“The greatest poets in every language are those who know only their own language. Shakespeare and Keats handled English as a million Professors of Poetry cooperating could never handle it. The greatest Art has always sprung from the direct pressure of the real world upon the souls of the artists. To be cultured is to lose that vivid sense of the reality of the life around you, to see it intellectually rather than to feel it intuitively. Hence art that is too self-conscious misses the throb of life. George Eliot failed as soon as she began to substitute intellectual concepts for the vivid impressions of early memories. The moment people begin to prate about Art, the day of Art is over, and decadence is set in. Art should be the natural semi-unconscious enhancement of other things. The speaker wishing to convince becomes artistically oratorical, the prophet becomes artistically poetic, the church-builder artistically architectural, the painter of Madonnas artistically picturesque, the composer of prayer-chants artistically musical. Art was the child of Religion, but it has long since abandoned its mother. Portrait and landscape painting arose as accessories to sacred pictures; the origin of the opera is to be sought in the Mass; literature developed from religious writings. But gradually it was discovered that you might paint noblemen as well as sages, and that scenery could be dissociated from the backgrounds of Crucifixions and Marriages at Cana. And from seeing that Art needn’t have a religious meaning or content, men came to see that it needn’t have any meaning or content at all. Art, indeed, presents possibilities of a divorce from intellect and morals of which artists have eagerly availed themselves. But Art for Art’s sake is Dead-Sea fruit–rosy without, ashes within. Socrates was not perhaps quite right in saying that the Beautiful was the Useful, but it doesn’t follow that the Beautiful should be the Useless. Even crockery, cutlery, and furniture should never be Beautiful at the cost of utility. Their Beauty should be implicated with their natural shapes, inblent with and inseparable from their uses, not a monstrous accretion from without. The most artistic knife is the quintessence of knifehood.”
“But that is my idea of Art for Art’s sake,” I interrupted, for he had now got his second wind. “Art has always to express the quintessence of something–be it a street, a life, a national movement, a—-“
“Art for Art’s sake means making beautiful knives that won’t cut and beautiful glasses that won’t hold water, and beautiful pictures and poems that say nothing. The people who want their Art dissociated from their morals are in danger of spiritual blight, and inhabiting a universe of empty nothings. Too much self-consciousness is as sterile as too little. Look at these modern Renaissances! They all—-“
“Yes, I know: I have written about that,” I said. “And now there is another one, the Jewish. Have you read the plan for ‘A Jewish State,’ by Dr. Herzl, of Vienna? No dreamer he, but wonderfully sane, despite his lofty conception of a moralised, rationalised, modern State. Too ‘modern,’ indeed, this idea of Messiah as a joint-stock company! I predicted years ago we should come to that. But methinks the Doctor—-“
“They are starting the Grand Prix,” hastily interrupted the Young Fogey. “Good-bye! Such a delightful talk!” And turning his back on the horses, he hurried off the field to lose himself and perhaps find a new pair of English ears among the parasols and equipages of the sunlit Prater.
XI
CRITICS AND PEOPLE
What is the critic’s duty at the play? Does he represent Art, or does he represent the Public? If he represent Art, then he is but a refracting medium between the purveyor and the public, which will therefore be wofully mistaken if it seek in his critiques a guide to its play-going, as it to some extent does. For while people do not always like a play because they are told it is good, they often refrain from going to see one because they are told it is bad. When I was a dramatic critic–a phrase that merely means I did not pay for my seat–nothing struck me more forcibly than the frequent discrepancy between the opinions of the audience at a _première_ and the opinions of the papers. Again and again have I seen an audience moved to laughter and cheers and tears by a play which the great outside public would be informed the next morning was indifferent or worse. The discrepancy was sometimes explicable by _claques_, which are almost as discreditable to managements as the keeping of tame critics, who eat food out of their hand. Sometimes it was not professional _claques_, but amateurs come to see a friend’s play _en masse_, and applauding out of all proportion to its merits, not so much perhaps from friendship as from simple astonishment at finding any merits. But putting aside _claques_, it remains true that an audience will often heartily enjoy what a critic will heartily damn–sometimes in half a dozen papers, your capable critic being like a six-barrelled revolver. And so–often enough–the piece, after futile efforts to masquerade in the advertisement columns in a turned garment of favourable phrases, dies in an odour of burnt paper; the treasury is robbed of its due returns; and numerous worthy persons to whom it would have given boundless pleasure are deprived of their just enjoyment. The obvious truth is that the public and the critics–the people who pay to see plays and the people who are paid to see plays–have different canons of criticism. Sometimes their judgments coincide, but quite as frequently they disagree. It is the same with popular books. And the reason of this is not far to seek. The critic is not only more cultured than the average playgoer, he is more _blasé_. He knows the stock situations, the stage tricks, the farcical misunderstandings, the machine-made pathos, the dull mechanic round of repartee, the innocent infant who intervenes in a divorce suit (like the Queen’s Proctor), the misprised mother-in-law, the bearded spinster sighing like a furnace, the ingenuous and slangy young person of fifteen with the well-known cheek, and the even more stereotyped personages preserved in Mr. Jerome’s “Stage-land.” They all come, if not from Sheffield, from a perpetual tour in the provinces. The critic knows, too, which plays are taken from the French and which from the English, where the actor is gagging and when he is “fluffy.” A good deal of the disillusionment of the scene is also his: he knows that the hero is not young nor the heroine beautiful, nor the villain as vicious as either.
How different the attitude of the occasional playgoer! Seeing only a tithe of the plays of the day, he neither knows nor cares whether they repeat one another. The most hackneyed device may seem brilliantly original to him, the stalest stage trick as fresh as if just hot from the brain; and jokes that deterred the dove from returning to the ark arride him vastly. _Per contra_, for his unjaded imagination absolutely new scenes and dialogues have no more novelty than the comparatively aged. Probability or truth to life he demands not, perfection of form were thrown away upon him. His soul melts before the simplest pathos, he is made happy by a happy ending, and when Momus sits on a hat “he openeth his mouth and saith Ha! ha!” He is a flute upon which you may play what false notes you will. In some versions of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” he placidly accepts two Topsies. I s’pec’s one growed out of t’ other. He hath a passion for the real as well as the ideal, and in order to see a fire-engine, or Westminster Bridge, or a snow-storm, he will perspire you two hours at the pit’s mouth. He could see them any day in the street, but it gives him wondrous joy to see them in their wrong places. How absurd, then, for the average critic to be play-taster to the occasional playgoer! He no more represents him than an M. P. represents the baby he kisses. As well might one ask a connoisseur to choose the claret for a back-parlour supper-party. Thus the critic cannot honestly represent the Public. That he cannot represent Art without injuring the Theatre as well as the Public, has already been shown. The conclusion one is driven to is that the critic has no _raison d’être_ at all in the topical press. There he should be replaced by the reporter. The influence of cultivated criticism should be brought to bear on the drama only from the columns of high-class magazines or books.
Nor am I more certain of the use of the art critic. He is far too conflicting to be of any practical value, and he as often contradicts himself as his fellows. He hides his ignorance in elegant English, sometimes illuminated by epigram, and from his dogmatic verdicts there is no appeal. Not infrequently he is resolved to be a critic “in spite of nature,” as Sir Joshua has it in a delicious phrase which was possibly given him by his friend “the great lexicographer.” In a letter to the “Idler,” the painter recommends those devoid of eye or taste, and with no great disposition to reading and study, to “assume the character of a connoisseur, which may be purchased at a much cheaper rate than that of a critic in poetry.” “The remembrance of a few names of painters, with their general characters,” says Sir Joshua, “and a few rules of the Academy, which they may pick up among the Painters, will go a great way towards making a very notable Connoisseur.” He goes on to describe a gentleman of this cast, whose mouth was full of the cant of Criticism, “which he emitted with that volubility which generally those orators have who annex no ideas to their words.”
When I once expressed to Mr. Whistler my conviction that, with the single exception of religion, more nonsense was talked on the subject of art than on any other topic in the world, that great authority refused to allow religion any such precedence. Certainly during the season when, for the middle-class Londoner, art “happens,” the claims of art to that proud pre-eminence become overwhelming, if only temporarily so. Everybody gives his opinion freely, and it is worth the price. To criticise painting is only less difficult than to execute it. Fifty per cent. of art is sheer science, the rigid, accurate science of form and perspective, I do not say that accuracy is necessary to art. Still it is what most people presume to judge. But does one person in a hundred know the true proportions of things, or possess the eye to gauge the anatomy of a figure? Owing to the neglect in schools of the rudiments of drawing, our eyes barely note the commonest objects; we remark just enough of their characteristics to identify them. “Consider!” as Mr. John Davidson writes in his “Random Itinerary”: “did you ever see a sparrow? You have heard and read about sparrows. The streets are full of them; you know they exist. But you could not describe one, or say what like is its note. You have never seen a sparrow, any more than you have seen the thousand-and-one men and women you passed in Fleet street the last time you walked through it. _Did_ you ever see a sparrow?” And then there is colour. Do you really know what the colour of that landscape is, or what complex hues mantle the surface of yonder all-mirroring pool? Do you know that, the appearance of nature is constantly varying with every change of light and every passing cloud? Do you know how Primrose Hill looks at night? Perhaps you think you know how a haystack looks in the sunlight; yet across the Channel the illustrious Monet devoted months to painting one haystack, making fresh discoveries daily. I do not believe you know how many Roman figures there are on your watch-dial. You probably think there are twelve. But what is far more important, you may be quite devoid of artistic sensibility. Yet you would not hesitate to criticise the Academy or even to be paid for it. I had occasion to buy a doll the other day. It was a she-doll. There seems, by the way, a tremendous preponderance of the fair sex in dolls: what difficult social problems must agitate the Dolls’ Houses! This was a pretty doll, with wide blue eyes, and a wealth of golden tow, and an expression of aristocratic innocence on its waxen cheek, faintly flushed with paint, and I bore it home with pride. But when I came to examine it, I found it was but a sawdust abomination. Oh the modelling of the arm, oh the anatomy of the leg, oh the patella proximate to the ankle! I felt that if I gave that doll to the expectant infant, she might grow up to be an art critic. Thus, then, mused I sorrowfully, is the nation’s taste made in Germany. We are corrupted from the cradle, even as upon our tombs badly carved angels balance themselves dolefully. Let me make a nation’s dolls: I care not who makes its pictures. Was it of these dolls a late President of the Royal Academy was thinking, when he said that the German genius did not find its best expression in plastic art? The Academy will not be permanently improved until we improve our dolls.
XII
TABLE-TALK
Now that the world is so full of free dinners for the well-fed, it behoves hostesses to reconsider their methods. With so many dinner-tables open to the lion, or even to the cub, they must do their spiriting dexterously if they would feed him. In these days when seven hostesses pluck hold of the swallow-tails of one man, and the form of grace before meals must be, “For those we are about to receive, Lord make us truly thankful,” something more than the average attraction is needed to induce the noble animal to dine at your expense. There is one improvement in the great dinner function for which I would respectfully solicit the attention of ladies who entertain but do not amuse. “It is a great point in a gallery how you hang your pictures,” says the sage of Concord, “and not less in society how you seat your party. When a man meets his accurate mate, Society begins and life is delicious.” Yes, but how rarely does a man meet his accurate mate in these minor marriages of the dinner-table! How often is he chained for hours to an unsympathetic soul he has not even made the mistake of selecting. The terrible length of the modern dinner makes the grievance very real, and in a society already vibrant with the demand for easier divorce it is curious that there has arisen no Sarah Grand of the dining-room to protest against this diurnal evil. Suppose that at a dance you were told off to one perpetual partner, who would ever don pumps? Is it not obvious that at a dinner you should have the same privilege as at a dance–the privilege of choosing your partner for each course? It could be done during the drawing-room wait. I give an example of an ordinary menu, marked after the fashion of a gentleman’s dance programme, from which it will the seen at a glance how much more delightful a dinner would become if you could change your partner as often as your plate.
MENU, JUNE 15th, 1894.
Plats. Engagements.
