All Things Considered
to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown
paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration, I should favour the
editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg or arm of an
editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to individual choice.
Of course, all this secrecy about Christmas is merely sentimental and
ceremonial; if you do not like what is sentimental and ceremonial, do
not celebrate Christmas at all. You will not be punished if you don’t;
also, since we are no longer ruled by those sturdy Puritans who won for
us civil and religious liberty, you will not even be punished if you
do. But I cannot understand why any one should bother about a
ceremonial except ceremonially. If a thing only exists in order to be
graceful, do it gracefully or do not do it. If a thing only exists as
something professing to be solemn, do it solemnly or do not do it.
There is no sense in doing it slouchingly; nor is there even any
liberty. I can understand the man who takes off his hat to a lady
because it is the customary symbol. I can understand him, I say; in
fact, I know him quite intimately. I can also understand the man who
refuses to take off his hat to a lady, like the old Quakers, because he
thinks that a symbol is superstition. But what point would there be in
so performing an arbitrary form of respect that it was not a form of
respect? We respect the gentleman who takes off his hat to the lady; we
respect the fanatic who will not take off his hat to the lady. But what
should we think of the man who kept his hands in his pockets and asked
the lady to take his hat off for him because he felt tired?
This is combining insolence and superstition; and the modern world is
full of the strange combination. There is no mark of the immense
weak-mindedness of modernity that is more striking than this general
disposition to keep up old forms, but to keep them up informally and
feebly. Why take something which was only meant to be respectful and
preserve it disrespectfully? Why take something which you could easily
abolish as a superstition and carefully perpetuate it as a bore? There
have been many instances of this half-witted compromise. Was it not
true, for instance, that the other day some mad American was trying to
buy Glastonbury Abbey and transfer it stone by stone to America? Such
things are not only illogical, but idiotic. There is no particular
reason why a pushing American financier should pay respect to
Glastonbury Abbey at all. But if he is to pay respect to Glastonbury
Abbey, he must pay respect to Glastonbury. If it is a matter of
sentiment, why should he spoil the scene? If it is not a matter of
sentiment, why should he ever have visited the scene? To call this kind
of thing Vandalism is a very inadequate and unfair description. The
Vandals were very sensible people. They did not believe in a religion,
and so they insulted it; they did not see any use for certain
buildings, and so they knocked them down. But they were not such fools
as to encumber their march with the fragments of the edifice they had
themselves spoilt. They were at least superior to the modern American
mode of reasoning. They did not desecrate the stones because they held
them sacred.
Another instance of the same illogicality I observed the other day at
some kind of “At Home.” I saw what appeared to be a human being dressed
in a black evening-coat, black dress-waistcoat, and black
dress-trousers, but with a shirt-front made of Jaegar wool. What can be
the sense of this sort of thing? If a man thinks hygiene more important
than convention (a selfish and heathen view, for the beasts that perish
are more hygienic than man, and man is only above them because he is
more conventional), if, I say, a man thinks that hygiene is more
important than convention, what on earth is there to oblige him to wear
a shirt-front at all? But to take a costume of which the only
conceivable cause or advantage is that it is a sort of uniform, and
then not wear it in the uniform way—this is to be neither a Bohemian
nor a gentleman. It is a foolish affectation, I think, in an English
officer of the Life Guards never to wear his uniform if he can help it.
But it would be more foolish still if he showed himself about town in a
scarlet coat and a Jaeger breast-plate. It is the custom nowadays to
have Ritual Commissions and Ritual Reports to make rather unmeaning
compromises in the ceremonial of the Church of England. So perhaps we
shall have an ecclesiastical compromise by which all the Bishops shall
wear Jaeger copes and Jaeger mitres. Similarly the King might insist on
having a Jaeger crown. But I do not think he will, for he understands
the logic of the matter better than that. The modern monarch, like a
reasonable fellow, wears his crown as seldom as he can; but if he does
it at all, then the only point of a crown is that it is a crown. So let
me assure the unknown gentleman in the woollen vesture that the only
point of a white shirt-front is that it is a white shirt-front.
Stiffness may be its impossible defect; but it is certainly its only
possible merit.
Let us be consistent, therefore, about Christmas, and either keep
customs or not keep them. If you do not like sentiment and symbolism,
you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else; I
should suggest the birthday of Mr. M’Cabe. No doubt you could have a
sort of scientific Christmas with a hygienic pudding and highly
instructive presents stuffed into a Jaeger stocking; go and have it
then. If you like those things, doubtless you are a good sort of
fellow, and your intentions are excellent. I have no doubt that you are
really interested in humanity; but I cannot think that humanity will
ever be much interested in you. Humanity is unhygienic from its very
nature and beginning. It is so much an exception in Nature that the
laws of Nature really mean nothing to it. Now Christmas is attacked
also on the humanitarian ground. Ouida called it a feast of slaughter
and gluttony. Mr. Shaw suggested that it was invented by poulterers.
