But Mr. Gladstone (of the Oxford Movement) could not join in this simple German triumph over the disaster and disgrace that had at last destroyed the Eternal City. In those deep tones of reproach he could command so well, he rebuked the Prince for his insensibility to this blasting and blackening of a name that had meant so much in history; no Christian, he felt, could be insensible to the utter downfall of so large a section of the Christian world. He meant it. He was tremendously upset about it. He returned to the subject afterwards; repeatedly imploring Prince Albert to drop at least one tear upon the ruins of St. Peter’s, now lying as desolate as Stonehenge.

  But the Prince also was firm; and remained in his somewhat rare state of high spirits over the news that the unduly protracted business was finished; and the Pope had done himself in at last.

  And all this was because — of what? Because one more crown had been added to that tower of crowns that crowd after crowd, city after city, nation after nation, age after age, have reared higher and higher on the image which is of all others most strongly based and founded and built, as regards this earth, in the affection of the universal people. And Prince Albert, with his unselfish labours for the education of the working classes, and Gladstone, with his confident appeal to the great heart of the people, understood so little of what that crown and image really meant to millions of ordinary poor people, in all the countrysides and cities of half the world, that they actually expected that it would be dethroned like a tyranny, for this last toppling insolence in the demands of a tyrant.

  The one extraordinary thing on which these extraordinary men agreed, it seems, was that the decision would be unpopular. ... One of Belloc’s Ballades had a refrain chiefly remembered by the Envoi, which ran:

  Prince, is it true that when you met the Czar You said that English people think it low To coax to life a half-extinct cigar? Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!

  Anyhow, the one assumption shared by these admirable public men seems to have been wrong somewhere. Apple-women did not rush madly out of church; seamstresses in garrets did not dash their little images of Mary to the ground, on learning that she was named Immaculate.

  Four years after these potentates had their regrettable difference, while the Bishop still frowned and the parish priest feared to believe, little knots of poor peasants began to gather round a strange starved child before a crack in the rocks, from whence was to spring a strange stream and almost a new city; the rocks she had heard resound with a voice crying, “I am the Immaculate Conception. . . .”

  “Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!”

  LAUGHTER

  If we in any sense propose for discussion the subject of Laughter, we shall normally notice that our neighbours receive it in one of two ways. Either they laugh, which is perhaps the best thing they could do with a proposal for the analysis of laughter; since practice is better than precept; and anyone sitting down, as I do here, to write a whole article on this subject is a very proper object for the derision of mankind. But if they have sense enough to laugh, they will also probably have sense enough to go away; the colloquy will be cut short and exhibit only the kind of wit which is identified with brevity.

  If, on the other hand, we mention Laughter to them and they do not laugh, what they always do is this; to twist their silly faces into expressions of ferocious gravity and gloom and begin to talk about Primitive Psychology, and the automatic reflexes of Pithecanthropus; and after a month or two of this cheery little chat, they practically always bring out the result (which is an unmistakable sign and a symptom of their dying minds) that “laughter is, after all, founded on some form of the instinct of cruelty”. The whole being a neat and polished exposition of the great modern habit of being as unscientific as possible in the use of scientific words. They have not yet proved that there is any instinct of cruelty, any more than there is an instinct of chewing glass. Some lunatics do chew glass; even some eminent men have done it; I think the famous Sir Richard Grenville had the habit. Some men have a perversion called cruelty; but if primitive men develop a talent for humour from a perversion of cruelty, it is quite as difficult to explain how they developed the perversion as how they developed the talent. We might as well explain the beginning of poetry by saying that Pithecanthropus was addicted to cocaine. The whole thing is one of those impudent insinuations of popular science, quite unsupported by serious science, but having a very strong moral or anti-moral motive; to suggest by innumerable irresponsible hints that human beings owe everything to semi-human beings called primitive men; and that these were utterly degraded creatures, dwelling in a darkness of hatred and fear.

  On the face of it, all this theory of laughter is laughable. Anybody can make a child laugh by some simple inversion or incongruity; such as putting spectacles on the teddy bear. Are we asked to believe that a dark troglodyte stirs in the cave of the infant’s skull, and takes pleasure in torturing the teddy bear with unfamiliar optical conditions; or fiendishly rejoices in the agony of an aged uncle when temporarily deprived of his goggles? The sort of literature at which children really laugh is the simplest sort of nonsense like “the cow jumped over the moon”. Are we to suppose children lie awake and laugh to think of the long and chilly journey of the lost quadruped, in the cold altitudes wholly unsuited to warm-blooded mammals? It is obvious that the mind is amused with incongruity, when there is no direct or indirect idea of discomfort. Why it is amused with incongruity is indeed a very deep question, and we shall get no further with such questions until we adopt a totally different attitude to the whole story of man; until we have the patience to respect a great many of the mysteries as mysteries, and wait for an explanation which really explains; instead of jumping at any explanation that merely explains away. But I suspect it will be found connected with the idea of human dignity rather than indignity; and rather related to the strangeness of man on this strange earth, than to the mere dull brutalities connecting him with the dull mud.