1. Hors d’oeuvres . . . . S. S.
2. Soup . . . . . . . . . A. P. S. 3. Poisson . . . . . . . Pinky.
4. Poisson . . . . . . . L. R.
5. Entrée . . . . . . . . Blue Bow. 6. Entrée . . . . . . . . Red Hair.
7. Joint . . . . . . . . W.
8. Sweet . . . . . . . . Minnie.
9. Sweet . . . . . . . . Minnie.
10. Cheese . . . . . . . Long Arms. 11. Dessert . . . . . . . I. V.
(Interval before ladies rise.)
Extra Entrée . . . . . . Agnes.
Extra Joint . . . . . . . Eyeglasses. Extra Sweet . . . . . . . Minnie.
You perceive at once that you would always put your idol _pro tem_, down for the sweets, which would become as fertile a source of flirtation as “love” in tennis. Of course the same tact and discretion would be needed in filling your menu as in filling your programme. Some ladies who are excellent at the entrée may be inadvisable for the joint, which they may sit out, expecting to monopolise your attention to the detriment of your meal. Others who are dull at the soup may be agreeably vivacious towards the later items. A new series of formulae would be added to the language:
“May I have the pleasure of seeing your menu?”
“Will you give me one sweet?”
“Can you spare me the joint?”
“I am so sorry: I have just given it away.”
“See me eat the poisson, as Grossmith says.”
“Will you put me down for a fish?”
“This is our entrée, I think.”
“May I have my dessert, Minnie?”
“Are you engaged for the cheese?”
“Yes; but you can have the second entrée.”
“Don’t forget to keep the soup for me!”
“If you don’t mind sitting it out!”
“Are you open for the extra joint?”
“Thank you: I am full up.”
For hostesses who shrink from such a revolution, a beginning might be made by an automatic change of seats by the gentlemen, say one to the right as in the _chassé-croisé_ of the Caledonians. Failing this, the only remaining method of avoiding monotony and the chilling separation of the extremes of the board is to follow the example of King Arthur and employ a round table. The round dinner-table is the only way of making both ends meet.
Having got your round table, what are you to eat upon it? There is hardly any edible known to the menu which some sect or other would not banish from the kitchen, while if you were to follow the “Lancet” you would eat nothing at all, starving like Tantalus amid a wealth of provisions. Of these sects of the stomach I was aware of many. But it is only recently that the claims of “natural food” have been brought within my heathen ken. The apostle of the new creed is an American lady doctor, whose gospel, however, is somewhat vitiated by her championship of Mrs. Maybrick, so that one cannot resist the temptation of suspecting that she thinks the jury would never have found that interesting lady guilty if they had fed upon starchless food. For this is the creed of the new teaching. All starch foods are chiefly digested in the intestines instead of in the main stomach, and hence are unnatural and morbiferous, and the chief cause of the nervous prostration and broken-down health that abound on all sides. (Herr Nordau gives quite a different explanation of the general breakdown, but no matter.) “The ‘Natural Food Society,'” says its official organ, “is founded in the belief that the food of primeval man consisted of fruit and nuts of sub-tropical climes, spontaneously produced; that on these foods man was, and may again become, at least as free from disease as the animals are in a state of nature.” How curiously apposite seem Dryden’s lines, written in a very different connection!
This was the fruit the private spirit brought, Occasioned by great zeal and little thought. While crowds unlearned, with rude devotion warm, About the sacred viands buzz and swarm.
And this couplet of his, too, might be commended to the devotees:
A thousand daily sects rise up and die; A thousand more the perished race supply.
What does it matter what primeval man ate? It is not even certain that he was a member of the Natural Food Society. The savage, as we know him, lives on the game he hunts and shoots, and prefers his fellow-man to vegetarianism. No one ever accused the red Indian of nervous prostration, “when wild in woods the noble savage ran”; nor are leopards and tigers usually in broken-down health. But, in justice to the Natural Food Society, I must admit that it displays a pleasant absence of fanaticism, for there is a proviso in italics: “_All persons about to experiment with the non-starch food system are urged at first not to use nuts, but to use instead whatever animal food they have been accustomed to._” The central feature of the system is abstention from bread, cereals, pulses, and starchy vegetables, for which food fruits are to be substituted. All this seems a mighty poor excuse for the formation of a new sect. Fortunately the Society uses up its superfluous energies “in working for the higher life,” and in its coupling of health and holiness is sound in its psychology, whatever it may be in its physiology.
You never heard of Peterkin’s pudding, by the way, but there is a fine moral baked in it. Johannes came to his wife one day and said, “_Liebes_ Gretchen, could you not make me a pudding such as Peterkin is always boasting his wife makes him? I am dying of envy to taste it. Every time he talks of it my chops water.” “It is not impossible I could make you one,” said Gretchen good-naturedly; “I will go and ask Frau Peterkin how she makes it.” When Johannes returned that evening from the workshop, where Peterkin had been raving more than ever over his wife’s pudding, Gretchen said gleefully, “I have been to Frau Peterkin: she has a good heart, and she gave me the whole recipe for Peterkin’s pudding.” Johannes rubbed his hands, and his mouth watered already in anticipation. “It is made with raisins,” began Gretchen. Johannes’s jaw fell. “We can scarcely afford raisins,” he interrupted: “couldn’t you manage without raisins?” “Oh, I dare say,” said Gretchen, doubtfully. “There is also candied lemon-peel.” Johannes whistled. “Ach, we can’t run to that,” he said. “No, indeed,” assented Gretchen; “but we must have suet and yeast.” “I don’t see the necessity,” quoth Johannes. “A good cook like you”–here he gave her a sounding kiss–“can get along without such trifles as those.” “Well, I will try,” said the good Gretchen, as cheerfully as she could; and so next morning Johannes went to work light-hearted and gay. When he returned home, lo! the long-desired dainty stood on the supper-table, beautifully brown. He ran to embrace his wife in gratitude and joy; then he tremblingly broke off a hunch of pudding and took a huge bite. His wife, anxiously watching his face, saw it assume a look of perplexity, followed by one of disgust. Johannes gave a great snort of contempt. “_Lieber Gott!_” he cried, “and _this_ is what Peterkin is always bragging about!”
XIII
THE ABOLITION OF MONEY
The Cynic was very old and very wise and very unpopular. I was the only person at his “At Home” that afternoon. I gave him my views on Bi-metallism, having just read the leader in the “Times.” He yawned obtrusively, and growled, “Bi-metallism, indeed! The only remedy for modern civilisation is A-metallism. Money must be abolished. The root of all evil must be pulled up.”
“Money abolished!” I echoed in amaze. “Why, any student of political economy will tell you we could not live without it. Lacking a common measure of value, we—-“
“So it has always been held by students when answering political-economy papers,” he interrupted impatiently. “Yet I dreamt once of a land where the currency was called in, and the morning stars sang together.”
“But the exchange of commodities—-” I began.
“Was effected by the sublime simplicity of barter. At one sweep were swept away all that monstrous credit system which had created an army of accountants and a Court of bankruptcy; all that chaos of single and double-faced entry–all that sleight-of-hand abracadabra of signatures–all those paper phantoms of capital. The Stock Exchange and other gambling-hells shrivelled up. There was a vast saving of clerical labour, and there were few loopholes for fraud. Everything was too simple. Swift retribution overtook the man who shirked his obligations to his fellows. Nobody could juggle with bits of paper at the North Pole and ruin people at the South. The windows of human Society were cleared of the gigantic complex cobweb full of dead flies. One could look inside and see what was going on. ‘Gentlemen’ could not flourish in the light. They were like the fungi that grew in cellars. Every man became both a worker and a trader.”
“Not an unmixed gain, that,” I protested.
“I grant you,” said the Cynic. “Some of the finer shades of fine gentlemanliness were lost: the honourable feeling of cheating one’s tradesmen, the noble scorn of tailors, the lofty despisal of duns. When all men were tradesmen, these higher class distinctions fused into one another. There arose a clannish feeling which prevented the tradesman from defrauding one of his own class. But there was an even graver evil to be placed to the debit side of the new system. For the professors of political economy (who had thrown up their posts as a conscientious protest against the abolition of money and of salaries) proved to be right. So clumsy was the mechanism of exchange that men were actually driven to doing more than one kind of work. All those advantages of specialisation which Adam Smith, supplemented by Babbage, had so laboriously pointed out were completely lost to a wasteful world. Rather than be without certain luxuries and necessaries men gave up moving their legs all day up and down in time with iron treadles, or feeding machines with bits of material exactly alike, or remaining doubled up underground, or making marks from hour to hour and from year to year on pieces of ruled paper. The waste by friction became enormous. Some of the least thrifty even made their own furniture, and wove their own clothes, and carved out rude ornaments for themselves. Whether from a natural want of economy, or from an unwillingness to encounter the difficulties of traffic, or from a mere spirit of independence, these men deliberately reverted to the condition from which mankind had so painfully emerged.
“Some even pretended to enjoy it, and, rather paradoxically, asserted that the abolition of gold had brought about the golden age of primitive legend. Others who felt keenly the falling-off in production, and the absence of those huge stores of unsold commodities which glutted the ancient markets, and gave a nation a sense of wealth in the midst of poverty; the aesthetic spirits who lamented the disappearance of the ancient mansions and palaces, which, although they were empty three parts of the year, yet afforded men the consolation of knowing that they were ample enough to shelter the majority of the homeless–men of this stamp were chagrined by the cumbersome mechanism of exchange, which made these glories of the past impracticable, and they were for introducing counters. But counters, although they had the advantage of lacking intrinsic value, would be quite as bad as actual coins if men could entirely trust one another never to repudiate their obligations. Unfortunately Society had grown so honest under the new _régime_ that this condition was fulfilled, and the operation of counters would have been identical with that of money. Moreover, counters would have brought back card-playing, horse-racing, fire and life assurance, and other forms of gambling, which without them involved such complex calculations and valuations of loaves and fishes that all the pleasure was spoilt. When these things were pointed out to the aesthetic and the economical, they were convinced and remained of the same opinion.
“But even with all these deficits, the balance in favour of the _status quo_ was eminently satisfactory. It was rediscovered that man really wanted very little here below, and that it was better for all to get it than for some to continue to want it; and, taking into account also the general freedom from war, newspapers, and other evils of a moneyed civilisation, it must be conceded that the common people had very little to grumble at.”
“But what of the uncommon people?” I interrupted at last. “They must have been martyred.”
“Certainly, for the good of the common people. You see, everything was topsy-turvey. Besides, they suffered only during the earlier stages of transition. There was, for instance, the poet who went round among the workmen to chaffer verses. But there were few willing to barter solid goods for poetry. Here and there an intelligent artisan in love purchased a serenade, and an occasional lunatic (for Nature hath her aberrations under any system) became the proprietor of an epic. But the sons of toil drove few bargains or hard with the sons of the Muses. The best poets fared worst, for the crowd sympathised not with their temper, nor with their diction, and they were like to die of starvation and so achieve speedy recognition. But the minor poets, too, were in sore strait. The market was exceedingly limited. Sellers were many and buyers few. Rondeaux were hawked about from butcher to baker, at ten to the joint, or three to the four-pound loaf, and triolets were going at a hollow-toothful of brandy. A ballade-worth of butter would hardly cover a luncheon biscuit, while a five-act blank-verse tragedy was given away for a pound of tea, and that only when the characters were incestuous and the caesuras irreproachable. A famous female poet was reduced to pawning her best sonnet for a glass of lemonade and a bun.
