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New page: {{title |title = The Everlasting Man |author = Gilbert Keith Chesterton |section = |notes = ''The Everlasting Man is a two-part history of mankind, Christ, and Christianity published in 1...
 
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rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought and everlasting
rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought and everlasting
enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; and still as new as it is old.
enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; and still as new as it is old.
==Part I: On the Creature Called Man==
===I. The Man in the Cave===
Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there is a
small star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I could never
observe in the faces or demeanour of most astronomers or men of science any
evidence that they have discovered it; though as a matter of fact they were
walking about on it all the time. It is a star that brings forth out of itself very
strange plants and very strange animals; and none stranger than the men of
science. That at least is the way in which I should begin a history of the world,
if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning with an account of the
astronomical universe. I should try to see even this earth from the outside, not
by the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by some
imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised
spectator. Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study
humanity. I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to
dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle vulgar about this idea
of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as the first idea is not feasible, that of
making the earth a strange planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop
to the other trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant. I
would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet at all, in the
sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary place too.
That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical,
then in some more familiar fashion.
One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a
comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the
Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if
God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I
remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was
blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of
course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which
really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show
you how this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.' My
remark was strictly pious and proper confessing the divine purpose even in its
most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I learned
many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much
of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in
the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at
the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and
gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into
the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect
people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog
made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations
of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like
evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not
read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy
man.
But this little incident has always lingered in my mind as a sort of parable.
Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a
rather wordy exposition of evolution, for much the same reason that operated
in this case. There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word
and even about the idea. As a matter of fact, it is not, touching these primary
things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea. Nobody can imagine
how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by
explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more
logical to start by saying 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth' even
if you only mean 'In the beginning some unthinkable power began some
unthinkable process.' For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody
ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than
he could create one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the
fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand
it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that
they have read the Origin of Species.
But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a slope, is a
great part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as an illusion; for slowness
has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more
intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves.
For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as
incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine
with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance
looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a
curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and
uncanny. The medieval wizard may have flown through the air from the top of
a tower; but to see an old gentleman walking through the air, in a leisurely and
lounging manner, would still seem to call for some explanation. Yet there runs
through all the rationalistic treatment of history this curious and confused idea
that difficulty is avoided, or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere
delay or on something dilatory in the processes of things. There will be
something to be said upon particular examples elsewhere; the question here is
the false atmosphere of facility and ease given by the mere suggestion of going
slow; the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old woman
travelling for the first time in a motor-car.
Mr. H. G. Wells has confessed to being a prophet; and in this matter he was a
prophet at his own expense. It is curious that his first fairy-tale was a complete
answer to his last book of history. The Time Machine destroyed in advance all
comfortable conclusions founded on the mere relativity of time. In that
sublime nightmare the hero saw trees shoot up like green rockets, and
vegetation spread visibly like a green conflagration, or the sun shoot across the
sky from east to west with the swiftness of a meteor. Yet in his sense these
things were quite as natural when they went swiftly; and in our sense they are
quite as supernatural when they go slowly. The ultimate question is why they
go at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that it
always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any rate a
philosophical or metaphysical question. And most certainly he will not think
the question answered by some substitution of gradual for abrupt change; or,
in other words by a merely relative question of the same story being spun out
or rattled rapidly through, as can be done with any story at a cinema by turning
a handle.
Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something
more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would
ask the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by
simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things
like life rather than words like evolution. For this purpose it would really be
better to turn the handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the
grass growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could
contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair. What
we know, in a sense in which we know nothing else, is that the trees and the
grass did grow and that number of other extraordinary things do in fact
happen; that queer creatures support themselves in the empty air by beating it
with fans of various fantastic shapes; that other queer creatures steer
themselves about alive under a load of mighty waters; that other queer
creatures walk about on four legs, and that the queerest creature of all walks
about on two. These are things and not theories; and compared with them
evolution and the atom and even the solar system are merely theories. The
matter here is one of history and not of philosophy so that it need only be
noted that no philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great
transitions: the origin of the universe itself and the origin of the principle of
life itself. Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third
mystery attaches to the origin of man himself. In other words, a third bridge
was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there came into the
world what we call reason and what we call will. Man is not merely an
evolution but rather a revolution. That he has a backbone or other parts upon a
similar pattern to birds and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning
of the fact. But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing
on his hind legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive
than if he were standing on his head.
I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of man. It
illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish directness is needed to
see the truth about the childhood of the world. It illustrates what I mean by
saying that a mixture of popular science and journalistic jargon have confused
the facts about the first things, so that we cannot see which of them really
comes first. It illustrates, though only in one convenient illustration, all that I
mean by the necessity of seeing the sharp differences that give its shape to
history, instead of being submerged in all these generalisations about slowness
and sameness. For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells's phrase, an outline of
history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini's phrase, that this
evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd outline. But, above all, it
illustrates what I mean by saying that the more we really look at man as an
animal, the less he will look like one.
To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with
numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to
be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character.
His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and
psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life
was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I
believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happened
to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive
diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained
elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a
priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive
man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But
on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and
reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down
before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend
why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very
refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he
should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and
the river romance of the hippopotami are effected without any of this
preliminary fracas or shindy. The cave-man may have been no better that the
cave-bear; but the child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with
any such bias for spinsterhood. In short these details of the domestic life of the
cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in
any case I should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I
have never been able to find it. But the curious thing is this: that while ten
thousand tongues of more or less scientific or literary gossip seemed to be
talking at once about this unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man,
the one connection in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk about him
as the cave-man has been comparatively neglected. People have used this
loose term in twenty loose ways, but they have never even looked at their own
term for what could really be learned from it.
In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except
what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of
what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but
it is concerned with the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary caveman
and his club. And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider
quite simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it. What was
found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the
number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard's
Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with
female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs. It was something
quite unconnected, one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and
philosophical implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole
question for us. And if we wish to see as it really is this authentic glimpse of
the morning of the world, it will be far better to conceive even the story of its
discovery as some such legend of the land of morning. It would be far better to
tell the tale of what was really found as simply as the tale of heroes finding the
Golden Fleece or the Gardens of the Hesperides, if we could so escape from a
fog of controversial theories into the clear colours and clean-cut outlines of
such a dawn. The old epic poets at least knew how to tell a story, possibly a
tall story but never a twisted story, never a story tortured out of its own shape
to fit theories and philosophies invented centuries afterwards. It would be well
if modern investigators could describe their discoveries in the bald narrative
style of the earliest travellers, and without any of these long allusive words
that are full of irrelevant implication and suggestion. Then we might realise
exactly what we do know about the cave-man, or at any rate about the cave.
A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a
sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret
corridors of rock. They crawled through cracks that seemed almost
impassable, they crept through tunnels that might have been made for moles,
they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed to be burying
themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection. This is but
the commonplace of all such courageous exploration; but what is needed here
is some one who shall put such stories in the primary light, in which they are
not commonplace. There is, for instance, something strangely symbolic in the
accident that the first intruders into that sunken world were a priest and a boy,
the types of the antiquity and of youth of the world. But here I am even more
concerned with the symbolism of the boy than with that of the priest. Nobody
who remembers boyhood needs to be told what it might be to a boy to enter
like Peter Pan under a roof of the roots of all the trees and go deeper and
deeper, till he reach what William Morris called the very roots of the
mountains. Suppose somebody, with that simple and unspoilt realism that is a
part of innocence, to pursue that journey to its end, not for the sake of what he
could deduce or demonstrate in some dusty magazine controversy, but simply
for the sake of what he could see. What he did see at last was a cavern so far
from the light of day that it might have been the legendary Domdaniel cavern,
that was under the floor of the sea. This secret chamber of rock, when
illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large
and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they
followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages,
the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or
paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by
an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long
sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or
tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be
contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous
spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as
where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings
his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in
the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set
themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other
details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and
presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only
an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.
Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in
the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of
that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with
countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can
be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human
and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the
abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and
psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in
connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex
novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the
spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's readers would be very
much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows
on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The
submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a
violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or
to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they
graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and
innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he
did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as
commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has
at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking
is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific
evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If
any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without
taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to
nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures
on a wall.
But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral here to be
drawn from them. That moral is something much larger and simpler, so large
and simple that when it is first stated it will sound childish. And indeed it is in
the highest sense childish; and that is why I have in this apologue in some
sense seen it through the eyes of a child. It is the biggest of all the facts really
facing the boy in the cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was
one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a
certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to us in
the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the primitive
man's work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible in being
primitive. He would see what was there to see; and he would not be tempted
into seeing what was not there, by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable
speculation. If he had heard of such things he would admit, of course, that the
speculations might be true and were not incompatible with the facts that were
true. The artist may have had another side to his character besides that which
he has alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have
taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we can
say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that
when the cave-man's finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case
may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer
as they come down to drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but
they are irrelevant. The common sense of the child could confine itself to
learning from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the
cave are very nearly all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the
child would be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with
rock and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of trying
to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had drawn a stag
just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun. The man had drawn a
stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut;
because it was difficult. The child and the man, being both human, would be
united by the brotherhood of men; and the brotherhood of men is even nobler
when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class.
But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man of crude evolutionism;
because there is none to be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all
been drawn by St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals,
there would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.
Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave was a
crèche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe, and that coloured
animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them; very much as diagrams of
elephants and giraffes adorn a modern infant school. And though this was but
a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other assumptions that we make
only too readily. The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in
caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after that
suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the
Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground. The cave might have had
a special purpose like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a
refuge in war or the meeting place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But
it is quite true that its artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a
nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical fury and fear. I have
conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it is easy to conceive any child,
modern or immeasurably remote, as making a living gesture as if to pat the
painted beasts upon the wall. In that gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we
shall see later, of another cavern and another child.
But suppose the boy had not been taught by a priest but by a professor, by one
of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts to a mere
evolutionary variation. Suppose the boy saw himself, with the same simplicity
and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running with the pack of nature and roughly
indistinguishable from the rest save by a relative and recent variation. What
would be for him the simplest lesson of that strange stone picture-book? After
all, it would come back to this; that he had dug very deep and found the place
where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal
deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man.
That sounds like a truism, but in this connection it is really a very tremendous
truth. He might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken
continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in the inside of the
world as far from men as the other side of the moon; he might see in those
cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone, traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the
fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of biological life, rather like the ruins of
successive creations and separate universes than the stages in the story of one.
He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all
our common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life
with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a
forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger. But
nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one significant line upon the
sand; nowhere one claw that had even begun to scratch the faint suggestion of
a form. To all appearance, the thing would be as unthinkable in all those
countless cosmic variations of forgotten aeons as it would be in the beasts and
birds before our eyes The child would no more expect to see it than to see the
cat scratch on the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog. The childish common
sense would keep the most evolutionary child from expecting to see anything
like that; yet in the traces of the rude and recently evolved ancestors of
humanity he would have seen exactly that. It must surely strike him as strange
that men so remote from him should be so near, and that beasts so near to him
should be so remote. To his simplicity it must seem at least odd that he could
not find any trace of the beginning of any arts among any animals. That is the
simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures; only it is too
simple to be learnt. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in
kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism
to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it
sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a
man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique.
Art is the signature of man.
That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings ought
really to begin. The evolutionist stands staring in the painted cavern at the
things that are too large to be seen and too simple to be understood. He tries to
deduce all sorts of other indirect and doubtful things from the details of the
pictures, because he can not see the primary significance of the whole; thin
and theoretical deductions about the absence of religion or the presence of
superstition; about tribal government and hunting and human sacrifice and
heaven knows what. In the next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more
detail the much disputed question about these prehistoric origins of human
ideas and especially of the religious idea. Here I am only taking this one case
of the cave as a sort of symbol of the simpler sort of truth with which the story
ought to start. When all is said, the main fact that the record of the reindeer
men attests, along with all other records, is that the reindeer man could draw
and the reindeer could not. If the reindeer man was as much an animal as the
reindeer, it was all the more extraordinary that he could do what all other
animals could not. If he was an ordinary product of biological growth, like any
other beast or bird, then it is all the more extraordinary that he was not in the
least like any other beast or bird. He seems rather more supernatural as a
natural product than as a supernatural one.
But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave of the speculations of
Plato, because it is a sort of model of the mistake of merely evolutionary
introductions and prefaces. It is useless to begin by saying that everything was
slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the
plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such
development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them;
Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well.
The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not
paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild
horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we
can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape
is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk
about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other
words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing
absolute and alone. How he came there, or indeed how anything else came
there, is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for
historians. But an excellent test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter
of the impulse of art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures;
because he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be
made in any other image but the image of man. But the truth is so true that,
even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in the form of
some moral or metaphysical principle. In the next chapter we shall see how
this principle applies to all the historical hypotheses and evolutionary ethics
now in fashion; to the origins of tribal government or mythological belief. But
the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular one of
what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a
new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a
mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a
mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining shadows
in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind.
Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways; other
things may excel it or excel each other in various ways; just as in the furniture
of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than
a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the
microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God These
are the only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for
the open road.
It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what is meant
by saying that man is at once the exception to everything and the mirror and
the measure of all things. But to see man as he is, it is necessary once more to
keep close to that simplicity that can clear itself of accumulated clouds of
sophistry. The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being;
almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has
much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from
another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and
an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his
own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers
and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is
propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful
liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken
with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some
secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone
among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root
realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some
higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise
these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain
in the same sense unique. This is realised by the whole popular instinct called
religion, until disturbed by pedants, especially the laborious pedants of the
Simple Life. The most sophistical of all sophists are gymnosophists.
It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call
man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to
see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad
daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality. It is reached by
stretching a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light
and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower things which may
happen to be similar. The solid thing standing in the sunlight, the thing we can
walk round and see from all sides, is quite different. It is also quite
extraordinary, and the more sides we see of it the more extraordinary it seems.
It is emphatically not a thing that follows or flows naturally from anything
else. If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could have felt
from the first the general nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see
that things would evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have
been nothing whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such
an unnatural novelty. To such a mind, man would most certainly not have
seemed something like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture,
or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange
sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension. We
might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe. It would be more
like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly jump over the moon or
one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings in a flash and fly. It would not be a
question of the cattle finding their own grazing ground but of their building
their own cattle-sheds, not a question of one swallow making a summer but of
his making a summer house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is one
of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. The very fact that a
bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any farther, proves that he
has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it more completely than if he built
nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of
the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But
when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with
satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass
between him and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But
suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds begin to build as men
build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of time there were seven styles of
architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected forked
twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to
broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the
heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the
hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds
celebrated in letters or politics and stuck them up in front of the nest. Suppose
that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of the thousand things
that man had already done even in the morning of the world; and we can be
quite certain that the onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere
evolutionary variety of the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful
wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That
bird would tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of some
thing that had happened. That something would be the appearance of a mind
with a new dimension of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God, no
other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.
Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing was
evolved at all. There is not a particle of roof that this transition came slowly,
or even that it came naturally. In a strictly scientific sense, we simply know
nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew, or what it is. There
may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of
the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development
of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in
what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a
transaction outside of time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in the
ordinary sense. The historian must take it or something like it for granted; it is
not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he cannot explain it as a
historian, he will not explain it as a biologist. In neither case is there any
disgrace to him in accepting it without explaining it; for it is a reality, and
history and biology deal with realities. He is quite justified in calmly
confronting the pig with wings and the cow that jumped over the moon,
merely because they have happened. He can reasonably accept man as a freak,
because he accepts man as a fact. He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy
and disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy and
disconnected thing. For reality is a thing in which we can all repose, even if it
hardly seems related to anything else. The thing is there; and that is enough for
most of us. But if we do indeed want to know how it can conceivably have
come there, if we do indeed wish to see it related realistically to other things, if
we do insist on seeing it evolved before our very eyes from an environment
nearer to its own nature, then assuredly it is to very different things that we
must go. We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple
dreams, if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster. We
shall have discovered very different causes before he becomes a creature of
causation; and invoked other authority to turn him into something reasonable,
or even into anything probable. That way lies all that is at once awful and
familiar and forgotten, with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. We can
accept man as a fact, if we are content with an unexplained fact. We can
accept him as an animal, if we can live with a fabulous animal. But if we must
needs have sequence and necessity, then indeed we must provide a prelude and
crescendo of mounting miracles, that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in
all the seven heavens of another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.
===II. Professors and Prehistoric Men===
Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been
noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by
incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural
discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot
experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men
make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an
aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in
his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own
back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will
correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about the
arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off
the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him
to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry off his mate on the
principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like
a pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If
he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and
see if they behave in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in
the hollow of a hill, he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry
bones. In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go
by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be
even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being
constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a
straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as
they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific
mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by
one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is
constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble
with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The
marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The
student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it would
be truer to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the difficulty above
described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry. We have a series of
hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called fancies, and cannot in any
case be further corrected by facts. The most empirical anthropologist is here as
limited as an antiquary. He can only cling to a fragment of the past and has no
way of increasing it for the future He can only clutch his fragment of fact,
almost as the primitive man clutched his fragment of flint. And indeed he does
deal with it in much the same way and for much the same reason. It is his tool
and his only tool. It is his weapon and his only weapon. He often wields it with
a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown by men of science when they can
collect more facts from experience and even add new facts by experiment.
Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog
with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a theory from it, proving
that mankind is going to the dogs--or that it came from them.
For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and
watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an evolution
being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be
ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow. He produces his
little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous
things from it. He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be
smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-bone
and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human. If they all
form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature
would be almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to
produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details
of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical
character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon.
Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the
First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully
shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered No
uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would
imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few
teeth and a fragment of a cranium. In the same way people talked about him as
if he were an individual whose influence and character were familiar to us all.
I have just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white
inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves by the
personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern inhabitants of
Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but I do not imagine
that they need any encouragement from the discovery of a few highly doubtful
bones. Anyhow, those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to
fill up the whole of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between
man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors. On the assumption of
that evolutionary connection (a connection which I am not in the least
concerned to deny), the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative
absence of any such remains recording that connection at that point. The
sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a
term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too
strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen into
turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They talk of
searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk
of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an
argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed
middle.
In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain religious and
historical problems, I shall waste no further space on these speculations on the
nature of man before he became man. His body may have been evolved from
the brutes; but we know nothing of any such transition that throws the smallest
light upon his soul as it has shown itself in history. Unfortunately the same
school of writers pursue the same style of reasoning when they come to the
first real evidence about the first real men. Strictly speaking of course we
know nothing about prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was
prehistoric. The history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in
terms. It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to
indulge. If a parson had casually observed that the Flood was ante-diluvian, it
is possible that he might be a little chaffed about his logic. If a bishop were to
say that Adam was Preadamite, we might think it a little odd. But we are not
supposed to notice such verbal trifles when sceptical historians talk of the part
of history that is prehistoric. The truth is that they are using the terms historic
and prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their minds. What they
mean is that there are traces of human lives before the beginning of human
stories; and in that sense we do at least know that humanity was before history.
Human civilisation is older than human records. That is the sane way of stating
our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of its other
arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read.
But it is certain that the primitive arts were arts; and it is in every way
probable that the primitive civilisations were civilisations. The man left a
picture of the reindeer, but he did not leave a narrative of how he hunted the
reindeer; and therefore what we say of him is hypothesis and not history. But
the art he did practice was quite artistic; his drawing was quite intelligent and
there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would be quite intelligent,
only if it exists it is not intelligible. In short, the prehistoric period need not
mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period. It does
not mean the time before civilisation or the time before arts and crafts. It
simply means the time before any connected narratives that we can read. This
does indeed make all the practical difference between remembrance and
forgetfulness; but it is perfectly possible that there were all sorts of forgotten
forms of civilisation, as well as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism. And
in any case everything indicated that many of these forgotten or half-forgotten
social stages were much more civilised and much less barbaric than is vulgarly
imagined today. But even about these unwritten histories of humanity, when
humanity was quite certainly human, we can only conjecture with the greatest
doubt and caution. And unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things
commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism of current culture. For that
culture is full of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony
of agnosticism. It was in the Darwinian age that the word first became known
and the thing first became impossible.
It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by
impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have
hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without
support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe
began confidently with the words 'They wore no clothes.' Not one reader in a
hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know
whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has
perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we
should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently anticipated
that we might discover an everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as
the everlasting rock. But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be
immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments, or even highly
ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of them than these
people have left. The plaiting of rushes and grasses, for instance, might have
become more and more elaborate without in the least becoming more eternal.
One civilisation might specialise in things that happened to be perishable, like
weaving and embroidery, and not in things that happen to be more permanent,
like architecture and sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such
specialist societies. A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory
machinery might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with no
other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor and manager
of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked-- or possibly wore iron hats
and trousers.
It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear clothes any more
than they did weave rushes; but merely that we have not enough evidence to
know whether they did or not. But it may be worthwhile to look back for a
moment at some of the very few things that we do know and that they did do.
If we consider them, we shall certainly not find them inconsistent with such
ideas as dress and decoration. We do not know whether they decorated other
things. We do not know whether they had embroideries, and if they had the
embroideries could not be expected to have remained. But we do know that
they did have pictures; and the pictures have remained. And there remains
with them, as already suggested, the testimony to something that is absolute
and unique; that belongs to man and to nothing else except man; that is a
difference of kind and not a difference of degree. A monkey does not draw
clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of representation
and a man carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at all; he does not
begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all. A line of some
kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin.
Another distinguished writer, again, in commenting on the cave drawings
attributed to the neolithic men of the reindeer period, said that none of their
pictures appeared to have any religious purpose; and he seemed almost to infer
that they had no religion. I can hardly imagine a thinner thread of argument
than this which reconstructs the very inmost moods of the pre-historic mind
from the fact that somebody who has scrawled a few sketches on a rock, from
what motive we do not know, for what purpose we do not know, acting under
what customs or conventions we do not know, may possibly have found it
easier to draw reindeer than to draw religion. He may have drawn it because it
was his religious symbol. He may have drawn it because it was not his
religious symbol. He may have drawn anything except his religious symbol.
He may have drawn his real religious symbol somewhere else; or it may have
been deliberately destroyed when it was drawn. He may have done or not done
half a million things; but in any case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that
he had no religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious
symbol that he had no religion. Now this particular case happens to illustrate
the insecurity of these guesses very clearly. For a little while afterwards,
people discovered not only paintings but sculptures of animals in the caves.
Some of these were said to be damaged with dints or holes supposed to be the
marks of arrows; and the damaged images were conjectured to be the remains
of some magic rite of killing the beasts in effigy; while the undamaged images
were explained in connection with another magic rite invoking fertility upon
the herds. Here again there is something faintly humorous about the scientific
habit of having it both ways. If the image is damaged it proves one superstition
and if it is undamaged it proves another. Here again there is a rather reckless
jumping to conclusions; it has hardly occurred to the speculators that a crowd
of hunters imprisoned in winter in a cave might conceivably have aimed at a
mark for fun, as a sort of primitive parlour game. But in any case, if it was
done out of superstition, what has become of the thesis that it had nothing to
do with religion? The truth is that all this guess work has nothing to do with
anything. It is not half such a good parlour game as shooting arrows at a
carved reindeer, for it is shooting them into the air.
Such speculators rather tend to forget, for instance, that men in the modern
world also sometimes make marks in caves. When a crowd of trippers is
conducted through the labyrinth of the Marvelous Grotto or the Magic
Stalactite Cavern, it has been observed that hieroglyphics spring into sight
where they have passed; initials and inscriptions which the learned refuse to
refer to any remote date. But the time will come when these inscriptions will
really be of remote date. And if the professors of the future are anything like
the professors of the present, they will be able to deduce a vast number of very
vivid and interesting things from these cave-writings of the twentieth century.
If I know anything about the breed, and if they have not fallen away from the
full-blooded confidence of their fathers, they will be able to discover the most
fascinating facts about us from the initials left in the Magic Grotto by 'Arry
and 'Arriet, possibly in the form of two intertwined A's. From this alone they
will know (1) That as the letters are rudely chipped with a blunt pocket knife,
the twentieth century possessed no delicate graving-tools and was
unacquainted with the art of sculpture. (2) That as the letters are capital letters,
our civilisation never evolved any small letters or anything like a running
hand. (3) That because initial consonants stand together in an unpronounceable
fashion, our language was possibly akin to Welsh or more probably of the
early Semitic type that ignored vowels. (4) That as the initials of 'Arry and
'Arriet do not in any special fashion profess to be religious symbols, our
civilisation possessed no religion. Perhaps the last is about the nearest to the
truth; for a civilisation that had religion would have a little more reason.
It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow and
evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause; but from a
combination that might be called a coincidence. Generally speaking, the three
chief elements in the combination are, first, the fear of the chief of the tribe
(whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with regrettable familiarity, the Old Man),
second, the phenomena of dreams, and third, the sacrificial associations of the
harvest and the resurrection symbolised in the growing corn. I may remark in
passing that it seems to me very doubtful psychology to refer one living and
single spirit to three dead and disconnected causes, if they were merely dead
and disconnected causes. Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels
of the future, were to tell us that there would arise among men a new and as
yet nameless passion, of which men will dream as they dream of first love, for
which they will die as they die for a flag and a fatherland. I think we should be
a little puzzled if he told us that this singular sentiment would be a
combination of the habit of smoking Woodbines, the increase of the income
tax and the pleasure of a motorist in exceeding the speed limit. We could not
easily imagine this, because we could not imagine any connection between the
three or any common feeling that could include them all. Nor could anyone
imagine any connection between corn and dreams and an old chief with a
spear, unless there was already a common feeling to include them all. But if
there was such a common feeling it could only be the religious feeling; and
these things could not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed
already. I think anybody's common sense will tell him that it is far more likely
that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already; and that in the light of it
dreams and kings and corn-fields could appear mystical then, as they can
appear mystical now.
For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making things seem distant and
dehumanised, merely by pretending not to understand things that we do
understand. It is like saying that prehistoric men had an ugly and uncouth habit
of opening their mouths wide at intervals and stuffing strange substances into
them, as if we had never heard of eating. It is like saying that the terrible
Troglodytes of the Stone Age lifted alternate legs in rotation, as if we never
heard of walking. If it were meant to touch the mystical nerve and awaken us
to the wonder of walking and eating, it might be a legitimate fancy. As it is
here intended to kill the mystical nerve and deaden us to the wonder of
religion, it is irrational rubbish. It pretends to find some thing
incomprehensible in the feelings that we all comprehend. Who does not find
dreams mysterious, and feel that they lie on the dark borderland of being?
Who does not feel the death and resurrection of the growing things of the earth
as something near to the secret of the universe? Who does not understand that
there must always be the savour of something sacred about authority and the
solidarity that is the soul of the tribe? If there be any anthropologist who really
finds these things remote and impossible to realise, we can say nothing of that
scientific gentleman except that he has not got so large and enlightened a mind
as a primitive man. To me it seems obvious that nothing but a spiritual
sentiment already active could have clothed these separate and diverse things
with sanctity. To say that religion came from reverencing a chief or sacrificing
at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart before a really primitive horse. It is
like saying that the impulse to draw pictures came from the contemplation of
the pictures of reindeers in the cave. In other words, it is explaining painting
by saying that it arose out of the work of painters; or accounting for art by
saying that it arose out of art. It is even more like saying that the thing we call
poetry arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode being
officially composed to celebrate the advent of spring; or that of a young man
rising at a regular hour to listen to the skylark and then writing his report on a
piece of paper. It is quite true that young men often become poets in the
spring; and it is quite true that when once there are poets, no mortal power can
restrain them from writing about the skylark But the poems did not exist
before the poets. The poetry did not arise out of the poetic forms. In other
words, it is hardly an adequate explanation of how a thing appeared for the
first time to say it existed already. Similarly, we cannot say that religion arose
out of the religious forms, because that is only another way of saying that it
only arose when it existed already. It needed a certain sort of mind to see that
there was anything mystical about the dreams or the dead, as it needed a
particular sort of mind to see that there was any thing poetical about the
skylark or the spring. That mind was presumably what we call the human
mind, very much as it exists to this day; for mystics still meditate upon death
and dreams as poets still write about spring and skylarks. But there is not the
faintest hint to suggest that anything short of the human mind we know feels
any of these mystical associations at all. A cow in a field seems to derive no
lyrical impulse or instruction from her unrivalled opportunities for listening to
the skylark. And similarly there is no reason to suppose that live sheep will
ever begin to use dead sheep as the basis of a system of elaborate ancestorworship.
It is true that in the spring a young quadruped's fancy may lightly
turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs has ever led it to turn
however lightly to thoughts of literature. And in the same way, while it is true
that a dog has dreams, while most other quadrupeds do not seem even to have
that, we have waited a long time for the dog to develop his dreams into an
elaborate system or religious ceremonial. We have waited so long that we have
really ceased to expect it; and we no more look to see a dog apply his dreams
to ecclesiastical construction than to see him examine his dreams by the rules
of psycho-analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason or other these
natural experiences, and even natural excitements, never do pass the line that
separates them from creative expression like art and religion, in any creature
except man. They never do, they never have, and it is now to all appearance
very improbable that they ever will. It is not impossible, in the sense of selfcontradictory,
that we should see cows fasting from grass every Friday or
going on their knees as in the old legend about Christmas Eve. It is not in that
sense impossible that cows should contemplate death until they can lift up a
sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of. It is not in that
sense impossible that they should express their hopes of a heavenly career in a
symbolic dance, in honour of the cow that jumped over the moon. It may be
that the dog will at last have laid in a sufficient store of dreams to enable him
to build a temple to Cerberus as a sort of canine trinity. It may be that his
dreams have already begun to turn into visions capable of verbal expression, in
some revelation about the Dog Star as the spiritual home for lost dogs. These
things are logically possible, in the sense that it is logically difficult to prove
the universal negative which we call an impossibility. But all that instinct for
the probable, which we call common sense, must long ago have told us that the
animals are not to all appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to say the
least, we are not likely to have any personal evidence of their passing from the
animal experience to the human experiments. But spring and death and even
dreams, considered merely as experiences, are their experiences as much as
ours. The only possible conclusion is that these experiences, considered as
experiences, do not generate anything like a religious sense in any mind except
a mind like ours. We come back to the fact of a certain kind of mind that was
already alive and alone. It was unique and it could make creeds as it could
make cave-drawings. The materials for religion had lain there for countless
ages like the materials for everything else; but the power of religion was in the
mind. Man could already see in these things the riddles and hints and hopes
that he still sees in them. He could not only dream but dream about dreams. He
could not only see the dead but see the shadow of death; and was possessed
with that mysterious mystification that forever finds death incredible.
It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when he
unmistakably appears as man. We cannot affirm this or anything else about the
alleged animal originally connecting man and the brutes. But that is only
because he is not an animal but an allegation. We cannot be certain the
Pithecanthropus ever worshipped, because we cannot be certain that he ever
lived. He is only a vision called up to fill the void that does in fact yawn
between the first creatures who were certainly men and any other creatures
that are certainly apes or other animals. A few very doubtful fragments are
scraped together to suggest such an intermediate creature because it is required
by a certain philosophy; but nobody supposes that these are sufficient to
establish anything philosophical even in support of that philosophy. A scrap of
skull found in Java cannot establish anything about religion or about the
absence of religion. If there ever was any such ape-man, he may have
exhibited as much ritual in religion as a man or as much simplicity in religion
as an ape. He may have been a mythologist or he may have been a myth. It
might be interesting to inquire whether this mystical quality appeared in a
transition from the ape to the man, if there were really any types of the
transition to inquire about. In other words, the missing link might or might not
be mystical if he were not missing. But compared with the evidence we have
of real human beings, we have no evidence that he was a human being or a
half-human being or a being at all. Even the most extreme evolutionists do not
attempt to deduce any evolutionary views about the origin of religion from
him. Even in trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude or irrational
sources, they begin their proof with the first men who were men. But their own
proof only proves that the men who were already men were already mystics.
They used the rude and irrational elements as only men and mystics can use
them. We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime too early
for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred to which bones and stones
cannot in their nature bear witness; and man became a living soul.
Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those who are
thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away. Subconsciously they feel
that it looks less formidable when thus lengthened out into a gradual and
almost invisible process. But in fact this perspective entirely falsifies the
reality of experience. They bring together two things that are totally different,
the stray hints of evolutionary origins and the solid and self-evident block of
humanity, and try to shift their standpoint till they see them in a single
foreshortened line. But it is an optical illusion. Men do not in fact stand related
to monkeys or missing links in any such chain as that in which men stand
related to men. There may have been intermediate creatures whose faint traces
can be found here and there in the huge gap. Of these beings, if they ever
existed, it may be true that they were things very unlike men or men very
unlike ourselves. But of prehistoric men, such as those called the cave-men or
the reindeer men, it is not true in any sense whatever. Prehistoric men of that
sort were things exactly like men and men exceedingly like our selves. They
only happened to be men about whom we do not know much, for the simple
reason that they have left no records or chronicles; but all that we do know
about them makes them just as human and ordinary as men in a medieval
manor or a Greek city.
Looking from our human standpoint up the long perspective of humanity, we
simply recognise this thing as human. If we had to recognise it as animal we
should have had to recognise it as abnormal. If we chose to look through the
other end of the telescope, as I have done more than once in these
speculations, if we chose to project the human figure forward out of an
unhuman world, we could only say that one of the animals had obviously gone
mad. But seeing the thing from the right end, or rather from the inside, we
know it is sanity; and we know that these primitive men were sane. We hail a
certain human freemasonry wherever we see it, in savages, in foreigners or in
historical characters. For instance, all we can infer from primitive legend, and
all we know of barbaric life, supports a certain moral and even mystical idea
of which the commonest symbol is clothes. For clothes are very literally
vestments and man wears them because he is a priest. It is true that even as an
animal he is here different from the animals. Nakedness is not nature to him; it
is not his life but rather his death; even in the vulgar sense of his death of cold.
But clothes are worn for dignity or decency or decoration where they are not in
any way wanted for warmth. It would sometimes appear that they are valued
for ornament before they are valued for use. It would almost always appear
that they are felt to have some connection with decorum. Conventions of this
sort vary a great deal with various times and places; and there are some who
cannot get over this reflection, and for whom it seems a sufficient argument
for letting all conventions slide. They never tire of repeating, with simple
wonder, that dress is different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden Town;
they cannot get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency in despair.
They might as well say that because there have been hats of a good many
different shapes, and some rather eccentric shapes, therefore hats do not matter
or do not exist. They would probably add that there is no such thing as
sunstroke or going bald. Men have felt everywhere that certain norms were
necessary to fence off and protect certain private things from contempt or
coarse misunderstanding; and the keeping of those forms, whatever they were,
made for dignity and mutual respect. The fact that they mostly refer, more or
less remotely, to the relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts that must be
put at the very beginning of the record of the race. The first is the fact that
original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing
rooted in the origins. Whatever else men have believed, they have all believed
that there is something the matter with mankind This sense of sin has made it
impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just as it has made it impossible
to be natural and have no laws. But above all it is to be found in that other fact,
which is the father and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father and
mother; the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths.
That fact is the family. Here again we must keep the enormous proportions of
a normal thing clear of various modifications and degrees and doubts more or
less reasonable, like clouds clinging about a mountain. It may be that what we
call the family had to fight its way from or through various anarchies and
aberrations; but it certainly survived them and is quite as likely as not to have
also preceded them. As we shall see in the case of communism and nomadism,
more formless things could and did lie on the flank of societies that had taken
a fixed form; but there is nothing to show that the form did not exist before the
formlessness. What is vital is that form is more important than formlessness;
and that the material called mankind has taken this form. For instance, of the
rules revolving round sex, which were recently mentioned, none is more
curious than the savage custom commonly called the couvade. That seems like
a law out of topsyturvydom; by which the father is treated as if he were the
mother. In any case it clearly involves the mystical sense of sex; but many
have maintained that it is really a symbolic act by which the father accepts the
responsibility of fatherhood. In that case that grotesque antic is really a very
solemn act; for it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know as
human society. Some groping in these dark beginnings have said that mankind
was once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under a matriarchy it would not be
called mankind but womankind. But others have conjectured that what is
called matriarchy was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone
remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then
came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide what he had
created. So he became the head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to
beat women with, but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible
person. Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the
first family act, and it would still be true that man then for the first time acted
like a man, and therefore for the first time became fully a man. But it might
quite as well be true that the matriarchy or moral anarchy, or whatever we call
it, was only one of the hundred social dissolutions or barbaric backslidings
which may have occurred at intervals in prehistoric as they certainly did in
historic times. A symbol like the couvade, if it was really such a symbol, may
have commemorated the suppression of a heresy rather than the first rise of a
religion. We cannot conclude with any certainty about these things, except in
their big results in the building of mankind, but we can say in what style the
bulk of it and the best of it is built. We can say that the family is the unit of the
state; that it is the cell that makes up the formation. Round the family do
indeed gather the sanctities that separate men from ants and bees. Decency is
the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall of that city; property is but the family
farm; honour is but the family flag. In the practical proportions of human
history, we come back to that fundamental of the father and the mother and the
child. It has been said already that if this story cannot start with religious
assumptions, it must none the less start with some moral or metaphysical
assumptions, or no sense can be made of the story of man. And this is a very
good instance of that alternative necessity. If we are not of those who begin by
invoking a divine Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and
see that triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the world. For the
highest event in history, to which all history looks forward and leads up, is
only something that is at once the reversal and the renewal of that triangle. Or
rather it is the one triangle superimposed so as to intersect the other, making a
sacred pentacle of which, in a mightier sense than that of the magicians, the
fiends are afraid. The old Trinity was of father and mother and child and is
called the human family. The new is of child and mother and father and has
the name of the Holy Family. It is in no way altered except in being entirely
reversed; just as the world which is transformed was not in the least different,
except in being turned upside-down.
===III. The Antiquity of Civilisation===
The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man
watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn
breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is breaking
behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for us in the original
night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even the carved
ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees; in which the painted portrait
can be twelve times the size of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set
four-square and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing
and staring enormous at the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a
stamp would shake the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already
civilized. Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old. And among other more
important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalisations about the
previous and unknown period when it was really young. The two first human
societies of which we have any reliable and detailed record are Babylon and
Egypt. It so happens that these two vast and splendid achievements of the
genius of the ancients bear witness against two of the commonest and crudest
assumptions of the culture of the moderns. If we want to get rid of half the
nonsense about nomads and cave-men and the old man of the forest, we need
only look steadily at the two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and
Babylon.
Of course most of these speculators who are talking about primitive men are
thinking about modern savages. They prove their progressive evolution by
assuming that a great part of the human race has not progressed or evolved; or
even changed in any way at all. I do not agree with their theory of change; nor
do I agree with their dogma of things unchangeable. I may not believe that
civilised man has had so rapid and recent a progress; but I cannot quite
understand why uncivilised man should be so mystically immortal and
immutable. A somewhat simpler mode of thought and speech seems to me to
be needed throughout this inquiry. Modern savages cannot be exactly like
primitive man, because they are not primitive. Modern savages are not ancient
because they are modern. Something has happened to their race as much as to
ours, during the thousands of years of our existence and endurance on the
earth. They have had some experiences, and have presumably acted on them if
not profited by them. Like the rest of us. They have had some environment,
and even some change of environment, and have presumably adapted
themselves to it in a proper and decorous evolutionary manner. This would be
true even if the experiences were mild or the environment dreary; for there is
an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form of monotony. But it has
appeared to a good many intelligent and well-informed people quite as
probable that the experience of the savages has been that of a decline from
civilisation. Most of those who criticise this view do not seem to have any
very clear notion of what a decline from civilisation would be like. Heaven
help them, it is likely enough that they will soon find out. They seem to be
content if cave-men and cannibal islanders have some things in common, such
as certain particular implements. But it is obvious on the face of it that any
peoples reduced for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in
common. If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows; but we
should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made bows
and arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat were so short of
armament that they fought with clubs cut in the wood. But a professor of the
future would err in supposing that the Russian army of 1916 was a naked
Scythian tribe that had never been out of the wood. It is like saying that a man
in his second childhood must exactly copy his first. A baby is bald like an old
man; but it would be an error for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby
had a long white beard. Both a baby and an old man walk with difficulty; but
he who shall expect the old gentleman to lie on his back, and kick joyfully
instead, will be disappointed.
It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must have
been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of it. There
were almost certainly some things, there were probably many things, in which
the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An example of the way in
which this distinction works, and an example essential to our argument here, is
that of the nature and origin of government I have already alluded to Mr. H. G.
Wells and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If
we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the
prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant
and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be
writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very wonderful
and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly
know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette
requires it to be spelt with capital letters. He says of the same potentate, 'No
one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in his seat.' I have difficulty in
believing that anybody has dug up a prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label,
'Visitors are Requested not to Touch,' or a complete throne with the
inscription, 'Reserved for the Old Man.' But it may be presumed that the
writer, who can hardly be supposed to be merely making up things out of his
own head, was merely taking for granted this very dubious parallel between
the prehistoric and the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes
the chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit
on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious
and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those cases, for all I know, he is
despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a grain of evidence that primitive
government was despotic and tyrannical. It may have been, of course, for it
may have been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all. But
the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does
not prove that the first men were ruled despotically. It does not even suggest it;
it does not even begin to hint at it. If there is one fact we really can prove,
from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a
development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of
societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be
defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are
less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of
liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while
they sleep. It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden and
militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took advantage of being
the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East. But I
cannot see why the Sultan should have appeared any earlier in history than
many other human figures. On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously
depends upon the superiority of his armour, and armament of that sort comes
with more complex civilisation. One man may kill twenty with a machinegum;
it is obviously less likely that he could do it with a piece of flint. As for
the current cant about the strongest man ruling by force and fear, it is simply a
nursery fairy-tale about a giant with a hundred hands. Twenty men could hold
down the strongest strong man in any society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly
they might admire, in a romantic and poetical sense, the man who was really
the strongest; but that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral and even
mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the spirit that
endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of
an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new
one. As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler of an old humanity.
It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a pure
democracy. To this day the comparatively simple agricultural communities are
by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing which is always breaking
down through the complexity of civilisation. Anyone who likes may state it by
saying that democracy is the foe of civilisation. But he must remember that
some of us really prefer democracy to civilisation, in the sense of preferring
democracy to complexity. Anyhow, peasants tilling patches of their own land
in a rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under a village tree, are the
most truly self-governing of men. It is surely as likely as not that such a simple
idea was found in the first condition of even simpler men. Indeed the despotic
vision is exaggerated, even if we do not regard the men as men. Even on an
evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic sort, there is really no reason
why men should not have had at least as much camaraderie as rats or rooks.
Leadership of some sort they doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals;
but leadership implies no such irrational servility as that attributed to the
superstitious subjects of the Old Man. There was doubtless some body
corresponding, to use Tennyson's expression, to the many-wintered crow that
leads the clanging rookery home. But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began
to act after the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia, it would
become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered crow would not see
many more winters. It may be remarked, in this connection, but even among
animals it would seem that something else is respected more than bestial
violence, if it be only the familiarity which in men is called tradition or the
experience which in men is called wisdom. I do not know if crows really
follow the oldest crow, but if they do they are certainly not following the
strongest crow. And I do know, in the human case, that if some ritual of
seniority keeps savages reverencing somebody called Old Man, then at least
they have not our own servile sentimental weakness for worshipping the
Strong Man.
It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive art and religion
and everything else, is very imperfectly known or rather guessed at; but that it
is at least as good a guess to suggest that it was as popular as a Balkan or
Pyrenean village as that it was as capricious and secret as a Turkish divan.
Both the mountain democracy and the oriental palace are modern in the sense
that they are still there, or are some sort of growth of history; but of the two
the palace has much more the look of being an accumulation and a corruption,
the village much more the look of being a really unchanged and primitive
thing. But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond expressing a
wholesome doubt about the current assumption. I think it interesting, for
instance, that liberal institutions have been traced even by moderns back to
barbarians or undeveloped states, when it happened to be convenient for the
support of some race or nation or philosophy. So the Socialists profess that
their ideal of communal property existed in very early times. So the Jews are
proud of the Jubilees or juster redistributions under their ancient law . So the
Teutonists boasted of tracing parliaments and juries and various popular things
among the Germanic tribes of the north. So the Celtophiles and those
testifying to the wrongs of Ireland have pleaded the more equal justice of the
clan system, to which the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow. The
strength of the case varies in the different cases; but as there is some case for
all of them, I suspect there is some case for the general proposition that
popular institutions of some sort were by no means uncommon in early and
simple societies. Each of these separate schools were making the admission to
prove a particular modern thesis; but taken together they suggest a more
ancient and general truth, that there was something more in prehistoric
councils than ferocity and fear. Each of these separate theorists had his own
axe to grind, but he was willing to use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest
that the stone axe might have been as republican as the guillotine.
But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in progress In one
sense it is a true paradox that there was history before history. But it is not the
irrational paradox implied in prehistoric history; for it is a history we do not
know. Very probably it was exceedingly like the history we do know, except
in the one detail that we do not know it. It is thus the very opposite of the
pretentious prehistoric history, which professes to trace everything in a
consistent course from the amoeba to the anthropoid and from the anthropoid
to the agnostic. So far from being a question of our knowing all about queer
creatures very different from ourselves, they were very probably people very
like ourselves, except that we know nothing about them. In other words, our
most ancient records only reach back to a time when humanity had long been
human, and even long been civilised. The most ancient records we have not
only mention but take for granted things like kings and priests and princes and
assemblies of the people; they describe communities that are roughly
recognisable as communities in our own sense. Some of them are despotic; but
we cannot tell that they have always been despotic. Some of them may be
already decadent and nearly all are mentioned as if they were old. We do not
know what really happened in the world before those records; but the little we
do know would leave us anything but astonished if we learnt that it was very
much like what happens in this world now. There would be nothing
inconsistent or confounding about the discovery that those unknown ages were
full of republics collapsing under monarchies and rising again as republics,
empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing colonies. Kingdoms
combining again into world states and breaking up again into small
nationalities, classes selling themselves into slavery and marching out once
more into liberty; all that procession of humanity which may or may not be a
progress but most assuredly a romance. But the first chapters of the romance
have been torn out of the book; and we shall never read them.
It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and social stability.
According to the real records available, barbarism and civilisation were not
successive states in the progress of the world. They were conditions that
existed side by side, as they still exist side by side. There were civilisations
then as there are civilisations now; there are savages now as there were
savages then. It is suggested that all men passed through a nomadic stage; but
it is certain that there are some who have never passed out of it, and it seems
not unlikely that there were some who never passed into it. It is probable that
from very primitive times the static tiller of the soil and the wandering
shepherd were two distinct types of men; and the chronological rearrangement
of them is but a mark of that mania for progressive stages that has largely
falsified history. It is suggested that there was a communist stage, in which
private property was everywhere unknown, a whole humanity living on the
negation of property; but the evidences of this negation are themselves rather
negative. Redistributions of property, jubilees, and agrarian laws, occur at
various intervals and in various forms; but that humanity inevitably passed
through a communist stage seems as doubtful as the parallel proposition that
humanity will inevitably return to it. It is chiefly interesting as evidence that
the boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a
revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is an
amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism. In spite of all
the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and the cave-man
beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as soon as feminism
became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human civilisation in its first
stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was the cave-woman who carried
the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little better than guesses; they have a
curious way of following the fortune of modern theories and fads. In any case
they are not history in the sense of record; and we may repeat that when it
comes to record, the broad truth is that barbarism and civilisation have always
dwelt side by side in the world, the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb
the barbarians, sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost all
cases possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and institutions which
the barbarians possess in a ruder form; such as government or social authority,
the arts and especially the decorative arts, mysteries and taboos of various
kinds especially surrounding the matter of sex, and some form of that
fundamental thing which is the chief concern of this enquiry; the thing that we
call religion.
Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters, might in this matter
have been specially provided as models. They might almost be called working
models to show how these modern theories do not work. The two great truths
we know about these two great cultures happen to contradict flatly the two
current fallacies which have just been considered. The story of Egypt might
have been invented to point the moral that man does not necessarily begin with
despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism
because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often
much the same thing, because he is exhausted And the story of Babylon might
have been invented to point the moral that man need not be a nomad or a
communist before he becomes a peasant or a citizen, and that such cultures are
not always in successive stages but often in contemporary states. Even
touching these great civilisations with which our written history begins there is
a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too cocksure. We can read the
bricks of Babylon in a very different sense from that in which we guess about
the Cup and Ring stones; and we do definitely know what is meant by the
animals in the Egyptian hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animal in the
neolithic cave. But even here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered
line after line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted to read too much
between the lines; even the real authority on Babylon may forget how
fragmentary is his hard-won knowledge; may forget that Babylon has only
heaved half a brick at him, though half a brick is better than no cuneiform. But
some truths, historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not evolutionary, facts
and not fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and Babylon; and these two
truths are among them.
Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation of the
desert. It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity, that it is created by the
