XXI. On Quacks in the Home

  CAN anything be done to dam, not to say damn, the deluge of Quackery that is now being poured out everywhere to inform what is called the ignorance of the democracy? As the term implies, it is not only democracy that is ignorant. Those who would inform it are more ignorant still, or they would not invariably say the democracy when they mean the demos. Democracy does not mean the populace, or even the people; it means government by the people. Democracy is a very noble thing, and it does not exist — at any rate at present. Demos is a very jolly thing in its way, especially when it does all the things that ideal democrats generally abuse it for doing, such as drinking, shouting, and going to the Derby. But, what ever else it is doing, it is not ruling: it is not teaching, but being taught. And there might be a reasonable ease for its being taught, were it not for the unfortunate fact that it is being taught tosh. Which brings me back, after this parenthesis on the word democracy, to the more solemn and sacred subject of quackery.

  Quackery is false science; it is everywhere apparent in cheap and popular science; and the chief mark of it is that men who begin by boasting that they have cast away all dogmas go on to be incessantly, impudently, and quite irrationally dogmatic. Let any one run his eye over any average newspaper or popular magazine, and note the number of positive assertions made in the name of popular science, without the least pretence of scientific proof, or even of any adequate scientific authority. It is all the worse because the dogmas are generally concerned with domes tic and very delicate human relations; with heredity and home environment; and everything that can be coloured by the pompous and pretentious polysyllables of Psychology and Education. At least many of the old dogmas, right or wrong, were concerned with cherubim and seraphim, with lost spirits and beatified souls; but these dogmas always directly attack fathers and wives and children, without offering either credentials or evidence. The general rule is that nothing must be accepted on any ancient or admitted authority, but everything must be accepted on any new or nameless authority, or accepted even more eagerly on no authority at all. It is quite satisfactory, of course, if any nobody says in any newspaper: ‘Dr. Binns, of Buffalo, has told us that, while aunts may be fond of nephews, great-aunts always have an instinctive hatred and aversion both for nephews and nieces.’ But it is even more convincing than that if the information is anonymous in every way, and the writer merely states: ‘ Recent science has shown that second cousins are naturally antagonistic, but that in second cousins once removed, the antagonism is sometimes introverted into suicidal mania. Where all these statements come from nobody knows. Where they all go to everybody ought to know, since they go to everybody. But it is in practice very difficult to discover what becomes of them, and whether they are really treated as wisdom or waste paper. On the whole, I fear it is more likely that everybody believes them than that anybody takes the trouble to check them.

  This evil is wilder in America, but I doubt if it is worse in America. It is scattered all over our own Press and public speech, and is all the more insidious because it is not so much associated with the conspicuous figures of picturesque charlatans and fantastic prophets, such as strut in strange plumage about the plains of the West. Anyhow, it is scattered so widely both here and there that the difficulty is to pick up any adequate example. For the triviality of one specimen does not convey the tremendous and mountainous multitude of specimens. Here is one example, however, which I find in a periodical of considerable intellectual pretensions, to judge by its title. Like most of these professed organs of thought, it is marked by a complete incapacity for any precision in thinking. But I mention it, not because it is worse than the rest, but because it is representative of the rest and all the rest are no better. The instructor informs us that there can be between parent and child a negative transference (the intense italics arc his), which seems to mean, not merely that the child will hate the parent, but that the child will love somebody who is the opposite of the hated parent. ‘Thus a child who is treated coldly by his mother will come to reject all people like his mother and seek for her opposite. We will say the mother is good, honest, moral, even pious. The boy will gravitate to some one crooked, immoral, or even wicked, in short, his mother’s goodness may send him to the devil, though all the time she may be wondering why her excellent precepts, her discipline, her goodness are failing to develop like traits in her son.’