“Times were no less hard for the comic writer. Hitherto he had only to outrage his mother-tongue, or to debase the moral currency, to find the land ready to accord him of the fat thereof. He used to sit in a room in Fleet street and make or steal jokes in return for gold. By the wonderful mechanism of the old Society other men and women, in whatever part of the world he might stray, would rush to feed and clothe and house him, and play and sing and dance to him, and physic him, and drive him about in carriages, and tell him the news and shave him, and press upon him aromatic mixtures to smoke, and love him, and kowtow to him, and beg of him, and even laugh at his jokes, all in return for making or stealing jokes in Fleet street. Some of these men and women would detest jokes, or have a blindness to their points; nevertheless, not one but would be eager to express in the most practical form his or her sense of the services rendered to Society by the joker. But now that people saw with open eyes through the transparent mechanism of exchange, they were extremely loth to part with their tangible commodities in return for mere flashes of wit or vulgarity. Previously they had only half realised that they were soberly and seriously making coats, or working machines, or smelting iron, while these jesters were merely cudgelling their brains or consulting back files. The complexity of the thing had disguised the facts. But now that they saw exactly what was going on, they became suddenly callous to numerous vested interests, and their new-found desire to know why they should give up the fruits of their labour pressed very cruelly upon innocent individuals. The comic writer found it no joke to live with ‘I’d Rajah not’s’ going at seventy-five to the cigarette, or mockeries of the mother-in-law yielding but a ton of coals to the thousand. Puns were barely vendible, and even comic pictures could only be sold at a great sacrifice of decency.
“The heir was a type of sufferer. When he came around asking for champagne and chicken, the working-man said, ‘What are you offering us in exchange?’ and he replied, ‘My relationship to my father.’ But they would not buy.
“Antiquarians and scholars, too, found it a hard task to live. No one needed the things they raked up from the dust-heap of the past. Critics were in an exceptionally critical condition. No one cared to exchange his productions with a man who in return had to offer only his opinion of somebody else’s! As this opinion was usually worthless even under the old _régime_, people soon began to turn up their noses at it, and nobody would give a rusk for the information that Turner was a better artist than Nature, or that hanging was too good for Whistler. Remarks about the Italian Renaissance were accounted paltry equivalents for green peas, invidious comparisons among the Lake poets were not easily negotiable for alpaca umbrellas, and the subtlest misreadings of Shakespeare were considered trivial substitutes for small-clothes. The artists were reduced to borrowing half-rolls from their models, partly because people had gone back to Nature and liked their scenery free from oil, and drank in the Spirit of Beauty without water, and partly because it was so difficult to assess the value of a picture now that critics had been starved out and speculation had died away. Allegorical painters continued a much-misunderstood race, and the fusion of classes had reacted fatally on the brisk trade in ‘Portraits of a Gentleman.’ People who, in their celestial aspirations after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, had forgotten that they ate and drank and required food, warmth, and shelter to hatch all these sublime things with Capital Letters–people who had heretofore poured lofty scorn on those who could not forget that a man was a being with a body–these were now the most clamant demanders of the material. Only by the withdrawal of physical necessaries and luxuries did they come to realise how much they had depended on such, or to perceive the impossibility of the Worship of Truth on an empty stomach. Alas! under this crude system of barter the most ardent expression of their sentiments concerning the ideal and the _Kalokagathon_ would not keep them in cigars. The professional paradoxist went about with holes in his boots. Epigrams in hand, sickness at heart, and emptiness at stomach, he crawled through the town in search of a buyer. He offered a dozen of the choicest apothegms for a pair of hob-nailed boots, conjuring the cobbler like the veriest ‘commercial’ to note the superiority of the manufacture. He pointed out that he travelled with the latest novelties in Impressionist Ethics, perfect unfitness guaranteed. He even offered to make a reduction if the cobbler would take a quantity. The worthy craftsman, stung by the prospect of a cheap job lot of epigrams, was prevailed upon to look at the goods. But when he read that ‘Vice is the foundation of all virtue,’ that ‘Self-sacrifice is the quintessence of selfishness,’ and that ‘The Good of Evil outweighs the Evil of Good,’ he felt that he could do much better with his boots, even if he only employed them to kick the epigrammatist. The poor wretch thought himself lucky when he succeeded in purchasing two epigramsworth of tobacco and a paradoxworth of potatoes. To cap his misfortunes, the nation suffered from a sudden invasion of immigrant epigrammatists, so that cynicisms went a-begging at ten for a sausage-roll. Nor was the dull but moral maxim at less discount than the witty but improper epigram. Essays inculcating the most superior virtues failed to counterbalance a day’s charing, and the finest spiritualistic soft soap would not wash clothes. Even the washerwoman deemed her work more real and valuable than the manufacture of moralities too fine for use, and the deliberate effusion of sentiments too good to be true.
“In those days, too, a complete political platform, comprising a score of first-class articles of faith, sold at a pair of second-hand slop-trousers, and a speech of three hours and three hundred parentheses could not fetch more than a pot of jam in the open market. The workhouses were crowded with politicians, critics, poets, novelists, bishops, sporting tipsters, scholars, heirs, soldiers, dudes, painters, journalists, peers, bookmakers, landlords, punsters, idealists, and other incorrigible persons. Nothing was more curious and heartrending in the history of this transition to a new stage than the rapidity with which those who had been most exigent towards life bated their terms. Men who, in their aspirations after the Good and the Beautiful and the True, had unwittingly wasted an intolerable deal of the world’s substance in riotous idealising,–men who had so long breathed the atmosphere of ottomans and rose-leaves that they were barely conscious of their privileges,–now found themselves clamouring for bread wherewith to stay the cravings of their inner selves, and accounted themselves happy if they found a roof to shelter them. The pathos of it was that they felt it all too intensely to see the pathos of it, or to express it in poem, picture, or song.
“It was, of course, the current political economy to which was due this immense depreciation in the exchange value of the higher kinds of intellectual and artistic work. In the old Socialistic system which had been swept away by the abolition of money, men had purchased literary and musical commodities in common, each consumer paying his quota for his share of an unconsumable and infinitely divisible whole. But now few individuals cared or could afford to purchase whole works for their private edification; and so it came to pass that men of talent suffered as much as men of genius in the olden days. And when it began to be understood of the people that the times were other, and that Art and Letters and Apostleship would not pay, men turned in resignation to work with their hands, and they made all kinds of useful things.
“And the bookmakers returned not to their pens, nor the pot-boiling painters to their palettes, nor the apostles to their prophesying, being otherwise engaged and not thereto driven by inward necessity.
“And the Society of Authors perished!
“But the great poets, and the prophets, and the workers in colour and form, upon whom the spirit rested, these wrought on when their daily labour for a livelihood was at an end, for joy of their art and for the religious fire that was in them, giving freely of their best to their fellow-men, and exempt for evermore from all taint of trade.”
The Cynic paused, and I sat silent, deeply impressed by what he had said, and striving to imprint every word of it upon my memory, so that I might sell it to a magazine.
XIV
MODERN MYTH-MAKING
So far as I can gather from the publications of the Folklore Society, the science of Folklore is in a promising condition. The doctors seem to be agreed neither about the facts nor the methods nor the conclusions, but otherwise their unanimity is wonderful. Originally the science was made in Germany, where it still flourishes, like all sciences that require infinite pains and inexhaustible dulness. All that can be done with any fruitfulness is apparently the collection and classification of stories, songs and superstitions. Hypotheses and theories are mainly bricks without straw, and the only certain conclusion that may be drawn from the prevalence of folk-tales all over the world is that all men are liars. This was the first contribution to the science, and the Psalmist may be regarded as the founder of Folklore. Herder made an advance when he collected the folk-songs of many nations; and Grimm as a collector was truly scientific, but when he brought in his mythological explanations he brought in mythology. Benfey’s celebrated theory that European folk-tales are Oriental in origin and comparatively recent in date seems to be bearing up well.
But no one seems to study the mythopoetic instinct as it manifests itself in modern life, in the daily refraction of fact through the medium of imagination (a medium whose power of refraction is far greater than that of water). Because we no longer create gods and goddesses, or people the woods and brooks with fairies and nymphs, and the forest with gnomes and the hills with hobgoblins–because we do not soften our lives with an atmosphere of gracious supernaturalism, and fresco our azure ceiling with angels–it is assumed that the mythopoetic instinct is dead. Far from it! It is as lively as ever, and we may watch it at play in the building up of legends, in the creation of mythical figures; in the shaping of the Boulanger legend, the Napoleonic legend, the Beaconsfield legend with its poetical machinery of the primrose, the Booth legend, the Blavatsky legend; in the fathering of epigrams upon typical wits like Sheridan, or the attribution of all jokes to “Punch”; in the creation of non-existent bodies like the Æsthetes, and in the private circulation of scandals about public personages; in the perpetual revival of the Blood Accusation against the Jews, or the pathetic clinging to the miracles of exposed Spiritualists and Theosophists; in the Gladstone of Tory imaginations and the Balfour of Radical; in the Irish patriot of oratory; in the big-footed Englishwoman of French fancy, and the English conception of the Scotchman who cannot see a joke; in the persistence of traditional beliefs or prejudices that would be destroyed by one inspection.
Apotheosis is still with us, and diabolification (if I may coin a word). We canonise as prodigally as in the mediaeval ages, and are as keen as ever about relics. We are still looking out for dead King Arthur: he will return by way of the County Council. _Plus ça change plus c’est la méme[*] chose_–probably the profoundest observation ever made by a Frenchman. Our mythopoetic instinct is as active as of yore, only the mode of its expression is changed. It works on modern lines, has taken to prose instead of poetry, and only occasionally unfurls wings. Why does not the Folklore Society investigate the origin of our modern myths? Why not seize on the instinct as it is seen at play in our midst, moulding movements and fashioning faiths? Why not catch it in the act–employ vivisection, so to speak, instead of dissecting dead remains? Why not try to extract from the living present the laws of the creation and development of myths and the conditions of their persistence, so that by applying these laws retrospectively we may come to understand our heritage of tradition? Ah! but this would require insight into life, which your scientist has no mind for. Besides, dry-as-dust work–collation and classification–may be distributed among the members of a society; but how require of them fresh vision? There is dispute as to how folklore arose: one school talks vaguely of creation by the clan, the community, the race; another insists that the germ at least must always have sprung from some one individual mind, just as a proverb may be the wisdom of many but must be the wit of one; that ideas that are “in the air,” like a tree whose branches are everywhere and whose trunk nowhere, had a single root once; and that every _on dit_ was literally “_one says_” originally. But if we watch the process of mythopoetising in our daily life, we shall see both theories illustrated. Consider the myth of Lord Randolph’s small stature: it may be traced easily enough to Mr. Furaiss’s pencil. Many people who have the impression forget whence they derived it; and many who never saw Punch had the idea conveyed to them by London letter-writing journalists who never saw Churchill. Yet there is no doubt that the myth is the creation of a single man. In this instance the genesis is clear, and it makes for the one-man theory. In other instances, I can quite imagine myths arising from a spectacle witnessed in common by a multitude, or an incident developing itself under the eyes of many. No single reporter of the doings in Sherwood Forest built up the Robin Hood legend.
[* Transcriber’s note: So in original. One would rather expect an accent circonflexe on the first ‘e’, not an accent aigu.]
Doubtless every ballad was the work of an individual; crowds do not spontaneously burst out into identical remarks, except on the stage. But the crowd was ready for the individual’s ballad; it furnished him with his theme and his inspiration, so that he “gave back in rain what he received in mist.” Thus, most folklore would owe its birth to the co-operation of the individual and the community–the former the creative or male factor, the latter the receptive or feminine factor. The one man launches his jest, his caricature, his story, his melody, into a sympathetic but inarticulate environment. Then it is taken up, it is transformed, it grows mighty. The “Times” is something very different from the total of the contributors’ manuscripts.