mysterious bounty and almost sinister benevolence of the Nile. When we first
hear of Egyptians they are living as in a string of river-side villages, in small
and separate but co-operative communities along the bank of the Nile. Where
the river branched into the broad Delta there was traditionally the beginning of
a somewhat different district or people; but this need not complicate the main
truth. These more or less independent though interdependent peoples were
considerably civilised already. They had a sort of heraldry; that is, decorative
art used for symbolic and social purposes; each sailing the Nile under its own
ensign representing some bird or animal. Heraldry involves two things of
enormous importance to normal humanity; the combination of the two making
that noble thing called co-operation; on which rest all peasantries and peoples
that are free. The art of heraldry means independence; an image chosen by the
imagination to express the individuality. The science of heraldry means
interdependence; an agreement between different bodies to recognise different
images; a science of imagery. We have here therefore exactly that compromise
of co-operation between free families or groups which is the most normal
mode of life for humanity and is particularly apparent wherever men own their
own land and live on it. With the very mention of the image of bird and beast
the student of mythology will murmur the word 'totem' almost in his sleep. But
to my mind much of the trouble arises from his habit of saying such words as
if in his sleep. Throughout this rough outline I have made a necessarily
inadequate attempt to keep on the inside rather than the outside of such things;
to consider them where possible in terms of thought and not merely in terms of
terminology. There is very little value in talking about totems unless we have
some feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem. Granted that they had
totems and we have no totems; was it because they had more fear of animals
or more familiarity with animals? Did a man whose totem was a wolf feel like
a were-wolf or like a man running away from a were-wolf? Did he feel like
Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about his brother the wolf, or
like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves? Was a totem a thing like the
British lion or a thing like the British bull-dog? Was the worship of a totem
like the feeling of niggers about Mumbo Jumbo, or of children about Jumbo? I
have never read any book of folk-lore, however learned, that gave me any light
upon this question, which I think by far the most important one. I will confine
myself to repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common
understanding about the images that stood for their individual states; and that
this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense that it is already there
at the beginning of history. But as history unfolds itself, this question of
communication is clearly the main question of these riverside communities.
With the need of communication comes the need of a common government
and the growing greatness and spreading shadow of the king. The other
binding force besides the king, and perhaps older than the king, is the
priesthood; and the priesthood has presumably even more to do with these
ritual symbols and signals by which men can communicate. And here in Egypt
arose probably the primary and certainly the typical invention to which we
owe all history, and the whole difference between the historic and the
prehistoric: the archetypal script, the art of writing.
The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half so popular as they
might be. There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated gloom, more
than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It is part of the
same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man a crawling
creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear. It comes of course from
the fact that men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is
irreligion. For them anything primary and elemental must be evil. But it is the
curious consequence that while we have been deluged with the wildest
experiments in primitive romance, they have all missed the real romance of
being primitive. They have described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in
which the men of the Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues; in
which the Assyrians or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted as their own most
archaic art. But none of these makers of imaginary scenes have tried to
imagine what it must really have been like to see those things as fresh which
we see as familiar. They have not seen a man discovering fire like a child
discovering fireworks. They have not seen a man playing with the wonderful
invention called the wheel, like a boy playing at putting up a wireless station.
They have never put the spirit of youth into their descriptions of the youth of
the world. It follows that amid all their primitive or prehistoric fancies there
are no jokes. There are not even practical jokes, in connection with the
practical inventions. And this is very sharply defined in the particular case of
hieroglyphics; for there seems to be serious indication that the whole high
human art of scripture or writing began with a joke.
There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun with a
pun. The king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing to send a
message up the river in that inconveniently long and narrow territory, hit on
the idea of sending it in picture writing, like that of the Red Indian. Like most
people who have written picture-writing for fun, he found the words did not
always fit. But when the word for taxes sounded rather like the word for pig,
he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun and chanced it. So a modern
hieroglyphist might represent 'at once' by unscrupulously drawing a hat
followed by a series of upright numerals. It was good enough for the Pharaohs
and ought to be good enough for him. But it must have been great fun to write
or even to read these messages, when writing and reading were really a new
thing. And if people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it seems
that neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them from the habit), I
suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that the ancient Egyptians
were human beings. I suggest that somebody should describe the scene of the
great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them roaring with laughter
and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal puns grew more and more
wild and indefensible. There might be another scene of almost equal
excitement about the decoding of this cipher; the guesses and clues and
discoveries having all the popular thrill of a detective story. That is how
primitive romance and primitive history really ought to be written. For
whatever was the quality of the religious or moral life of remote times, and it
was probably much more human than is conventionally supposed, the
scientific interest of such a time must have been intense. Words must have
been more wonderful than wireless telegraphy; and experiments with common
things a series of electric shocks. We are still waiting for somebody to write a
lively story of primitive life. The point is in some sense a parenthesis here; but
it is connected with the general matter of political development, by the
institution which was most active in these first and most fascinating of all the
fairy-tales of science.
It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests. Modern writers
like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness of sympathy with a
pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at least in recognising what pagan
priesthoods did for the arts and sciences. Among the more ignorant of the
enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests had
obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a debate that I
was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient priest probably resisted
the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in reply, that it was far more likely that
the ancient priest made the discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly
probable that the ancient priest had a great deal to do with the discovery of the
art of writing. It is obvious enough in the fact that the very word hieroglyphic
is akin to the word hierarchy. The religion of these priests was apparently a
more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is more particularly described
elsewhere. It passed through a period when it cooperated with the king,
another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king, who happened
to be a prince with a private theism of his own, and a third period when it
practically destroyed the king and ruled in his stead. But the world has to
thank it for many things which it considers common and necessary: and the
creators of those common things ought really to have a place among the heroes
of humanity. If we were at rest in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a
rather irrational reaction from Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan
honour to these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of
the man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who
first tamed a horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, there would
be more sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with cockney statues of stale
politicians and philanthropists. But one of the strange marks of the strength of
Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilisation has been able to
be really human.
The point is here, however, that the Egyptian government, whether pontifical
or royal, found it more and more necessary to establish communication; and
there always went with communication a certain element of coercion. It is not
necessarily an indefensible thing that the state grew more despotic as it grew
more civilised; it is arguable that it had to grow more despotic in order to grow
more civilised. That is the argument for autocracy in every age; and the
interest lies in seeing it illustrated in the earliest age. But it is emphatically not
true that it was most despotic in the earliest age and grew more liberal in a
later age; the practical process of history is exactly the reverse. It is not true
that the tribe began in the extreme of terror of the Old Man and his seat and
spear; it is probable, at least in Egypt, that the Old Man was rather a New Man
armed to attack new conditions. His spear grew longer and longer and his
throne rose higher and higher, as Egypt rose into a complex and complete
civilisation. That is what I mean by saying that the history of the Egyptian
territory is in this the history of the earth; and directly denies the vulgar
assumption that terrorism can only come at the beginning and cannot come at
the end. We do not know what was the very first condition of the more or less
feudal amalgam of land owners, peasants and slaves in the little
commonwealths beside the Nile; but it may have been a peasantry of an even
more popular sort. What we do know is that it was by experience and
education that little commonwealths lose their liberty; that absolute
sovereignty is something not merely ancient but rather relatively modern; and
it is at the end of the path called progress that men return to the king.
Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings, the primary
problem of liberty and civilisation. It is the fact that men actually lose variety
by complexity. We have not solved the problem properly any more than they
did; but it vulgarises the human dignity of the problem itself to suggest that
even tyranny has no motive save in tribal terror. And just as the Egyptian
example refutes the fallacy about despotism and civilisation, so does the
Babylonian example refute the fallacy about civilisation and barbarism.
Babylon also we first hear of when it is already civilised; for the simple reason
that we cannot hear of anything until it is educated enough to talk. It talks to us
in what is called cuneiform; that strange and stiff triangular symbolism that
contrasts with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt. However relatively rigid
Egyptian art may be, there is always something different from the Babylonian
spirit which was too rigid to have any art. There is always a living grace in the
lines of the lotus and something of rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement
of the arrows and the birds. Perhaps there is something of the restrained but
living curve of the river, which makes us in talking of the serpent of old Nile
almost think of the Nile as a serpent. Babylon was a civilisation of diagrams
rather than of drawings. Mr. W. B. Yeats who has a historical imagination to
match his mythological imagination (and indeed the former is impossible
without the latter) wrote truly of the men who watched the stars 'from their
pedantic Babylon.' The cuneiform was cut upon bricks, of which all their
architecture was built up; the bricks were of baked mud and perhaps the
material had something in it forbidding the sense of form to develop in
sculpture or relief. Theirs was a static but a scientific civilisation, far advanced
in the machinery of life and in some ways highly modern. It is said that they
had much of the modern cult of the higher spinsterhood and recognised an
official class of independent working women. There is perhaps something in
that mighty stronghold of hardened mud that suggests the utilitarian activity of
a huge hive. But though it was huge it was human; we see many of the same
social problems as in ancient Egypt or modern England; and whatever its evils
this also was one of the earliest masterpieces of man. It stood, of course, in the
triangle formed by the almost legendary rivers of Tigris and Euphrates, and the
vast agriculture of its empire, on which its towns depended, was perfected by a
highly scientific system of canals. It had by tradition a high intellectual life,
though rather philosophic than artistic; and there preside over its primal
foundation those figures who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom
of antiquity; the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.
Against this solid society, as against some vast bare wall of brick, there surged
age after age the nameless armies of the Nomads. They came out of the deserts
where the nomadic life had been lived from the beginning and where it is still
lived to-day. It is needless to dwell on the nature of that life; it was obvious
enough and even easy enough to follow a herd or a flock which generally
found its own grazing-ground and to live on the milk or meat it provided. Nor
is there any reason to doubt that this habit of life could give almost every
human thing except a home. Many such shepherds or herds men may have
talked in the earliest time of all the truths and enigmas of the Book of Job; and
of these were Abraham and his children, who have given to the modern world
for an endless enigma the almost mono-maniac monotheism of the Jews. But
they were a wild people without comprehension of complex social
organisation; and a spirit like the wind within them made them wage war on it
again and again. The history of Babylonia is largely the history of its defence
against the desert hordes; who came on at intervals of a century or two and
generally retreated as they came. Some say that an admixture of nomad
invasion built at Nineveh the arrogant kingdom of the Assyrians, who carved
great monsters upon their temples, bearded bulls with wings like cherubim,
and who sent forth many military conquerors who stamped the world as if with
such colossal hooves. Assyria was an imperial interlude; but it was an
interlude. The main story of all that land is the war between the wandering
peoples and the state that was truly static. Presumably in prehistoric times, and
certainly in historic times, those wanderers went westward to waste whatever
they could find. The last time they came they found Babylon vanished; but that
was in historic times and the name of their leader was Mahomet.
Now it is worth while to pause upon that story because, as has been suggested,
it directly contradicts the impression still current that nomadism is merely a
prehistoric thing and social settlement a comparatively recent thing. There is
nothing to show that the Babylonians had ever wandered; there is very little to
show that the tribes of the desert ever settled down. Indeed it is probable that
this notion of a nomadic stage followed by a static stage has already been
abandoned by the sincere and genuine scholars to whose researches we all owe
so much. But I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars,
but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread
from certain imperfect investigations, and which has made fashionable a false
notion of the whole history of humanity. It is the whole vague notion that a
monkey evolved into a man and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a
civilised man and therefore at every stage we have to look back to barbarism
and forward to civilisation. Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense
entirely in the air. It is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis
which they defend. Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects
than by theories; and it will be well if anyone tempted to make that
assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for a
moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and vaguely
crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian wall.
One fact does certainly fall across us like its shadow. Our glimpses of both
these early empires show that the first domestic relation had been complicated
by something which was less human, but was often regarded as equally
domestic. The dark giant called Slavery had been called up like a genii and
was labouring on gigantic works of brick and stone. Here again we must not
too easily assume that what was backward was barbaric; in the matter of
manumission the earlier servitude seems in some ways more liberal than the
later; perhaps more liberal than the servitude of the future. To insure food for
humanity by forcing part of it to work was after all a very human expedient;
which is why it will probably be tried again. But in one sense there is a
significance in the old slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all
antiquity before Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the
insignificance of the individual before the State. It was as true of the most
democratic City State in Hellas as of any despotism in Babylon. It is one of the
signs of this spirit that a whole class of individuals could be insignificant or
even invisible. It must be normal because it was needed for what would now
be called 'social service.' Somebody said, 'The Man is nothing and the Work is
all,' meaning it for a breezy Carlylean commonplace. It was the sinister motto
of the heathen Servile State. In that sense there is truth in the traditional vision
of vast pillars and pyramids going up under those everlasting skies for ever by
the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants and dying like
flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands.
But there are two other reasons for beginning with the two fixed points of
Egypt and Babylon. For one thing they are fixed in tradition as the types of
antiquity; and history without tradition is dead. Babylon is still the burden of a
nursery rhyme, and Egypt (with its enormous population of princesses
awaiting reincarnation) is still the topic of an unnecessary number of novels.
But a tradition is generally a truth; so long as the tradition is sufficiently
popular; even if it is almost vulgar. And there is a significance in this
Babylonian and Egyptian element in nursery rhymes and novels; even the
news papers, normally so much behind the times, have already got as far as the
reign of Tutankhamen. The first reason is full of the common sense of popular
legend; it is the simple fact that we do know more of these traditional things
than of other contemporary things; and that we always did. All travellers from
Herodotus to Lord Carnarvon follow this route. Scientific speculations of today
do indeed spread out a map of the whole primitive world, with streams of
racial emigration or admixture marked in dotted lines everywhere; over spaces
which the unscientific medieval map-maker would have been content to call
'Terra incognita,' if he did not fill the inviting blank with a picture of a dragon,
to indicate the probable reception given to pilgrims. But these speculations are
only speculations at the best; and at the worst the dotted lines can be far more
fabulous than the dragon.
There is unfortunately one fallacy here into which it is very easy for men to
fall, even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially those who are
most imaginative. It is the fallacy of suppositing that because an idea is greater
in the sense of larger, therefore it is greater in the sense of more fundamental
and fixed and certain. If a man lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of
Thibet, he may be told that he is living in the Chinese Empire; and the Chinese
Empire is certainly a splendid and spacious and impressive thing. Or
alternatively he may be told that he is living in the British Empire, and be duly
impressed. But the curious thing is that in certain mental states he can feel
much more certain about the Chinese Empire that he can not see than about the
straw hut that he can see. He has some strange magical juggle in his mind, by
which his argument begins with the empire though his experience begins with
the hut. Sometimes he goes mad and appears to be proving that a straw hut
cannot exist in the domains of the Dragon Throne; that it is impossible for
such a civilisation as he enjoys to contain such a hovel as he inhabits. But his
insanity arises from the intellectual slip of supposing that because China is a
large and all-embracing hypothesis, therefore it is something more than a
hypothesis. Now modern people are perpetually arguing in this way; and they
extend it to things much less real and certain than the Chinese Empire. They
seem to forget, for instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System
as he is certain of the South Downs. The Solar System is a deduction, and
doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is a very vast and farreaching
deduction and therefore he forgets that it is a deduction at all and
treats it as a first principle. He might discover that the whole calculation is a
mis-calculation; and the sun and stars and street-lamps would look exactly the
same. But he has forgotten that it is a calculation, and is almost ready to
contradict the sun if it does not fit into the solar system. If this is a fallacy even
in the case of facts pretty well ascertained, such as the Solar System and the
Chinese Empire, it is an even more devastating fallacy in connection with
theories and other things that are not really ascertained at all. Thus history,
especially prehistoric history, has a horrible habit of beginning with certain
generalisations about races. I will not describe the disorder and misery this
inversion has produced in modern politics. Because the race is vaguely
supposed to have produced the nation, men talk as if the nation were
something vaguer than the race. Because they have themselves invented a
reason to explain a result, they almost deny the result in order to justify the
reason. They first treat a Celt as an axiom and then treat an Irishman as an
inference. And then they are surprised that a great fighting, roaring Irishman is
angry at being treated as an inference. They cannot see that the Irish are Irish
whether or no they are Celtic, whether or no there ever were any Celts. And
what misleads them once more is the size of the theory; the sense that the
fancy is bigger than the fact. A great scattered Celtic race is supposed to
contain the Irish, so of course the Irish must depend for their very existence
upon it. The same confusion, of course, has eliminated the English and the
Germans by swamping them in the Teutonic race; and some tried to prove
from the races being at one that the nations could not be at war. But I only give
these vulgar and hackneyed examples in passing, as more familiar examples of
the fallacy; the matter at issue here is not its application to these modern things
but rather to the most ancient things. But the more remote and unrecorded was
the racial problem, the more fixed was this curious inverted certainty in the
Victorian man of science. To this day it gives a man of those scientific
traditions the same sort of shock to question these things, which were only the
last inferences when he turned them into first principles. He is still more
certain that he is an Aryan even than that he is an Anglo-Saxon, just as he is
more certain that he is an Anglo-Saxon than that he is an Englishman. He has
never really discovered that he is a European. But he has never doubted that he
is an Indo-European. These Victorian theories have shifted a great deal in their
shape and scope; but this habit of a rapid hardening of a hypothesis into a
theory, and of a theory into an assumption, has hardly yet gone out of fashion.
People cannot easily get rid of the mental confusion of feeling that the
foundations of history must surely be secure; that the first steps must be safe;
that the biggest generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction
may seem to them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the
large thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and
enormous.
Every race on the face of the earth has been the subject of these speculations,
and it is impossible even to suggest an outline of the subject. But if we take the
European race alone, its history, or rather its prehistory, has undergone many
retrospective revolutions in the short period of my own lifetime. It used to be
called the Caucasian race; and I read in childhood an account of its collision
with the Mongolian race; it was written by Bret Harte and opened with the
query 'Or is the Caucasian played out?' Apparently the Caucasian was played
out, for in a very short time he had been turned into the Indo-European man;
sometimes, I regret to say, proudly presented as the Indo-Germanic man. It
seems that the Hindu and the German have similar words for mother or father;
there were other similarities between Sanskrit and various Western tongues;
and with that all superficial differences between a Hindu and a German
seemed suddenly to disappear. Generally this composite person was more
conveniently described as the Aryan, and the really important point was that
he had marched westward out of those high lands of India where fragments of
his language could still be found. When I read this as a child, I had the fancy
that after all the Aryan need not have marched westward and left his language
behind him; he might also have marched eastward and taken his language with
him. If I were to read it now, I should content myself with confessing my
ignorance of the whole matter. But as a matter of fact I have great difficulty in
reading it now, because it is not being written now. It looks as if the Aryan is
also played out. Anyhow he has not merely changed his name but changed his
address; his starting-place and his route of travel. One new theory maintains
that our race did not come to its present home from the East but from the
South. Some say the Europeans did not come from Asia but from Africa.
Some have even had the wild idea that the Europeans came from Europe; or
rather that they never left it.
Then there is a certain amount of evidence of a more or less prehistoric
pressure from the North, such as that which seems to have brought the Greeks
to inherit the Cretan culture and so often brought the Gauls over the hills into
the fields in Italy. But I merely mention this example of European ethnology to
point out that the learned have pretty well boxed the compass by this time; and
that I, who am not one of the learned, cannot pretend for a moment to decide
where such doctors disagree. But I can use my own common sense, and I
sometimes fancy that theirs is a little rusty from want of use. The first act of
common sense is to recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain.
And I will affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we
all know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.
The truth, it may be repeated, is that what we really see, as distinct from what
we may reasonably guess, in this earliest phase of history is darkness covering
the earth and great darkness the peoples, with a light or two gleaming here and
there on chance patches of humanity; and that two of these flames do burn
upon two of these tall primeval towns; upon the high terraces of Babylon and
the huge pyramids of the Nile. There are indeed other ancient lights, or lights
that may be conjectured to be very ancient, in very remote parts of that vast
wilderness of night. Far away to the east there is a high civilisation of vast
antiquity in China; there are the remains of civilisations in Mexico and South
America and other places, some of them apparently so high in civilisation as to
have reached the most refined forms of devil-worship. But the difference lies
in the element old tradition; the tradition of these lost cultures has been broken
off, and though the tradition of China still lives, it is doubtful whether we
know anything about it. Moreover, a man trying to measure the Chinese
antiquity has to use Chinese traditions of measurement; and he has a strange
sensation of having passed into another world under other laws of time and
space. Time is telescoped outwards and centuries assume the slow and stiff
movement of aeons; the white man trying to see it as the yellow man sees,
feels as if his head were turning round and wonders wildly whether it is
growing a pigtail. Any how he cannot take in a scientific sense that queer
perspective that leads up to the primeval pagoda of the first of the Sons of
Heaven. He is the real antipodes; the only true alternative world to
Christendom; and he is after a fashion walking upside down. I have spoken of
the medieval map-maker and his dragon; but what medieval traveller, however
much interested in monsters, would expect to find a country where a dragon is
a benevolent and amiable being? Of the more serious side of Chinese tradition
something will be said in another connection; but I am only talking of tradition
and the test of antiquity. And I only mention China as an antiquity that is not
for us reached by a bridge old tradition; and Babylon and Egypt as antiquities
that are. Herodotus is a human being, in a sense in which a Chinaman in a
billy-cock hat, sitting opposite to us in a London tea shop, is hardly human.
We feel as if we knew what David and Isaiah felt like, in a way in which we
never were quite certain what Li Hung Chang felt like. The very sins that
snatched away Helen or Bathsheba have passed into a proverb of private
human weakness, of pathos and even of pardon. The very virtues of the
Chinaman have about them something terrifying. This is the difference made
by the destruction or preservation of a continuous historical inheritance; as
from ancient Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world
that we inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to
it, we are led to the central fact of civilised history.
That centre was the Mediterranean; which was not so much a piece of water as
a world. But it was a world with something of the character of such a water;
for it became more and more a place of unification in which the streams of
strange and very diverse cultures met. The Nile and the Tiber alike flow into
the Mediterranean; so did the Egyptian and the Etrurian alike contribute to a
Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour of the great sea spread indeed very far
in land and the unity was felt among the Arabs alone in the deserts and the
Gauls beyond the northern hills. But the gradual building up of a common
culture running round all the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of
antiquity. As will be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a good
business. In that orbis terrarum or circle of lands there were the extremes of
evil and of piety, there were contrasted races and still more contrasted
religions. It was the scene of an endless struggle between Asia and Europe
from the night of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of the Turkish ships
at Lepanto. It was the scene, as will be more especially suggested later, of a
supreme spiritual struggle between the two types of paganism, confronting
each other in the Latin and the Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the
Punic mart. It was the world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the
world of all that matters most, with all respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols
of the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition mattered and
still matters. Between it and the Far East there were, of course, interesting
cults and conquests of various kinds, more or less in touch with it, and in
proportion as they were so intelligible also to us. The Persians came riding in
to make an end of Babylon; and we are told in a Greek story how these
barbarians learned to draw the bow and tell the truth. Alexander the great
Greek marched with his Macedonians into the sunrise and brought back
strange birds coloured like the sunrise clouds and strange flowers and jewels
from the gardens and treasuries of nameless kings. Islam went eastward into
that world and made it partly imaginable to us; precisely because Islam itself
was born in that circle of lands that fringed our own ancient and ancestral sea.
In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its majesty without
losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China and the Chinese apparently
took very little notice of them. All these things are interesting in themselves;
but it is impossible to shift the centre of gravity to the inland spaces of Asia
from the in]and sea of Europe. When all is said, if there were nothing in the
world but what was said and done and written and built in the lands lying
round the Mediterranean, it would still be in all the most vital and valuable
things the world in which we live. When that southern culture spread to the
north-west it produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we
ourselves are the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new
countries, it was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. But
round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves, apart from all
extensions and echoes and commentaries on the things, the Republic and the
Church; the Bible and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the memories of
the lost empires, Aristotle and the measure of all things. It is because the first
light upon this world is really light, the daylight in which we are still walking
to-day, and not merely the doubtful visitation of strange stars, that I have
begun here with noting where that light first falls on the towered cities of the
eastern Mediterranean.
But though Babylon and Egypt have thus a sort of first claim, in the very fact
of being familiar and traditional, fascinating riddles to us but also fascinating
riddles to our fathers, we must not imagine that they were the only old
civilisations on the southern sea; or that all the civilisation was merely
Sumerian or Semitic or Coptic, still less merely Asiatic or African. Real
research is more and more exalting the ancient civilisation of Europe and
especially of what we may still vaguely call the Greeks. It must be understood
in the sense that there were Greeks before the Greeks, as in so many of their
mythologies there were gods before the gods. The island of Crete was the
centre of the civilisation now called Minoan, after the Minos who lingered in
ancient legend and whose labyrinth was actually discovered by modern
archeology. This elaborate European society, with its harbours and its drainage
and its domestic machinery, seems to have gone down before some invasion of
its northern neighbours, who made or inherited the Hellas we know in history.
But that earlier period did not pass till it had given to the world gifts so great
that the world has ever since been striving in vain to repay them, if only by
plagiarism.
Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town
of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a
wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never
perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a balladmonger,
who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by
tradition as a blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this
town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most
beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend;
that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew
of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the
poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth
in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its
prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well
be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word
spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the
world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to
quote the Iliad and die.
But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another element of
great historical importance; which has hardly I think been given its proper
place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem that his sympathies
apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are on the side of the vanquished
rather than of the victor. And this is a sentiment which increases in the poetical
tradition even as the poetical origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as
a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in late times.
But Hector grows greater as the ages pass, and it is his name that is the name
of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of
Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last
ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats
through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred
defeats that is its triumph.
The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending, for it is lifted up forever into
living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope. Troy standing was a
small thing that may have stood nameless for ages. But Troy falling has been
caught up in a flame and suspended in an immortal instant of annihilation; and
because it was destroyed with fire the fire shall never be destroyed. And as
with the city so with the hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight
is found the first figure of the Knight. There is a prophetic coincidence in his
title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle the
horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder of
the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which the Iliad ends.
It is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of
chivalry. But there are other reasons for giving in this glimpse of antiquity the
name upon the sacred town. The sanctity of such towns ran like a fire round
the coasts and islands of the northern Mediterranean, the high-fenced hamlet
for which heroes died. From the smallness of the city came the greatness of the
citizen. Hellas with her hundred statues produced nothing statelier than that
walking statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man. Hellas of the hundred
statues was one legend and literature; and all that labyrinth of little walled
nations resounding with the lament of Troy.
A later legend, an afterthought but not an accident, said that stragglers from
Troy founded a republic on the Italian shore. It was true in spirit that
republican virtue had such a root. A mystery of honour, that was not born of
Babylon or the Egyptian pride, there shone like the shield of Hector, defying
Asia and Africa; till the light of a new day was loosened, with the rushing of
the eagles and the coming of the name; the name that came like a thunderclap
when the world woke to Rome.
===IV. God and Comparative Religion===
I was once escorted over the Roman foundations of an ancient British city by a
professor, who said something that seems to me a satire on a good many other
professors. Possibly the professor saw the joke, though he maintained an iron
gravity, and may or may not have realised that it was a joke against a great
deal of what is called comparative religion. I pointed out a sculpture of the
head of the sun with the usual halo of rays, but with the difference that the face
in the disc, instead of being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune or
Jupiter. 'Yes,' he said with a certain delicate exactitude, 'that is supposed to
represent the local god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva, but
this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.'
That is what we call a powerful understatement. The modern world is madder
than any satires on it; long ago Mr. Belloc made his burlesque don say that a
bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern research to be a Silenus. But that
is not better than the real appearance of Minerva as the Bearded Woman of
Mr. Barnum. Only both of them are very like many identifications by 'the best
authorities' on comparative religion; and when Catholic creeds are identified
with various wild myths, I do not laugh or curse or misbehave myself; I
confine myself decorously to saying that the identification is not complete.
In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly
applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped
corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth, I
remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and
dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal
contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred million
persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the
substance.
But there is another entity, more or less definable and much more imaginable
than the many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind. And it has a much
better light to be called, in a reasonable sense, the religion of humanity. Man is
not indeed the idol; but man is almost everywhere the idolator. And these
multitudinous idolatries of man kind have something about them in many
ways more human and sympathetic than modern metaphysical abstractions. If
an Asiatic god has three heads and seven arms, there is at least in it an idea of
material incarnation bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther
away. But if our friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday
walk, were transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes,
they would surely seem farther away. If the arms of Brown and the legs of
Robinson waved from the same composite body, they would seem to be
waving something of a sad farewell. If the heads of an three gentlemen
appeared smiling on the same neck, we should hesitate even by what name to
address our new and somewhat abnormal friend. In the many-headed and
many-handed Oriental idol there is a certain sense of mysteries be coming at
least partly intelligible; of formless forces of nature taking some dark but
material form, but though this may be true of the multiform god it is not so of
the multiform man The human beings be come less human by becoming less
separate; we might say less human in being less lonely. The human beings
become less intelligible as they become less isolated; we might say with strict
truth that the closer they are to us the farther they are away. An Ethical Hymnbook
of this humanitarian sort of religion was carefully selected and
expurgated on the principle of preserving anything human and eliminating
anything divine. One consequence was that a hymn appeared in the amended
form of 'Nearer Mankind to Thee, nearer to Thee.' It always suggested to me
the sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the Tube. But it is strange
and wonderful how far away the souls of men can seem, when their bodies are
so near as all that.
The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this
modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion than a
communion. It is a thing to which human groups left to themselves, and even
human individuals left to themselves, have everywhere tended by an instinct
that may truly be called human. Like all healthy human things, it has varied
very much within the limits of a general character; for that is characteristic of
everything belonging to that ancient land of liberty that lies before and around
the servile industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its products are
all of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and
drink the same bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole and another at the
South might recognise the same optimistic level on the same dubious tinned
salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every valley and
every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any wine once
reminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county to county
without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When I am
