All Things Considered
the greatest English poets. Suppose, for instance, it were proposed to
bury Mr. Rudyard Kipling in Westminster Abbey. I should be against
burying him in Westminster Abbey; first, because he is still alive (and
here I think even he himself might admit the justice of my protest);
and second, because I should like to reserve that rapidly narrowing
space for the great permanent examples, not for the interesting foreign
interruptions, of English literature. I would not have either Mr.
Kipling or Mr. George Moore in Westminster Abbey, though Mr. Kipling
has certainly caught even more cleverly than Mr. Moore the lucid and
cool cruelty of the French short story. I am very sure that Geoffrey
Chaucer and Joseph Addison get on very well together in the Poets’
Corner, despite the centuries that sunder them. But I feel that Mr.
George Moore would be much happier in Pere-la-Chaise, with a riotous
statue by Rodin on the top of him; and Mr. Kipling much happier under
some huge Asiatic monument, carved with all the cruelties of the gods.
As to the affair of the English monument to Shakspere, every people has
its own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to be
said for ours. There is the French monumental style, which consists in
erecting very pompous statues, very well done. There is the German
monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues,
badly done. And there is the English monumental method, the great
English way with statues, which consists in not erecting them at all. A
statue may be dignified; but the absence of a statue is always
dignified. For my part, I feel there is something national, something
wholesomely symbolic, in the fact that there is no statue of Shakspere.
There is, of course, one in Leicester Square; but the very place where
it stands shows that it was put up by a foreigner for foreigners. There
is surely something modest and manly about not attempting to express
our greatest poet in the plastic arts in which we do not excel. We
honour Shakspere as the Jews honour God—by not daring to make of him a
graven image. Our sculpture, our statues, are good enough for bankers
and philanthropists, who are our curse: not good enough for him, who is
our benediction. Why should we celebrate the very art in which we
triumph by the very art in which we fail?
England is most easily understood as the country of amateurs. It is
especially the country of amateur soldiers (that is, of Volunteers), of
amateur statesmen (that is, of aristocrats), and it is not unreasonable
or out of keeping that it should be rather specially the country of a
careless and lounging view of literature. Shakspere has no academic
monument for the same reason that he had no academic education. He had
small Latin and less Greek, and (in the same spirit) he has never been
commemorated in Latin epitaphs or Greek marble. If there is nothing
clear and fixed about the emblems of his fame, it is because there was
nothing clear and fixed about the origins of it. Those great schools
and Universities which watch a man in his youth may record him in his
death; but Shakspere had no such unifying traditions. We can only say
of him what we can say of Dickens. We can only say that he came from
nowhere and that he went everywhere. For him a monument in any place is
out of place. A cold statue in a certain square is unsuitable to him as
it would be unsuitable to Dickens. If we put up a statue of Dickens in
Portland Place to-morrow we should feel the stiffness as unnatural. We
should fear that the statue might stroll about the street at night.
But in France the question of whether Zola shall go to the Panthéon
when he is dead is quite as practicable as the question whether he
should go to prison when he was alive. It is the problem of whether the
nation shall take one turn of thought or another. In raising a monument
to Zola they do not raise merely a trophy, but a finger-post. The
question is one which will have to be settled in most European
countries; but like all such questions, it has come first to a head in
France; because France is the battlefield of Christendom. That question
is, of course, roughly this: whether in that ill-defined area of verbal
licence on certain dangerous topics it is an extenuation of indelicacy
or an aggravation of it that the indelicacy was deliberate and solemn.
Is indecency more indecent if it is grave, or more indecent if it is
gay? For my part, I belong to an old school in this matter. When a book
or a play strikes me as a crime, I am not disarmed by being told that
it is a serious crime. If a man has written something vile, I am not
comforted by the explanation that he quite meant to do it. I know all
the evils of flippancy; I do not like the man who laughs at the sight
of virtue. But I prefer him to the man who weeps at the sight of virtue
and complains bitterly of there being any such thing. I am not
reassured, when ethics are as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that
they are also as grave and sincere as suicide. And I think there is an
obvious fallacy in the bitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between
the aversion to Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the popularity of some such joke
as “Dear Old Charlie.” Surely there is nothing mysterious or
unphilosophic in the popular preference. The joke of “Dear Old Charlie”
is passed—because it is a joke. “Ghosts” are exorcised—because they
are ghosts.