Perhaps the most interesting field of folklore work, from the point of view of mere literature, was that opened up by Von Hahn’s classification of the stories of the world according to their original elements, their bare plots. There are about seventy main types of stories to which all the wandering tales of the world may be reduced. As thus:
GRATEFUL BEASTS’ TYPE
1. A man saves some beasts and a man from a pit.
2. The beasts somehow make him rich, and the man somehow tries to ruin him.
I have little doubt that these might be fined down to seventeen on a very broad basis of classification. I should like to see an analysis of the world’s novels similar to that which Polti has made for the drama. Probably it would need a Society to do it, though it would be easy enough to keep pace with the output when once the arrears were cleared off. There are only twenty novels published every week in England, omitting serials, and probably only two or three hundred in the whole world. By a division of labour these could be easily taken to pieces and their plots dissected. In time this might lead to a copyright in incidents as well as in words and titles, and the stock situations would be stocked no more, and the conventional novelists would be killed off. Even if Parliament did not see its way to copyrighting incidents, for fear good ideas spoiled by weak writers should be lost to use by the strong, the publication of a catalogue of the motives of fiction already treated would deter all but the most shameless from changing infants at nurse, or rescuing young ladies from bulls, or mistaking brother and sister for lovers, or having to do with wills lost, stolen, or strayed. Colossal as the task looks, a first rough analysis would sweep away half the new novels of the month and include three-fourths of the fiction of the past. Here is the broadest and most general formula of English fiction as she is wrote for the young person: _A young man meets a young woman under unpropitious conditions which delay their union._
Nine-tenths of the novels of the day may be dissected under the following heads: (_a_) Description of Hero; (_b_) Of Heroine; (_c_) How they first met; (_d_) Why they did not marry till the last chapter.
There! Quite unintentionally I have given away the secret of novel-writing. It is, for all the world, like the parlour game of Consequences, wherein each person fills up a form unknown to the others. The muscular John Jones met the beautiful Princess of Portman Square in the Old Kent Road, and said to her, “Oh, ‘Arriet, I’m waitin’ for you,” and she replied, “You must wait till the end of the third volume,” and the consequences were that they got married, and the world said, “We must get this from Mudie’s.” After this lesson in fiction any one may rival the masters, provided he can hold a pen and doesn’t mind leaving the spelling to the compositors. You may perhaps think that the real value of a book lies in the accessories before the marriage, in the pictures of life and character; but I can assure you, unless you turn everything round this axis, the critics will tell you you can’t construct. For my part, I would rather have “The Story of an African Farm,” two-storied as it really is, than a hundred bungalow romances. Better genius without art than art without genius.
For French fiction the formula would have to be varied. It would run: (_a_)Hero; (_b_)Heroine; (_c_)How they first loved; (_d_)What the hero’s wife or the heroine’s husband did; (_e_)Who died?
Another piece of work I should like to see done is a census of the population of novels. Then we should see clearly how far they are a reflection of life. In England I warrant the professional men would outnumber all others; the aristocracy would come next, and the urban working-man would be swamped by the villagers. The nation of shopkeepers would be poorly represented, and artisans would be few in the land. There would be more perfectly beautiful English girls than there are girls in England, more American millionaires than even the States can raise, and more penniless lords than if Debrett were a charity list of paupers; more satanic guardsmen than ever wore “the widow’s uniform,” more briefless barristers than all the men who have eaten dinners in vegetarian restaurants, and more murderers than have ever been caught since the days of Jonathan Wild. Indeed, I am not certain but what the population of English novels would come out thirteen millions, mostly criminals. The relative proportions of blondes and brunettes would also be brought out, and whether there is a run on any especial colour of hair. Plain heroines came in with Jane Eyre. It would be interesting to ascertain if they are still worn or still weary.
CHAPTER XV
THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOPSY-TURVEYDOM
My friends, topsy-turveydom is not so easy as it looks. The trouble is not in inverting, but in finding _what to invert_. Our language is full of ancient saws, but it takes wit to discover which to turn upside down. Anybody can stand anything on its head, but it is only the real humourist who knows which thing can stand on its head without falling or looking foolish. ‘T is the same in stage dialogue. Many a man of moderate wit can find a repartee when the joke is unconsciously led up to by another speaker. It is the preparation for the joke that is the dramatist’s difficulty. To borrow a term from the Greek grammars, the protasis of the repartee is more troublesome than the apodosis. The puzzle is, therefore, find the protasis. When Barry Pain says that sometimes the glowing fire in the grate stares at you from behind its bars, as if it could read pictures in you, you cannot help laughing. If he had given you the protasis, “You gaze into the fire as if you could read pictures in it,” even you could have invented the inversion. Topsy-turveydom is, I repeat, no laughing matter. It is an art–and must be studied. When Besant’s School of Literature is founded, there will be
EXERCISES IN TOPSY-TURVEYDOM
1. Invert the following commonplaces humorously:
Honesty is the best policy.
The cup that cheers but not inebriates. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Like a child in its mother’s arms.
(_Not so easy, you see!_)
2. Invert the following _motifs_ humorously:
(_a_) A parted husband and wife reconciled by their little child. (Stock Poetry.)
(_b_) A patient marrying his nurse on recovery. (Stock Story.)
(_c_) A mother-in-law who comes to stay six months. (The Old Humour.)
Inversion may be applied, you see, both to ideas and to phrases. Let me contribute a specimen of either sort to the literary primer of the future:
THE ECONOMY OF SMOKING
I must really give up not smoking, at least till the American Copyright Act works smoothly, and I am in a position to afford luxuries. At present this habit of not smoking is a drain upon my resources which I can ill support. Whenever a man comes to my house, I have to give him cigars, or else gain the reputation of a churly and ill-mannered host. In the olden days, when I was economical and smoked all day long, I could go to that man’s house and get those cigars back. Very often, too, I used to get the best of the bargain, and thus effect considerable economies in the purchase of good tobacco. Nowadays, not only have I got to give away cigars for nothing, but they must be good ones. Formerly if I gave my friends bad cigars, it was from a box I was obviously smoking myself, and therefore they had at least the consolation of knowing I was a companion in misfortune. But to give others “evils from which you are yourself exempt” (to quote Lucretius) would be a terrible blend of bad taste and inhospitality. Under such circumstances a man looks on a bad cigar as an insult, and the greater insult because it is a gratuitous one. But my losses from these sources are trivial compared with the item for theatres. In the pure, innocent days, when I could not bear to let my pipe out of my mouth even for a moment, I was unable to go to theatres; but now that I have taken to not smoking, I have fallen a victim to my other craving–the passion for the play. Three stalls a week tot up frightfully in a year. No, decidedly I must check this extravagant habit of not smoking before I am irretrievably ruined.
This is forced, but Truth often dwells the bottom of a paradox.
THE DANGER OF LEARNING TO SWIM
The danger of drowning arises mainly from being able to swim. The ability to swim is of little use as a safeguard against drowning, for it is only in a minority of cases that the accident thoughtfully allows you every facility for displaying your powers of natation; you are not conceded calm stream, a calm mind, and a bathing-costume; usually you are disorganised, _ab initio_, by the unexpectedness of the thing, you are weighed down by your clothes and your purse, you are entangled with sails, or clutched at by fellow-passengers, or sucked into vortices. In a big steamer accident, what chance is there for those who can swim? Only an occasional Hercules can keep afloat in a heavy sea, and he not for long. The most that swimming can do for you is to enable you to save yourself in circumstances where you would very probably be saved by somebody else. On the other hand, the ability to swim exposes you to many risks you w|uld never have run had you been helpless in the water. You swim in perilous places, you go out too far and cannot get back, you expose yourself to the possibilities of cramp, you try to save other people’s lives and lose your own. There is also the temptation to go to the Bath Club in Piccadilly and die of a too luxurious lunch. On the whole, I believe as many swimmers are drowned as non-swimmers when a general accident occurs, while the swimmers invite special accidents of their own. Do you deduce from this that I advise you not to learn to swim? Quite the contrary: it is a delightful and invigorating exercise. Only you must not imagine you are thereby armed against fate. Swimming for amusement is as different from swimming for life as yachting on the Thames is from crossing the Atlantic.
For my example of phrase-inversion I cannot do better than reprint the open letter addressed by me–in the height of his success, and in parody of his manner–to the great _phraseur_ and _farunix_ of his little day; especially as some have thought to see in it proof that prophecy has not yet died out of Israel.
MY DEAR SIR: I have never for one moment doubted that you are a thinker, a poet, an art critic, a dramatist, a novelist, a wit, an Athenian, and whatever else you say you are. You are all these things–I confess it to your shame. I have always looked down upon you with admiration. As an epigrammatist I consider you only second to myself, though I admit that in the sentiment, “to be intelligible is to be found out,” I had the disadvantage of prior publication. When you point out that Art is infinitely superior to Nature, I feel that you are cribbing from my unpublished poems, and I am quite at one with you in regarding the sunset as a plagiarism. Nature is undoubtedly a trespasser, and should be warned off without the option of a fine. I say these things to make it quite clear that I speak to you more in anger than in sorrow. You are much too important to be discussed seriously, and if I take the trouble to give you advice, it is only because I am so much younger than you. I am certain you are ruining yourself by cigarette cynicism; far better the rough, clay-pipe cynicism of a Swift. There is no smoke without fire, but it requires very little fire to keep a cigarette going. The art of advertising oneself by playful puffs is not superior to Nature. But you are not really playful and innocent; it would be ungracious to deny that you have all the corruption which the Stage has so truly connected with the cigarette. Still, isn’t it about time you got divorced and settled down? At present there are only two good plays in the world–“The Second Book of Samuel” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”; surely you have power to add to their number. Try a quiet life of artistic production, and don’t talk so much about Art. We are tired of missionaries, whether they wear the white tie of the Church or of Society, and it is a great pity we have not the simple remedy of the savages, who eat theirs. These few words of admonition would be incomplete if I did not impress upon you that policy is the only honesty. Art is short and life is long, and a stitch in time debars one from having a new coat. You can take a drink to the horse, but you can’t make him well; and nothing succeeds like failure. Vice is the only perfect form of virtue, and virtue—- Easy there! Steady! Avast! Belay! Which!
The Boeotians are dull folk, no doubt, but life would be dull without them. Imagine a wilderness of Wildes! It would be like a sky all rainbows. Then what beautiful whetstones the Boeotians are! Abuse them, by all means, so long as they will pay for it. But what a blessing that the minds capable of taking the artistic view of life are rare enough to keep the race sane! The coarser forms of egotism seem less baneful to the brain-tissue. You claim to be an Athenian, but the Athenians did not smoke cigarettes. It is true that tobacco had not been invented, but this is a sordid detail If Athens stands for anything in the history of culture, it is for sanity, balance, strength. Aristotle, at least as much an Athenian as any native of Ireland, meditated about aesthetics, but he meditated also about politics, logic, philosophy, political economy, ethics–everything. Socrates was a _causeur_, but he was also a martyr. No, after all the Beautiful is _not_ so important as you imagine you are. No doubt for a few billion years painters and musicians and epigrammatists will remain the centre cf creation; but when the sun grows cold it is conceivable that invaluable canvases may be used up as fuel, and that humanity may sacrifice even your printed paradoxes to keep warmth a little longer in its decrepit bones. The fact is, you are too _borné_, too one-sided, to be accepted as as a “king of men.” You take such broad views that you grow narrow. What you want is a little knowledge of life, and twelve months’ hard labour.
But though topsy-turveydom may be attained with comparative ease, it performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use. Our moral ideals grow mouldy if preached too much; our stories stale if told too often. Conventionality is but a living death. The other side of everything must be shown, the reverse of the medal, the silver side of the shield as well as the golden. Convex things are equally concave, and concave things convex. The world was made round so that one man’s “up” should be another man’s “down.” The world is the Earthly Paradox, with four cardinal points of mutual contradiction, all equally N., S., E., and W. ‘T is thus a symbol of all paradoxes, of all propositions in which mutually contradictory things are true. Nay, paradox is the only truth, for it cannot be denied; including, like the world, its own contradiction. Topsy-turveydom unfolds our musty ideas to the sun and spreads them out the other way. The man who reverses the Fifth Commandment and says that parents should honour their children is not a flippant jester, but a philosophic thinker. This is the true inwardness of the topsy-turvey humourist.
