What is interesting about each generation of men is the things they never thought of. Mandeville and his age never thought of physical science built on detailed data like our own. Macaulay and his age never thought of a creed being the creative soul of a society, giving it an art and culture. Hence they never understood things that were and are still to be found in Italy or Spain, which are still called medieval things, though they are in many ways increasing with modern developments. I know no better way of explaining what they are, and how they affect all our modern thought of religious unity or religious toleration, than by taking a single passage in Macaulay’s famous essay commonly called Gladstone on Church and State. Everybody knows that the great Gladstone, being then a young Tory and High Churchman, had written a book arguing that the State must have a State religion, because it must have a moral relation to other things. To this Macaulay replied with a remarkable retort, which exactly marks out the limits of his social life and its difference from the other. He answers triumphantly by saying that we might as well demand that a stage coach company, or some sort of omnibus company, should have an official religion. An omnibus company, he said, also has moral duties. It is bound to take care of the lives and the limbs of its passengers; bound to treat its employees properly; bound to keep its word in business, and so on. Therefore, he adds with a hearty laugh, we should have an omnibus company calling itself a religious body. He is quite sure that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum; he is quite sure that all the men of his age are laughing with him. And so they were; it is their laughter that exactly marks their limitation — the limit of their power of social imagination and construction.

  I suppose it would have surprised even Macaulay, and still more his readers, to be told that, if a medieval State had an omnibus company, the omnibus company probably would have an official religion. It would probably have a patron saint: an advocate in heaven supposed to be protecting that particular omnibus company and no other. It would quite certainly have religious services invoking blessings on that particular omnibus company and pledging it to those social duties. It would have processions in the street on its feast day, carrying omnibuses garlanded with flowers, with the image of the patron saint of omnibuses carried above torches or lighted candles and perhaps an illuminated blazon of the company motto, whatever it might be — presumably Quod Ab Omnibus. They still do that sort of thing in Italy and Spain; and that is what people mean by calling those countries medieval. In that older sort of society, Continental or medieval, all sorts of other secular bodies besides the State do have a religious side and a religious function. The Church is only established in the State in the same sense in which it is established in the workshop or the market or the factory or the family. They all have separate images, separate legends, separate services and dedications. This seemed utterly fantastic to the men of the nineteenth century, in the social situation of Macaulay. And he thought he had destroyed a proposal merely by showing that it might lead to so preposterous a state of things. Well, there was doubtless much to be said for Macaulay and his mercantile phase of history, but there is one paradox about it which it might be well to note.

  For instance, let us consider amicably such a problem of festive forms. This practice does, in Italy and elsewhere, really do a great deal to brighten human life, to enlarge it, and especially to vary it. Having myself grown up, in my boyhood, under the shadow of Macaulay, I reacted early against the contentment with which his age accepted daily life as prosaic. I used to amuse myself with what seemed like impossible fancies of a poetry attaching to the common objects of daily life; about the pillar-box as a red goblin or the green omnibus as a fairy-ship. But what could only be the fairy-tale of Notting Hill could be any day the reality of Rome. In Rome there easily could be, and quite possibly is, a patron saint of postmen, who would be capable on occasion of thinking the red paint on a post as symbolic as the red robe of a cardinal. What could only be dreamed of in the north is really done in the south. Nor is there the smallest difficulty about applying the poetry to modern and mechanical things. In London also, in my youth, we had begun to put poetry into such things — or at least to put such things into poetry. But it never got very much beyond putting them into little books of poems. In some thin, expensive volume, published by Mr. John Lane or Mr. Elkin Mathews (probably at the poet’s expense), could be found phrases that compared the electric lamps to the beauty of lightning, or the underground railway to the caverns of the under world. But the Italians would as soon stick a statue of St. Michael before a standard lamp as on a stone pedestal. They would think no more of putting up a medallion of the Virgin in the Underground Railway than in the Catacombs. There are, I think, advantages; but there are conditions. And one of the conditions is that people cannot do this unless there really is a single-rooted popular religion, common to the whole community. Your omnibus company will have to do without its garlands and its graven images where the public is divided into different religious sects.

  In Macaulay’s day it was divided into a hundred sects, and therefore its public art was the worst that the world has ever seen. The few statues it did put up, of politicians and philanthropists, with whiskers and trousers complete, are still the eyesores of our streets. Its dress was the ugliest, its school of manners the dullest, its general moral tone the heaviest and most sullen, of all the periods of the past. There was any amount of variety in religious speculation of a sort; but there was less variety in social behaviour than there had ever been before or since. The truth is that men had got so far from each other in spiritual isolation that they could not join even in a joke. They did not feel sufficiently in spiritual agreement, even about omnibuses, to give them a patron saint; their feeling was not really ab omnibus. The problem of religious unity and religious liberty is not an easy one. But it is not irrelevant to remember that fact — that, when men were most divided in doctrine, they all wore the same top-hats, trousers, and mutton-chop whiskers; and that, where men are united in doctrine, they can turn out wearing different clothes: wearing the colours or liveries of all their various trades and occupations, with twenty quaint ceremonies peculiar to each. Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral. But beyond that men are free to choose, not necessarily by looks.