  It is not surprising that an age exhibiting this monstrous spectacle, of men being sombre and pessimistic about the origin of Laughter, should also exhibit some loss of the simpler sort of laughter in its literature and art. And I fancy even those who might claim that we produce more humour would admit that we produce less laughter. But the poison of the anti-human heresy I have mentioned works back in a curious fashion into the practice of those who have heard the theory; and the ideas of cause and effect act and react on each other. It may be that only in a dry age could pedants be found to trace back all mirth to malignity; it may be that the atmospheric suggestion of that origin has made the mirth less mirthful, and more dry if not more malignant. But certainly, at the best, the tendency of recent culture has been to tolerate the smile but discourage the laugh. There are three differences involved here. First, that the smile can unobtrusively turn into the sneer; second, that the smile is always individual and even secretive (especially if it is a little mad), while the laugh can be social and gregarious, and is perhaps the one genuine surviving form of the General Will; and third, that laughing lays itself open to criticism, is innocent and unguarded, has the sort of humanity which has always something of humility. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticising the men who laugh. We may read in any current novel, “Grigsby stroked his chin and smiled a rather superior smile.” We seldom read, even in a novel, “Grigsby flung back his head and howled at the ceiling with a slightly superior laugh.” The moment Grigsby abandons himself so far as to laugh he has lost something of that perfect superiority of the Grigsbys, for which they are famous in fashionable circles, and for which so many of their fellow-creatures would love to kick them, as old Weller kicked Mr. Stiggins. For it is a complete mistake to suppose that there is less cruelty since we abandoned the good old custom of kicking Mr. Stiggins. The only difference is that it is Mr. Grigsby who is allowed to be cruel; because of the lack of simpler and humbler men to enjoy the innocent pleasure of kicking him. In the mind of Mr. Grigsby, at that exquisite moment when he smiles, there is infinitely more cruelty, in the sense of mere malice, than there was in the mind of Weller when he applied the boot, or Dickens when he wrote the book. The chief mark of the most modern change in the world is that milder social manners do not go with warmer social feelings. The chief fact we have to face today is the absence of even that amount of democratic comradeship which was involved in coarse laughter or merely conventional ridicule. The men of the older fellowship may have sometimes unjustly disliked a scapegoat or an alien, but they liked each other much more than a good many literary men now like each other. It is obvious in a thousand ways that there was more communal sentiment, or if you will sentimentality, in the camps where Bret Harte’s ruffians brandished bowie-knives and revolvers, or in the public-house cellar where Mr. Bardell was knocked on the head with a quart pot, than in many a modern intellectual circle in which the soul is at last finally isolated, like the heads in hell held apart in their rings of ice. Therefore, in this modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favour of laughing. Laughter has something in it in common with the ancient winds of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes men forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves; something (as the common phrase goes about a joke) that they cannot resist. The saint is he who enjoys good things and refuses them. The prig is he who despises good things and enjoys them. But when he hears a really good thing, which he really enjoys, then he can no longer despise it. On that awful and apocalyptic occasion, he does not smile; he laughs.

  TALES FROM TOLSTOI

  In one sense there is a real and actual law of progress by which we grow simpler as we grow more civilised, for the more we scan and study the phenomena around us the more they tend to unify themselves with the power behind them, and the whole of existence thus seen for the first time seems something of an entirely new shape and colour, a fresh and surprising thing. And all the great writers of our time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-establish communication with the elemental or, as it is sometimes more roughly and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the return to nature consists in drinking no wine ; some think that it consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into very ineffectual British War Office bayonets.

  It is natural, according to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionists, to kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoi by seeing how much he can reject.

  Now, this heroic desire to return to nature is, of course, in some respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but characteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It is impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail in the sense that it is vitally important if it is to discharge its real duty that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see nature, especially our own nature, face to face is a folly; it is even a blasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy tale who should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would find his tail growing like a tree in the meadow at the end of the world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search of nature when seen from the outside looks very like the gyrations of the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity, much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think that she is heeding us least. “Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,” said the Hebrew poets. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a man’s back that the spirit of nature hides.

  It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoi. We feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the pomp and sumptuousness of the world’s history was simple in the truest sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.

  King Solomon brought merchant men Because of his desire With peacocks, apes and ivory, From Tarshish unto Tyre.

  But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a part of his folly — I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoi, we feel, would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at “Solomon in all his glory”. With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step further. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the shameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field.

  Any collection of Tales from Tolstoi is calculated to draw particular attention to this ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoi’s work. In one sense, and that the deepest sense, the work of Tolstoi is, of course, a genuine and noble appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is pretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is that an artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique — all the part of his work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real moral of Tolstoi comes out constantly in his stories, the great moral which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all the tales, the folklore simplicity with which “a man or a woman” are spoken of without further identification, the love — one might almost say the lust — for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood, and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man — these influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoi, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoi has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one’s corner of a great and good man.

  It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoi the great artist with Tolstoi the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of their pitiful pleasures from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.

  THE NEW CASE FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS

  Any amount of nonsense has been talked about the need of novelty, and in that sense there is nothing particularly meritorious about being modern. A man who seriously describes his creed as Modernism might just as well invent a creed called Mondayism, meaning that he puts special faith in the fancies that occurred to him on Monday; or a creed called Morningism, meaning that he believed in the thoughts that occurred to him in the morning but not in the afternoon.

  Modernity is only the moment of time in which we happen to find ourselves, and nobody who thinks will suppose that it is bound to be superior, either to the time that comes after it or to the time that went before. But in a relative and rational sense we may congratulate ourselves on knowing the news of the moment, and having realised recent facts or discoveries that some people still ignore.