the invitation. Not everyone will read the poems of Mr. Doughty; Mr. Doughty has made it hard for them; but if they do, they are repaid. Not everyone will tolerate the finesse of Mr. Henry James; but among those who can understand him, assuredly Mr. James is in very good company.



VI

SPECIALISM IN PHILOSOPHY AND JUSTICE

In the play called Justice, Mr. Galsworthy attacked the professional mechanism of English law in much the same way as the late William James attacked professional philosophy. These two kinds of specialism, or departmentalism, may therefore conveniently be treated together; for I may leave Mr. Galsworthy and William James to conduct the attack, contenting myself with the task of linking up their forces. Both Professor James and Mr. Galsworthy appealed against the machine—the one against the machine of thought which is divorced from common perception, the other against the machine of the law which has no contact with the needs of persons. "We," said William James, meaning the Pragmatists, or the Humanists, "turn to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be constituted, with as good a conscience as rationalists are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual abodes." In Justice the young advocate who appears for the defence is not so much pleading for the client under the law, as arraigning the present legal system, setting up a new conception of law based upon common sense, human insight, and a morality finer than legalism. "Gentlemen," he says, "men like the defendant are destroyed daily under our laws for want of that human insight which sees them as they are, patients, and not criminals.... Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. Is this young man to be ground to pieces under this machine for an act which at the worst was one of weakness?"

This attempt to get back to something that satisfies the human mind, the human idea of good, is to be seen equally in these two thinkers who belong to different countries and different traditions. The word "satisfactory" continually occurs in Professor James' writings. "Humanism," he says, "conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory,' has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigour and finality." He wishes to break with that view of philosophy which says "the anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor." He is one of those who, having been a lifelong student of philosophy and psychology, has the energy to know that, however theoretically perfect may be the logical system evolved by thought, that system will not be sufficient to prevent a man from saying, "After all, am I sure of it?" The only things of which we are sure are those things which we directly experience. We know the appearance of a tree, because we see it; we know the emotion of pity or love, because we have felt it; we know that what we call tigers exist in India, because acquaintances have seen them, and direct experience has taught us that their evidence is satisfactory, and if we went to India their testimony could be found true by the evidence of our own senses. "What becomes our warrant for calling anything reality? The only reply is—the faith of the present critic or inquirer. At every moment of his life he finds himself subject to a belief in some realities, even though his realities of this year should prove to be his illusions of the next." "The most we can claim is, that what we say about cognition may be counted as true as what we say about anything else." Nothing is true for him unless it has reference to the world which we know, which we accept on faith, by the practical evidence of our senses, or, it might be added, our desires, our aspirations, our intuitions. Nothing is ruled out so long as it can be pinned down at any moment to what is real, to what is individual. "Demonstration in the last resort" is to the senses.

Contemned though they may be by some thinkers, these sensations are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock, the first and last limits, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of the mind. To find such sensational termini should be our aim with all higher thought. They end discussion, they destroy the false conceit of knowledge, and without them we are all at sea with each other's meaning. If two men act alike on a percept, they believe themselves to feel alike about it; if not, they may suspect they know it in differing ways. We can never be sure we understand each other till we are able to bring the matter to this test. This is why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air; they have no practical issue of a sensational kind.

Truth, then, for the Pragmatists is that which has "practical consequences." A belief is held to be true when it is "found to work." Transcendent ideas have no validity except as ideas unless they are found to have a "cash value" in practical life, that is to say, unless they refer to, and are operative in, the world of immediate experience. "Reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for 'truth' in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as possible the old." You may talk of Absolutes as much as you like, you may contemplate the fundamental categories of the mind, you may dwell upon the a priori conceptions to which all our experiences must conform, but the fact remains, says Professor James, turning his back on all transcendental idealism, "the concrete truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine."

The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth—truth saves us from a world of that complexion. What wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling! In particular what wonder that all little provisional fools' paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison with its bare pursuit! When Absolutists reject humanism because they feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole habit of their mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality, in comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible youths. Their own subjective apperceiving mass is what speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject our humanism—as they apprehend it. Just so with us humanists, when we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy.

I am not here seeking to examine closely, still less to criticise, Professor James' pragmatic doctrines. What I am concerned to show is that we have in him a trained philosopher adopting towards the theory of knowledge a point of view strangely similar to that which Mr. Galsworthy takes up towards the social ethics of modern England. Is it not Mr. Galsworthy's function to "condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems" of morality and etiquette? Professor James' rationalist antagonists are exactly like the administrators of law and order criticised by Sweedle in the play: "They've forgot what human nature's like." Just as your Hegelian wishes for nothing but the perfection of knowledge, and leaves you in an inconceivable, unknowable Absolute, so, according to Falder, who has been in prison, "Nobody wishes you any harm, but they down you all the same." In precisely the same way as Professor James pleads for a view of truth which rests on the unfailing vividness of finite experience, so Mr. Galsworthy pleads for a justice which shall be applicable, not to an infinite number of imaginary cases, but to the individual, to the person whom we might chance to know, and meet, and work with—to the necessitous human being. He pleads for a law which shall be elastic, not rigid; dealing with men, not cases; for which mercy shall come to be a part of the idea of justice. That which is good enough for human beings in their dealings one with another ought not to be too good for the law. Intercourse with concrete reality is Professor James' requirement for the truth of an idea; intercourse with human beings is Mr. Galsworthy's requirement as the basis of social morality and of law. That does not of course mean that the legislator must be acquainted with all those for whom he legislates any more than that we can directly experience the facts of history which we claim to know. But every rule—in knowledge, in morality, in law—must be referable to this test of intercourse. Let your judgment of human beings be such as you would award to those who are sufficiently human to be among your friends. Let it be directed solely towards the well-being of the individual so far as that is consistent with the well-being of society. Again and again Mr. Galsworthy has shown us how stereotyped views, abstractions of the human mind, settle down upon classes and individuals and warp their judgments and their conduct. In Fraternity he showed how the idea of class differences becomes an obsession in the human mind, obliterating the truer idea of human community, of those common qualities in character which are not skin-deep, like class, but fundamental. In Strife he showed how the idea of the rights of an employer, of the rights of a workman, is an abstraction hiding from master and workman the human bond which human intercourse would have revealed. In Justice, again, he showed how that lowest of all existing codes, the legal code, erects a "temple-like" abstraction of the law to which all individuals, however different they may be, however various their requirements, are made to conform.