speaking of this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something that doubtless
includes very wide differences; nevertheless I will here maintain that it is one
thing. I will maintain that most of the modern botheration comes from not
realising that it is really one thing. I will advance the thesis that before all talk
about comparative religion and the separate religious founders of the world,
the first essential is to recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost native
and normal to the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing is
Paganism, and I propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival to
the Church of Christ.
Comparative religion is very comparative indeed. That is, it is so much a
matter of degree and distance and difference that it is only comparatively
successful when it tries to compare. When we come to look at it closely we
find it comparing things that are really quite incomparable. We are accustomed
to see a table or catalogue of the world's great religions in parallel columns,
until we fancy they are really parallel. We are accustomed to see the names of
the great religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha; Confucius.
But in truth this is only a trick, another of these optical illusions by which any
objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a particular point of
sight. Those religions and religious founders, or rather those whom we choose
to lump together as religions and religious founders, do not really show any
common character. The illusion is partly produced by Islam coming
immediately after Christianity in the list; as Islam did come after Christianity
and was largely an imitation of Christianity. But the other eastern religions, or
what we call religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not
resemble each other. When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list, we
come to something in a totally different world of thought. To compare the
Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an English
squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a hundred-percent
American. Confucianism may be a civilisation but it is not a religion.
In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and
easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel. It is not easy, therefore,
to expose the fallacy by which a false classification is created to swamp a
unique thing, when it really is a unique thing. As there is nowhere else exactly
the same fact, so there is nowhere else exactly the same fallacy. But I will take
the nearest thing I can find to such a solitary social phenomenon, in order to
show how it is thus swamped and assimilated. I imagine most of us would
agree that there is something unusual and unique about the position of the
Jews. There is nothing that is quite in the same sense an international nation;
an ancient culture scattered in different countries but still distinct and
indestructible. Now this business is like an attempt to make a list of Nomadic
Nations in order to soften the strange solitude of the Jew. It would be easy
enough to do it, by the same process of putting a plausible approximation first,
and then tailing off into totally different things thrown in somehow to make up
the list. Thus in the new list of nomadic nations the Jews would be followed by
the Gypsies; who at least are really nomadic if they are not really national.
Then the professor of the new science of Comparative Nomadics could pass
easily on to something different; even if it was very different. He could remark
on the wandering adventure of the English who had scattered their colonies
over so many seas; and call them nomads. It is quite true that a great many
Englishmen seem to be strangely restless in England. It is quite true that not all
of them have left their country for their country's good. The moment we
mention the wandering empire of the English, we must add the strange exiled
empire of the Irish. For it is a curious fact, to be noted in our imperial
literature, that the same ubiquity and unrest which is a proof of English
enterprise and triumph is a proof of Irish futility and failure. Then the
professor of Nomadism would look round thoughtfully and remember that
there was great talk recently of German waiters, German barbers, German
clerks, Germans naturalising themselves in England and the United States and
the South American republics. The Germans would go down as the fifth
nomadic race; the words Wanderlust and Folk-Wandering would come in very
useful here. For there really have been historians who explained the Crusades
by suggesting that the Germans were found wandering (as the police say) in
what happened to be the neighbourhood of Palestine. Then the professor,
feeling he was now near the end, would make a last leap in desperation. He
would recall the fact that the French army has captured nearly every capital in
Europe, that it marched across countless conquered lands under Charlemagne
or Napoleon; and that would be wanderlust and that would be the note of a
nomadic race. Thus he would have his six nomadic nations all compact and
complete, and would feel that the Jew was no longer a sort of mysterious and
even mystical exception. But people with more common sense would probably
realise that he had only extended nomadism by extending the meaning of
nomadism, and that he had extended that until it really had no meaning at all.
It is quite true that the French soldier has made some of the finest marches in
all military history. But it is equally true, and far more self-evident, that if the
French peasant is not a rooted reality there is no such thing as a rooted reality
in the world; or in other words, if he is a nomad there is nobody who is not a
nomad.
Now that is the sort of trick that has been tried in the case of comparative
religion and the world's religious founders all standing respectably in a row. It
seeks to classify Jesus as the other would classify Jews, by inventing a new
class for the purpose and filling up the rest of it with stop-gaps and second-rate
copies. I do not mean that these other things are not often great things in their
own real character and class. Confucianism and Buddhism are great things, but
it is not true to call them Churches; just as the French and English are great
peoples, but it is nonsense to call them nomads. There are some points of
resemblance between Christendom and its imitation in Islam; for that matter
there are some points of resemblance between Jews and Gypsies. But after that
the lists are made up of anything that comes to hand; of anything that can be
put in the same catalogue without being in the same category.
In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference to men much more
learned than myself, I propose to cut across and disregard this modern method
of classification, which I feel sure has falsified the facts of history. I shall here
submit an alternative classification of religion or religions, which I believe
would be found to cover all the facts and, what is quite as important here, all
the fancies. Instead of dividing religion geographically and as it were
vertically, into Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would
divide it psychologically and in some sense horizontally; into the strata of
spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same
country, or even in the same man. Putting the Church apart for the moment, I
should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass of mankind under
such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers. I
believe some such classification will help us to sort out the spiritual
experiences of men much more successfully than the conventional business of
comparing religions; and that many famous figures will naturally fall into their
place in this way who are only forced into their place in the other. As I shall
make use of these titles or terms more than once in narrative and allusion, it
will be well to define at this stage for what I mean them to stand. And I will
begin with the first, the simplest and the most sublime, in this chapter.
In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin by an attempt
to describe the indescribable. Many get over the difficulty of describing it by
the expedient of denying it, or at least ignoring it; but the whole point of it is
that it was something that was never quite eliminated even when it was
ignored. They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great
thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget
that every seed comes from a tree, or something larger than itself. Now there is
very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some
detail that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced. Much more
probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be
managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many people did begin
with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all; and
afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a sort of
secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which the folk-lore
students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support such a view. Some of
the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists use
the word, the Australian aborigines for instance, are found to have a pure
monotheism with a high moral tone. A missionary was preaching to a very
wild tribe of polytheists, who had told him all their polytheistic tales, and
telling them in return of the existence of the one good God who is a spirit and
judges men by spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz of excitement
among these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret,
and they cried to each other, 'Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!'
Probably it was a point of politeness and even decency among those
polytheists not to speak of Atahocan. The name is not perhaps so much
adapted as some of our own to direct and solemn religious exhortation but
many other social forces are always covering up and confusing such simple
ideas. Possibly the old god stood for an old morality found irksome in more
expansive moments; possibly intercourse with demons was more fashionable
among the best people, as in the modern fashion of Spiritualism. Anyhow,
there are any number of similar examples. They all testify to the unmistakable
psychology of a thing taken for granted, as distinct from a thing talked about.
There is a striking example in a tale taken down word for word from a Red
Indian in California which starts out with hearty legendary and literary relish:
'The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is
his wife and the stars are their children'; and so on through a most ingenious
and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis saying
that the sun and moon have to do something because 'It is ordered that way by
the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.' That is exactly the attitude of
most paganism towards God. He is something assumed and forgotten and
remembered by accident; a habit possibly not peculiar to pagans. Sometimes
the higher deity is remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of
mystery. But always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative about his
mythology and taciturn about his religion. The Australian savages, indeed,
exhibit a topsyturveydom such as the ancients might have thought truly worthy
of the antipodes. The savage who thinks nothing of tossing off such a trifle as
a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a baby chopped in two, or
dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic cow milked to make the rain,
merely in order to be sociable, will then retire to secret caverns sealed against
women and white men, temples of terrible initiation where to the thunder of
the bull-roarer and the dripping of sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the
final secrets, known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a
little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that there
is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.
In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the savage
seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts of his belief
and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts. But the explanation
is that they are not in that sense parts of his belief, or at least not parts of the
same sort of belief. The myths are merely tall stories, though as tall as the sky,
the water spout, or the tropic rain. The mysteries are true stories, and are taken
secretly that they may be taken seriously. Indeed it is only too easy to forget
that there is a thrill in theism. A novel in which a number of separate
characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a
sensational novel. It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river are the
disguises of one god and not of many. Alas, we also find it only too easy to
take Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade into a truism or
preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a secret, it is clear that he is
always either an old truism or an old tradition. There is nothing to show that he
is an improved product of the mere mythology and everything to show that he
preceded it. He is worshipped by the simplest tribes with no trace of ghosts or
grave-offerings, or any of the complications in which Herbert Spencer and
Grant Allen sought the origin of the simplest of all ideas. Whatever else there
was, there was never as such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The
idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained
away; but it was never evolved.
There are not a few indications of this change in other places It is implied, for
instance, in the fact that even polytheism seems often the combination of
several monotheisms. A god will gain only a minor seat on Mount Olympus,
when he had owned earth and heaven and all the stars while he lived in his
own little valley. Like many a small nation melting in a great empire, he gives
up local universality only to come under universal limitation. The very name
of Pan suggests that he became a god of the wood when he had been a god of
the world. The very name of Jupiter is almost a pagan translation of the words
'Our Father which art in heaven.' As with the Great Father symbolised by the
sky, so with the Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth. Demeter and
Ceres and Cybele often seem to be almost capable of taking over the whole
business of godhood, so that men should need no other gods. It seems
reasonably probable that a good many men did have no other gods but one of
these, worshipped as the author of all.
Over some of the most immense and populous tracts of the world such as
China, it would seem that the simpler idea of the Great Father has never been
very much complicated with rival cults, though it may have in some sense
ceased to be a cult itself. The best authorities seem to think that though
Confucianism is in one sense agnosticism, it does not directly contradict the
old theism, precisely because it has become a rather vague theism. It is one in
which God is called Heaven, as in the case of polite persons tempted to swear
in drawing-rooms. But Heaven is still overhead, even if it is very far overhead.
We have all the impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was
remote without ceasing to be true. And this phrase alone would bring us back
to the same idea even in the pagan mythology of the West. There is surely
something of this very notion of the withdrawal of some higher power, in all
those mysterious and very imaginative myths about the separation of earth and
sky. In a hundred forms we are told that heaven and earth were once lovers, or
were once at one, when some upstart thing, often some undutiful child, thrust
them apart; and the world was built on an abyss; upon a division and a parting.
One of its grossest versions was given by Greek civilisation in the myth of
Uranus and Saturn. One of its most charming versions was that of some savage
niggers, who say that a little pepper-plant grew taller and taller and lifted the
whole sky like a lid; a beautiful barbaric vision of daybreak for some of our
painters who love that tropical twilight. Of myths, and the highly mythical
explanations which the moderns offer of myths, something will be said in
another section; for I cannot but think that most mythology is on another and
more superficial plane. But in this primeval vision of the rending of one world
into two there is surely something more of ultimate ideas. As to what it means,
a man will learn far more about it by lying on his back in a field, and merely
looking at the sky, than by reading all the libraries even of the most learned
and valuable folklore. He will know what is meant by saying that the sky
ought to be nearer to us than it is, that perhaps it was once nearer than it is, that
it is not a thing merely alien and abysmal but in some fashion sundered from
us and saying farewell. There will creep across his mind the curious
suggestion that after all, perhaps, the myth-maker was not merely a moon-calf
or village idiot thinking he could cut up the clouds like a cake, but had in him
something more than it is fashionable to attribute to the Troglodyte; that it is
just possible that Thomas Hood was not talking like a Troglodyte when he said
that, as time went on, the tree-tops only told him he was further off from
heaven than when he was a boy. But anyhow the legend of Uranus the Lord of
Heaven dethroned by Saturn the Time Spirit would mean something to the
author of that poem. And it would mean, among other things, this banishment
of the first fatherhood. There is the idea of God in the very notion that there
were gods before the gods. There is an idea of greater simplicity in all the
allusions to that more ancient order. The suggestion is supported by the
process of propagation we see in historic times. Gods and demigods and
heroes breed like herrings before our very eyes and suggest of themselves that
the family may have had one founder; mythology grows more and more
complicated, and the very complication suggests that at the beginning it was
more simple. Even on the external evidence, of the sort called scientific, there
is therefore a very good case for the suggestion that man began with
monotheism before it developed or degenerated into polytheism. But I am
concerned rather with an internal than an external truth; and, as I have already
said, the internal truth is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something
of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not
merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.
I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism. I
suspect we have only a hint of it here and there in these savage creeds or
Greek origins. It is not exactly what we mean by the presence of God; in a
sense it might more truly be called the absence of God. But absence does not
mean non-existence; and a man drinking the toast of absent friends does not
mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is a void but it is not a
negation; it is some thing as positive as an empty chair. It would be an
exaggeration to say that the pagan saw higher than Olympus an empty throne.
It would be nearer the truth to take the gigantic imagery of the Old Testament,
in which the prophet saw God from behind; it was as if some immeasurable
presence had turned its back on the world. Yet the meaning will again be
missed, if it is supposed to be anything so conscious and vivid as the
monotheism of Moses and his people. I do not mean that the pagan peoples
were in the least overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering.
On the contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly, as we all carry
the load of the sky. Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, we can all
ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and precisely
because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force it is felt as nothing. A
thing of this kind can only be an impressing and a rather subtle impression; but
to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan literature and religion. I
repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of
the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the
absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I
doubt if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who
was happy as St. Francis was happy. We feel it in the legend of a Golden Age
and again in the vague implication that the gods themselves are ultimately
related to something else, even when that Unknown God has faded into a Fate.
Above all we feel it in those immortal moments when the pagan literature
seems to return to a more innocent antiquity and speak with a more direct
voice, so that no word is worthy of it except our own monotheistic
monosyllable. We cannot say anything but 'God' in a sentence like that of
Socrates bidding farewell to his judges: 'I go to die and you remain to live; and
God alone knows which of us goes the better way.' We can use no other word
even for the best moments of Marcus Aurelius: 'Can they say dear city of
Cecrops, and canst thou not say dear city of God?' We can use no other word
in that mighty line in which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the veritable
cry of a Christian before Christ: 'O you that have borne things more terrible, to
this also God shall give an end.'
In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the gods; but
because it is higher it is also further away. Not yet could even Virgil have read
the riddle and the paradox of that other divinity, who is both higher and nearer.
For them what was truly divine was very distant, so distant that they dismissed
it more and more from their minds. It had less and less to do with the mere
mythology of which I shall write later. Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit
admission of its intangible purity, when we consider what most of the
mythologies like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the Greeks
did not degrade it even by imaginations. When the gods were more and more
remembered only by pranks and profligacies, it was relatively a movement of
reverence. It was an act of piety to forget God. In other words, there is
something in the whole tone of the time suggesting that men had accepted a
lower level, and still were half conscious that it was a lower level. It is hard to
find words for these things; yet the one really just word stands ready. These
men were conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else; and the
same is true of an heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember
the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or
break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as
the momentary power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of
humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven. But
it remains true that even for these men there were moments, like the memories
of childhood, when they heard themselves talking with a simpler language;
there were moments when the Roman, like Virgil in the line already quoted,
cut his way with a sword-stroke of song out of the tangle of the mythologies,
the motley mob of gods and goddesses sank suddenly out of sight and the Sky-
Father was alone in the sky.
This latter example is very relevant to the next step in the process. A white
light as of a lost morning still lingers on the figure of Jupiter, of Pan or of the
elder Apollo; and it may well be, as already noted, that each was once a
divinity as solitary as Jehovah or Allah. They lost this lonely universality by a
process it is here very necessary to note; a process of amalgamation very like
what was afterwards called syncretism. The whole pagan world set itself to
build a Pantheon. They admitted more and more gods, gods not only of the
Greeks but of the barbarians; gods not only of Europe but of Asia and Africa.
The more the merrier, though some of the Asian and African ones were not
very merry. They admitted them to equal thrones with their own, sometimes
they identified them with their own. They may have regarded it as an
enrichment of their religious life; but it meant the final loss of all that we now
call religion. It meant that ancient light of simplicity, that had a single source
like the sun, finally fades away in a dazzle of conflicting Lights and colours.
God is really sacrificed to the Gods; in a very literal sense of the flippant
phrase, they have been too many for him.
Polytheism, therefore, was really a sort of pool; in the sense of the pagans
having consented to the pooling of their pagan religions. And this point is very
important in many controversies ancient and modern. It is regarded as a liberal
and enlightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our
own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened
when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth some wild and
fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy and
rustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger
ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the
whole world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more
antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and their single
sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages benighted and left
behind. But these superstitious savages were preserving something that is
much more like the cosmic power as conceived by philosophy, or even as
conceived by science. This paradox by which the rude reactionary was a sort
of prophetic progressive has one consequence very much to the point. In a
purely historical sense, and apart from any other controversies in the same
connection, it throws a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the
beginning on a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of
religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the mission and
the meaning of the Jews.
It is true in this sense, humanly speaking, that the world owes God to the Jews.
It owes that truth to much that is blamed on the Jews, possibly to much that is
blameable in the Jews. We have already noted the nomadic position of the
Jews amid the other pastoral peoples upon the fringe of the Babylonian
Empire, and something of that strange erratic course of theirs blazed across the
dark territory of extreme antiquity, as they passed from the seat of Abraham
and the shepherd princes into Egypt and doubled back into the Palestinian hills
and held them against the Philistines from Crete and fell into captivity in
Babylon; and yet again returned to their mountain city by the Zionist policy of
the Persian conquerors; and so continued that amazing romance of restlessness
of which we have not yet seen the end. But through all their wanderings, and
especially through all their early wanderings, they did indeed carry the fate of
the world in that wooden tabernacle, that held perhaps a featureless symbol
and certainly an invisible god. We may say that one most essential feature was
that it was featureless. Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the
Christian culture has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts of
antiquity, we must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the
Hebrew inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those limitations
that did in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, like a wall built round a
wide open space. The God who could not have a statue remained a spirit. Nor
would his statue in any case have had the disarming dignity and grace of the
Greek statues then or the Christian statues afterwards. He was living in a land
of monsters. We shall have occasion to consider more fully what those
monsters were, Moloch and Dagon and Tanit the terrible goddess. If the deity
of Israel had ever had an image, he would have had a phallic image. By merely
giving him a body they would have brought in all the worst elements of
mythology; all the polygamy of polytheism; the vision of the harem in heaven.
This point about the refusal of art is the first example of the limitations which
are often adversely criticised, only because the critics themselves are limited.
But an even stronger case can be found in the other criticism offered by the
same critics. It is often said with a sneer that the God of Israel was only a God
of battles, 'a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts' pitted in rivalry against other gods
only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles.
Well it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the ordinary
way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the desolate
disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been only too easy for
them to have seen him stretching out his hands in love and reconciliation,
embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship
with the gods; the last god to sell his crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian
pantheon or the nectar of Olympus or the mead of Valhalla. It would have
been easy enough for his worshippers to follow the enlightened course of
Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that
his followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the
almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the
divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin. The more
we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final
culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic
reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. As it was, while the
whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is
called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and
narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to
be universal. He was as narrow as the universe. In a word, there was a popular
pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-
Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-Jupiter. If there had been,
there would certainly have been another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before
the liberal and enlightened amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter, the
image of the Lord of Hosts would have been deformed out of all suggestion of
a monotheistic maker and ruler and would have become an idol far worse than
any savage fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and
Carthage. What that civilisation meant we shall consider more fully in the
chapter that follows; when we note how the power of demons nearly destroyed
Europe and even the heathen health of the world. But the world's destiny
would have been distorted still more fatally if monotheism had failed in the
Mosaic tradition. I hope in a subsequent section to show that I am not without
sympathy with all that health in the heathen world that made its fairy-tales and
its fanciful romances of religion. But I hope also to show that these were
bound to fail in the long run; and the world would have been lost if it had been
unable to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all
things. That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity that poets
and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal Prayer, that
we live in a large and serene world under a sky that stretches paternally over
all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy and philanthropy are truisms in a
religion of reasonable men, all that we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a
secretive and restless nomadic people; who bestowed on men the supreme and
serene blessing of a jealous God.
The unique possession was not available or accessible to the pagan world,
because it was also the possession of a jealous people. The Jews were
unpopular, partly because of this narrowness already noted in the Roman
world, partly perhaps because they had already fallen into that habit of merely
handling things for exchange instead of working to make them with their
hands. It was partly also because polytheism had become a sort of jungle in
which solitary monotheism could be lost; but it is strange to realise how
completely it really was lost. Apart from more disputed matters, there were
things in the tradition of Israel which belong to all humanity now, and might
have belonged to all humanity then. They had one of the colossal cornerstones
of the world: the Book of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad
and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and
parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world. It is a solemn
and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the
pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects
the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore
more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with
mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a
type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when
he who doubts can only say 'I do not understand,' it is true that he who knows
can only reply or repeat 'You do not understand.' And under that rebuke there
is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be
worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem remained
unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged with
polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews stood apart and
kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they should have kept a thing
like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if
the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid. But there were other
reasons for a cross-purpose and an impasse, characteristic of the whole of the
end of paganism. After all, the tradition of Israel had only got hold of one-half
of the truth, even if we use the popular paradox and call it the bigger half. I
shall try to sketch in the next chapter that love of locality and personality that
ran through mythology; here it need only be said that there was a truth in it
that could not be let out though it were a lighter and less essential truth. The
sorrow of Job had to be joined with the sorrow of Hector; and while the former
was the sorrow of the universe the latter was the sorrow of the city; for Hector
could only stand pointing to heaven as the pillar of holy Troy. When God
speaks out of the whirlwind he may well speak in the wilderness. But the
monotheism of the nomad was not enough for all that varied civilisation of
fields and fences and walled cities and temples and towns; and the turn of
these things also was to come, when the two could be combined in a more
definite and domestic religion. Here and there in all that pagan crowd could be
found a philosopher whose thought ran of pure theism; but he never had, or
supposed that he had, the power to change the customs of the whole populace.
Nor is it easy even in such philosophies to find a true definition of this deep
business of the relation of polytheism and theism. Perhaps the nearest we can
come to striking the note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away
from all that civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of
Israel. It is in a saying I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as
well as men are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma
wakes. There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which
is less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even if
they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered later in a
fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to say here that there
is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine awakening than is implied for us
in the passage from mythology to religion. But the symbol is very subtle and
exact in one respect; that it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption
between the very ideas of mythology and religion, the chasm between the two
categories. It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no
comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than
there is between a man and the men who walked about in his dreams. Under
the next heading some attempt will be made to indicate the twilight of that
dream in which the gods walk about like men. But if anyone fancies the
contrast of monotheism and polytheism is only a matter of some people having
one god and others a few more, for him it will be far nearer the truth to plunge
into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin cosmology; that he may feel a
shudder going through the veil of things, the many-handed creators, and the
throned and haloed animals and all the network of entangled stars and rulers of
the night, as the eyes of Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.
===V. Man and Mythologies===
What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the daydreams.
To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can come true.
To compare them to travellers' tales is not to deny that they may be true tales,
or at least truthful tales. In truth they are the sort of tales the traveller tells to
himself. All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men. It
seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and
therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise it.
There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular
origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is
only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies
of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a
song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that
folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated
artistically they are not appreciated at all. When the professor is told by the
Polynesian that once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless
the learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true, he is
no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best Red Indian
authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and stars in a box,
unless he clasps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a child would at such a
charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter. This test is not
nonsensical; primitive children and barbaric children do laugh and kick like
other children; and we must have a certain simplicity to repicture the
childhood of the world. When Hiawatha was told by his nurse that a warrior
threw his grandmother up to the moon, he laughed like any English child told
by his nurse that a cow jumped over the moon. The child sees the joke as well
as most men, and better than some scientific men. But the ultimate test even of
the fantastic is the appropriateness of the inappropriate. And the test must
appear merely arbitrary because it is merely artistic. If any student tells me that
the infant Hiawatha only laughed out of respect for tribal custom of sacrificing
the aged to economical housekeeping, I say he did not. If any scholar tells me
that the cow jumped over the moon only because a heifer was sacrificed to
Diana, I answer that it did not. It happened because it is obviously the right
thing for a cow to jump over the moon. Mythology is a lost art, one of the few
arts that really are lost; but it is an art. The horned moon and the horned
mooncalf make a harmonious and almost a quiet pattern. And throwing your
grandmother into the sky is not good behaviour; but it is perfectly good taste.
Thus scientists seldom understand, as artists understand, that one branch of the
beautiful is the ugly. They seldom allow for the legitimate liberty of the
grotesque. And they will dismiss a savage myth as merely coarse and clumsy
and an evidence of degradation, because it has not all the beauty of the herald
Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; when it really has the beauty of
the Mock Turtle or the Mad Hatter. It is the supreme proof of a man being
prosaic that he always insists on poetry being poetical. Sometimes the humour
is in the very subject as well as the style of the fable. The Australian
aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages, have a story about a giant frog
who had swallowed the sea and all the waters of the world; and who was only
forced to spill them by being made to laugh. All the animals with all their
antics passed before him and, like Queen Victoria, he was not amused. He
collapsed at last before an eel who stood delicately balanced on the tip of its
tail, doubtless with a rather desperate dignity. Any amount of fine fantastic
literature might be made out of that fable. There is philosophy in that vision of
the dry world before the beatific Deluge of laughter. There is imagination in
the mountainous monster erupting like an aqueous volcano; there is plenty of
fun in the thought of his goggling visage as the pelican or the penguin passed
by. Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore student remains grave.
Moreover, even where the fables are inferior as art, they cannot be properly
judged by science; still less properly judged as science. Some myths are very
crude and queer like the early drawings of children; but the child is trying to
draw. It is none the less an error to treat his drawing as if it were a diagram, or
intended to be a diagram. The student cannot make a scientific statement about
the savage, because the savage is not making a scientific statement about the
world. He is saying something quite different; what might be called the gossip
of the gods. We may say, if we like, that it is believed before there is time to
examine it. It would be truer to say it is accepted before there is time to believe
it.
I confess I doubt the whole theory of the dissemination of myths or (as it
commonly is) of one myth. It is true that something in our nature and
conditions makes many stories similar; but each of them may be original. One
man does not borrow the story from the other man, though he may tell it from
the same motive as the other man. It would be easy to apply the whole
argument about legend to literature; and turn it into a vulgar monomania of
plagiarism. I would undertake to trace a notion like that of the Golden Bough
through individual modern novels as easily as through communal and
antiquated myths. I would undertake to find something like a bunch of flowers
figuring again and again from the fatal bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray
of roses sent by the Princess of Ruritania. But though these flowers may spring
from the same soil, it is not the same faded flower that is flung from hand to
hand. Those flowers are always fresh.
The true origin of all the myths has been discovered much too often. There are
too many keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms in
Shakespeare. Everything is phallic; everything is totemistic; everything is
seed-time and harvest; everything is ghosts and grave-offerings; everything is
the golden bough of sacrifice; everything is the sun and moon; everything is
everything. Every folk-lore student who knew a little more than his own
monomania, every man of wider reading and critical culture like Andrew
Lang, has practically confessed that the bewilderment of these things left his
brain spinning. Yet the whole trouble comes from a man trying to look at these
stories from the outside, as if they were scientific objects. He has only to look
at them from the inside, and ask himself how he would begin a story. A story
may start with anything and go anywhere. It may start with a bird without the
bird being a totem; it may start with the sun without being a solar myth. It is
said there are only ten plots in the world; and there will certainly be common
and recurrent elements. Set ten thousand children talking at once, and telling
tarradiddles about what they did in the wood, and it will not be hard to find
parallels suggesting sun-worship or animal worship. Some of the stories may
be pretty and some silly and some perhaps dirty; but they can only be judged
as stories. In the modern dialect, they can only be judged aesthetically. It is
strange that aesthetics, or mere feeling, which is now allowed to usurp where it
has no rights at all, to wreck reason with pragmatism and morals with anarchy,
is apparently not allowed to give a purely aesthetic judgement on what is
obviously a purely aesthetic question. We may be fanciful about everything
except fairy-tales.
Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle ideas.
Everybody ought to know that, for everybody has been a child. Ignorant as a
child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only atmospheres but
fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine shades. Nobody
understands it who has not had what can only be called the ache of the artist to
find some sense and some story in the beautiful things he sees; his hunger for
secrets and his anger at any tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He feels
that nothing is perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious
beauty of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue. One need only
be a very minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until it spoke
like a titan or a dryad. It is often said that pagan mythology was a
personification of the powers of nature. The phrase is true in a sense, but it is
very unsatisfactory; because it implies that the forces are abstractions and the
personification is artificial. Myths are not allegories. Natural powers are not in
this case abstractions. It is not as if there were a God of Gravitation. There
may be a genius of the waterfall; but not of mere falling, even less than of