Topsy-turveydom has played a prodigious part in the progress of thought. The history of philosophy and science is merely a tale of development by topsy-turveydom, every new thinker simply contradicting his predecessor. Thales said water was the primitive principle of all things; so Anaximander said it was air, whereupon Anaximenes said it was matter. This made Pythagoras maintain it was not concrete matter but abstract number; whereupon Xenophanes would have it that it was not number but pure monistic being, and his disciple Zeno invented some delightful and immortal paradoxes to prove that time and motion and number and change have no existence, and only existence exists. Up comes Heraclitus, proving that existence doesn’t exist, and there is nothing in the world but becoming: that so far from change not existing, nothing exists but change. It was now about time to return to earth, and so Empedocles and Democritus came along with their Atoms; thereby provoking Anaxagoras into bringing in Soul to explain things. Things were going on thus satisfactorily when the Sophists appeared on the scene to say that we didn’t really know anything, because all our knowledge was subjective, so Socrates insisted that it didn’t matter, because conduct was three-fourths of life. Plato retorted that it did matter, and he invented an archetypal universe of which this was a faint and distorted copy. Naturally Aristotle must contradict him by founding empirical science, which concerns itself only with this world. On his heels came the Stoics, who would have nothing to do with science except in so far as it made men virtuous, and who wanted to live soberly and severely. This provoked the neo-Platonists into craving for ecstatic union with the supernatural. The transition period from ancient philosophy to modern was one long fight between Nominalists and Realises, the one school teaching the exact opposite of the other.
But it is in the history of Modern Philosophy and Modern Science that one finds the strongest examples of this progress by paradox. The triumph of topsy-turveydom was when Galileo, the Oscar Wilde of Astronomy, declared that the earth went round the sun–a sheer piece of inversion. Darwin, the Barry Pain of Biology, asserted that man rose from the brutes, and that, instead of creatures being adapted to conditions, conditions adapted creatures. Berkeley, the Lewis Carroll of Metaphysics, demonstrated that our bodies are in our minds, and Kant, the W. S. Gilbert of Philosophy, showed that space and time live in us. In Literature it is the same story. To credit the scholars, Homer is no longer a man, nor the Bible a book. As for Zechariah, it was written before Genesis. This topsy-turveydom is a valuable organon of scientific discovery. Take any accepted proposition, invert it, and you get a New Truth. Any historian who wishes to make a name has but to state that Ahab was a saint and Elijah a Philistine–that Ananias was a realist and George Washington a liar–that Charles I. was a Republican hampered by his official position, and that the Armada defeated Drake–that Socrates died of drinking, and that hemlock was what he gave Xantippe. In fact, there is no domain of intellect in which a judicious cultivation of topsy-turveydom may not be recommended. Ask why R. A.’s are invariably colour-blind, and you become a great art critic, while a random regret that Mendelssohn had no ear for music will bring you to the very front in musical circles. For the tail shall always wag the dog in the end, and Aristides will never be able to remain in Athens if men will call him “the Just.” _Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse._ We are bored–and then comes the topsy-turveyist’s opportunity. “To every action there is an equal and contrary reaction” is a sure law of motion, and in the seesaw of speculation the “down” of to-day is the “up” of to-morrow. Next century we shall be sick of science; and indeed the spooks are already returning for the funeral of this. I shall end with
AN APOLOGY TO A CELEBRATED CHARACTER
As a synonym for sin,
Jezebel,
I ‘ll no longer drag you in,
Jezebel.
Now I know your glorious mission was to spread the truths Phoenician,
Metaphoric life anew you shall begin, Jezebel;
Metaphoric life anew you shall begin,
Cultured Baalite, loyal wife,
Jezebel,
Martyr in a noble strife,
Jezebel;
Protestant for light and sweetness ‘gainst the narrow incompleteness
Of Elijah and Elisha’s view of life, Jezebel;
Of Elijah and Elisha’s view of life.
XVI
GHOST-STORIES
Why do ghosts walk at Christmas? What seduction hath Yule Tide for these phantastic fellows, that it lures them from their warm fireplaces? Is it that the cool snow is grateful after the fervours of their torrid zone, where even the pyrometer would fail to record the temperature? Is it that Dickens is responsible for the season, and that Marley’s ghost has set the fashion among the younger spooks? The ghost of Hamlet’s father was not so timed: he walked in all weathers. Perhaps it is the supernatural associations of Christmas that create the atmosphere in which ghosts live and move and have their being. Or perchance it is at the season of family reunion that the thoughts turn most naturally to vacant chairs and the presences that once filled them. Or is it that the ghosts walk for me alone, by reason that Christmas always brings me haunting thoughts of them? For my youth was nursed upon the “penny dreadfuls” of an age that knew not “Chums,” nor the “Boys’ Own Paper.” They were not so very dreadful, those “penny dreadfuls,” though dreadfully disrespectful to schoolmasters, who were wont to rend them in pieces in revenge. The heroes of the stories began to urge on their wild career in the school-room, where they executed practical jokes that would have gladdened the heart of Mr. Gilbert’s merry Governor; the jokers were never found out unless they confessed to spare another boy’s feelings, and then the schoolmaster was so touched that he spared theirs. After passing through five forms and upsetting them all, they arrived at the sixth form, which demanded a new volume to itself, called, let us say, “Tom Tiddler’s School-days Continued,” and mainly devoted to cigars and flirtation. “Tom Tiddler at College” followed–all “wines” and proctor-baiting, with Tom Tiddler as stroke in the victorious ‘Varsity eight. “Tom Tiddler Abroad” was the next title, for the chronicle of a popular hero would run on for years and years; and in this section red Indians and wild beasts were rampant. ‘T were long to trace the fortunes of Tom Tiddler in all their thrilling involutions; but when he had painted the globe red he married and settled down. And then began “Young Tom Tiddler’s School-days,” “Young Tom Tiddler’s Schooldays Continued,” “Young Tom Tiddler Abroad,” and all the weekly round of breathlessness; and never was proverb truer than that the young cock cackles as the old cock crows. By the time interest palled in the son a new generation of readers had arisen, and the unblushing paper commenced to run “Tom Tiddler’s School-days” again. So went the whirligig. But at Christmas, when the blue-nosed waifs carol in the cold and boys have extra pennies, Tom Tiddler himself slunk into the background, lost in the ample folds of a “Double Number,” the same blazoned impudently, as though it did not demand double money. But the extra pennyworth was all ghosts: ghosts, ghosts, ghosts; full measure, pressed down and running over; not your Ibsenian shadows of heredity, but real live ghosts, handsomely appointed, with chains and groans and wavy wardrobes. They lived in moated granges and ivy-wreathed castles, and paced snowy terraces or dark, desolate corridors. There was no talk then of psychic manifestations, or auras, or telepathy, or spiritual aether. Ghosts were solid realities in those days of the double number.
“To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late,” as Macaulay sings, and it is no less impossible to escape spirit-rapping and all the fascinating _menu_ of the Psychical Society. The epidemic, which is contagious to the last degree, seizes its victims when they are off guard, under pretense of amusing an idle hour, and ends by robbing them of sleep and health; some it drives into lunatic asylums and some into newspaper correspondence. That thought-reading is not necessarily delusion or collusion is now generally recognised; a _protégée_ of Mr. F. W. Myers convinced me of the possibility of simple feats, though not of her explanation of them. She credited them to spirits, and wicked spirits to boot. In vain, I pointed out that spirits who occupied themselves so docilely about matters so trivial must be harmless creatures with no more guile than the village idiot: she would concede no grain of goodness in their composition. Table-turning I had never seen. Ghosts I had never met, though I had met plenty of persons who had their acquaintance. Like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu–or is it Madame de Stäel[*]?–I did not believe in them, but I was afraid of them. Premonitions I had often had, but they had scarcely ever come true. But now I am prepared to believe anything and everything, and to come up to the Penitent Form–if there be one–of the Psychical Society and to declare myself saved. I am already preparing a waxen image of a notorious critic, to stick pins thereinto. Not that I did not always believe the Spook Society was doing necessary work in supplementing the crude treatises of our psychologists, who are the most fatuous and self-complacent scientists going.
[* Transcriber’s note: So in original. One would rather expect the accent tréma on the ‘e’, not on the ‘a’.]
My conversion to a deeper interest in the obscurer psychic phenomena befell through encountering a theatrical touring company in a dull provincial town. The barber told me about it–a dapper young Englishman of twenty-five, with an unimpeachable necktie.
BARBER. “They’re playing ‘Macbeth’ to-night, sir.”
AUTHOR. (growling). “Indeed?”
B. “Yes, sir; I’m told it’s pretty thick.”
A. “What’s pretty thick?”
B. “‘Macbeth.'”
A. “What do you mean by ‘thick’?”
B. “Full of gore, sir. I don’t like those sort o’ pieces. I like opera–‘Utopia’ and that sort o’ thing. You can see plenty o’ thick things in real life. I don’t want to go to the theatre to get the creeps and horrors. But I’ve seen ‘Othello’ and ‘Virginius.'”
A. “Ha! Do you know who wrote ‘Othello’?”
B. “No, that I don’t.”
A. “Do you know who wrote ‘Macbeth’?”
B. “Now you ask me something!”
A. (speculating sadly on the vanity of fame and the absurdity of being a national bard, but determined to vindicate a brother author) “‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth’ were written by Shakespeare.”
B. (unmoved) “Ah! that’s the man that wrote ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ isn’t it?”
A. (astonished) “Yes.”
So the Author went to see the thick play, and found he knew Lady Macbeth, nay, had–by an odd episode–first seen her in dressing-gown and curl-papers; so, presuming upon this intimate acquaintanceship, he got himself bidden to the Banquet–in less Shakespearian language, he went to supper. The Banquet was uninterrupted by Banquos or other bogies. Lady Macbeth–in a Parisian art-gown–sipped milk after her bloody exertions, and listened graciously, her fair young head haloed in smoke, to her guest’s comparison of herself with Mrs. Siddons. But Lady Macbeth’s Chaperon was a Medium, self-made, and when the compliments and the supper had been cleared away, the Medium kindly proposed to exhibit her newly-discovered prowess with the Planchette. The Planchette, as everybody knows, and as I didn’t know myself till I saw it, is a wooden heart that runs on two hind wheels, and has a pencil stuck through the centre of its apex. The Medium gracefully places her hand upon the heart, which after an interval of Quaker-like meditation begins to write, as abruptly as a Quaker is moved by the Spirit, and as abruptly finishes.
AUTHOR. “What do I want to do early to-morrow morning?”
What was in his mind was: “Send a wire to Manchester.” The Planchette almost instantly scribbled: “Send a telegram to your brother.” Now, his brother _was_ connected with the matter; and although at the time he considered the Planchette half wrong, yet in the morning, after reconsidering the question, the Author actually did send the wire to his brother instead. Sundry other things did the Planchette write, mostly wise, but sometimes foolish. It did not hesitate, for example, over the publisher of a certain anonymous book, but failed to give the title, though it wrote glibly, “Children of Night.” These results were sufficiently startling to invite further investigation, so the trio next proceeded to “call spirits from the vasty deep” by making a circle of their thirty fingers upon a wooden table. Very soon the table gave signs of upheaval, while some cobbling sprite fell to tapping merrily at his trade within its ligneous recesses. Lady Macbeth said that these taps denoted its readiness to hold communion with the grosser earth, and constituted its sole vocabulary. As in the game of Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, its information was to be extracted by a series of queries admitting of “yes” or “no” in answer. One tap denoted “no,” three “yes,” and two “doubtful.” It could also give numerical replies. The table or the sprite, having indicated its acquiescence in this code, proceeded to give a most satisfactory account of itself. It told the Author his age, the time of day, the date of the month, carefully allowing for its being past midnight (which none of the human trio had thought of); it was excellently posted on his private concerns, knowing the date of his projected visit to America, and the name of his past work and his future wife. Its orthography was impeccable, though its method was somewhat todious, for the Author had to run through the alphabet to provoke the sprite into tapping at any particular letter. But one soon grew reconciled to its cumbrous methods, as though holding converse with a foreigner; and its remarks made up in emphasis what they lacked in brevity, and were given with exemplary promptitude. Interrogated as to its own personality, it declared it was an unborn spirit, destined to be born in ten years. “Do you know what makes you be born?” inquired the Author. “Yes,” it replied. “Will you tell us?” “Yes.” “Tell us, then.” “F-O-R-C-E.” “Is it God’s force?” “No.” “Is He not omnipotent, then?” “No.” “What is the true religion?” “Buddhism.” “Do you mean Madame Blavatsky was right?” “Yes.” “Is there a heaven?” “Yes.” “A Hell?” “No.” To hear a small still voice rapping, rapping in the silence of the small hours, rapping out the secrets of the universe, was weird enough. It was as though Milton’s words were indeed inspired, and–
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen.