  You will note the utter chaos of terminology and definition, even in these few lines. Some of us, to begin with, might hesitate to insist on the goodness of a mother who treated a child coldly. But what is meant by the mother being good, as distinct from her being moral? What is meant by the mother’s mysterious rival being immoral, as distinct from being wicked? And what in the name of goodness (or morality) is meant by the mysterious word ‘even’, which is reserved only for wickedness and for piety? The transference of these thoughts, from writer to reader, is a very negative transference indeed. However, the writer, having said that the mother’s goodness, which seems to be the same as her coldness, may send the boy to the devil, goes on to say that it may be a good thing that he should go to the devil; in which case it was presumably a good thing that the mother should be cold. Revolt, we are told, sometimes leads to new ways of life, and it may be highly satisfactory that the boy should seek for the opposite of his mother. But what is the opposite of your mother? As a point of logic, it seems rather subtle; nor does the logician here instructing us give us very much help. ‘A rebel boy may, of course, become, like the proverbial minister’s son, a good-for-naught or a crook; on the other hand, a boy like Balzac who hated his practical father, became a great novelist — his father’s opposite. Or in a different way, Beethoven, whose father was a poor fiddler, a drunkard and ne’er-do-well, became one of the great composers of the world, doggedly determined to protect his mother and be as unlike his father as possible.’ If that was his object, we can hardly say that he succeeded very well. I am not quite sure what is the opposite of a poor fiddler, but certainly it is not a great composer. There may be many a great composer who has been a poor fiddler, and many a poor fiddler who may yet be a great composer. The same mysterious use of the word ‘opposite’ darkens the other instance given from the career of Balzac. I cannot understand why, in logic, a great novelist is the exact contrary of a practical father. I do not see why any child may not happen to rejoice in the possession of a great practical novelist-father. The children of Sir Walter Scott, for instance, to a great extent did so, despite the accident which ruined his later fortunes. But it is not only false in the typical case of Scott, it is far from true even in the actual case of Balzac. Balzac had a decidedly ‘practical’ side to him; he was not only busy, but business-like, in his own way; and, anyhow, all these crude contrasts about complex characters are all nonsense. Balzac did not become a great novelist because his father had annoyed him with practicality; he became a great novelist because he was a great man. Beethoven did not succeed because his father drank; it is much more likely that he was a composer for the same reason that made his father a fiddler. These are only a few random examples of these random statements which are thrown about everywhere, that the people may learn Science from men who have never learnt Logic. Now that everybody is talking about the public being informed of this or that, is there any way of stopping the public being misinformed in this endless and exuberant fashion?

  XXII. On a Generally Accepted Mistake

  THE current cant, which is a cant against cant, has produced a crop of modern proverbs, or phrases, which everybody repeats for the hundredth time and nobody examines for the first time, or they would instantly be found to be false. A typical case is that which we have all heard again and again in some such form as this: ‘In every age people have thought their own time prosaic and only the past poetical. If you think the medieval or any other period picturesque, that is only the glamour of antiquity; men in those days felt about them as you do about these days. Their costumes and customs were as dull and trivial to them as yours are to you.’ The maxim appeals in many ways to the modern mind; it merges something with something else; it levels downwards; it contradicts the claims of chivalry and religious devotion; it is comforting and it is entirely untrue.

  Mr. Rudyard Kipling, always the poet of this popular modernity, has summarized the notion admirably in a poem about Romance being at all times actually in the present and apparently in the past — a poem beginning, I think:

  ‘Farewell, Romance,’ the cavemen cried,

  With bone and flint he went away.

  I need hardly say that there is not a grain of anything remotely resembling evidence that the cavemen ever cried anything of the sort. It is one of the thousand things which are said about them because there is no evidence either way. But there are tons of evidence that the earliest men whose motives we can follow regarded their own rituals and traditions as reasonably dignified. There have been periods in which poets and satirists have said that society was degenerating through luxury or laxity, and many periods in which they were perfectly right in saying so. There have been some periods — not very many — in which men have been intensely interested in some special period of the past. So the men of the Renaissance vaguely regarded antiquity as a heroic age. But they did not regard their own as a prosaic age. Shakespeare might be thrilled by Plutarch’s tales of great men in togas and tunics; but that did not prevent him from conceiving Hamlet as an ordinary Elizabethan gentleman, fencing with rapier and dagger, wearing probably a ruff and almost certainly a beard. Every modern man, when he first heard of Hamlet in modern dress, felt a faint shiver of doubt; even if he was sympathetic, he feared that it might be comic. But Shakespeare probably did conceive Hamlet in modern dress — in his modern dress. And there is nothing to show that he thought it in the least comic.