mere water. The impersonation is not of something impersonal. The point is
that the personality perfects the water with significance. Father Christmas is
not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow
afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something
that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens, so that snow
itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The test therefore is purely
imaginative. But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that
it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true
artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching
transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the
veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something
there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the
pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation
that can call it up.
Now we do not comprehend this process in ourselves, far less in our most
remote fellow-creatures And the danger of these things being classified is that
they may seem to be comprehended. A really fine work of folklore, like The
Golden Bough, will leave too many readers with the idea, for instance, that
this or that story of a giant's or wizard's heart in a casket or a cave only 'means'
some stupid and static superstition called 'the external soul.' But we do not
know what these things mean, simply because we do not know what we
ourselves mean when we are moved by them. Suppose somebody in a story
says 'Pluck this flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,' we
do not know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is
impossible seems almost inevitable. Suppose we read 'And in the hour when
the king extinguished the candle his ships were wrecked far away on the coast
of Hebrides.' We do not know why the imagination has accepted that image
before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences seem really to
correspond to something in the soul. Very deep things in our nature, some dim
sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that
the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling
of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions past fading out,
are in an idea like that of the external soul. The power even in the myths of
savages is like the power in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a
metaphor is often very emphatically an external soul. The best critics have
remarked that in the best poets the simile is often a picture that seems quite
separate from the text. It is as irrelevant as the remote castle to the flower or
the Hebridean coast to the candle. Shelley compares the skylark to a young
woman on a turret, to a rose embedded in thick foliage, to a series of things
that seem to be about as unlike a skylark in the sky as anything we can
imagine. I suppose the most potent piece of pure magic in English literature is
the much-quoted passage in Keats's Nightingale about the casements opening
on the perilous foam. And nobody notices that the image seems to come from
nowhere; that it appears abruptly after some almost equally irrelevant remarks
about Ruth; and that it has nothing in the world to do with the subject of the
poem. If there is one place in the world where nobody could reasonably expect
to find a nightingale, it is on a window-sill at the seaside. But it is only in the
same sense that nobody would expect to find a giant's heart in a casket under
the sea. Now, it would be very dangerous to classify the metaphors of the
poets. When Shelley says that the cloud will rise 'like a child from the womb,
like a ghost from the tomb,' it would be quite possible to call the first a case of
the coarse primitive birth-myth and the second a survival of the ghost-worship
which became ancestor-worship. But it is the wrong way of dealing with a
cloud; and is liable to leave the learned in the condition of Polonius, only too
ready to think it like a weasel, or very like a whale.
Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept in
mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions. First,
these imaginative impressions are often strictly local. So far from being
abstractions turned into allegories, they are often images almost concentrated
into idols. The poet feels the mystery of a particular forest; not of the science
of afforestation or the department of woods and forests. He worships the peak
of a particular mountain, not the abstract idea of altitude. So we find the god is
not merely water but often one special river; he may be the sea because the sea
is single like a stream; the river that runs round the world. Ultimately
doubtless many deities are enlarged into elements; but they are something
more than omnipresent. Apollo does not merely dwell wherever the sun
shines; his home is on the rock of Delphi. Diana is great enough to be in three
places at once, earth and heaven and hell, but greater is Diana of the
Ephesians. This localised feeling has its lowest form in the mere fetish or
talisman, such as millionaires put on their motor-cars. But it can also harden
into something like a high and serious religion, where it is connected with high
and serious duties; into the gods of the city or even the gods of the hearth.
The second consequence is this; that in these pagan cults there is every shade
of sincerity--and insincerity. In what sense exactly did an Athenian really think
he had to sacrifice to Pallas Athena? What scholar is really certain of the
answer? In what sense did Dr. Johnson really think that he had to touch all the
posts in the street or that he had to collect orange-peel? In what sense does a
child really think that he ought to step on every alternate paving-stone? Two
things are at least fairly clear. First, in simpler and less self-conscious times
these forms could become more solid without really becoming more serious.
Day-dreams could be acted in broad daylight, with more liberty of artistic
expression; but still perhaps with something of the light step of the
somnambulist. Wrap Dr. Johnson in an antique mantle, crown him (by his kind
permission) with a garland, and he will move in state under those ancient skies
of morning; touching a series of sacred posts carved with the heads of the
strange terminal gods, that stand at the limits of the land and of the life of man.
Make the child free of the marbles and mosaics of some classic temples to play
on a whole floor inlaid with squares of black and white; and he will willingly
make this fulfilment of his idle and drifting daydream the clear field for a
grave and graceful dance. But the posts and the paving-stones are little more
and little less real than they are under modern limits. They are not really much
more serious for being taken seriously. They have the sort of sincerity that
they always had; the sincerity of art as a symbol that expresses very real
spiritualities under the surface of life. But they are only sincere in the same
sense as art; not sincere in the same sense as morality. The eccentric's
collection of orange-peel may turn to oranges in a Mediterranean festival or to
golden apples in a Mediterranean myth. But they are never on the same plane
with the difference between giving the orange to a blind beggar and carefully
placing the orange-peel so that the beggar may fall and break his leg. Between
these two things there is a difference of kind and not of degree. The child does
not think it wrong to step on the paving-stone as he thinks it wrong to step on
the dog's tail. And it is very certain that whatever jest or sentiment or fancy
first set Johnson touching the wooden posts, he never touched wood with any
of the feeling with which he stretched out his hands to the timber of that
terrible tree, which was the death of God and the life of man.
As already noted, this does not mean that there was no reality or even no
religious sentiment in such a mood. As a matter of fact the Catholic Church
has taken over with uproarious success the whole of this popular business of
giving people local legends and lighter ceremonial movements. In so far as all
this sort of paganism was innocent and in touch with nature, there is no reason
why it should not be patronised by patron saints as much as by pagan gods.
And in any case there are degrees of seriousness in the most natural makebelieve.
There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in the
wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and
really frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we
have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact that beauty
and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch
them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul. We all
understand that and the pagans understood it. The point is that paganism did
not really stir the soul except with these doubts and fancies, with the
consequence that we to-day can have little beyond doubts and fancies about
paganism. All the best critics agree that all the greatest poets, in pagan Hellas
for example, had an attitude towards their gods which is quite queer and
puzzling to men in the Christian era. There seems to be an admitted conflict
between the god and the man; but everybody seems to be doubtful about
which is the hero and which is the villain. This doubt does not merely apply to
a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae; it applies to a moderate conservative
like Sophocles in the Antigone; or even to a regular Tory and reactionary like
Aristophanes in the Frogs. Sometimes it would seem that the Greeks believed
above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to revere. But the point of
the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that
the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of
architecture for a castle in the clouds.
This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies round
the whole world, whose remote branches under separate skies bear like
coloured birds the costly idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes of Africa
and the fairy kings and princesses of the folk-tales of the forest, and buried
amid vines and olives the Lares of the Latins, and carried on the clouds of
Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of Greece. These are the myths:
and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men. But he
who has most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not
and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a
religion. They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the
need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of
festivity and formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar they do
not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say 'I believe in
Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,' etc., as he stands up and says 'I believe in God
the Father Almighty,' and the rest of the Apostles Creed. Many believed in
some and not in others, or more in some and less in others, or only in a very
vague poetical sense in any. There was no moment when they were all
collected into an orthodox order which men would fight and be tortured to
keep intact. Still less did anybody ever say in that fashion: 'I believe in Odin
and Thor and Freya,' for outside Olympus even the Olympian order grows
cloudy and chaotic. It seems clear to me that Thor was not a god at all but a
hero. Nothing resembling a religion would picture anybody resembling a god
as groping like a pigmy in a great cavern, that turned out to be the glove of a
giant. That is the glorious ignorance called adventure Thor may have been a
great adventurer; but to call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with
Jack and the Beanstalk. Odin seems to have been a real barbarian chief,
possibly of the Dark Ages after Christianity. Polytheism fades away at its
fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing like monotheism
as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy the need to cry out on
some uplifted name or some noble memory in moments that are themselves
noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city. But the
name was so used by many to whom it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy,
or rather it partially satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of
surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring of
wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of sacrifice.
It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to the full; of putting
something in the other balance to ballast our dubious pride, of paying tithes to
nature for our land. This deep truth of the danger of insolence, or being too big
for our boots, runs through all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great.
But it runs side by side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real
nature of the gods to be propitiated. Where that gesture of surrender is most
magnificent, as among the great Greeks, there is really much more idea that
the man will be the better for losing the ox than that the god will be the better
for getting it. It is said that in its grosser forms there are often actions
grotesquely suggestive of the god really eating the sacrifice. But this fact is
falsified by the error that I put first in this note on mythology. It is
misunderstanding the psychology of day-dreams. A child pretending there is a
goblin in a hollow tree will do a crude and material thing, like leaving a piece
of cake for him. A poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like
bringing to the god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of seriousness in
both acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude
fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the pagan
does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian.
He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul
said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their
gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St.
Paul declared to them whom they had ignorantly worshipped.
The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt
to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field
reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to view of all history that reason is
something separate from religion even in the most rational of these
civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on
the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to
rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality
the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they
meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church
had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that
the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and
religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the
philosophers. Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought
truth by means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the
most grotesque ugliness. But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its
own triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It
remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand extravagances,
through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the moon or the world
being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy convolutions and mystic
malformations of Asiatic art, through all the stark and staring rigidity of
Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through every kind of cracked mirror of
mad art that seemed to deform the world and displace the sky, it remained true
to something about which there can be no argument; something that makes it
possible for some artist of some school to stand suddenly still before that
particular deformity and say, 'My dream has come true.' Therefore do we all in
fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we
are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what is
meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist
or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all know the
meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this sense it is true that
it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only because it is the ignorant who
appreciate poems. Imagination has its own laws and triumphs; and a
tremendous power began to clothe its images, whether images in the mind or
in the mud, whether in the bamboo of the South Sea Islands or the marble of
the mountains of Hellas. But there was always a trouble in the triumph, which
in these pages I have tried to analyse in vain; but perhaps I might in conclusion
state it thus.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to
worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange;
but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt
freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything
that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him for
ever. Henceforth being merely secular would be a servitude and an inhibition.
If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons. We therefore
feel throughout the whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and
distrust. When the man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when
he pours out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy
and a virile thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a man was
made. His imaginative experiment is therefore justified. But precisely because
it began with imagination, there is to the end something of mockery in it, and
especially in the object of it. This mockery, in the more in tense moments of
the intellect, becomes the almost intolerable irony of Greek tragedy. There
seems a disproportion between the priest and the altar or between the altar and
the god. The priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than the god.
All the order of the temple is solid and sane and satisfactory to certain parts of
our nature; except the very centre of it, which seems strangely mutable and
dubious, like a dancing flame. It is the first thought round which the whole has
been built; and the first thought is still a fancy and almost a frivolity. In that
strange place of meeting, the man seems more statuesque than the statue. He
himself can stand for ever in the noble and natural attitude of the statue of the
Praying Boy. But whatever name be written on the pedestal, whether Zeus or
Ammon or Apollo, the god whom he worships is Proteus.
The Praying Boy may be said to express a need rather than to satisfy a need. It
is by a normal and necessary action that his hands are lifted; but it is no less a
parable that his hands are empty. About the nature of that need there will be
more to say; but at this point it may be said that perhaps after all this true
instinct, that player and sacrifice are a liberty and an enlargement, refers back
to that vast and half-forgotten conception of universal fatherhood. which we
have already seen everywhere fading from the morning sky. This is true; and
yet it is not all the truth. There remains an indestructible instinct, in the poet as
represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localising his God. It
is something in the soul of poetry if not of piety. And the greatest of poets,
when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or the
absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and
a name. No poet is merely a pantheist; those who are counted most pantheistic,
like Shelley, start with some local and particular image as the pagans did.
After all, Shelley wrote of the skylark because it was a skylark. You could not
issue an imperial or international translation of it for use in South America, in
which it was changed to an ostrich. So the mythological imagination moves as
it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word,
mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a
recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a
place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places
found. So far could the lonely imagination lead, and we must turn later to the
lonely reason. Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel together.
That is where all these things differed from religion or the reality in which
these different dimensions met in a sort of solid. They differed from the reality
not in what they looked like but in what they were. A picture may look like a
landscape; it may look in every detail exactly like a landscape. The only detail
in which it differs is that it is not a landscape. The difference is only that
which divides a portrait of Queen Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth. Only in
this mythical and mystical world the portrait could exist before the person; and
the portrait was therefore more vague and doubtful. But anybody who has felt
and fed on the atmosphere of these myths will know what I mean, when I say
that in one sense they did not really profess to be realities. The pagans had
dreams about realities; and they would have been the first to admit, in their
own words, that some came through the gate of ivory and others through the
gate of horn. The dreams do indeed tend to be very vivid dreams when they
touch on those tender or tragic things, which can really make a sleeper awaken
with the sense that his heart has been broken in his sleep. They tend
continually to hover over certain passionate themes of meeting and parting, of
a life that ends in death or a death that is the beginning of life. Demeter
wanders over a stricken world looking for a stolen child; Isis stretches out her
arms over the earth in vain to gather the limbs of Osiris; and there is
lamentation upon the hills for Atys and through the woods for Adonis. There
mingles with all such mourning the mystical and profound sense that death can
be a deliverer and an appeasement; that such death gives us a divine blood for
a renovating river and that all good is found in gathering the broken body of
the god. We may truly call these foreshadowing; so long as we remember that
foreshadowings are shadows. And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit
very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing
which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the
real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different.
Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is not a dog; and it
is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man. Nobody really thought of
Isis as a human being, nobody really thought of Demeter as a historical
character, nobody thought of Adonis as the founder of a Church. There was no
idea that any one of them had changed the world; but rather that their recurrent
death and life bore the sad and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the
world. Not one of them was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of
the sun and moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they
mean the shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. In certain
sacrificial and communal aspects they naturally suggest what sort of a god
might satisfy them; but they do not profess to be satisfied. Anyone who says
they do is a bad judge of poetry.
Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism than
with Christianity. Those who call these cults 'religions,' and 'compare' them
with the certitude and challenge of the Church have much less appreciation
than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why classic literature is
still something that hangs in the air like a song. It is no very human tenderness
for the hungry to prove that hunger is the same as food. It is no very genial
understanding of youth to argue that hope destroys the need for happiness.
And it is utterly unreal to argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely
in the abstract, were even in the same world with a living man and a living
polity that were worshipped because they were concrete. We might as well say
that a boy playing at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the
trenches; or that boy's first fancies about 'the not impossible she' are the same
as the sacrament of marriage. They are fundamentally different exactly where
they are superficially similar; we might almost say they are not the same even
when they are the same. They are only different because one is real and the
other is not. I do not mean merely that I myself believe that one is true and the
other is not. I mean that one was never meant to be true in the same sense as
the other. The sense in which it was meant to be true I have tried to suggest
vaguely here, but it is undoubtedly very subtle and almost indescribable. It is
so subtle that the students who profess to put it up as a rival to our religion
miss the whole meaning and purport of their own study. We know better than
the scholars, even those of us who are no scholars, what was in that hollow cry
that went forth over the dead Adonis and why the Great Mother had a daughter
wedded to death. We have entered more deeply than they into the Eleusinian
Mysteries and have passed a higher grade, where gate within gate guarded the
wisdom of Orpheus. We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last
secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a
prophet saying 'These things are.' It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist
crying, 'Why cannot these things be?'
===VI. The Demons and the Philosophers===
I have dwelt at some little length on this imaginative sort of paganism, which
has crowded the world with temples and is everywhere the parent of popular
festivity. For the central history of civilisation, as I see it, consists of two
further stages before the final stage of Christendom. The first was the struggle
between this paganism and something less worthy than itself, and the second
the process by which it grew in itself less worthy. In this very varied and often
very vague polytheism there was a weakness of original sin. Pagan gods were
depicted as tossing men like dice; and indeed they are loaded dice. About sex
especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born mad.
They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity. This disproportion dragged
down the winged fancies; and filled the end of paganism with a mere filth and
litter of spawning gods. But the first point to realise is that this sort of
paganism had an early collision with another sort of paganism; and that the
issue of that essentially spiritual struggle really determined the history of the
world. In order to understand it we must pass to a review of the other kind of
paganism. It can be considered much more briefly; indeed there is a very real
sense in which the less that is said about it the better. If we have called the first
sort of mythology the day-dream, we might very well call the second sort of
mythology the nightmare.
Superstition recurs in all ages, and especially in rationalistic ages. I remember
defending the religious tradition against a whole luncheon table of
distinguished agnostics; and before the end of our conversation every one of
them had procured from his pocket, or exhibited on his watch-chain, some
charm or talisman from which he admitted that he was never separated. I was
the only person present who had neglected to provide himself with a fetish.
Superstition recurs in a rationalist age because it rests on something which, if
not identical with rationalism, is not unconnected with scepticism. It is at least
very closely connected with agnosticism. It rests on something that is really a
very human and intelligible sentiment, like the local invocations of the numen
in popular paganism. But it is an agnostic sentiment, for it rests on two
feelings: first that we do not really know the laws of the universe; and second
that they may be very different to all we call reason. Such men realise the real
truth that enormous things do often turn upon tiny things. When a whisper
comes, from tradition or what not, that one particular tiny thing is the key or
clue, something deep and not altogether senseless in human nature tells them
that it is not unlikely. This feeling exists in both the forms of paganism here
under consideration. But when we come to the second form of it, we find it
transformed and filled with another and more terrible spirit.
In dealing with the lighter thing called mythology, I have said little about the
most disputable aspect of it; the extent to which such invocation of the spirits
of the sea or the elements can indeed call spirits from the vasty deep; or rather,
(as the Shakespearean scoffer put it) whether the spirits come when they are
called. I believe that I am right in thinking that this problem, practical as it
sounds, did not play a dominant part in the poetical business of mythology.
But I think it even more obvious, on the evidence, that things of that sort have
sometimes appeared, even if they were only appearances. But when we come
to the world of superstition, in a more subtle sense, there is a shade of
difference; a deepening and a darkening shade. Doubtless most popular
superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do not believe as a
dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for walking under a
ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not very laborious exercise
of walking round it. There is no more in it than what I have already
adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the possibilities of so strange a
world. But there is another sort of superstition that does definitely look for
results; what might be called a realistic superstition. And with that the question
of whether spirits do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I
have said, it seems to me pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that
there is a distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world.
Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable
neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men
eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of
witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white
magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more
carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been
more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of
desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with
practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the
darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them.
And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere
mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of
good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk
of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man
consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective,
especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really
be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather
went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an
assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense
kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth,
that he had broken them.
In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather that the cult
of demons often came after the cult of deities, and even after the cult of one
single and supreme deity. It may be suspected that in almost all such places the
higher deity is felt to be too far off for appeal in certain petty matters, and men
invoke the spirits because they are in a more literal sense familiar spirits. But
with the idea of employing the demons who get things done, a new idea
appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly described as the
idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious
and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that
some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the
hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is
after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to
lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very
small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and
unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most
disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a
sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world.
This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most
cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even
artistic, a sort of art for art's sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it
horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible. They wish, in
the most literal sense, to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude
races like the Australian natives are not cannibals; while much more refined
and intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They are
refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a self-conscious
diabolism. But if we could understand their minds, or even really understand
their language, we should probably find that they were not acting as ignorant,
that is as innocent cannibals. They are not doing it because they do not think it
wrong, but precisely because they do think it wrong. They are acting like a
Parisian decadent at a Black Mass. But the Black Mass has to hide
underground from the presence of the real Mass. In other words, the demons
have really been in hiding since the coming of Christ on earth. The
cannibalism of the higher barbarians is in hiding from the civilisation of the
white man. But before Christendom, and especially outside Europe, this was
not always so. In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like
dragons. They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods. Their
enormous images could be set up in public temples in the centre of populous
cities. And all over the world the traces can be found of this striking and solid
fact, so curiously overlooked by the moderns who speak of all such evil as
primitive and early in evolution, that as a matter of fact some of the very
highest civilisations of the world were the very places where the horns of
Satan were exalted, not only to the stars but in the face of the sun. Take for
example the Aztecs and American Indians of the ancient empires of Mexico
and Peru. They were at least as elaborate as Egypt or China and only less
lively than that central civilisation which is our own. But those who criticise
that central civilisation (which is always their own civilisation) have a curious
habit of not merely doing their legitimate duty in condemning its crimes, but
of going out of their way to idealise its victims. They always assume that
before the advent of Europe there was nothing anywhere but Eden. And
Swinburne, in that spirited chorus of the nations in 'Songs before Sunrise,'
used an expression about Spain in her South American conquests which
always struck me as very strange. He said something about 'her sins and sons
through sinless lands dispersed,' and how they 'made accursed the name of
man and thrice accursed the name of God.' It may be reasonable enough that
he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why in the world should he say
that the South Americans were sinless? Why should he have supposed that
continent to be exclusively populated by archangels or saints perfect in
heaven? It would be a strong thing to say of the most respectable
neighbourhood; but when we come to think of what we really do know of that
society the remark is rather funny. We know that the sinless priests of this
sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who accepted as the nectar and
ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing but incessant human sacrifice
accompanied by horrible torments. We may note also in the mythology of this
American civilisation that element of reversal or violence against instinct of
which Dante wrote; which runs backwards everywhere through the unnatural
religion of the demons. It is notable not only in ethics but in aesthetics. A
South American idol was made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was
made as beautiful as possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by
working backwards against their own nature and the nature of things. There
was always a sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red
timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked
mirror.
In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation of tropical
America systematically indulged in human sacrifice. It is by no means clear,
so far as I know, that the Eskimos ever indulged in human sacrifice. They were
not civilised enough. They were too closely imprisoned by the white winter
and the endless dark. Chill penury repressed their noble rage and froze the
genial current of the soul. It was in brighter days and broader daylight that the
noble rage is found unmistakably raging. It was in richer and more instructed
lands that the genial current flowed on the altars, to be drunk by great gods
wearing goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment by
long cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell. A warmer climate
and a more scientific cultivation were needed to bring forth these blooms; to
draw up towards the sun the large leaves and flamboyant blossoms that gave
their gold and crimson and purple to that garden, which Swinburne compares
to the Hesperides. There was at least no doubt about the dragon.
I do not raise in this connection the special controversy about Spain and
Mexico; but I may remark in passing that it resembles exactly the question that
must in some sense be raised afterwards about Rome and Carthage. In both
cases there has been a queer habit among the English of always siding against
the Europeans, and representing the rival civilisation, in Swinburne's phrase,
as sinless; when its sins were obviously crying or rather screaming to heaven.
For Carthage also was a high civilisation, indeed a much more highly civilised
civilisation. And Carthage also founded that civilisation on a religion of fear,
sending up everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice. Now it is very right to
rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards and
ideals. But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the other races and
religions that professed the very opposite standards and ideals. There is a very
real sense in which the Christian is worse than the heathen, the Spaniard worse
than the Red Indian, or even the Roman potentially worse than the
Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in which he is worse; and that is not
in being positively worse. The Christian is only worse because it is his
business to be better.
This inverted imagination produces things of which it is better not to speak.
Some of them indeed might almost be named without being known; for they
are of that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent. They are too
inhuman even to be indecent. But without dwelling much longer in these dark
corners, it may be noted as not irrelevant here that certain anti-human
antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be
suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of
the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against
the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to
them was preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were
perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that
involved such a war upon children; and it is probable enough that this
abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in
Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course by any
representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and irresponsible
diabolists who did happen to be Jews. This sense that the forces of evil
especially threaten childhood is found again in the enormous popularity of the
Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did but give another version of a
very national English legend, when he conceived the wickedest of all possible
witches as the dark alien woman watching behind her high lattice and heading,
like the babble of a brook down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.
Anyhow the part of such speculations that concerns this story centered
especially round that eastern end of the Mediterranean, where the nomads had
turned gradually into traders and had begun to trade with the whole world.
Indeed in the sense of trade and travel and colonial extension, it already had
something like an empire of the whole world. Its purple dye, the emblem of its
rich pomp and luxury, had steeped the wares which were sold far away amid
the last crags of Cornwall and the sails that entered the silence of tropic seas
amid all the mystery of Africa. It might be said truly to have painted the map
purple. It was already a world-wide success, when the princes of Tyre would
hardly have troubled to notice that one of their princesses had condescended to
marry the chief of some tribe called Judah; when the merchants of its African
outpost would only have curled their bearded and Semitic lips with a slight
smile at the mention of a village called Rome. And indeed no two things could
have seemed more distant from each other, not only in space but in Spirit, than
the monotheism of the Palestinian tribe and the very virtues of the small Italian
republic. There was but one thing between them; and the thing which divided
them has united them. Very various and incompatible were the things that
could be loved by the consuls of Rome and the prophets of Israel; but they
were at one in what they hated. It is very easy in both cases to represent that
hatred as something merely hateful. It is easy enough to make a merely harsh
and inhuman figure either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel or
Cato thundering against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their limitations
and their local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and
therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and
intermediate, facing east and west and calling up this passion in its eastern and
western enemies; and that something is the first subject of this chapter.
The civilisation that centered in Tyre and Sidon was above all things practical.
It has left little in the way of art and nothing in the way of poetry. But it prided
itself upon being very efficient; and it followed in its philosophy and religion
that strange and sometimes secret train of thought which we have already
noted in those who look for immediate effects. There is always in such a
mentality an idea that there is a short cut to the secret of all success; something
that would shock the world by this sort of shameless thoroughness. They
believed, in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods.
In their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always careful
to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, upon which we shall
have to touch more than once in the rest of the narrative; it is enough to say
here that it involved the theory I have suggested, about a certain attitude
towards children. This was what called up against it in simultaneous fury the
servant of one God in Palestine and the guardians of all the household gods in
Rome This is what challenged two things naturally so much divided by every
sort of distance and disunion, whose union was to save the world.
I have called the fourth and final division of the spiritual elements into which I
should divide heathen humanity by the name of The Philosophers. I confess
that it covers in my mind much that would generally be classified otherwise;
and that what are here called philosophies are very often called religions. I
believe however that my own description will be found to be much the more
realistic and not the less respectful. But we must first take philosophy in its
purest and clearest form that we may trace its normal outline; and that is to be
found in the world of the purest and clearest outlines, that culture of the
Mediterranean of which we have been considering the mythologies and
idolatries in the last two chapters.
Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to the pagan what
Catholicism is to the Catholic. It was never a view of the universe satisfying
all sides of life; a complete and complex truth with something to say about
everything. It was only a satisfaction of one side of the soul of man, even if we
call it the religious side; and I think it is truer to call it the imaginative side.
But this it did satisfy; in the end it satisfied it to satiety. All that world was a
tissue of interwoven tales and cults, and there ran in and out of it, as we have
already seen, that black thread among its more blameless colours; the darker
paganism that was really diabolism. But we all know that this did not mean
that all pagan men thought of nothing but pagan gods. Precisely because
mythology only satisfied one mood, they turned in other moods to something
totally different. But it is very important to realise that it was totally different.
It was too different to be inconsistent. It was so alien that it did not clash.
While a mob of people were pouring on a public holiday to the feast of Adonis
or the games in honour of Apollo, this or that man would prefer to stop at
home and think out a little theory about the nature of things. Sometimes his
hobby would even take the form of thinking about the nature of God; or even
in that sense about the nature of the gods. But he very seldom thought of
pitting his nature of the gods against the gods of nature.
It is necessary to insist on this abstraction in the first student of abstractions.
He was not so much antagonistic as absent-minded. His hobby might be the
universe; but at first the hobby was as private as if it had been numismatics or