“What!” thought the Author, “shall the Great Secret which has puzzled so many heads–heads in caps and heads in turbans, heads in bonnets and heads in berettas, as Heine hath it–shall the explanation of the Universe, which baffled Aristotle, and puzzled Hegel, and still more his readers, be the property of this wretched little unborn babe, this infant rapping in the night, and with no language but a rap? Was, then, Wordsworth right, and is our birth ‘but a sleep and a forgetting’?” And, mingled with these questionings, a sort of compassion for the poor orphan spirit, inarticulate and misunderstood, beating humbly at the gates of speech. Natheless was the Author quite incredulous, and even while he was listening reverently to these voices from Steadland, his cold cynic brain was revolving a scientific theory to account for the striking manifestations.
In the course of two or three _séances_, with lights turned low, but honesty burning high–for Lady Macbeth was guileless, and her Chaperon above suspicion,–various other “spirits” hastened to be interviewed. There was “Ma,” who afterwards turned out to be the Chaperon’s “Pa,” whose name–a queer French name–it gave in full. The Chaperon’s “Pa,” who was dead, announced he was no longer a widower, for his relief had just rejoined him on Wednesday–the 10th. This news of her mother’s death was unknown to the Chaperon. In truth, “Pa” is still a widower.
Another “spirit”–a woman (who refused to give her age)–predicted that the amount of money taken at the theatre the next night would be £44. The actual returns on the morrow were £44 0_s_. 6_d_. But when, elated by its success, it prophesied £43, the returns were only £34. But this same creature, that gave only an inverted truth–perhaps it was momentarily controlled by the spirit of Oscar Wilde–displayed remarkable knowledge in other directions. Asked if it knew what piece had been played the week before in the theatre–a question that none of the three could have answered–it replied, “‘The Road to —-‘” “Do you mean ‘The Road to Ruin’?” the Author interrupted eagerly, tired of its tedious letter-by-letter methods. “No,” it responded vehemently; and finished, “‘F-o-r-t-u-n-e.'” Lady Macbeth consulted the “Era,” and sure enough “The Road to Fortune” had preceded her own company. “Can you tell us the piece to follow?” the author asked; and the “spirit” responded readily “‘The Pro—-‘” “Do you mean ‘The Professor’s Love Story’?” the Author again interrupted. “No; ‘The Prodigal,'” answered the table. “Ah! ‘The Prodigal,'” echoed the Author, confounding it temporarily with “The Profligate”; but the spirit dissented, and added, “‘Daughter.'” There being no means of verifying this for the moment, the Author proceeded to inquire for the piece to follow that, and was unhesitatingly informed that it was “The Bauble Shop.” “Where is ‘The Bauble Shop’ now?” he inquired. The spirit amiably rapped out “Eastbourne.” This was correct according to the “Era.” Consulting the hoardings after leaving the house, the Author discovered that the other replies were quite exact, save for the fact that “The Bauble Shop” was to come first and “The Prodigal Daughter” second. Here was the paradoxical humour of this Oscar Wilde-ish “spirit” again.
Endless was the information vouchsafed by these disembodied intelligences, in any language one pleased; and, although they at times displayed remarkable obstinacy, refusing to answer, or breaking off abruptly in the middle of a most interesting communication, as though they had been betrayed into indiscretion: yet, to speak generally, there was scarcely any topic on which they were not ready to discourse–past, present, or to come–and their remarks, whether accurate or not, were invariably logical, bearing an intelligible relation to the question. Even sporting tips were obtainable without a fee, and Avington was given as the winner of the Liverpool Cup, though the Author had never heard of him, and the other two were not aware he was booked for the race, still less that he was the favourite. In the sequel he only came second. Real tips did the “spirits” give, tipping the table vehemently. They were also very obedient to commands, moving or lifting the table in whatsoever direction the Author ordered, much as though they were men from Maple’s; and when he willed them to raise it, the united forces of Lady Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s Chaperon could not easily depress its spirits. Nor did they contradict one another. There was a cheerful unanimity about the Author’s dying at fifty-seven. But this did not perturb the Author, whose questions were all cunningly contrived to test his theory of the “spiritual world.” For instance, he set them naming cards, placed on the table with faces downwards and _unknown to anybody_; arguing that with their bloated omniscience they could scarcely fail to name a card shoved under their very noses. Nor did they–altogether. Most began well, but were spoiled by success. However, here is the record performance–eight consecutive attempts of the table to give the “correct card” under the imposition of the hands of the Chaperon and the Author only, neither knowing the card till it was turned up to verify the table’s assertion:
TABLE’S CARD. ACTUAL CARD.
1. Jack of Diamonds . . . Queen of Spades.
2. Jack of Diamonds . . . Jack of Diamonds.
3. Three of Clubs . . . Jack of Spades.
4. Jack of Diamonds . . . Jack of Diamonds.
5. Seven of Clubs . . . Five of Diamonds.
6. Three of Spades . . . Three of Spades.
7. Ten of Hearts . . . Ten of Hearts.
8. Nine of Clubs . . . Nine of Clubs.
Here are five bull’s-eyes out of eight shots! The name of the performer deserves record. It was the spirit of a German woman, named Gretehen, who died three years ago, but refused to say at what age. She was wrong sometimes, but then it may have been her feminine instinct for fibbing. “The spirits play tricks,” say the spiritualists. “Sometimes they are wicked spirits, who tell lies.” The Planchette also wrote out the names of unseen cards placed upon it face downwards. The artistic spirit of the Author now bids him pause: the narrative has now reached a point of interest at which recollections of “Tom Tiddler’s Schooldays” urge him to pen the breathless motto: “To be continued in our next.”
XVII
A THEORY OF TABLE-TURNING
The yearning of humanity for the supernatural, even for the pseudo-supernatural, is as pathetic as it is profound. Wherefore I regret that I can make no concessions to it. The following theory of table-turning came to me as I experimented, from my general knowledge of psychology. I have not compared it with the theories of the Psychical Society, which I have never read, preferring to jot down the impressions of an independent observer, which, if they should at all coincide with the explanations of the spook-hunters, will irrefutably demonstrate that their Society was founded in vain. If, moreover, as Mr. Andrew Lang has since pointed out, it coincides largely with the theory of Dr. Carpenter, so much the better.
What are the facts? If two or more people (according to the size of the table) place their hands in circular contact around a table, and possess their souls in patience for a delightfully uncertain period, sundry strange manifestations will occur. Even after the first few moments the more imaginative will feel the table throbbing, unsuspicious of the fact that it is the blood at their finger-tips. Presently, too, an uncanny wave of cold air will pass underneath the arch of their palms. This is, according to the professional witches of Endor, the frigid flitting of the spirits, but the most superficial meteorologist will expound it you learnedly. Your hand, passive and in a fixed position, heats the air under it, which, becoming lighter, is constantly displaced by the colder circumambient air. Finally, when everybody is wrought up to an exalted expectation of the supernatural, the table begins to oscillate, to move slowly to and fro, to waltz, and even to raise itself partially or wholly off the ground. Sometimes it taps instead of moving. Nor are these motions and these taps merely the intoxicated irregularities of an exuberant energy. They are coherent responses (according to a code agreed upon with the “spirit” in possession) to questions asked by one of the sitters. They are the expression of infinite and ungrudging information on almost every subject. Through this wooden language, through this music of the tables and this dancing movement of their legs, tabular information respecting your past or other people’s past and future lives, together with full details of the doings of the departed in those other spheres of heaven or hell which they adorn or illumine respectively, may be obtained at the lowest rates, and with only that reasonable delay which results from the exigencies of a letter-code. For the “spirits” of the table, be it understood, are unable to communicate with earth except by taps and movements for “yes” or “no,” or by rapping out numbers; so that they have to signify their meaning, snailwise, letter by letter. The “spirit” of the Planchette will indeed write you out sentences; but to that, like the actor in melodrama, I will return anon. In the stock _séances_, I know, spirits materialise themselves and glide white-sheeted through darkened rooms. But as my own _séances_ and “spirits” were personally conducted by myself, the optical illusions of Messrs. Maskelyne & Cook, the Pepper’s Ghost of the dear old Polytechnic, had no opportunity of putting in an appearance. My spooks did nothing but answer questions, so that the very suggestion that they were spirits came entirely from me. In fact, they do but dance to the “medium’s” piping; and should he suggest that they are methylated, the chances are that not a few would cheerfully acquiesce in this description of themselves. In short, it is only the prepossession, the pathetic prejudice, in favour of visitors from other worlds that leads at all to the thought of “spirits,” drawing such a red herring across the track that the average observer, who is nothing if not unobservant, has all his partisan faculties of mis-observation brought into full play on behalf of the spirit-world. Doubtless the actual presence of “spirits” is the cheapest way of accounting for the phenomena. But one might as well call in “spirits” to explain the dancing of a kettle-lid. Not till every natural hypothesis has been exhausted is the scientific observer entitled to call in the supernatural. And in reality all that has to be explained is the mechanical movements of tables under certain specified conditions, the said movements having an apparent relation to will and intelligence.
First of all, what moves the table?
Well, the slightest exercise of the finger or wrist muscles is sufficient to move the small, light round table which is usually the subject of experiment; and when once the slightest movement is established–by the involuntary contraction of a single muscle–all the other persons’ muscles, in accommodating themselves to the movement of the table, cannot help helping it, either by pulling or pushing in the direction in which it is going. It is, in fact, almost impossible to follow the movement of a moving table and yet keep your superimposed hands perfectly passive; and with ninety-nine persons out of a hundred the startled interest in the movement even begets an unconscious desire to help it, which at times almost rises to a curious semi-conscious self-deception, a voluntary exaggeration of the marvellous. Yet nothing makes the ordinary sitter angrier than to be told he has helped to move the table. It is as though he were accused of cheating at whist, or worse, of playing a foolish card. Take half a dozen persons at random, and there are sure to be one or two so impressionable and emotional that they cannot help contributing the slight initial impulse which gathers force as it goes. These nervous subjects cannot sit a quarter of an hour perfectly still without a twitching of the muscles, while the tense state of expectation which subtly transforms itself into a wish to see the table move and not have the experiment in vain, finally compels them, despite themselves, to start the “manifestations.” Indeed, to think of a thing is half to do it. Every idea has a tendency to project itself in action. If you think strongly, for instance, of lifting your hand, it is difficult not to do it, for the idea of motion is motion in embryo. The wish is father to the thought, and the thought to the deed. The wish to see the table move is the grandfather of its motion. Even with the most sceptical, when the table is requested to go in a particular direction the muscles involuntarily tend thither. All the deepest analyses of scientific psychology are involved in this wretched little episode of table-turning, and it is not marvellous that the ordinary observer should perceive only the marvellous.
So much for the movements. But how about the raps? How about those mysterious tappings which come from the very heart of the table, as eloquent of the preternatural as those immortal taps heard by Poe ere the raven stepped into his chamber? I should be more impressed by these taps if I were not capable of manufacturing them myself _ad lib._ without detection, by secretly manipulating the ball of my thumb. One is therefore justified in assuming that, where these raps are not produced by conscious fraud, they are the involuntary result of the same motions that produced them voluntarily. Even wood has a certain elasticity, and an imperceptible increase followed by an imperceptible relaxation of pressure on the surface of the table will alter the tension of the wood, the molecules of which in springing back to their prior position will emit a creak or a tap, just as a piece of extended elastic will when let go again. Both the raps and the movements, then, are in essence phenomena of the same order: simple results of muscular pressure, conscious, sub-conscious, or unconscious.
It now only remains to explain the answers themselves, to account not only for their almost invariably logical form, but also for their occasionally astonishing content. For the table is not infrequently wiser than anybody in the room; also it knows the past and is ready to predict the future.
The whole thing is really an excellent object-lesson in Psychology. For the solution is obvious. The table being unconscious, _you answer yourself_–you not only produce the raps and movements, but you regulate them.
