1 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
2 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 kitchen-garden, 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.
3 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.
4 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.
5 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.
6 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.
7 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.
8 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.
9 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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 pose 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.
14 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.
PART I
On the Creature Called Man
I: THE MAN IN THE CAVE
15 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.
16 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.
17 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.
18 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.
19 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.
20 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.
21 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.
22 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.
23 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 cave-man 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.
24 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.
25 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.
26 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.
27 Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the
cave was a creche, 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.
28 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.
29 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.
30 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.
31 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.
32 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.
33 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
35 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.
36 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.
37 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.
38 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.
39 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.
40 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.
41 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.
42 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.
43 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.
44 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.
45 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 ancestor-worship. 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 self-contradictory, 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.
46 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.
47 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.
48 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.
49 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
50 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.
51 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.
52 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 machine-gum; 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.
53 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.
54 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.
55 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.
56 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.
57 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.
58 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.
59 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.
60 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.
61 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.
62 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.
63 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 modem 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.
64 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.
65 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.
66 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.
67 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 to-day 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.
68 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 far-reaching 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.
69 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.
70 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.
71 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.
72 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.
73 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.
74 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 ballad-monger, 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.
75 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.
76 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.
77 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
78 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.'
79 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.
80 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.
81 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
Hymn-book 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-hanged 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.
82 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.
83 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-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilisation but it is not a religion.
84 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.
85 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.
86 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.
87 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!'
88 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.
89 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.
90 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.
91 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.
92 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.'
93 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.
94 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.
95 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.
96 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.
97 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 corner-stones 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
98 What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be
called the day-dreams. 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.
99 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.
100 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.
101 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.
102 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.
103 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.
104 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.
105 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.
106 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
107 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 make-believe. 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.
108 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.
109 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.
110 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.
111 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.
112 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.
113 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
114 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.
115 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.
116 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.
117 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.
118 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.
119 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.
120 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.
121 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.
122 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.
123 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.
124 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.
125 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.
126 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.
127 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.
128 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.
129 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.
130 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.
131 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.
132 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 top-hats 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.
133 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.
134 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.
135 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.
136 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.
137 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.
138 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.
139 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
140 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.
141 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.
142 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.
143 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?
144 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.
145 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.
146 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.
147 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.
148 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.
149 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.
150 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.
151 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
152 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.
153 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.
154 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.
155 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.
156 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
157 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.
158 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.
159 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?
160 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.
161 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.
162 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.
163 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
164 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.
165 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.
166 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.
167 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.
168 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.
169 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.
170 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.
171 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.