  XXXII. On Jane Austen in the General Election

  THERE was a remark about Jane Austen in connexion with the General Election. We have most of us seen a good many remarks about Jane Austen in connexion with the Flapper or the New Woman or the Modern View of Marriage, or some of those funny things. And those happy few of us who happen to have read Jane Austen have generally come to the conclusion that those who refer to her have not read her. Feminists are, as their name implies, opposed to anything feminine. But some times they disparaged the earlier forms of the feminine, even when they showed qualities commonly called masculine. They talk of Sense and Sensibility without knowing that the moral is on the side of Sense. They talk about fainting. I do not remember any woman fainting in any novel of Jane Austen. There may be an exception that I have forgotten; there is indeed a lady who falls with a great whack off the Cobb at Lyme Regis. But few ladies would do that as a mere affected pose of sentiment. But rarely does a lady dash herself from Shakespeare’s Cliff or the Monument solely to assume a graceful attitude below. Jane Austen herself was certainly not of the fainting sort. Nor were her favourite heroines, like Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennett. The real case against Jane Austen (if anybody is so base and thankless as to want to make a case against her) is not that she is sentimental, but that she is rather cynical. Allowing for the different conventions of subject-matter in the two periods, she was rather like Miss Rose Macaulay. But Miss Rose Macaulay finds herself in a world where fainting-fits would be a very mild form of excitement. There is something very amusing about this appeal to a comparison between the novels of the two periods. The heroine of many a modern novel writhes and reels her way through the story, chews and flings away fifty half-smoked cigarettes, is perpetually stifling a scream or else not stifling it, howling for solitude or howling for society, goading every mood to the verge of madness, seeing red mists before her eyes, seeing green flames dance in her brain, dashing to the druggist and then collapsing on the doorstep of the psycho-analyst; and all the time congratulating herself on her rational superiority to the weak sensibility of Jane Austen.

  I do not say the new woman is like the new neurotic heroine; any more than I think the older woman was like the artificial fainting heroine. But if the critics have a right to argue from the old novels, we have a right to argue from the new. And what I say is true of the novels of some new novelists; and what they say is not true of the novels of Jane Austen. But, as I have said, we are already familiar with this sort of journalistic comment on Jane Austen’s novels. It was always sufficiently shallow and trivial, being based on a vague association, connected with ladies who wore drooping ringlets and were therefore supposed to droop. But the particular example that I observed was more unique and interesting, because it has a special point of application to-day. A writer in a leading daily paper, in the course of a highly optimistic account of the new attitude of woman to men, as it would appear in the General Election, made the remark that a modern girl would see through the insincerity of Mr. Wickham, in Pride and Prejudice, in five minutes.

  Now this is a highly interesting instance of the sort of injustice done to Jane Austen. The crowd (I fear, the considerable crowd) of those who read that newspaper and do not read that author will certainly go away with the idea that Mr. Wickham was some sort of florid and vulgar impostor — like Mr. Mantalini. But Jane Austen was a much more shrewd and solid psychologist than that. She did not make Elizabeth Bennett to be a person easily deceived, and she did not make her deceiver a vulgar impostor. Mr. Wickham was one of those very formidable people who tell lies by telling the truth. He did not merely swagger or sentimentalize or strike attitudes; he simply told the girl, as if reluctantly, that he had been promised a living in the Church by old Mr. Darcy, and that young Mr. Darcy had not carried out the scheme. This was true as far as it went; anybody might have believed it; most people would have believed it, if it were told with modesty and restraint. Mr. Wickham could be trusted to tell it with modesty and restraint. What Mr. Wickham could not be trusted to do was to tell the rest of the story; which made it a very different story. He did not think it necessary to mention that he had misbehaved himself in so flagrant a fashion that no responsible squire could possibly make him a parson; so that the squire had compensated him and he had become an officer in a fashionable regiment instead. Now that is a very quiet, commonplace, everyday sort of incident, and the sort of incident that does really occur. It is a perfectly sound and realistic example of the way in which quite sensible people can be deceived by quite unreliable people. And the novelist knew her business much too well to make the unreliable person obviously unreliable. That sort of quiet and plausible liar does exist; I certainly see no reason to think he has ceased to exist. I think Jane Austen was right in supposing that Elizabeth Bennett might have believed him. I think Jane Austen herself might have believed him. And I am quite certain that the Modern Girl might believe him any day.