This is, of course, the whole question of Zola. I am grown up, and I do
not worry myself much about Zola’s immorality. The thing I cannot stand
is his morality. If ever a man on this earth lived to embody the
tremendous text, “But if the light in your body be darkness, how great
is the darkness,” it was certainly he. Great men like Ariosto,
Rabelais, and Shakspere fall in foul places, flounder in violent but
venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are
dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still
speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the best
things in the world: Rabelais, of the instruction of ardent and austere
youth; Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakspere, of the splendid stillness
of mercy. But in Zola even the ideals are undesirable; Zola’s mercy is
colder than justice—nay, Zola’s mercy is more bitter in the mouth than
injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us,
like Rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning. He takes us
into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books
nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass
bottles, and where the rule is taught from the exceptions. Zola’s truth
answers the exact description of the skeleton in the cupboard; that is,
it is something of which a domestic custom forbids the discovery, but
which is quite dead, even when it is discovered. Macaulay said that the
Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but
because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Of such substance also was
this Puritan who had lost his God. A Puritan of this type is worse than
the Puritan who hates pleasure because there is evil in it. This man
actually hates evil because there is pleasure in it. Zola was worse
than a pornographer, he was a pessimist. He did worse than encourage
sin: he encouraged discouragement. He made lust loathsome because to
him lust meant life.
OXFORD FROM WITHOUT
Some time ago I ventured to defend that race of hunted and persecuted
outlaws, the Bishops; but until this week I had no idea of how much
persecuted they were. For instance, the Bishop of Birmingham made some
extremely sensible remarks in the House of Lords, to the effect that
Oxford and Cambridge were (as everybody knows they are) far too much
merely plutocratic playgrounds. One would have thought that an Anglican
Bishop might be allowed to know something about the English University
system, and even to have, if anything, some bias in its favour. But (as
I pointed out) the rollicking Radicalism of Bishops has to be
restrained. The man who writes the notes in the weekly paper called the
_Outlook_ feels that it is his business to restrain it. The passage has
such simple sublimity that I must quote it—
“Dr. Gore talked unworthily of his reputation when he spoke of the
older Universities as playgrounds for the rich and idle. In the first
place, the rich men there are not idle. Some of the rich men are, and
so are some of the poor men. On the whole, the sons of noble and
wealthy families keep up the best traditions of academic life.”
So far this seems all very nice. It is a part of the universal
principle on which Englishmen have acted in recent years. As you will
not try to make the best people the most powerful people, persuade
yourselves that the most powerful people are the best people. Mad
Frenchmen and Irishmen try to realise the ideal. To you belongs the
nobler (and much easier) task of idealising the real. First give your
Universities entirely into the power of the rich; then let the rich
start traditions; and then congratulate yourselves on the fact that the
sons of the rich keep up these traditions. All that is quite simple and
jolly. But then this critic, who crushes Dr. Gore from the high throne
of the _Outlook_, goes on in a way that is really perplexing. “It is
distinctly advantageous,” he says, “that rich and poor—_i. e._, young
men with a smooth path in life before them, and those who have to hew
out a road for themselves—should be brought into association. Each
class learns a great deal from the other. On the one side, social
conceit and exclusiveness give way to the free spirit of competition
amongst all classes; on the other side, angularities and prejudices are
rubbed away.” Even this I might have swallowed. But the paragraph
concludes with this extraordinary sentence: “We get the net result in
such careers as those of Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and Mr. Asquith.”
Those three names lay my intellect prostrate. The rest of the argument
I understand quite well. The social exclusiveness of aristocrats at
Oxford and Cambridge gives way before the free spirit of competition
amongst all classes. That is to say, there is at Oxford so hot and keen
a struggle, consisting of coal-heavers, London clerks, gypsies,
navvies, drapers’ assistants, grocers’ assistants—in short, all the
classes that make up the bulk of England—there is such a fierce
competition at Oxford among all these people that in its presence
aristocratic exclusiveness gives way. That is all quite clear. I am not
quite sure about the facts, but I quite understand the argument. But
then, having been called upon to contemplate this bracing picture of a
boisterous turmoil of all the classes of England, I am suddenly asked
to accept as example of it, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and the present
Chancellor of the Exchequer. What part do these gentlemen play in the
mental process? Is Lord Curzon one of the rugged and ragged poor men
whose angularities have been rubbed away? Or is he one of those whom
Oxford immediately deprived of all kind of social exclusiveness? His
Oxford reputation does not seem to bear out either account of him. To
regard Lord Milner as a typical product of Oxford would surely be
unfair. It would be to deprive the educational tradition of Germany of
one of its most typical products. English aristocrats have their
faults, but they are not at all like Lord Milner. What Mr. Asquith was
meant to prove, whether he was a rich man who lost his exclusiveness,
or a poor man who lost his angles, I am utterly unable to conceive.
There is, however, one mild but very evident truth that might perhaps
be mentioned. And it is this: that none of those three excellent
persons is, or ever has been, a poor man in the sense that that word is