That should be considered before it becomes more considerable.
I do not know whether an animal killed at Christmas has had a better or
a worse time than it would have had if there had been no Christmas or
no Christmas dinners. But I do know that the fighting and suffering
brotherhood to which I belong and owe everything, Mankind, would have a
much worse time if there were no such thing as Christmas or Christmas
dinners. Whether the turkey which Scrooge gave to Bob Cratchit had
experienced a lovelier or more melancholy career than that of less
attractive turkeys is a subject upon which I cannot even conjecture.
But that Scrooge was better for giving the turkey and Cratchit happier
for getting it I know as two facts, as I know that I have two feet.
What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul
of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business. Nothing shall
induce me to darken human homes, to destroy human festivities, to
insult human gifts and human benefactions for the sake of some
hypothetical knowledge which Nature curtained from our eyes. We men and
women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other
a terrible and tragic loyalty. If we catch sharks for food, let them be
killed most mercifully; let any one who likes love the sharks, and pet
the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give them sugar and
teach them to dance. But if once a man suggests that a shark is to be
valued against a sailor, or that the poor shark might be permitted to
bite off a nigger’s leg occasionally; then I would court-martial the
man—he is a traitor to the ship.
And while I take this view of humanitarianism of the anti-Christmas
kind, it is cogent to say that I am a strong anti-vivisectionist. That
is, if there is any vivisection, I am against it. I am against the
cutting-up of conscious dogs for the same reason that I am in favour of
the eating of dead turkeys. The connection may not be obvious; but that
is because of the strangely unhealthy condition of modern thought. I am
against cruel vivisection as I am against a cruel anti-Christmas
asceticism, because they both involve the upsetting of existing
fellowships and the shocking of normal good feelings for the sake of
something that is intellectual, fanciful, and remote. It is not a human
thing, it is not a humane thing, when you see a poor woman staring
hungrily at a bloater, to think, not of the obvious feelings of the
woman, but of the unimaginable feelings of the deceased bloater.
Similarly, it is not human, it is not humane, when you look at a dog to
think about what theoretic discoveries you might possibly make if you
were allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarians’ fancy
about the feelings concealed inside the bloater, and the
vivisectionists’ fancy about the knowledge concealed inside the dog,
are unhealthy fancies, because they upset a human sanity that is
certain for the sake of something that is of necessity uncertain. The
vivisectionist, for the sake of doing something that may or may not be
useful, does something that certainly is horrible. The anti-Christmas
humanitarian, in seeking to have a sympathy with a turkey which no man
can have with a turkey, loses the sympathy he has already with the
happiness of millions of the poor.
It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet.
Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and Tolstoian
non-resistance were not only not opposite, but were the same thing.
They are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be
resisted, looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the
conquered. Thus again teetotalism and the really degraded gin-selling
and dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy. They are both
based on the idea that fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug. But
I am specially certain that the extreme of vegetarian humanity is, as I
have said, akin to the extreme of scientific cruelty—they both permit a
dubious speculation to interfere with their ordinary charity. The sound
moral rule in such matters as vivisection always presents itself to me
in this way. There is no ethical necessity more essential and vital
than this: that casuistical exceptions, though admitted, should be
admitted as exceptions. And it follows from this, I think, that, though
we may do a horrid thing in a horrid situation, we must be quite
certain that we actually and already are in that situation. Thus, all
sane moralists admit that one may sometimes tell a lie; but no sane
moralist would approve of telling a little boy to practise telling
lies, in case he might one day have to tell a justifiable one. Thus,
morality has often justified shooting a robber or a burglar. But it
would not justify going into the village Sunday school and shooting all
the little boys who looked as if they might grow up into burglars. The
need may arise; but the need must have arisen. It seems to me quite
clear that if you step across this limit you step off a precipice.
Now, whether torturing an animal is or is not an immoral thing, it is,
at least, a dreadful thing. It belongs to the order of exceptional and
even desperate acts. Except for some extraordinary reason I would not
grievously hurt an animal; with an extraordinary reason I would
grievously hurt him. If (for example) a mad elephant were pursuing me
and my family, and I could only shoot him so that he would die in
agony, he would have to die in agony. But the elephant would be there.
I would not do it to a hypothetical elephant. Now, it always seems to
me that this is the weak point in the ordinary vivisectionist argument,