  But the rather queer application of all this to the case of the General Election is not without a moral, after all. The optimistic journalist, who gloried in the infallible intuition of the Flappers’ Vote, chose a very unlucky example for his own purpose when he chose the ingenious Mr. Wickham. For Mr. Wickham was, or is, exactly the sort of man who does make a success of political elections. Sometimes he is just a little too successful to succeed. Sometimes he is actually found out, by some accident, doing very dexterous things in the art of finance; and he disappears suddenly, but even then silently. But in the main he is made for Parliamentary life. And he owes his success to two qualities, both exhibited in the novel in which he figures. First, the talent for telling a lie by telling half of the truth. And second, the art of telling a lie not loudly and offensively, but with an appearance of gentlemanly and graceful regret. It was a very fortunate day for professional politicians when some reactionaries began to accuse them of being demagogues. The truth is that they seldom dare to be demagogues; and their greatest success is when they talk with delicacy and reserve like diplomatists. A dictator has to be a demagogue; a man like Mussolini cannot be ashamed to shout. He cannot afford to be a mere gentleman. His whole power depends on convincing the populace that he knows what he wants, and wants it badly. But a politician will be much wiser if he disguises himself as a gentleman. His power consists very largely in getting people to take things lightly. It is in getting them to be content with his sketchy and superficial version of the real state of things. Nothing tends more happily to this result than the shining qualities of Mr. Wickham; good manners and good nature and a light touch. All sorts of answers are given by Ministers to questions asked in Parliament, which could only be delivered in this way. If such palpable nonsense were thundered by an orator, or shouted by a demagogue, or in any way made striking and decisive, even the House of Commons would rise in riot or roar with laughter. Nonsense so nonsensical as that can only be uttered in the tones of a sensible man.

  So vividly do I see Mr. Wickham as a politician that I feel inclined to rewrite the whole of Pride and Prejudice to suit the politics of to-day. It would be amusing to send the Bennett girls rushing round to canvass: Elizabeth with amusement, and Jane with dignified reluctance. As for Lydia, she would be a great success in modern politics. But her husband would be the greatest success of all; and he might become a Cabinet Minister while poor old Darcy was sulking in the provinces, a decent, truthful, honourable Diehard, cursing the taxes and swearing the country was going to the dogs — and especially to the puppies.

  XXXIII. On Dictatorships

  I DO not object to men denouncing the Dictator ships that are everywhere springing up in Europe, as in the last instance in Serbia. But I do object to men declining even to inquire what it is they denounce.

  Everybody knows that the movement for a Dictatorship began among the Italians, though hardly anybody knows why. It began where so many other things have begun — in the centre of what is sometimes called the Latin civilization. Out of that Columbus came to discover America. Out of that Napoleon came to rediscover Europe. For, though all sorts of sense and nonsense have been talked for and against Napoleon, the main thing about him was this: that, just after the age when nations had grown most exclusively national, he realized that there really is or could be one nation as large as the Roman Empire. Perhaps the most profound of his many epigrams was the statement that all European wars are civil wars. But there is another side to the truth, and Napoleon was mistaken in not allowing enough for the nationalism of Spain and of England. And this fair and balanced view of the case is very relevant to the real question about Mussolini and the new Dictators.

  I think that the fair way of putting it would be something like this. It has repeatedly happened in Europe, when abuses of a stale system began to accumulate, that the men of the north and the men of the south have dealt with the subject differently. The names I give them are not exact, but they cause less confusion than talking about Teutons and Latins, let alone the hundred perils of talking about Protestants and Catholics. The more enlightened of the northerners, especially their kings and aristocracies, have generally been quite aware of the decadence and danger. But they have believed, rightly or wrongly, in delay and deliberation, and an attempt to graft the new things on to the old. Whether they were wise or no, things grew worse, and they went on thinking about how things might be made better. And then, before they had finished their wiser deliberations, if they were wiser, something happened. There came promptly and perhaps prematurely, but certainly with stunning effect, the blow of the Latins. We may say that Latins are too impatient to wait. We may also say that Latins are too intelligent to wobble. But anyhow, that is what happened in the French Revolution and that is what has happened in the Fascist Revolution.

  At the end of the eighteenth century every rational person knew that a great many old things would have to be mended or ended. The despots knew it better than most people. Frederick of Prussia, Joseph of Austria, Catherine the Tsaritsa of the Russians, came afterwards to stand in some ways for the reaction; but they were all originally in favour of the reform. The aristocracy, which in England took the place of a despot, knew it equally well. The wisest Whigs compromised with the American democracy and began to talk about reforming the English representation. But, when all was said and done, it was mostly compromise when it was not mostly talk. I use the expression ‘when all was said and done’, but not very much was done, compared with what was said. And then, while this was going on, with whatever proportions of progress and procrastination, the news came like a thunderclap: the Man of the South had struck. The men from Marseilles had dragged their guns to Paris, roaring their imperishable song; the Bastille had fallen, and the mightiest of Christian monarchies was suddenly no more. That is how the thing happened. You may say that the northern moderates, left to themselves, would have done better. You may say that the northern moderates, left to themselves, would have done nothing. But anyhow, they were not left to themselves, because the hot and logical race, the men of the Mediterranean, would endure nonsense no more.