The connection between mind and body is, it seems to me, admirably illustrated by table-turning. According to the latest philosophic view, the connection itself defies human comprehension. It is simply a case of _non possumus intelligere_. But the connection itself may be expressed thus: No idea or feeling without physical disturbance, no physical disturbance without feeling or idea. Mind and body are as related as the tune to the violin-string. Every state of mind tends to set up nervous vibration, and every nervous vibration tends to set up a state of mind. In either case the tendency may be, and usually is, counteracted. The average member of a spiritualistic circle cannot prevent the thought in his brain taking on bodily expression to the extent of a muscular contraction stimulating the very sensitive tips of the fingers. You cannot think of a joke or see the humour of anything without wanting to smile, though you may suppress your smile in obedience to other considerations. Nor can you put your features into smiling position, without experiencing a latent sense of amusement, though you would not know what you were smiling at. But if six cool scientific intellects, acquainted with the tricks of their own organisms and determined to dissever thought from motion, were to sit round a table, they might sit till doomsday without the “spirit” turning up. This is what the spiritualists mean by unsympathetic persons, persons obnoxious to the spirits, persons with antipathetic auras, and all the rest of the jargon. But six intellects taken at random, being anything but cool and scientific, are not able to prevent their ideas passing over into action in the shape of muscular twitches; though if even the unscientific were to look up at the ceiling and forget all about the table, the table would probably forget to move. Now the majority of the replies of the table deal with matters actively present to the consciousness of at least one of the six owners of the superimposed hands. When the table raps out something known only to this one person, and the startled person admits that the table is right, an uncanny feeling is produced; the table seems at least to be a thought-reader, and on this wave of astonishment the hypothesis of “spirits” rides up triumphantly. When the topic is one of which nobody knows anything–_e.g._, whether the supposed spirit is a man or woman–chance, or a vague idea floating up in the mind of one of the party, determines the reply.
But what of those replies in which some striking truth is told of which none of the party was conscious, as for instance in the examples I gave in my last, when the table informed us that Mr. Jones’s “Bauble Shop” was then playing at Eastbourne, or that “The Road to Fortune” had been playing in the town in which we were the week before we arrived? To clear up this most remarkable aspect of the whole matter we must go still deeper into Psychology.
What we are pleased to call our Mind is made up of two parts–our Consciousness and–what I shall call loosely yet sufficingly and without prejudice to Metaphysics–our Sub-Consciousness. The latter is immeasurably the vaster portion. It is a tossing ocean of thoughts which feeds the narrow little fountain of Consciousness. It holds all our memories. We cannot be conscious of all ourselves and all our past at once–that way madness lies, or divinity. We may know ten languages, but we can only think in the mould of one at a time. Our thoughts and memories can only come up into clear Consciousness by ones or twos–to be dealt with and then dismissed. They spirit from the great deep of Sub-Consciousness into the thin fountain-stream of Consciousness, and fall back again into the great deep. And this great deep is never still, though we know nothing of its churning save by its tossing up through the fountain some new mental combination of which it had received only the elements–as when the mathematician has the solution of a problem flashed upon him at the moment of waking, or as the author has the development of his plot thrust upon him when he is playing billiards, or as the wit finds repartees invented for him by his brilliant but unknown collaborator. This is what the crowd calls “inspiration,” the late Mr. Stevenson “Brownies,” and the scientist “unconscious cerebration.” A man of talent has a good Working Consciousness, a man of genius a good Working Sub-Consciousness. Hence the frequent mental instability of genius. The Infant Prodigy’s feats are done by his Sub-Consciousness. Instinct is Racial Genius, Genius is Individual Instinct. The highest Genius is sane. A Shakespeare or a Goethe has both a good Working Consciousness and a good Working Sub-Consciousness, with the former so self-balanced that it regulates the products of the latter. The cultivation of the Working Consciousness may either improve or impair the products of its bigger brother. Education, the cultivation of the critical faculty, would be fatal to some writers, actors, painters, and musicians; it would but spoil the Working Sub-Consciousness. Others–more sanely balanced–would gain in art more than they lost in nature.
Now, what are the elements with which our Sub-Consciousness works?–what does this ocean contain? It would be easier to discover what it does not contain. Wrecks and argosies and dead faces, mermaidens and subterranean palaces, and the traces of vanished generations; these are but a millionth part of its treasures: the Sub-Consciousness were perhaps better likened to the property-room and scene-dock of the Great Cosmic Theatre, holding infinite wardrobes and scenes ready-painted, parks and seas and libraries, and ruined cottages and whitewashed attics, to say naught of an army of supers ready to put on all the faces we have ever seen. In our Sub-Consciousness, moreover, are stored up all the voices and sounds and scents we have ever perceived, and to all these reminiscences of our own sensations are perhaps added the shadows of our ancestors’ sensations–episodes that perchance we re-experience only in dreamland–so that part of the vivid vision of genius, of the poet’s eye bodying forth the shapes of things unknown, may be inherited Memory. And thus Imagination, when it is not a mere fresh combination of elements experienced, may be only a peculiar variety of atavism.
From this boundless reservoir, then, which holds our heredity and our experience, go forth the battalions of dreams–the infinitely possible permutations and combinations of its elements, wrought by the Working Sub-Consciousness when the poor Working Consciousness cannot get sound asleep, but must watch perforce with half an eye the procession of thoughts and images over which it has lost control. For it is the duty of Consciousness to control the stream sent up by Sub-Consciousness. When it is awake but unable to do this, we have Insanity; when asleep, Dreams. In Somnambulism the Working Sub-Consciousness is seen in an accentuated phase. It does all the work of its little brother, even to exercising its owner’s muscles. To be “possessed” by a popular song is a species of insanity–Consciousness ridden by a singing Sub-Consciousness.
Between our Consciousness and our Sub-Consciousness there is more or less easy communication. It is not perfect. You cannot draw up what you will from the ocean: you cannot always directly remember a name or a date that you know–you can only set an indirect train of thought at work. _Per contra_, it is not easy to transfer certain conscious states to the storehouse of Sub-Consciousness–to learn a page of prose, or deposit the memory of a piece of music, which you are forced to play slowly and thoughtfully before the digital dexterity is added to the treasures of your Sub-Consciousness. Under exceptional conditions, exceptional flotsam and jetsam is tossed up into Consciousness, as in the case of that servant girl who spoke Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in her delirium, having unconsciously absorbed the same from overhearing the studies of her learned master many years before.
Now, just as a conscious thought has an accompaniment of physical motion, so has a sub-conscious thought. Thus, then, a thought which does not pass through the thin fountain-stream of Consciousness may yet produce the same muscular twitches as if it were clearly present to the presiding Ego. In the case of the “Road to Fortune,” the name must have really sunk into my brain, although I was unaware of it, and probably could not have consciously recalled it to save my life. The stage-manager subsequently reminded me that he had in my presence regretted that the “Road to Fortune” had done such good business, since there would probably be a reaction. _I_ have only a recollection of his telling me that the success of the preceding piece would hurt his–my Consciousness had grasped at the intellectual side of his remark, my Sub-Consciousness had absorbed the irrelevant fact of the name of the piece. In examining the “Era,” to verify this item, Lady Macbeth’s eye must have unconsciously noted that “The Bauble Shop” was at Eastbourne; but the information was not registered in her Consciousness, for there is a struggle of thoughts to catch the thinker’s I–that is to say the Central Consciousness–and only the fittest can survive. We are indeed wiser than we know. Our Sub-Consciousness knows all we know, and all we have forgotten, and all that our mental sponge sucked in without spirting it through Consciousness. In fact, attention or inattention often determines whether a thought or a feeling shall come up into clear Consciousness or not. You can feel a pain in your big toe if you want to. Conversely, in the excitement of battle soldiers do not always feel their wounds.
When the table prophesies or delivers “a message from the other world,” the result is a compound of fluke with expectation or with apprehension. Fears or hopes dimly in the mind get accentuated, or transmuted, or distorted as in dreams; and when the “spirits” are proved wrong, as in the matter of the Chaperon’s mother, the spiritualists tell you that you have got hold of a “lying spirit.” Verily a cheap explanation! “They play tricks sometimes,” say their apologists. The true explanation is that your Sub-Consciousness was ignorant of the reply your Consciousness asked for. Endless as its contents seem, there are limits; and when it does not know, your Sub-Consciousness will rarely confess it. It makes a brazen guess, keeping the logical form of the answer, because your Sub-Consciousness knows that, but blundering deplorably in the matter. Sometimes it will not speak at all, but when it does it is cocksure to the last degree. Its humour is the humour of the stock joke, the Old Humour–as when it will not tell a woman’s age. Its sulkiness and eccentricity and occasional indecency are just what one would expect from a Sub-Consciousness, whose thoughts have no central I to keep them in order. (Compare Goethe’s explanation of the obscenities of Ophelia.) Sometimes, too, there are Obstructive Associations, which account for its inability to make up its want of mind; and as there are usually several persons at table, the result is complicated by their separate Sub-Consciousnesses. In brief, table-turning is a method of interrogating your Sub-Consciousness. It is, so to speak, objective introspection. The table enables you to peep at your Sub-Consciousness, to know your larger self. It is an external medium on which you may see registered visibly and audibly (through the vibrations you sub-consciously communicate to it) that Sub-Consciousness which _ex hypothesi_ you cannot peep at directly. The moving table may be considered the objectification of Sub-Consciousness, or a mirror in which Sub-Consciousness is reflected to the gaze of Consciousness (to the great benefit of the science of Psychology, which may be revolutionised by table-turning). By humouring your Sub-Consciousness, by addressing it as though it were a separate identity utterly unconnected with you, by asking a “spirit” to answer you, you help to break your Mind in two, to detach the Sub-Consciousness from the Consciousness, and so to get results which astonish yourself. So divided is mind against itself that (as when I thought “The Pro–” was to be “The Professor’s Love Story”) even a conscious expectation of something different does not turn the Sub-Consciousness from its first dogged determination; or it may be that somebody else’s Sub-Consciousness was in the ascendant. The “mediums” who excuse the “spirits” on the ground of their mendacity are not necessarily frauds: they are themselves deceived; they do not know that if the “spirits” lie, it is because a true reply was not latent in any one of the _human_ Consciousnesses or Sub-Consciousnesses present. But the conclusion of the whole matter seems to be this: there is a germ of scientific truth which the professional spiritualists doctor and wrap round with complex trickery in order to extract backsheesh from poor old women of both sexes anxious for information about deceased relatives. Circles are formed with pretentious mysticism, and no self-respecting “spirit” will appear without being received in state with extinguished lights and creepy accompaniments. The unconscious revelations made by the sitters are the sole genuine foundation of the spiritualists’ influence. Consciousness holds converse with deceased relatives, and Sub-Consciousness, which knows all about them, answers for them. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep” myself, and they will come when I call them, but the “vasty deep” is the deep of my own Sub-Consciousness. We seem to hear voices from spirit-land; but as when we hold a sea-shell to our ear and seem to hear the ocean it is only the blood in our own veins, so–to continue Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s fine sonnet–
Lo! in my heart I hear, as in a shell, The murmur of a world beyond the grave, Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be. Thou fool! this echo is a cheat as well,– The hum of earthly instincts,–and we crave A world unreal as the shell-heard sea.
Tables might be “turned” to various purposes. Criminals might be compelled to yield up their secrets to them in uncontrollable muscular vibrations, their Sub-Consciousness being tapped. For students under examination table-turning would be very useful for recalling forgotten knowledge. The Planchette would be the most convenient form. For obviously the _modus operandi_ of the Planchette is exactly the same as the table’s. The medium’s Sub-Consciousness arrives at an answer by guesswork, reminiscence, etc., and produces the muscular movements of writing without first passing the message through the writer’s Consciousness. Mr. Stead has, I believe, a familiar spirit called Julia. This is merely a projection of his own Sub-Consciousness, the Planchette being the artificial instrument for enabling him to give pseudo-objectivity to his thought, to detach a shred of his mind. Even so, many a dramatist marshals toy figures on a mimic stage. The external image is a help to weak imaginations. The process of novel-writing involves breaking up your mind into bits–one for each character. And when the characters are said to take the reins into their own hands, it means that the bits are developing an independent existence. If Mr. Stead is not careful, Julia will get the upper hand of him, his Sub-Consciousness will dominate his Consciousness, and then he will be mad. This detachment of bits of mind is dangerous; the monster may overpower Frankenstein. Julia is literally a child of Mr. Stead’s brain, a psychical daughter embodied in a Planchette. Double Consciousness, Double Identity, are well-known forms of insanity. In a mild degree they consist with sanity. Landseer could paint different heads simultaneously with both hands.