We may notice that in the cases both of the philosopher and the dramatist there is a return to what I may call a rudimentary common sense. Professor James' views come as a reaction in the course of the long evolution of ideas. If on the one side we had not had thinker after thinker who emphasised the necessity of approaching reality as a relation of the conscious mind, and on the other side sceptics who asserted that there is nothing knowable but the continuum of disconnected sensations which present themselves—a blind array of atoms—there would be no meaning in a thesis like that of Professor James, which refutes the follies of the two extremes, and stands upon a ground which is very nearly a denial of the possibility of philosophy. In like manner Mr. Galsworthy's ethics are only valuable as a chain in the progress of morality and institutions. Primitive society conceived punishment as an antidote to the horrors of unchecked violence. Mediaeval law devised fearful penalties for the forger, because forgery was a fearful menace to the stability of a commerce not yet backed by a high commercial morality. But now we have reached the time when we are menaced by the machinery set up by our ancestors. The law works with a violence and a brutality which were invented in, and proper to, an age of violence and brutality; and we are confronted with the daily spectacle of judges compelled to administer an antiquated and ferocious law, which awards to the criminal the double penalty of chastisement and shame. The old barbarism clings to the machine and works havoc. And because it is old, and because we are accustomed to it, we tolerate it. We do not put it to the test, which must be a personal test: How does it work in the case of this individual and of that? Is the application of these rules "satisfactory" when they are made to operate on the human beings for whom they were devised? Has this code any social "cash value" when it is brought to bear on the lawyer's clerk who forged a cheque to save a woman?

I have not considered Professor James' merits as a dialectician, or Mr. Galsworthy's as a dramatist. I have attempted to hint at that quality in them which is called "humanism," humanism in thought, humanism in ethics—the quality which makes men seek to judge ideas, institutions and things by what they are worth to human beings for their most pressing, their most vital needs. It is evident that this same "humanism" is beginning to manifest itself in politics, religion and even literary criticism. Clearly it tends at all times to set up individual conviction against authority, freedom against discipline. It has as its virtue the quality of being opposed to red tape, professionalism, departmentalism pedantry, officiousness, intolerance, lethargy, and the tyranny of custom; it has its dangers in that, resting as it does in the last resort on the personal and the concrete, it tends in ill-balanced minds to neglect the value of ancient and dear illusions, and to degenerate into chaos and caprice. Chaos, however, is not so much to be feared as those "little provisional fools' paradises of belief" exposed so brilliantly by William James.



PART THREE

LITERATURE AND MEN



I

BERNARD SHAW

It is doubtful if any person in England exercises so many-sided and so considerable an influence as that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not that his books are read by very many thousands of readers; that his plays have long runs or can compete in popularity with those of Mr. Barrie or the Gaiety Theatre; that his lectures and speeches are reported so fully as those of an ordinary Cabinet Minister; that his letters to the newspapers are as numerous as those of Mr. Algernon Ashton or Dr. Clifford in his prime. He seldom demonstrates his power by passing Acts of Parliament or organising garden parties. He figures less often in the Social and Personal columns than Sir H. Beerbohm Tree. He is not so well known in the law courts as Mr. Horatio Bottomley. Yet there is no other man in England who is so conspicuous in so many spheres of activity, and wherever he appears he is always facile princeps in the public eye. Everyone who has any knowledge of him is compelled to think about him, and those who have no direct knowledge of him—so insidious is his influence—are to be found constantly thinking in terms of Bernard Shaw. The active, talking, persuading, book-writing, lecturing, propagandist population of England has been bitten by him; it re-writes and popularises him; it even talks his jargon when it is criticising him. It began by regarding him as a brilliant and witty writer whom no one could take seriously; it now regards him as a serious, and indeed responsible, thinker whose wit is a matter of harmless inspiration, and often a tactical advantage.

Mr. Shaw, in fact, has thrust himself upon English public life. Wherever anything is doing or being talked about he is in the thick of it. Whenever he rises to speak, he is supreme. He sweeps away all the false issues in a few sentences; he attacks the very heart of the problem under discussion, and makes the most practical proposals. He can cover a hostile argument with ridicule, and drive it out of the field with good-tempered laughter. But his method is not only that of raillery. He is remorselessly logical. He can pursue the logical sequence of his case, and set it forth with a fusillade of perfectly relevant and illuminating instances and analogies. He never loses his thread like Mr. Chesterton; he never wanders off into vague rhetoric like Mr. Wells. He chases his enemies and his subject until he has subdued the first and set forth the second so that it shines with crystal clearness. There is no man in England who can state a case, on the platform or in the Press, with such perfect lucidity, such logical order, with such brightness and lightness, or with such force as Mr. Bernard Shaw. He is the greatest debater in England, the greatest pamphleteer, the most observable personality in public life.