playing draughts. And even when his wisdom came to be a public possession,
and almost a political situation, it was very seldom on the same plane as the
popular and religious institutions. Aristotle, with his colossal common sense,
was perhaps the greatest of all philosophers; certainly the most practical of all
philosophies But Aristotle would no more have set up the Absolute side by
side with the Apollo of Delphi, as a similar or rival religion, than Archimedes
would have thought of setting up the lever as a sort of idol or fetish to be
substituted for the Palladium of the city. Or we might as well imagine Euclid
building an altar to an isosceles triangle, or offering sacrifices to the square of
the hypotenuse. The one man meditated on metaphysics as the other man did
on mathematics; for the love of truth or for curiosity or for the fun of the thing.
But that sort of fun never seems to have interfered very much with the other
sort of fun; the fun of dancing or singing to celebrate some rascally romance
about Zeus becoming a bull or a swan. It is perhaps the proof of a certain
superficiality and even insincerity about the popular polytheism, that men
could be philosophers and even sceptics without disturbing it. These thinkers
could move the foundations of the world without altering even the outline of
that coloured cloud that hung above it in the air.
For the thinkers did move the foundations of the world, even when a curious
compromise seemed to prevent them from moving the foundations of the city.
The two great philosophers of antiquity do indeed appear to us as defenders of
sane and even of sacred ideas; their maxims often read like the answers to
sceptical questions too completely answered to be always recorded. Aristotle
annihilated a hundred anarchists and nature-worshipping cranks by the
fundamental statement that man is a political animal. Plato in some sense
anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by
insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas
exist just as men exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that
ideas exist as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered
where they conflict with the ideas. He had something of the social sentiment
that we call Fabian in his ideal of fitting the citizen to the city. Like an
imaginary head to an ideal hat; and great and glorious as he remains, he has
been the Father of all faddists. Aristotle anticipated more fully the sacramental
sanity that was to combine the body and the soul of things; for he considered
the nature of men as well as the nature of morals, and looked to the eyes as
well as to the light. But though these great men were in that sense constructive
and conservative, they belonged to a world where thought was free to the point
of being fanciful. Many other great intellects did indeed follow them, some
exalting an abstract vision of virtue, others following more rationalistically the
necessity of the human pursuit of happiness. The former had the name of
Stoics; and their name has passed into a proverb for what is indeed one of the
main moral ideals of mankind: that of strengthening the mind itself until it is
of a texture to resist calamity or even pain. But it is admitted that a great
number of the philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists. They
became a sort of professional sceptics who went about asking uncomfortable
questions, and were handsomely paid for making themselves a nuisance to
normal people. It was perhaps an accidental resemblance to such questioning
quacks that was responsible for the unpopularity of the great Socrates; whose
death might seem to contradict the suggestion of the permanent truce between
the philosophers and the gods. But Socrates did not die as a monotheist who
denounced polytheism; certainly not as a prophet who denounced idols. It is
clear to anyone reading between the lines that there was some notion, right or
wrong, of a purely personal influence affecting morals and perhaps politics
The general compromise remained, whether it was that the Greeks thought
their myths a joke or that they thought their theories a joke. There was never
any collision in which one really destroyed the other, and there was never any
combination in which one was really reconciled with the other. They certainly
did not work together; if anything the philosopher was a rival of the priest. But
both seemed to have accepted a sort of separation of functions and remained
parts of the same social system. Another important tradition descends from
Pythagoras; who is significant because he stands nearest to the Oriental
mystics who must be considered in their turn. He taught a sort of mysticism of
mathematics, that number is the ultimate reality; but he also seems to have
taught the transmigration of souls like the Brahmins; and to have left to his
followers certain traditional tricks of vegetarianism and water-drinking very
common among the eastern sages, especially those who figure in fashionable
drawing-rooms, like those of the later Roman Empire. But in passing to
eastern sages, and the somewhat different atmosphere of the east, we may
approach a rather important truth by other path.
One of the great philosophers said that it would be well if philosophers were
kings, or kings were philosophers. He spoke as of something too good to be
true; but, as a matter of fact, it not unfrequently was true. A certain type,
perhaps too little noticed in history, may really be called the royal philosopher.
To begin with, apart from actual royalty, it did occasionally become possible
for the sage, though he was not what we call a religious founder, to be
something like a political founder. And the great example of this, one of the
very greatest in the world, will with the very thought of it carry us thousands
of miles across the vast spaces of Asia to that very wonderful and in some
ways that very wise world of ideas and institutions, which we dismiss
somewhat cheaply when we talk of China. Men have served many very
strange gods; and trusted themselves loyally to many ideals and even idols.
China is a society that has really chosen to believe in intellect. It has taken
intellect seriously; and it may be that it stands alone in the world. From a very
early age it faced the dilemma of the king and the philosopher by actually
appointing a philosopher to advise the king. It made a public institution out of
a private individual, who had nothing in the world to do but to be intellectual.
It had and has, of course, many other things on the same pattern. It creates all
ranks and privileges by public examination; it has nothing that we call an
aristocracy; it is a democracy dominated by an intelligensia. But the point here
is that it had philosophers to advise kings; and one of those philosophers must
have been a great philosopher and a great statesman.
Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher; possibly not
even a religious man. He was not an atheist; he was apparently what we call an
agnostic. But the really vital point is that it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his
religion at all. It is like talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how
Rowland Hill established the postal system or Baden Powell organised the
Boy Scouts. Confucius was not there to bring a message from heaven to
humanity, but to organise China; and he must have organised it exceedingly
well. It follows that he dealt much with morals; but he bound them up strictly
with manners. The peculiarity of his scheme and of his country, in which it
contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is that he insisted
on perpetuating an external life with all its forms, that outward continuity
might preserve internal peace. Anyone who knows how much habit has to do
with health, of mind as well as body, will see the truth in his idea. But he will
also see that the ancestor-worship and the reverence for the Sacred Emperor
were habits and not creeds. It is unfair to the great Confucius to say he was a
religious founder. It is even unfair to him to say he was not a religious
founder. It is as unfair as going out of one's way to say that Jeremy Bentham
was not a Christian martyr.
But there is a class of most interesting cases in which philosophers were kings,
and not merely the friends of kings. The combination is not accidental. It has a
great deal to do with this rather elusive question of the function of the
philosopher. It contains in it some hint of why philosophy and mythology
seldom came to an open rupture. It was not only because there was something
a little frivolous about the mythology. It was also because there was something
a little supercilious about the philosopher. He despised the myths, but he also
despised the mob; and thought they suited each other. The pagan philosopher
was seldom a man of the people, at any rate in spirit; he was seldom a
democrat and often a bitter critic of democracy. He had about him an air of
aristocratic and humane leisure; and his part was most easily played by men
who happened to be in such a position. It was very easy and natural for a
prince or a prominent person to play at being as philosophical as Hamlet or
Theseus in the Midsummer Night's Dream. And from very early ages we find
ourselves in the presence of these princely intellectuals. In fact, we find one of
them in the very first recorded ages of the world; sitting on the primeval throne
that looked over ancient Egypt.
The most intense interest of the incident of Akenahten, commonly called the
Heretic Pharaoh, lies in the fact that he was the one example, at any rate before
Christian times, of one of these royal philosophers who set himself to fight
popular mythology in the name of private philosophy. Most of them assumed
the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, who is in many ways the model of this sort of
monarch and sage. Marcus Aurelius has been blamed for tolerating the pagan
amphitheatre or the Christian martyrdoms. But it was characteristic; for this
sort of man really thought of popular religion just as he thought of popular
circuses. Of him Professor Phillimore has profoundly said 'a great and good
man--and he knew it.' The heretic Pharaoh had a philosophy more earnest and
perhaps more humble. For there is a corollary to the conception of being too
proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting. Anyhow,
the Egyptian prince was simple enough to take his own philosophy seriously,
and alone among such intellectual princes he affected a sort of coup d'etat;
hurling down the high gods of Egypt with one imperial gesture and lifting up
for all men, like a blazing mirror of monotheistic truth, the disc of the
universal sun. He had other interesting ideas often to be found in such
idealists. In the sense in which we speak of a Little Englander he was a Little
Egypter. In art he was a realist because he was an idealist; for realism is more
impossible than any other ideal. But after all there falls on him something of
the shadow of Marcus Aurelius, stalked by the shadow of Professor
Phillimore. That is the matter with this noble sort of prince is that he has
nowhere quite escaped being something of a prig. Priggishness is so pungent a
smell that it clings amid the faded spices even to an Egyptian mummy. That
was the matter with the heretic Pharaoh, as with a good many other heretics,
was that he probably never paused to ask himself whether there was anything
in the popular beliefs and tales of people less educated than himself. And, as
already suggested, there was something in them. There was a real human
hunger in all that element of feature and locality, that procession of deities like
enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching at certain haunted spots, in
all the many wanderings of mythology. Nature may not have the name of Isis;
Isis may not be really looking for Osiris. But it is true that Nature is really
looking for something; Nature is always looking for the supernatural.
Something much more definite was to satisfy that need; but a dignified
monarch with a disc of the sun did not satisfy it. The royal experiment failed
amid a roaring reaction of popular superstitions, in which the priests rose on
the shoulders of the people and ascended the throne of the kings.
The next great example I shall take of the princely sage is Gautama, the great
Lord Buddha. I know he is not generally classed merely with the philosophers;
but I am more and more convinced from all information that reaches me, that
this is the real interpretation of his immense importance. He was by far the
greatest and the best of these intellectuals born in the purple. His reaction was
perhaps the noblest and most sincere of all the resultant actions of that
combination of thinkers and of thrones. For his reaction was renunciation.
Marcus Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony, that even in a palace
life could be lived well. The fierier Egyptian king concluded that it could be
lived even better after a palace revolution. But the great Gautama was the only
one of them who proved he could really do without his palace. One fell back
on toleration and the other on revolution. But after all there is something more
absolute about abdication. Abdication is perhaps the one really absolute action
of an absolute monarch. The Indian prince, reared in Oriental luxury and
pomp, deliberately went out and lived the life of a beggar. That is magnificent,
but it is not war; that is, it is not necessarily a Crusade in the Christian sense. It
does not decide the question of whether the life of a beggar was the life of a
saint or the life of a philosopher. It does not decide whether this great man is
really to go into the tub of Diogenes or the cave of St. Jerome. Now those who
seem to be nearest to the study of Buddha, and certainly those who write most
clearly and intelligently about him, convince me for one that he was simply a
philosopher who founded a successful school of philosophy, and was turned
into a sort of divus or sacred being merely by the more mysterious and
unscientific atmosphere of all such traditions in Asia. So that it is necessary to
say at this point a word about that invisible yet vivid border-line that we cross
in passing from the Mediterranean into the mystery of the East.
Perhaps there are no things out of which we get so little of the truth as the
truisms; especially when they are really true. We are all in the habit of saying
certain things about Asia, which are true enough but which hardly help us
because we do not understand their truth; as that Asia is old or looks to the
past or is not progressive. Now it is true that Christendom is more progressive,
in a sense that has very little to do with the rather provincial notion of an
endless fuss of political improvement. Christendom does believe, for
Christianity does believe, that man can eventually get somewhere, here or
hereafter, or in various ways according to various doctrines. The world's desire
can somehow be satisfied as desires are satisfied, whether by a new life or an
old love or some form of positive possession and fulfilment. For the rest, we
all know there is a rhythm and not a mere progress in things, that things rise
and fall; only with us the rhythm is a fairly free and incalculable rhythm. For
most of Asia the rhythm has hardened into a recurrence. It is no longer merely
a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel. What has happened to all those
highly intelligent and highly civilised peoples is that they have been caught up
in a sort of cosmic rotation, of which the hollow hub is really nothing. In that
sense the worst part of existence is that it may just as well go on like that
forever. That is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or
unprogressive or looking backwards. That is why we see even her curved
swords as arcs broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine
ornament as returning everywhere, like a snake that is never slain. It has very
little to do with the political varnish of progress; all Asiatics might have tophats
on their heads but if they had this spirit still in their hearts, they would
only think the hats would vanish and come round again like the planets; not
that running after a hat could lead them to heaven or even to home.
Now when the genius of Buddha arose to deal with the matter, this sort of
cosmic sentiment was already common to almost everything in the east. There
was indeed the jungle of an extraordinarily extravagant and almost
asphyxiating mythology. Nevertheless it is possible to have more sympathy
with this popular fruitfulness in folk-lore than with some of the higher
pessimism that might have withered it. It must always be remembered,
however, when all fair allowances are made, that a great deal of spontaneous
eastern imagery really is idolatry; the local and literal worship of an idol. This
is probably not true of the ancient Brahminical system, at least as seen by
Brahmins. But that phrase alone will remind us of a reality of much greater
moment. This great reality is the Caste System of ancient India. It may have
had some of the practical advantages of the Guild System of Medieval Europe.
But it contrasts not only with that Christian democracy, but with every
extreme type of Christian aristocracy, in the fact that it does really conceive
the social superiority as a spiritual superiority. This not only divides it
fundamentally from the fraternity of Christendom, but leaves it standing like a
mighty and terraced mountain of pride between the relatively egalitarian levels
both of Islam and of China. But the fixity of this formation through thousands
of years is another illustration of that spirit of repetition that has marked time
from time immemorial. Now we may also presume the prevalence of another
idea which we associate with the Buddhists as interpreted by the Theosophists.
As a fact, some of the strictest Buddhists repudiate the idea and still more
scornfully repudiate the Theosophists. But whether the idea is in Buddhism, or
only in the birthplace of Buddhism, or only in a tradition or a travesty of
Buddhism, it is an idea entirely proper to this principle of recurrence. I mean
of course the idea of Reincarnation.
But Reincarnation is not really a mystical idea. It is not really a transcendental
idea, or in that sense a religious idea. Mysticism conceives something
transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse
evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in
the sense of repeating them. It is no more transcendental for a man to
remember what he did in Babylon before he was born than to remember what
he did in Brixton before he had a knock on the head. His successive lives need
not be any more than human lives, under whatever limitations burden human
life. It has nothing to do with seeing God or even conjuring up the devil. In
other words, reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape from the wheel
of destiny, in some sense it is the wheel of destiny. And whether it was
something that Buddha founded, or something that Buddha found, or
something that Buddha entirely renounced when he found, it is certainly
something having the general character of that Asiatic atmosphere in which he
had to play his part. And the part he played was that of an intellectual
philosopher, with a particular theory about the right intellectual attitude
towards it.
I can understand that Buddhists might resent the view that Buddhism is merely
a philosophy, if we understand by a philosophy merely an intellectual game
such as Greek sophists played, tossing up worlds and catching them like balls.
Perhaps a more exact statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a
metaphysical discipline; which might even be called a psychological
discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow; and
that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire. It was
emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our
impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better
world. It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man
realised that there is really no reality, that everything, including his soul, is in
dissolution at every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and be
intangible to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to exist) in a sort of
ecstasy of indifference. The Buddhists call this beatitude and we will not stop
our story to argue the point; certainly to us it is indistinguishable from despair.
I do not see, for instance, why the disappointment of desire should not apply as
much to the most benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones. Indeed the
Lord of Compassion seems to pity people for living rather than for dying. For
the rest, an intelligent Buddhist wrote 'the explanation of popular Chinese and
Japanese Buddhism is that it is not Buddhism.' That has doubtless ceased to be
a mere philosophy, but only by becoming a mere mythology. One thing is
certain; it has never become anything remotely resembling what we call a
Church.
It will appear only a jest to say that all religious history has really been a
pattern of noughts and crosses. But I do not by noughts mean nothings, but
only things that are negative compared with the positive shape or pattern of the
other. And though the symbol is of course only a coincidence, it is a
coincidence that really does coincide. The mind of Asia can really be
represented by a round 0, if not in the sense of a cypher at least of a circle. The
great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth is really a very
perfect image of a certain idea of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong
to the Eastern philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense
includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing. In that sense it
does confess, or rather boast, that all argument is an argument in a circle. And
though the figure is but a symbol, we can see how sound is the symbolic sense
that produces it, the parallel symbol of the Wheel of Buddha generally called
the Swastika The cross is a thing at right angles pointing boldly in opposite
directions; but the Swastika is the same thing in the very act of returning to the
recurrent curve. That crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a wheel.
Before we dismiss even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols, we
must remember how intense was the imaginative instinct that produced them
or selected them both in the east and the west. The cross has become
something more than a historical memory; it does convey, almost as by a
mathematical diagram, the truth about the real point at issue; the idea of a
conflict stretching outwards into eternity. It is true, and even tautological, to
say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.
In other words the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand for the idea
of breaking out of the circle that is everything and nothing. It does escape from
the circular argument by which everything begins and ends in the mind. Since
we are still dealing in symbols, it might be put in a parable in the form of that
story about St. Francis, which says that the birds departing with his
benediction could wing their way into the infinites of the four winds of
heaven, their tracks making a vast cross upon the sky; for compared with the
freedom of that flight of birds, the very shape of the Swastika is like a kitten
chasing its tail. In a more popular allegory, we might say that when St. George
thrust his spear into the monster's jaws, he broke in upon the solitude of the
self-devouring serpent and gave it something to bite besides its own tail. But
while many fancies might be used as figures of the truth, the truth itself is
abstract and absolute; though it is not very easy to sum up except by such
figures. Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something
which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are
really there; or in other words that things are really things--In this Christianity
is at one with common sense; but all religious history shows that this common
sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.
It cannot otherwise exist, or at least endure, because mere thought does not
remain sane. In a sense it becomes too simple to be sane. The temptation of the
philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety. They are always attracted by
insane simplifications, as men poised above abysses are fascinated by death
and nothingness and the empty air. It needed another kind of philosopher to
stand poised upon the pinnacle of the Temple and keep his balance without
casting himself down. One of these obvious, these too obvious explanations is
that everything is a dream and a delusion and there is nothing outside the ego.
Another is that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is
certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our creation, in
the sense of our coloured differentiation and personality, and that nothing will
be well till we are again melted into one unity. By this theory, in short, the
Creation was the Fall. It is important historically because it was stored up in
the dark heart of Asia and went forth at various times in various forms over the
dim borders of Europe. Here we can place the mysterious figure of Manes or
Manichaeus, the mystic of inversion, whom we should call a pessimist, parent
of many sects and heresies; here, in a higher place, the figure of Zoroaster. He
has been popularly identified with another of these too simple explanations;
the equality of evil and good, balanced and battling in every atom. He also is
of the school of sages that may be called mystics; and from the same
mysterious Persian garden came upon ponderous wings Mithras, the unknown
god, to trouble the last twilight of Rome.
That circle or disc of the sun set up in the morning of the world by the remote
Egyptian has been a mirror and a model for all the philosophers. They have
made many things out of it, and sometimes gone mad about it, especially when
as in these eastern sages the circle became a wheel going round and round in
their heads. But the point about them is that they all think that existence can be
represented by a diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the
childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view.
They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. Still less
can they believe that it is a picture of something that really exists outside our
minds. Sometimes the philosophy paints the disc all black and calls himself a
pessimist; sometimes he paints it all white and calls himself an optimist;
sometimes he divides it exactly into halves of black and white and calls
himself a dualist, like those Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space
to do justice. None of them could understand a thing that began to draw the
proportions just as if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion
which the mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate. Like the
first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a new
purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only to be
distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all the ages to trace
the lines of a form--and of a Face.
===VII. The War of the Gods and Demons===
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression
of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing
the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are
quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about
on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.
Man cannot live without the two props of food and drink, which support him
like two legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives of all his
movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military marches or
religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss Kilmansegg or
the ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne. But it is such movements
that make up the story of mankind and without them there would practically be
no story at all. Cows may be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see
that they do much beyond grazing and seeking better grazing grounds; and that
is why a history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading.
Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external action at least; but
that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought
worthy of detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not
inspired a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar
title. But so far from the movements that make up the story of man being
economic, we may say that the story only begins where the motive of the cows
and sheep leaves off. It will be hard to maintain that the Crusaders went from
their homes into a howling wilderness because cows go from a wilderness to a
more comfortable grazing-grounds. It will be hard to maintain that the Arctic
explorers went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go
south. And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely
adventurous explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to be
human at all but cease to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of
these decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man. Economic
history would not even be history.
But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need not live
for food merely because they cannot live without food The truth is that the
thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery
necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which he
sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it.
There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life. For
once that he remembers exactly what work produces his wages and exact]y
what wages produce his meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is
a queer world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether
marriage is a failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, or
remembers his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the
mysterious lot of man. This is true of the majority even of the wage-slaves of
our morbid modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and in-humanity
has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is immeasurably more true
of the multitude of peasants or hunters or fishers who make up the real mass of
mankind. Even those dry pedants who think that ethics depend on economics
must admit that economics depend on existence. And any number of normal
doubts and day-dreams are about existence; not about how we can live, but
about why we do. And the proof of it is simple; as simple as suicide. Turn the
universe upside down in the mind and you turn all the political economists
upside down with it. Suppose that a man wishes to die, and the professor of
political economy becomes rather a bore with his elaborate explanations of
how he is to live. And all the departures and decisions that make our human
past into a story have this character of diverting the direct course of pure
economics. As the economist may be excused from calculating the future
salary of a suicide, so he may be excused from providing an old age pension
for a martyr. As he need not provide for the future of a martyr so he need not
provide for the family of a monk. His plan is modified in lesser and varying
degrees by a man being a soldier and dying for his own country, by a man
being a peasant and specially loving his own land, by a man being more or less
affected by any religion that forbids or allows him to do this or that. But all
these come back not to an economic calculation about livelihood but to an
elemental outlook upon life. They all come back to what a man fundamentally
feels, when he looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes,
upon that strange vision that we call the world.
No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it may be
allowable to say that we need a new thing; which may be called psychological
history. I mean the consideration of what things meant in the mind of a man,
especially an ordinary man; as distinct from what is defined or deduced merely
from official forms or political pronouncements. I have already touched on it
in such a case as the totem or indeed any other popular myth. It is not enough
to be told that a tom-cat was called a totem; especially when it was not called a
totem. We want to know what it felt like. Was it like Whittington's cat or like a
witch's cat? Was its real name Pashtl or Puss-in-Boots? That is the sort of
thing we need touching the nature of political and social relations. We want to
know the real sentiment that was the social bond of many common men, as
sane and as selfish as we are. What did soldiers feel when they saw splendid in
the sky that strange totem that we call the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What
did vassals feel about those other totems the lions or the leopards upon the
shield of their lord? So long as we neglect this subjective side of history,
which may more simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a
certain limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art. So
long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will
be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.
In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of war.
Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private, which tell us
nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have the official posters,
which could not have been spontaneous precisely because they were official.
At the best we have only the secret diplomacy, which could not have been
popular precisely because it was secret. Upon one or other of these is based the
historical judgement about the real reasons that sustained the struggle.
Governments fight for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about
harbours or high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It
seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do the
fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible and wonderful
thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers believes the silly
notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled by force. If they were all
to slack, it would be impossible to punish all the slackers And the least little
touch of slacking would lose a whole campaign in half a day. What did men
really feel about the policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the
politician, what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly
for their prince what did those blind men see in their prince?
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an appropriate
language, as realpolitik. As a matter of fact, it is an almost insanely unreal
politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for
material ends, without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are
hardly ever material to the men who fight. In any case no man will die for
practical politics, just as no man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a
hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not
be martyred for money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic
politics, is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world
believe that d soldier says, 'My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till
it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government
obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.' Can anybody suppose that
a clerk turned conscript says, 'If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments,
but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver
in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen.'
Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all
romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in
the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and
about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is
nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote complications
that death in any case will end. If he is sustained by certain loyalties, they must
be loyalties as simple as death. They are generally two ideas, which are only
two sides of one idea. The first is the love of something said to be threatened,
if it be only vaguely known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of
some strange thing that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it
sounds, though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national
home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the
good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down,
because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights
for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house. But the negative
side of it is quite as noble as well as quite as strong. Men fight hardest when
they feel that the foe is at once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his
atmosphere is alien and antagonistic, as the French feel about the Prussian or
the Eastern Christians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference of religion,
people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will pity
them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a difference that does
really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and the day. Men can think
of this difference even at the point of death; for it is a difference about the
meaning of life.
Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier than policy;
by hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the Great War, suffering
either in their bodies or in their souls for those they loved, they were long past
caring about details of diplomatic objects as motives for their refusal to
surrender. Of myself and those I knew best I can answer for the vision that
made surrender impossible. It was the vision of the German Emperor's face as
he rode into Paris. This is not the sentiment which some of my idealistic
friends describe as Love. I am quite content to call it hatred; the hatred of hell
and all its works, and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not
believe in hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long
introduction has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an understanding of
what is meant by a religious war. There is a religious war when two worlds
meet; that is when two visions of the world meet; or in more modern language
when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the one man's breath is the other
man's poison; and it is vain to talk of giving a pestilence a place in the sun.
And this is what we must understand, even at the expense of digression, if we
would see what really happened in the Mediterranean; when right athwart the
rising of the Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark
with all the riddles of Asia and trailing all the tribes and dependencies of
imperialism, came Carthage riding on the sea.
The ancient religion of Italy was on the whole that mixture which we have
considered under the head of mythology; save that where the Greeks had a
natural turn for the mythology, the Latins seem to have had a real turn for
religion. Both multiplied gods, yet they sometimes seem to have multiplied
them for almost opposite reasons. It would seem sometimes as if the Greek
polytheism branched and blossomed upwards like the boughs of a tree, while
the Italian polytheism ramified downward like the roots. Perhaps it would be
truer to say that the former branches lifted themselves lightly, bearing flowers;
while the latter hung down, being heavy with fruit. I mean that the Latins seem
to multiply gods to bring them nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and
radiated outwards into the morning sky. What strikes us in the Italian cults is
their local and especially their domestic character. We gain the impression of
divinities swarming about the house like flies; of deities clustering and
clinging like bats about the pillars or building like birds under the eaves. We
have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gate-posts, of a god of doors and
even a god of drains. It has been suggested that all mythology was a sort of
fairy-tale; but this was a particular sort of fairy-tale which may truly be called
a fireside tale, or a nursery-tale; because it was a tale of the interior of the
home; like those which make chairs and tables talk like elves. The old
household gods of the Italian peasants seem to have been great, clumsy.
wooden images, more featureless than the figure-head which Quilp battered
with the poker. This religion of the home was very homely. Of course there
were other less human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology. There were
Greek deities superimposed on the Roman; there were here and there uglier
things underneath, experiments in the cruel kind of paganism, like the Arician
rite of the priest slaying the slayer. But these things were always potential in
paganism; they are certainly not the peculiar character of Latin paganism. The
peculiarity of that may be roughly covered by saying that if mythology
personified the forces of nature, this mythology personified nature as
transformed by the forces of man. It was the god of the corn and not of the
grass, of the cattle and not the wild things of the forest; in short the cult was
literally a culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.
With this there was a paradox which is still for many the puzzle or riddle of
the Latins. With religion running through every domestic detail like a climbing
plant, there went what seems to many the very opposite spirit; the spirit of
revolt. Imperialists and reactionaries often involve Rome as the very model of
order and obedience; but Rome was the very reverse. The real history of
ancient Rome is much more like the history of modern Paris. It might be called
in modern language a city built out of barricades. It is said that the gate of
Janus was never closed because there was an eternal war without; it is almost
as true that there was an eternal revolution within. From the first Plebeian riots
to the last Servile Wars, the state that imposed peace on the world was never
really at peace. The rulers were themselves rebels.
There is a real relation between this religion in private and this revolution in
public life. Stories none the less heroic for being hackneyed remind us that the
Republic was founded on a tyrannicide that avenged an insult to a wife; that
the Tribunes of the people were re-established after another which avenged an
insult to a daughter. The truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred
will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticise the state. They alone
can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of the
hearth. That is why men are mystified in seeing that the same nations that are
thought rigid in domesticity are also thought restless in politics, for instance
the Irish and the French. It is worth while to dwell on this domestic point
because it is an exact example of what is meant here by the inside of history,
like the inside of houses. Merely political histories of Rome may be right
enough in saying that this or that was a cynical or cruel act of the Roman
politicians; but the spirit that lifted Rome from beneath was the spirit of all the
Romans; and it is not a cant to call it the ideal of Cincinnatus passing from the
senate to the plough. Men of that sort had strengthened their village on every
side, had extended its victories already over Italians and even over Greeks,
when they found themselves confronted with a war that changed the world. I
have called it here the war of the gods and demons.
There was established on the opposite coast of the inland sea a city that bore
the name of the New Town. It was already much older, more powerful, and
more prosperous than the Italian town; but there still remained about it an
atmosphere that made the name not inappropriate. It had been called new
because it was a colony like New York or New Zealand. It was an outpost or
settlement of the energy and expansion of the great commercial cities of Tyre
and Sidon. There was a note of the new countries and colonies about it, a
confident and commercial outlook. It was fond of saying things that rang with
a certain metallic assurance; as that nobody could wash his hands in the sea
without the leave of the New Town. For it depended almost entirely on the
greatness of its ships, as did the two great ports and markets from which its
people came. It brought from Tyre and Sidon a prodigious talent for trade and
considerable experience of travel. It brought other things as well.
In a previous chapter I have hinted at something of the psychology that lies
behind a certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those hungry for
practical results, apart from poetical results, to call upon spirits of terror and
compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending the Gods. There is always
a sort of dim idea that these darker powers will really do things, with no
nonsense about it. In the interior psychology of the Punic peoples this strange
sort of pessimistic practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New
Town, which the Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia,
the god who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps
identical with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans
did not at first quite know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to
go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him to
Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not gross
or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilisation,
abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far more civilised
than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not
a myth. These highly civilised people really met together to invoke the
blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a
large furnace. We can only realise the combination by imagining a number of
Manchester merchants with chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers,
going to church every Sunday at eleven o'clock to see a baby roasted alive.
The first stages of the political or commercial quarrel can be followed in far
too much detail, precisely because it is merely political or commercial. The
Punic Wars looked at one time as if they would never end; and it is not easy to
say when they ever began. The Greeks and the Sicilians had already been
fighting vaguely on the European side against the African city. Carthage had
defeated Greece and conquered Sicily. Carthage had also planted herself
firmly in Spain; and between Spain and Sicily the Latin city was contained and
would have been crushed; if the Romans had been of the sort to be easily
crushed. Yet the interest of the story really consists in the fact that Rome was
crushed. If there had not been certain moral elements as well as the material
elements, the story would have ended where Carthage certainly thought it had
ended. It is common enough to blame Rome for not making peace. But it was
a true popular instinct that there could be no peace with that sort of people. It
is common enough to blame the Roman for his Delenda est Carthago;
Carthage must be destroyed. It is commoner to forget that, to all appearance,
Rome itself was destroyed. The sacred savour that hung round Rome for ever,
it is too often forgotten, clung to her partly because she had risen suddenly
from the dead. Carthage was an aristocracy, as are most of such mercantile
states. The pressure of the rich on the poor was impersonal as well as
irresistible. For such aristocracies never permit personal government, which is
perhaps why this one was jealous of personal talent. But genius can turn up
anywhere, even in a governing class. As if to make the world's supreme test as
terrible as possible, it was ordained that one of the great houses of Carthage
should produce a man who came out of those gilded palaces with all the
energy and originality of Napoleon coming from nowhere. At the worst crisis
of the war Rome learned that Italy itself, by a military miracle, was invaded
from the north. Hannibal, the Grace of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue,
had dragged a ponderous chain of armaments over the starry solitudes of the
Alps; and pointed southward to the city which he had been pledged by all his
dreadful gods to destroy.
Hannibal marched down the road to Rome, and the Romans who rushed to war
with him felt as if they were fighting with a magician. Two great armies sank
to right and left of him into the swamps of the Trebia; more and more were
sucked into the horrible whirlpool of Cannae; more and more went forth only
to fall in ruin at his touch. The supreme sign of all disasters, which is treason,
turned tribe after tribe against the falling cause of Rome, and still the
unconquerable enemy rolled nearer and nearer to the city; and following their
great leader the swelling cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a pageant
of the whole world; the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains
and the gigantic Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt
in gold and the brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling
and darting like hawks, and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and
miscellaneous peoples; and the grace of Baal went before them.
The Roman augurs and scribes who said in that hour that it brought forth
unearthly prodigies, that a child was born with the head of an elephant or that
stars fell down like hailstones, had a far more philosophical grasp of what had
really happened than the modern historian who can see nothing in it but a
success of strategy concluding a rivalry in commerce. Something far different
was felt at the time and on the spot, as it is always felt by those who
experience a foreign atmosphere entering their own like a fog or a foul savour.
It was no mere military defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry, that
filled the Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature herself
becoming unnatural. It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking
with his appalling face across the plain; it was Baal who trampled the
vineyards with his feet of stone; it was the voice of Tanit the invisible, behind
her trailing veils, whispering of the love that is more horrible than hate. The
burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin of the Italian vines, were some thing
more than actual; they were allegorical. They were the destruction of domestic
and fruitful things, the withering of what was human before that inhumanity
that is far beyond the human thing called cruelty. The household gods bowed
low in darkness under their lowly roofs; and above them went the demons
upon a wind from beyond all walls, blowing the trumpet of the Tramontane.
The door of the Alps was broken down; and in no vulgar but a very solemn
sense, it was Hell let loose. The war of the gods and demons seemed already to
have ended; and the gods were dead. The eagles were lost, the legions were
broken; and in Rome nothing remained but honour and the cold courage of
despair.
In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was Carthage.
There still remained the inner working of an element strong in all successful
commercial states, and the presence of a spirit that we know. There was still
the solid sense and shrewdness of the men who manage big enterprises; there
was still the advice of the best financial experts; there was still business
government; there was still the broad and sane outlook of practical men of
affairs, and in these things could the Romans hope. As the war trailed on to
what seemed its tragic end, there grew gradually a faint and strange possibility
that even now they might not hope in vain. The plain business men of
Carthage, thinking as such men do in terms of living and dying races, saw
clearly that Rome was not only dying but dead. The war was over; it was
obviously hopeless for the Italian city to resist any longer, and inconceivable
that anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these circumstances,
another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be considered.
Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money; perhaps they felt
in their hearts, as do so many of their kind, that after all war must be a little
wicked because it costs money. The time had now come for peace; and still
more for economy. The messages sent by Hannibal from time to time asking
for reinforcements were a ridiculous anachronism; there were much more
important things to attend to now. It might be true that some consul or other
had made a last dash to the Metaurus, had killed Hannibal's brother and flung
his head, with Latin fury, into Hannibal's camp; and mad actions of that sort
showed how utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause. But even
excitable Latins could not be so mad as to cling to a lost cause for ever. So
argued the best financial experts; and tossed aside more and more letters, full
of rather queer alarmist reports. So argued and acted the great Carthaginian
Empire. That meaningless prejudice, the curse of commercial states, that
stupidity is in some way practical and that genius is in some way futile, led
them to starve and abandon that great artist in the school of arms, whom the
gods had given them in vain.
Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always
overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some dim connection between
brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man is dull so long as he is
also mean? Why do they vaguely think of all chivalry as sentiment and all
sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are, like all men, primarily
inspired by religion. For them, as for all men, the first fact is their notion of the
nature of things; their idea about what world they are living in. And it is their
faith that the only ultimate thing is fear and therefore that the very heart of the
world is evil. They believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead
things must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things are gold
and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of nature. It may sound
fanciful to say that men we meet at tea-tables or talk to at garden-parties are
secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch. But this sort of commercial mind has
its own cosmic vision and it is the vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal
blunder that was the ruin of Carthage. The Punic power fell because there is in
this materialism a mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the
soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind. Being too practical to be moral, it
denies what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army. It fancies that
money will fight when men will no longer fight. So it was with the Punic
merchant princes. Their religion was a religion of despair, even when their
practical fortunes were hopeful. How could they understand that the Romans
could hope even when their fortunes were hopeless? Their religion was a
religion of force and fear; how could they understand that men can still despise
fear even when they submit to force? Their philosophy of the world had
weariness in its very heart; above all they were weary of warfare; how should
they understand those who still wage war even when they are weary of it? In a
word, how should they understand the mind of Man, who had so long bowed
down before mindless things, money and brute force and gods who had the
hearts of beasts? They awoke suddenly to the news that the embers they had
disdained too much even to tread out were again breaking everywhere into
flames; that Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered, that
Scipio had carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it into Africa. Before
the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it and lost;
and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name of the New City
remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left upon the sand. Another war
was indeed waged before the final destruction: but the destruction was final.
Only men digging in its deep foundation centuries after found a heap of
hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of that religion. For Carthage fell
because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its
logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his
children.
The gods had risen again, and the demons had been defeated after all. But they
had been defeated by the defeated, and almost defeated by the dead. Nobody
understands the romance of Rome, and why she rose afterwards to a
representative leadership that seemed almost fated and fundamentally natural.
Who does not keep in mind the agony of horror and humiliation through which
she had continued to testify to the sanity that is the soul of Europe? She came
to stand alone in the midst of an empire because she had once stood alone in
the midst of a ruin and a waste. After that all men knew in their hearts that she
had been representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men. And
there fell on her the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible light and the
burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the
mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that
the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if
there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have
to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, divine things
descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. Europe evolved into
its own vices and its own impotence, as will be suggested on another page; but
the worst into which it evolved was not like what it had escaped. Can any man
in his senses compare the great wooden doll, whom the children expected to
eat a little bit of the dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected
to eat the children ? That is the measure of how far the world went astray,
compared with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were ruthless,
it was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival. They
remembered not trade routes and regulations, but the faces of sneering men;
and hated the hateful soul of Carthage. And we owe them something if we
never needed to cut down the groves of Venus exactly as men cut down the
groves of Baal. We owe it partly to their harshness that our thoughts of our
human past are not wholly harsh. If the passage from heathenry to Christianity
was a bridge as well as a breach, we owe it to those who kept that heathenry
human. If, after all these ages, we are in some sense at peace with paganism,
and can think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember the things that
were and the things that might have been. For this reason alone we can take
lightly the load of antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or
a cupid on a valentine. Laughter and sadness link us with things long past
away and remembered without dishonour; and we can see not altogether
without tenderness the twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the
household gods rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. Deleta est
Carthago.
===VIII. The End of the World===
I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of
a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just
been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had
come across in my wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought;
in which I had been so far initiated as to realise a general atmosphere of
loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later and more esoteric stage to
discover the beginnings of thought. My companion was the most amusing of
them, for however he may have stood towards thought, he was at least very
much their superior in experience, having travelled beyond the tropics while
they were meditating in the suburbs; though he had been charged with excess
in telling travellers' tales. In spite of anything said against him, I preferred him
to his companions and willingly went with him through the wood; where I
could not but feel that his sunburnt face and fierce tufted eyebrows and
pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan. Then we sat down in the
meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church;
while the warm afternoon began to mellow into early evening and the song of
a speck of a bird was faint far up in the sky and no more than a whisper of
breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient orchards of the garden of
England. Then my companion said to me: 'Do you know why the spire of that
church goes up like that, I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he
answered in an off-hand way, 'Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic
Worship of antiquity.' Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there
leering above his goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan
but the Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane
incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a
thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment I was in the
mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally
enormous seemed to open about me like a dawn. 'Why, of course,' I said after
a moment's reflection, 'if it hadn't been for phallic worship, they would have
built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex.' I could have
sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My friend did not seem offended, for
indeed he was never thin-skinned about his scientific discoveries. I had only
met him by chance and I never met him again, and I believe he is now dead;
but though it has nothing to do with the argument, it may be worth while to
mention the name of this adherent of Higher Thought and interpreter of
primitive religious origins; or at any rate the name by which he was known. It
was Louis de Rougemont.
That insane image of the Kentish church standing on the point of its spire, as
in some old rustic, topsy-turvy tale, always comes back into my imagination
when I hear these things said about pagan origins; and calls to my aid the
laughter of the giants. Then I feel as genially and charitably to all other
scientific investigators, higher critics, and authorities on ancient and modern
religion, as I do to poor Louis de Rougemont. But the memory of that
immense absurdity remains as a sort of measure and check by which to keep
sane, not only on the subject of Christian churches, but also on the subject of
heathen temples. Now a great many people have talked about heathen origins
as the distinguished traveller talked about Christian origins. Indeed a great
many modern heathens have been very hard on heathenism. A great many
modern humanitarians have been very hard on the real religion of humanity.
They have represented it as being everywhere and from the first rooted only in
these repulsive arcana; and carrying the character of something utterly
shameless and anarchical. Now I do not believe this for a moment. I should
never dream of thinking about the whole worship of Apollo what De
Rougemont could think about the worship of Christ. I would never admit that
there was such an atmosphere in a Greek city as that madman was able to
smell in a Kentish village. On the contrary, it is the whole point, even of this
final chapter upon the final decay of paganism, to insist once more that the
worst sort of paganism had already been defeated by the best sort. It was the
best sort of paganism that conquered the gold of Carthage. It was the best sort
of paganism that wore the laurels of Rome. It was the best thing the world had
yet seen, all things considered and on any large scale, that ruled from the wall
of the Grampians to the garden of the Euphrates. It was the best that
conquered; it was the best that ruled; and it was the best that began to decay.
Unless this broad truth be grasped, the whole story is seen askew. Pessimism
is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in
being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason
or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to
decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its
blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such
good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that
is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an
air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed
and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage at
any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on mortal
society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the worst was
dead if the best was dying?
To begin with, it must be noted that the relation of Rome to Carthage was
partially repeated and extended in her relation to nations more normal and
more nearly akin to her than Carthage. I am not here concerned to controvert
the merely political view that Roman statesmen acted unscrupulously towards
Corinth or the Greek cities. But I am concerned to contradict the notion that
there was nothing but a hypocritical excuse in the ordinary Roman dislike of
Greek cities. I am not presenting these pagans as paladins of chivalry, with a
sentiment about nationalism never known until Christian times. But I am
presenting them as men with the feelings of men; and those feelings were not a
pretence. The truth is that one of the weaknesses in nature-worship and mere
mythology had already produced a perversion among the Greeks due to the
worst sophistry; the sophistry of simplicity. Just as they became unnatural by
worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshipping man. If
Greece led her conqueror, she might have misled her conqueror; but these
were things he did originally wish to conquer--ever in himself. It is true that in
one sense there was less inhumanity even in Sodom and Gomorrah than in
Tyre and Sidon. When we consider the war of the demons on the children, we
cannot compare even Greek decadence to Punic devil-worship. But it is not
true that the sincere revulsion from either need be merely pharisaical. It is not
true to human nature or to common sense. Let any lad who has had the luck to
grow up sane and simple in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the
cult of Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened. And that first
impression, as has been said here so often about first impressions, will be
right. Our cynical indifference is an illusion; it is the greatest of all illusions;
the illusion of familiarity. It is right to conceive the more or less rustic virtues
of the ruck of the original Romans as reacting against the very rumour of it,
with complete spontaneity and sincerity. It is right to regard them as reacting,
if in a lesser degree, exactly as they did against the cruelty of Carthage.
Because it was in a less degree they did not destroy Corinth as they destroyed
Carthage. But if their attitude and action was rather destructive, in neither case
need their indignation have been mere self-righteousness covering mere
selfishness. And if anybody insists that nothing could have operated in either
case but reasons of state and commercial conspiracies, we can only tell him
that there is something which he does not understand; something which
possibly he will never understand; something which, until he does understand,
he will never understand the Latins. That something is called democracy. He
has probably heard the word a good many times and even used it himself; but
he has no notion of what it means. All through the revolutionary history of
Rome there was an incessant drive towards democracy; the state and the
statesman could do nothing without a considerable backing of democracy; the
sort of democracy that never has anything to do with diplomacy. It is precisely
because of the presence of Roman democracy that we hear so much about
Roman oligarchy. For instance, recent historians have tried to explain the
valour and victory of Rome in terms of that detestable and detested usury
which was practised by some of the Patricians; as if Curius had conquered the
men of the Macedonian phalanx by lending them money; or the consul Nero
had negotiated the victory of Metaurus at five per cent. But we realise the
usury of the Patricians because of the perpetual revolt of the Plebeians. The
rule of the Punic merchant princes had the very soul of usury. But there was
never a Punic mob that dared to call them usurers.
Burdened like all mortal things with all mortal sin and weakness, the rise of
Rome had really been the rise of normal and especially of popular things; and
in nothing more than in the thoroughly normal and profoundly popular hatred
of perversion. Now among the Greeks a perversion had become a convention.
It is true that it had become so much of a convention, especially a literary
convention, that it was sometimes conventionally copied by Roman literary
men. But this is one of those complications that always arise out of
conventions. It must not obscure our sense of the difference of tone in the two
societies as a whole. It is true that Virgil would once in a way take over a
theme of Theocritus; but nobody can get the impression that Virgil was
particularly fond of that theme. The themes of Virgil were specially and
notably the normal themes and nowhere more than in morals; piety and
patriotism and the honour of the countryside. And we may well pause upon the
name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity; upon his name who
was in so supreme a sense the very voice of autumn of its maturity and its
melancholy; of its fruits of fulfilment and its prospect of decay. Nobody who
reads even a few lines of Virgil can doubt that he understood what moral
sanity means to mankind. Nobody can doubt his feelings when the demons
were driven in flight before the household gods. But there are two particular
points about him and his work which are particularly important to the main
thesis here. The first is that the whole of his great patriotic epic is in a very
peculiar sense founded upon the fall of Troy; that is upon an avowed pride in
Troy although she had fallen. In tracing to Trojans the foundation of his
beloved race and republic, he began what may be called the great Trojan
tradition which runs through medieval and modern history. We have already
seen the first hint of it in the pathos of Homer about Hector. But Virgil turned
it not merely into a literature but into a legend. And it was a legend of the
almost divine dignity that belongs to the defeated. This was one of the
traditions that did truly prepare the world for the coming of Christianity and
especially of Christian chivalry. This is what did help to sustain civilisation
through the incessant defeats of the Dark Ages and the barbarian wars; out of
which what we call chivalry was born. It is the moral attitude of the man with
his back to the wall; and it was the wall of Troy. All through medieval and
modern times this version of the virtues in the Homeric conflict can be traced
in a hundred ways co-operating with all that was akin to it in Christian
sentiment. Our own countrymen, and the men of other countries, loved to
claim like Virgil that their own nation was descended from the heroic Trojans.
All sorts of people thought it the most superb sort of heraldry to claim to be
descended from Hector. Nobody seems to have wanted to be descended from
Achilles. The very fact that the Trojan name has become a Christian name, and
been scattered to the last limits of Christendom, to Ireland or the Gaelic
Highlands, while the Greek name has remained relatively rare and pedantic, is
a tribute to the same truth. Indeed it involves a curiosity of language almost in
the nature of a joke. The name has been turned into a verb; and the very phrase
about hectoring, in the sense of swaggering, suggests the myriads of soldiers
who have taken the fallen Trojan for a model. As a matter of fact, nobody in
antiquity was less given to hectoring than Hector. But even the bully
pretending to be a conqueror took his title from the conquered. That is why the
popularisation of the Trojan origin by Virgil has a vital relation to all those
elements that have made men say that Virgil was almost a Christian. It is
almost as if two great tools or toys of the same timber, the divine and the
human, had been in the hands of Providence; and the only thing comparable to
the Wooden Cross of Calvary was the Wooden Horse of Troy. So, in some
wild allegory, pious in purpose if almost profane in form, the Holy Child
might have fought the dragon with a wooden sword and a wooden horse.
The other element in Virgil which is essential to the argument is the particular
nature of his relation to mythology; or what may here in a special sense be
called folklore, the faiths and fancies of the populace. Everybody knows that
his poetry at its most perfect is less concerned with the pomposity of Olympus
than with the numina of natural and agricultural life. Everyone knows where
Virgil looked for the causes of things. He speaks of finding them not so much
in cosmic allegories of Uranus and Chronos; but rather in Pan and the
sisterhood of the nymphs and Sylvanus the old man of the forest. He is
perhaps most himself in some passages of the Eclogues, in which he has
perpetuated for ever the great legend of Arcadia and the shepherds. Here again
it is easy enough to miss the point with petty criticism about all the things that
happen to separate his literary convention from ours. There is nothing more
artificial than the cry of artificiality as directed against the old pastoral poetry.
We have entirely missed all that our fathers meant by looking at the externals
of what they wrote. People have been so much amused with the mere fact that
the china shepherdess was made of china that they have not even asked why
she was made at all. They have been so content to consider the Merry Peasant
as a figure in an opera that they have not asked even how he came to go to the
opera, or how he strayed on to the stage.
In short, one have only to ask why there is a china shepherdess and not a china
shopkeeper. Why were not mantelpieces adorned with figures of city
merchants in elegant attitudes; of ironmasters wrought in iron or gold
speculators in gold? Why did the opera exhibit a Merry Peasant and not a
Merry Politician? Why was there not a ballet of bankers, pirouetting upon
pointed toes? Because the ancient instinct and humour of humanity have
always told them, under whatever conventions, that the conventions of
complex cities were less really healthy and happy than the customs of the
countryside. So it is with the eternity of the Eclogues. A modern poet did
indeed write things called Fleet Street Eclogues, in which poets took the place
of the shepherds. But nobody has yet written anything called Wall Street
Eclogues, in which millionaires should take the place of the poets. And the
reason is that there is a real if only a recurrent yearning for that sort of
simplicity; and there is never that sort of yearning for that sort of complexity.
The key to the mystery of the Merry Peasant is that the peasant often is merry.
Those who do not believe it are simply those who do not know anything about
him, and therefore do not know which are his times for merriment. Those who
do not believe in the shepherd's feast or song are merely ignorant of the
shepherd's calendar. The real shepherd is indeed very different from the ideal
shepherd, but that is no reason for forgetting the reality at the root of the ideal.
It needs a truth to make a tradition. It needs a tradition to make a convention.
Pastoral poetry is certainly often a convention, especially in a social decline. It
was in a social decline that Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses lounged
about the gardens of Versailles. It was also in a social decline that shepherds
and shepherdesses continued to pipe and dance through the most faded
imitations of Virgil. But that is no reason for dismissing the dying paganism
without ever understanding its life. It is no reason for forgetting that the very
word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant. We may say that this art is only
artificiality; but it is not a love of the artificial. On the contrary, it is in its very
nature only the failure of nature-worship, or the love of the natural
For the shepherds were dying because their gods were dying. Paganism lived
upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name of mythology. But
everywhere, and especially in Italy, it had been a mythology and a poetry
rooted in the countryside; and that rustic religion had been largely responsible
for the rustic happiness. Only as the whole society grew in age and experience,
there began to appear that weakness in all mythology already noted in the
chapter under that name. This religion was not quite a religion. In other words,
this religion was not quite a reality. It was the young world's riot with images
and ideas like a young man's riot with wine or love-making; it was not so
much immoral as irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of time.
Because it was creative to any extent it was credulous to any extent. It
belonged to the artistic side of man, yet even considered artistically it had long
become overloaded and entangled. The family trees sprung from the seed of
Jupiter were a jungle rather than a forest; the claims of the gods and demi-gods
seemed like things to be settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald than
by a poet. But it is needless to say that it was not only in the artistic sense that
these things had grown more anarchic. There had appeared in more and more
flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of
nature-worship, however natural it may seem. I have said that I do not believe
that natural worship necessarily begins with this particular passion; I am not of
the De Rougemont school of scientific folk-lore. I do not believe that
mythology must begin with eroticism. But I do believe that mythology must
end in it. I am quite certain that mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only
did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more
indefensible. Greek vices, oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic
demons began to fill the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a
dung heap. The psychology of it is really human enough to anyone who will
try that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour in
the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being
a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a
time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing
at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made
love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in
all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase
the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to
their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason.
They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of
Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with
nightmares.
At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs and dances sound
fainter and fainter in the forest. For one thing the peasant civilisation was
fading, or had already faded from the whole countryside. The Empire at the
end was organised more and more on that servile system which generally goes
with the boast of organisation, indeed it was almost as senile as the modern
schemes for the organisation of industry. It is proverbial that what would once
have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for
bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon
doles and cinemas. In this as in many other respects the modern return to
heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the
heathen old age. But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and
especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits. The heat
had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along with the gods of
the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was too old;
he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ
was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was
born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the
whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if
it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the
mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is
thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and
nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of
glamour and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only
ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had never believed in
them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars. They
had played the flute; they had played the fool.
So came the twilight upon Arcady and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly
from the beechen grove. In the great Virgilian poems there is already
something of the sadness; but the loves and the household gods linger in
lovely lines like that which Mr. Belloc took for a test of understanding; incipe
parve puer risu cognoscere matrem. But with them as with us, the human
family itself began to break down under servile organisation and the herding of
the towns. The urban mob became enlightened; that is it lost the mental energy
that could create myths. All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the
people mourned for the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators. And
meanwhile something similar was happening to that intellectual aristocracy of
antiquity that had been walking about and talking at large ever since Socrates
and Pythagoras. They began to betray to the world the fact that they were
walking in a circle and saying the same thing over and over again. Philosophy
began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore. That unnatural simplification of
everything into one system or another, which we have noted as the fault of the
philosopher, revealed at once its finality and its futility. Everything was virtue
or everything was happiness or everything was fate or everything was good or
everything was bad; anyhow, everything was everything and there was no
more to be said; so they said it. Everywhere the sages had degenerated into
sophists; that is, into hired rhetoricians or askers of riddles. It is one of the
symptoms of this that the sage begins to turn not only into a sophist but into a
magician. A touch of oriental occultism is very much appreciated in the best
houses. As the philosopher is already a society entertainer, he may as well also
be a conjurer.
Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world;
and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of the
other continents. But this is an illusion, one of the many illusions of
materialism. The limits that paganism had reached in Europe were the limits of
human existence; at its best it had only reached the same limits anywhere else.
The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to teach them stoicism. The
Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach them about recurrence or the
simple life or the beauty of being a vegetarian. In so far as they could get these
things from the East, they had already got rather too much of them from the
East. The Syncretists were as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are
really the same. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by
extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a purer
religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas of Peru. All the rest of
the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to recognise that the Roman
Empire was recognised as the highest achievement of the human race; and also
as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure
hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal
amphitheatres and aqueducts. Man could do no more.
For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one king was
found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such good
news as the news of invasion and conquest. There was nothing left that could
conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could improve it. It was the
strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the best thing that was going to
the bad. It is necessary to insist again and again that many civilisations had
met in one civilisation of the Mediterranean sea; that it was already universal
with a stale and sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their resources
and still there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they
were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could think
anything except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world had risen to its
highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it
was only the wave of the world.
That mythology and that philosophy into which paganism has already been
analysed had thus both of them been drained most literally to the dregs. If with
the multiplication of magic the third department, which we have called the
demons, was even increasingly active, it was never anything but destructive.
There remains only the fourth element or rather the first; that which had been
in a sense forgotten because it was the first. I mean the primary and
overpowering yet impalpable impression that the universe after all has one
origin and one aim; and because it has an aim must have an author. What
became of this great truth in the background of men's minds, at this time, it is
perhaps more difficult to determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it
more and more clearly as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away;
and great men among them did much even to the last to lay the foundations of
a concept of the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held their secret
certainty of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is intensely
characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable figures,
especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But in the case of
many others I fancy there entered at this point a new negation. Atheism
became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is
not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious
assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the
world it sees. Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavoured to substitute
Evolution for God, had already dangled before men's eyes his dance of
glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it
was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it
possible for men to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of
impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as
they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a
swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation
but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all
human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all the
stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos
were bowed under a sort of gradual deluge. To men in that mood there was a
reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and
philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely
that reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if
there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have
moved and saved the world.
The life of the great civilisation went on with dreary industry and even with
dreary festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need
never end. A convenient compromise had been made between all the
multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that each group should
worship freely and merely live a sort of official flourish of thanks to the
tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his official title of
Divus. Naturally there was no difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time
before the world realised that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty
anywhere. The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other
seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The
incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of
proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said;
though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God
was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the
many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem
particularly despairing. They seem quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave
the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his
blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there
trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of
the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the
dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But
it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular attention;
people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse. It was
something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a
scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people;
but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute
about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what
they said. However mildly, there was a ring like iron. Men used to many
mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the
curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them
see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor's statue seemed to be
spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth;
it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their
foundation fancied they had struck a rock.
With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things
seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had
happened, these few men were palpably present. They were important enough
to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and walked stiffly
past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts away
from these men and women and they stand in the centre of a great space like
lepers. The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is
overhung on every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of
faces looking down towards them intently; for strange things are happening to
them. New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought
good news. That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in
establishing its first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why
that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they
stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round
them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been
darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly
phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and
confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and
theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and
isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more
illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of
hatred around the Church of God.

