All Things Considered
unfortunate way of going on; he said, one may almost say, that it had
ruined his life; the passage is there for the benefit of any one who
may take the trouble to read the book. There is ample evidence (though
even this is of a mystical and indirect kind), there is ample evidence
that Fielding probably thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than
to be an utter coward and sneak. There is simply not one rag or thread
or speck of evidence to show that Fielding thought that it was better
to be Tom Jones than to be a good man. All that he is concerned with is
the description of a definite and very real type of young man; the
young man whose passions and whose selfish necessities sometimes seemed
to be stronger than anything else in him.
The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad, though not so bad,
_spiritually_ speaking, as the practical morality of Arthur Pendennis
or the practical morality of Pip, and certainly nothing like so bad as
the profound practical immorality of Daniel Deronda. The practical
morality of Tom Jones is bad; but I cannot see any proof that his
theoretical morality was particularly bad. There is no need to tell the
majority of modern young men even to live up to the theoretical ethics
of Henry Fielding. They would suddenly spring into the stature of
archangels if they lived up to the theoretic ethics of poor Tom Jones.
Tom Jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is
walking about the streets; we meet him every day. We meet with him, we
drink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him.
The only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage
to write about him. We split up the supreme and central human being,
Tom Jones, into a number of separate aspects. We let Mr. J.M. Barrie
write about him in his good moments, and make him out better than he
is. We let Zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out
much worse than he is. We let Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of
spiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard
Kipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far
more cowardly. We let obscene writers write about the obscenities of
this ordinary man. We let puritan writers write about the purities of
this ordinary man. We look through one peephole that makes men out as
devils, and we call it the new art. We look through another peephole
that makes men out as angels, and we call it the New Theology. But if
we pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over
some old mildewed leaves, and if in that obscurity and decay we find
some faint traces of a tale about a complete man, such a man as is
walking on the pavement outside, we suddenly pull a long face, and we
call it the coarse morals of a bygone age.
The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the general
view of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown to
associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness;
according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old
idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about
immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth’s “Gin
Lane” or “Stages of Cruelty,” or it recorded, like the popular
broadsheet, “God’s dreadful judgment” against some blasphemer or
murderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homeless
scepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that
morality is somehow merely a matter of human taste—an accident of
psychology. And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man
wishing to praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it
that there is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it
is supreme. Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that
virtue is visionary. Every book which admits that evil is real is felt
in some vague way to be admitting that good is unreal. The modern
instinct is that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that
remains good. But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was
ever so evil, there was something that remained good—goodness remained
good. An actual avenging virtue existed outside the human race; to that
men rose, or from that men fell away. Therefore, of course, this law
itself was as much demonstrated in the breach as in the observance. If
Tom Jones violated morality, so much the worse for Tom Jones. Fielding
did not feel, as a melancholy modern would have done, that every sin of
Tom Jones was in some way breaking the spell, or we may even say
destroying the fiction of morality. Men spoke of the sinner breaking
the law; but it was rather the law that broke him. And what modern
people call the foulness and freedom of Fielding is generally the
severity and moral stringency of Fielding. He would not have thought
that he was serving morality at all if he had written a book all about
nice people. Fielding would have considered Mr. Ian Maclaren extremely
immoral; and there is something to be said for that view. Telling the
truth about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very
elementary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters are not
wicked, the book is. This older and firmer conception of right as
existing outside human weakness and without reference to human error
can be felt in the very lightest and loosest of the works of old
English literature. It is commonly unmeaning enough to call Shakspere a
great moralist; but in this particular way Shakspere is a very typical
moralist. Whenever he alludes to right and wrong it is always with this
old implication. Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is
wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.
THE MAID OF ORLEANS
A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read
Voltaire’s “La Pucelle,” a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of
Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again
for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began
to turn over the leaves of the new “Jeanne d’Arc,” by that great and
graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender
sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a
noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant
girl through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and
even respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of
Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come
to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire’s.
When a man of Voltaire’s school has to explode a saint or a great
religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a
common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a
saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular
fussy little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc,
though it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not
specially Voltaire’s nature. But M. France read M. France’s nature into
Joan of Arc—all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of
the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with
startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned
anywhere; Renan’s “Vie de Jésus.” It has just the same general
intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least
patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite
the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the
loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a
brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to
patronise.
And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively
unreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much
knowledge of reason as Anatole France. And, if anything is irrational,
it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculous
stories is irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this: you
explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by
inventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you are
confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into
the sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think
that he did. It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply
that he may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is
to write like this: “When we consider Jack’s curious and even perilous
heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a
profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and
a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover, there is little
doubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India, who
told him about the tricks of the mango plant, and how it is sent up to
the sky. We can imagine these two friends, the old man and the young,
wandering in the woods together at evening, looking at the red and
level clouds, as on that night when the old man pointed to a small
beanstalk, and told his too imaginative companion that this also might
be made to scale the heavens. And then, when we remember the quite
exceptional psychology of Jack, when we remember how there was in him a
union of the prosaic, the love of plain vegetables, with an almost
irrelevant eagerness for the unattainable, for invisibility and the
void, we shall no longer wonder that it was to him especially that was
sent this sweet, though merely symbolic, dream of the tree uniting
earth and heaven.” That is the way that Renan and France write, only
they do it better. But, really, a rationalist like myself becomes a
little impatient and feels inclined to say, “But, hang it all, what do
you know about the heredity of Jack or the psychology of Jack? You know
nothing about Jack at all, except that some people say that he climbed
up a beanstalk. Nobody would ever have thought of mentioning him if he
hadn’t. You must interpret him in terms of the beanstalk religion; you
cannot merely interpret religion in terms of him. We have the materials
of this story, and we can believe them or not. But we have not got the
materials to make another story.”
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole
France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible
to his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore
dismiss it and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries
to invent a real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He
produces a scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any
scientific proof. It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and
chemistry) said that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and
argon got into the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most
obvious example, the principal character in M. France’s story is a
person who never existed at all. All Joan’s wisdom and energy, it
seems, came from a certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest
trace in all the multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation
I can find for this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a
peasant girl could not possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very
hard for a freethinker to remain democratic. The writer seems
altogether to forget what is meant by the moral atmosphere of a
community. To say that Joan must have learnt her vision of a virgin
overthrowing evil from _a_ priest, is like saying that some modern girl
in London, pitying the poor, must have learnt it from _a_ Labour
Member. She would learn it where the Labour Member learnt it—in the
whole state of our society.
But that is the modern method: the method of the reverent sceptic. When
you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the