Hypnotism, on this theory, would be the lulling of the patient’s Consciousness, the closing of his central I, and the setting of his Sub-Consciousness to work in accordance with suggestions. Thought-transference seems a superfluous hypothesis here. Death is the cessation of both Consciousness and Sub-Consciousness; and when a drowned man is resuscitated his Sub-Consciousness can never have ceased. Do you fail to understand Sub-Consciousness? So do I–as much as that our digestion operates and our blood circulates without asking our permission. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Sub-Consciousness is simply the psychical side of the molecular changes that are going on in our nervous system. There is more than “metaphysical conceit” in that elegy of Donne’s:
Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought That one might almost say her body thought.
Sub-Consciousness is a greater marvel in itself than any that it explains, and beats the spooks hollower than they are. Just consider the phenomena of dreams, what things we do, what sights we see. It is only the commonness of dreams that blinds us to the fact that they are more marvellous than ghost-stories. Mr. Lang thinks the theory of the sub-conscious self that uses our muscles for its own ends is “the most startling thing ever offered to the public; and that it should be regarded as true by a sceptic is staggering to our judicial faculties.” But why? Our noble selves–are they not already exposed to the indignity of dreams? What matters another insult? We need not be greatly put out if Sub-Consciousness is busy in the day-time too. And what about Somnambulism? What about musical or literary creation? Are not our ideas made for us in the kitchen of our Sub-Consciousness? Our Consciousness is only a small part of ourselves. What produced De Quincey’s opium dreams was certainly not Consciousness. I can see visions, myself, without opium. In certain excited states of the brain I can travel in my chair, or bed, perfectly awake, through an endless and variegated series of scenes–domestic interiors with people talking or eating or playing cards, battle-fields with glittering phalanxes, beautiful tossing seas, gorgeous forests, melancholy hospitals, busy newspaper offices, etc., etc. These are almost entirely detached from my will, and the chief interest of the spectacle is the unexpectedness of its episodes. The scenes and the people have all the concreteness and detail of actuality, although I never forget that I am observing my own hallucinations. Just fancy what ghosts I could see in the dark if I lost my central control and let my Sub-Consciousness get the upper hand! Sociologists say, the seeing of dead people in dreams gave rise to the idea of ghosts. I would suggest that the same process as that of dreaming gives rise to the ghosts themselves. Great is the Sub-Consciousness! Who shall say what it does not contain, either _in esse_ or _in posse!_ Till we have exhausted the Sub-Consciousness let us not talk of spooks.
Two things alone remain to be considered. One is how the Planchette or the table is able to read cards placed face downwards upon it; the second is, is telepathy or thought-transference a possibility? As to the first point I have never yet been able to satisfy myself whether the results are more than Chance would account for; for Chance has strange vagaries–themselves part of the doctrine of Chances–and in order to decide, one would have to make a far more extended induction than I have had time for. But if the mathematical probabilities are really exceeded, one would be driven to the suspicion that there resides in the Sub-Consciousness a sense of which we are unaware, perhaps an extra way of perceiving by the tips of the fingers, which may be either a new embryonic sense, not yet developed by the struggle for existence, or the rudimentary survival of an old sense eliminated in the struggle, perhaps a relic from those primeval homogeneous organisms in which every part of the body did every kind of work. After all, the senses are all developments of the sense of touch. This suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the correct card is often given at the first trial, and not after, as if this unused sense were soon exhausted. By the way, though the “spirits” mostly failed to tell a card placed face down, and unknown to any one in the room, they were invariably successful when it was placed face up: a sufficient proof–is it not?–that there could be nothing in the replies which was not already in some one’s mind.
With regard to the question of telepathy, though I am tempted to believe in it, I have not yet met with any convincing instance of it. Thought-reading _à la_ Stuart Cumberland almost any one could do who practised it. The thought-reader merely takes the place of the table as a receiver of muscular vibrations. What tempts me to believe in the transfer of thought without physical connection is that, given telepathy, all the mysterious phenomena that have persisted in popular belief through the centuries could be swept away at one fell swoop. By telepathy, working mainly through the Sub-Consciousness, I will explain you Clairvoyance (that is, not the mere seeing of pictures, which is a phenomenon akin to dreaming, but the vision of other people’s Sub-Consciousnesses), ghosts, witchcraft, possession, wraiths, Mahatmas, astral bodies, etc., etc. But it is rather absurd to call in a new mystery to explain what may not even be facts. And so, till I am convinced either of ghosts or of telepathy, I must accord an impartial incredulousness to both. _Credat Christianus_, F. W. Myers or W. T. Stead! For I gather that the Psychical Society assert that they _must_ exist. But as yet–_je n’en vois pas la nécessité_. If it is indeed possible to telegraph without fees and to put a psychical girdle round the earth in twenty seconds, by all means let the noses of those extortionate cable companies be put out of joint. To me it is just as wonderful that mind can communicate with mind by letter or even by speech. One more puzzle adds no light to our darkness. And as for ghosts, I have more than a lurking sympathy with the farrier in “Silas Marner.”
“‘If ghos’es want me to believe in ’em, let ’em leave off skulking i’ the dark and i’ lone places–let ’em come where there’s company and candles!’
“‘As if ghos’es ‘u’d want to be believed in by anybody so ignorant!’ said Mr. Macey, in deep disgust at the farrier’s crass incompetence to apprehend the conditions of ghostly phenomena.”
And supposing “ghos’es” do exist–the moment the Supernatural is attested and classified it becomes as natural as anything else. Such spooks would add nothing to the dignity and sanctity of the scheme of creation, and are no friends to religion. The world would only be made to look more ridiculous if our deceased friends really rapped tables and pulled off bedclothes, as Miss Florence Marryat’s do. Mrs. Besant (who up to the moment of going to press is still a Theosophist), in her latest reading of the riddle of this painful earth, does but explain _obscurum per obscurius_. Where is the point of a progression through stages, if there is no continuous consciousness? What does it matter if I am not myself, but somebody else in his fifth plane or her nineteenth incarnation? Decidedly it is better to bear the religions we have, than fly to others that we know not of. If Mr. F. W. Myers hears that some ill-trained observers have seen ghosts, he becomes Dantesque and dithyrambic about “the love that rules the world and all the stars.” For my part, I fail to draw the moral. I am content to look nearer home–at coal-heavers and costermongers, poets and engineers–and to found my theory of life on less deniable data. A fig for your ghosts! What! Here have I been living and working and thinking nigh half a lifetime, and only now these gentry should deign to give me cognisance of their existence. Dame Nature would have indeed treated me scurvily had she reduced me to such absurd oracles. The phenomena seem so rare and so irregular, the vast majority of mankind having to go through life only afraid of ghosts, but never seeing them, that no general law of posthumous existence could be based on these obscure and erratic accidents. There may be only a survival of the fittest. It is not in the aberrations, but in the constant factors of human life that we must seek for light, and the attitude of these smellers after immortality is precisely that of the mediaevals who sought for the workings of divinity in eccentric variations from its own habits, till miracles became so commonplace that, as Charles Reade deliciously sums it up, a man in “The Cloister and the Hearth” could reply to his fellow, who was anxious to know why the market-place was black with groups, “Ye born fool! it is only a miracle.” If I am to seek for “intimations of immortality,” let me find them not in the haphazard freaks of disembodied intelligence, but where Wordsworth found them, and where Mr. Myers was once content to find them, in
Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings!
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised, High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
If Moses came to London he would be very disgusted with Mr. Stead and the correspondents of “Borderland” who collect “facts” for him. For that supremely sane and sage legislator made one clean sweep of all the festering superstitions that fascinate the silly and the sentimental to-day as much as they did three thousand years ago. Mr. Stead is a Puritan, and the Old Testament should be his impregnable rock. Yet Deuteronomy is most definite about “Julia.” “There shall not be found with thee … a consulter with a familiar spirit. For whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto the Lord.” His organisation of research is a delusion; science is not to be thus syndicated. The ordinary observer has no idea of scientific sifting, and in ten minutes I exposed a gentleman who impressed a large London club as “the most wonderful thought-reader in Europe.”
“Nature has many methods of producing the same effect,” says Henry James’s greater brother. “She may make our ears ring by the sound of a bell, or by a dose of quinine; make us see yellow by spreading a field of buttercups before our eyes, or by mixing a little Santonine powder with our food.” Probably not ten per cent. of the correspondents of “orderland” are aware of the existence of such “subjective sensations,” or realize, despite their nightly experience of dreams, that it does not take an actual external object to give you the sensation of something outside yourself. And passing optical illusions may have all the substantiality of ghosts. When Benvenuto Cellini went to consult a wizard, as he relates in his “Memoirs,” countless spirits were raised for his behoof, dancing amid the voluminous smoke of a kindled fire. He actually _saw_ them: it was a splendid case for “Borderland.” Yet the probabilities are that the cunning magician merely projected magic-lantern pictures on the background of the vapour. My brother woke up one morning, and accidentally directing his eyes to the ceiling, beheld there a couple of monsters–uncouth, amorphous creatures with ramifying conformations and deep purple veins. After a few moments they passed away; but the next morning, lo! they were there again, and the next, and the next, till at last, in alarm, off he goes to a specialist in eyes and unfolds his tale of woe. Is he, perhaps, going blind? “So you’ve discovered them at last!” laughs the eminent oculist. “These things are Purkinje’s Figures–the shadows of the network of blood-vessels of the retina microscopically magnified on the ceiling: everybody ought to see them–it’s a sign the eye is a good working lens. But they don’t notice them except by accident, when the light slants sideways, and when there’s a specially good background for them to be projected and magnified upon.” And, taking him into his mystic chamber, and reconstituting the conditions, “Look!” says he, “there are your old friends again!” And there they were, sure enough, in all their amorphous horror. It is, in fact, not so much the actual external object that determines our perception, as attention or inattention; and with wise unconsciousness we ignore all that it is not necessary for us to see at the moment. If our organism were always in perfect health, if our senses were not deceivers ever, if we did not dream as solid a world as that which we inhabit by day, then, indeed, a single appearance of a ghost would settle the question; but as things are, our own eyes are just what we mustn’t believe.
As Helmholtz pointed out, we ought to see everything double, except the few objects in the centre of vision; and as a matter of fact we do get double images, but the prejudiced intelligence perceives them as one. The drunken man is thus your only true seer. Genius, which has always been suspected of affinity with drunkenness, is really a faculty for seeing abnormally–that is to say, veraciously. Andrew Lang, who thinks that all children have genius, is thus partially justified; for till they have been taught to see conventionally, they see with fresh insight. Hence the awkwardness of their questions. Mr. Bernard Shaw recently wrote an article on “How to Become a Genius,” but he omitted to supply the recipe. It is simply this: see what you do see, and not what everybody tells you you see. To think what everybody says is to be a Philistine, and to say what everybody thinks is to be a genius. Every healthy eye sees Purkinje’s Figures when the conditions are present; but only a rare eye perceives them consciously. That is the eye of genius, but the Philistines cry, “Disease! Degeneration!”
XVIII
SOCIETIES TO FOUND
I have noted in my Sancho Panza moments a number of deficiencies in the commonweal which can only be remedied–in our modern manner–by societies. Let me start with a few of the most needed.
1. SOCIETY FOR PROVIDING NEW OATHS
The present currency is badly worn and was always nasty. Swear-words are a necessity. They are the safety-valves of the soul. Why not have them nice and innocent–the kind of oath a girl can use to her mother? It is