Revision as of 13:22, 9 December 2007

The Everlasting Man
written by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The Everlasting Man is a two-part history of mankind, Christ, and Christianity published in 1925.



  • Prefatory Note
  • Introduction: The Plan Of This Book
  • Part I: On the Creature Called Man
    • I. The Man in the Cave
    • II. Professors and Prehistoric Men
    • III. The Antiquity of Civilisation
    • IV. God and Comparative Religion
    • V. Man and Mythologies
    • VI. The Demons and the Philosophers
    • VII. The War of the Gods and Demons
    • VIII. The End of the World
  • Part II: On the Man Called Christ
    • I. The God in the Cave
    • II. The Riddles of the Gospel
    • III. The Strangest Story in the World
    • IV. The Witness of the Heretics
    • V. The Escape from Paganism
    • VI. The Five Deaths of the Faith
  • Conclusion: The Summary Of This Book
  • Appendix I. On Prehistoric Man
  • Appendix II. On Authority and Accuracy

Prefatory Note

This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood. The view suggested is historical rather than theological, and does not deal directly with a religious change which has been the chief event of my own life; and about which I am already writing a more purely controversial volume. It is impossible, I hope, for any Catholic to write any book on any subject, above all this subject, without showing that he is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking fact. To suggest this I have not needed to go much beyond matters known to us all; I make no claim to learning; and have to depend for some things, as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more learned. As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.

Introduction: The Plan Of This Book

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchengarden, shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the point of this book.

The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle; though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty. Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act farce, and move us to comfort him after the manner of the curate in the Bab Ballads; 'Your mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.' So we may truly say to the very feeblest cleric: 'Your mind is not so blank as that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street, or any of your critics in the newspapers; for they have not the most shadowy notion of what they want themselves. Let alone of what you ought to give them.' They will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they are in a state of reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.

But with this we come to the final and vital point I shall try to show in these pages that when we do make this imaginative effort to see the whole thing from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside. It is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant. It is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under those clear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church of Christ. To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it. But this second proposition requires more serious discussion; and I shall here set myself to discuss it.

As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led up to it; because that human story also had a root that was divine. I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of nature. And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something like sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals to men, and then to soften the sharp transition from heathens to Christians. Now the more we really read in a realistic spirit of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be. It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see this detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light that they cannot see the difference between black and white. It is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they have a motive for making out that all the white is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is painted. I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific. An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope? I do not pretend to be impartial in the sense that the final act of faith fixes a man's mind because it satisfies his mind. But I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are; in the sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative justice to all sides; and they cannot. I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope of Rome, or to have as little sympathy with Julian the Apostate as they have with the Society of Jesus. They are not impartial; they never by any chance hold the historical scales even; and above all they are never impartial upon this point of evolution and transition. They suggest everywhere the grey gradations of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the gods. I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of gods, it is not the daylight of men.

I maintain that when brought out into the daylight these two things look altogether strange and unique; and that it is only in the false twilight of an imaginary period of transition that they can be made to look in the least like anything else. The first of these is the creature called man and the second is the man called Christ. I have therefore divided this book into two parts: the former being a sketch of the main adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming Christian. Both motives necessitate a certain method, a method which is not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less easy to define or defend.

In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note of impartiality, it is necessary to touch the nerve of novelty. I mean that in one sense we see things fairly when we see them first. That, I may remark in passing, is why children generally have very little difficulty about the dogmas of the Church. But the Church, being a highly practical thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and not merely for children. There must be in it for working purposes a great deal of tradition, of familiarity, and even of routine. So long as its fundamentals are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition. But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see what is there. The only way to suggest the point is by an example of something, indeed of almost anything, that has been considered beautiful or wonderful. George Wyndham once told me that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes rise for the first time and it was very wonderful but not so wonderful as a horse allowing a man to ride on him. Somebody else has said that a fine man on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world. Now, so long as people feel this in the right way, all is well. The first and best way of appreciating it is to come of people with a tradition of treating animals properly; of men in the right relation to horses. A boy who remembers his father who rode a horse, who rode it well and treated it well, will know that the relation can be satisfactory and will be satisfied. He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of horses because he knows how they ought to be treated; but he will see nothing but what is normal in a man riding on a horse. He will not listen to the great modern philosopher who explains to him that the horse ought to be riding on the man. He will not pursue the pessimist fancy of Swift and say that men must be despised as monkeys and horses worshipped as gods. And horse and man together making an image that is to him human and civilised, it will be easy, as it were, to lift horse and man together into something heroic or symbolical; like a vision of St. George in the clouds. The fable of the winged horse will not be wholly unnatural to him: and he will know why Ariosto set many a Christian hero in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the sky. For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak 'chivalry.' The very name of the horse has been given to the highest mood and moment of the man; so that we might almost say that the handsomest compliment to a man is to call him a horse.

But if a man has got into a mood in which he is not able to feel this sort of wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end. We must now suppose that he has drifted into a dull mood, in which somebody sitting on a horse means no more than somebody sitting on a chair. The wonder of which Wyndham spoke, the beauty that made the thing seem an equestrian statue, the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have become to him merely a convention and a bore. Perhaps they have been merely a fashion; perhaps they have gone out of fashion; perhaps they have been talked about too much or talked about in the wrong way; perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses without the horrible risk of being horsy. Anyhow, he has got into a condition when he cares no more for a horse than for a towel-horse. His grandfather's charge at Balaclava seems to him as dull and dusty as the album containing such family portraits. Such a person has not really become enlightened about the album; on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust. But when he has reached that degree of blindness, he will not be able to look at a horse or a horseman at all until he has seen the whole thing as a thing entirely unfamiliar and almost unearthly.

Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the prehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangely small head set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as the face of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one disproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavy neck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club of horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is to be found in showing, not the cloven, but the uncloven hoof. Nor is it mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a monster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point is that when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more to have some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rode him. In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does not seem unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged dwarf who could get on top of him will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we shall come back to the same marvel of the man and the horse; and the marvel will be, if possible, even more marvellous. We shall have again a glimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St. George is not riding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.

In this example, which I have taken merely because it is an example, it will be noted that I do not say that the nightmare seen by the first man of the forest is either more true or more wonderful than the normal mare of the stable seen by the civilised person who can appreciate what is normal. Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the traditional grasp of truth is the better. But I say that the truth is found at one or other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediate condition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition. In other words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see it only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we have got into that state of mind about a horse as something stale, it is far better to be frightened of a horse because it is a good deal too fresh.

Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him. In short, it is the purpose of this introduction to maintain this thesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we know he is not an animal. It is precisely when we do try to picture him as a sort of horse on its hind legs, that we suddenly realise that he must be something as miraculous as the winged horse that towered up into the clouds of heaven. All roads lead to Rome, all ways lead round again to the central and civilised philosophy, including this road through elf-land and topsyturvydom. But it may be that it is better never to have left the land of the reasonable tradition, where men ride lightly upon horses and are mighty hunters before the Lord. So also in the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold tread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know; we believe every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us and talk in the same style. If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. I do not propose in this book to follow the alleged example of St. Francis Xavier with the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostles into Mandarins; not so much to make them look like natives as to make them look like foreigners. I do not propose to work what I believe would be a completely successful practical joke; that of telling the whole story of the Gospel and the whole history of the church in a setting of pagodas and pigtails; and noting with malignant humour how much it was admired as a heathen story, in the very quarters where it is condemned as a Christian story. But I do propose to strike wherever possible this note of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even on so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases, when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things. They do not fade into the rest with the colours of impressionism; they stand out from the rest with the colours of heraldry; as vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a ground of gold. So stands the Red Clay against the green field of nature, or the White Christ against the red clay of his race. But in order to see them clearly we have to see them as a whole. We have to see how they developed as well as how they began; for the most incredible part of the story is that things which began thus should have developed thus. Anyone who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can imagine that other things might have happened or other entities evolved. Anyone thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort of evolutionary equality; but anyone facing what did happen must face an exception and a prodigy. If there was ever a moment when man was only an animal, we can if we choose make a fancy picture of his career transferred to some other animal. An entertaining fantasia might be made in which elephants built in elephantine architecture, with towers and turrets like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus. A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed a costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers. We could imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous creature carving and painting with his hands and cooking and carpentering with his feet. But if we are considering what did happen, we shall certainly decide that man has distanced everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light. And in the same fashion, while we can if we choose see the Church amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean superstitions squabbling and killing each other at the end of the Empire, while we can if we choose imagine the Church killed in the struggle and some other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the more surprised (and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years afterwards rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; and still as new as it is old.

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