  The truth is that no other age except the nineteenth century (and perhaps our little bit of the twentieth) ever did regard its own dress and habits as ugly and undignified. The thing can be tested in a hundred ways, and one is even tolerably familiar. Sensational French artists, in the nineteenth century, deliberately and defiantly painted pictures from the Gospel in modern dress, with Christ standing among men in trousers and top-hats. It was purposely done to ‘shock’ the Salon; needless to say, it would have been far too shocking for the Royal Academy. Yet it was not the first time the thing had been done. It was only the first time it had been thought shocking. There is not a single one of the previous epochs of Christian art, from the stiffest primitive Byzantine to the last realism of the Venetians or Dutch, when artists had not painted the Gospel scenes with the dress and habits of their own time. It is not, in plain fact, a question of why men think the present fashion ugly and the past fashion beautiful. It is a question of why they think this of trousers and top-hats, when they did not think it of trunk-hose or togas or tunics. Many subtle explanations might be suggested; but I incline myself to suspect that the dark secret can, after all, be stated more simply. Might I tentatively suggest that top-hats and trousers give us this uncanny impression of ugliness because they are ugly? Might I suggest that the mercantile nineteenth century thought itself hideous because it was hideous? — and the perception did credit to its acumen and even to its humility.

  In short, there was a moment in the middle of the nineteenth century which was the midnight of artistic instinct, just as there was a moment about the middle of the ninth century which was the midnight of law and organization. It was blackest in a commercial country like England, which was only saved by treating itself as comic because it could not treat itself as dignified. It produced, for instance, the figure of the policeman, who was so comic that he had to be put at once into a pantomime, because he could not be put into a pageant. But almost any other age or country would have clad and armed the city guard so as to be an ornament to any pageant. Our age was ugly and undignified; our nation was redeemed by the national sense of humour that at least would not pretend to be dignified. The things of that period are all stamped with the insignia of indignity. It is not true that this is affected by it being a past or a present period. Mr. Kipling himself in the poem quoted, gave the case away by saying that ‘Romance brought up the nine-fifteen’, implying that the clerks in the train did not yet realize their own romance. But since that was written steam has grown old compared to petrol, as stage-coaches grew old compared to steam. Yet taking a third-class ticket at Euston Station is not much more wildly poetic now than it was when railways ruled the land. Steam may grow stale, but it does not grow specially poetical. If the old coach was faintly poetical, it was because a faint tradition of quite another sort lingered with the ancient echoes of the horse and of the horn. If the railway carriage does not turn into a romantic ruin before our eyes, it is because there lingers in it a nameless something of the nineteenth century: something that was proud of being prosaic and rigidly refuses to be anything else. It is the stamp of that particularly barbarous interlude: the only age in history when men dared not put the Twelve Apostles in modern dress.

  This particular matter, in which the medieval world differed from the modern, must be clearly understood to start with, for instance, as one of the conditions governing The Canterbury Tales. The creative imagination of Chaucer could do much; it could do much more than it is commonly credited with doing; but it could hardly have bridged the abyss between the sublime and the ridiculous which yawned in the imagination of a man of the nineteenth century. Chaucer did not regard his own age as comic and commonplace. He regarded some people in it as comic, and some, perhaps, as commonplace; but the clothes and externals of these people could be used just as easily to express what was most imaginative and ideal. The Knight as described, might have figured in any medieval picture as kneeling all clad in iron on one side of an enthroned Virgin and Child; his crusading spirit belongs altogether to that more remote region of delicate distances and golden clouds. But he is not out of the picture of The Canterbury Tales, nor of any medieval picture in which there might be grotesque dwarfs or gambolling dogs. But he would be out of the picture called ‘The Derby Day’, by Frith. That picture contains considerable variety; but it does not contain the Knight of The Canterbury Tales. For ‘The Derby Day’ was painted at that midnight moment of art when even the artist did not think that the world he saw was artistic. This unnatural sense of ugliness is so much our immediate inheritance that there are ordinary words that have never recovered from it. The very word ‘hat’ has a hazy air of farce about it; mentioned by itself it suggests first the hat of Charlie Chaplin or the admirable song of ‘Where Did You Get that Hat?’ The first lesson in medievalism is to understand that Chaucer did not feel about the word ‘hood’ as we do about the word ‘hat’. He knew there were knavish people who carried two faces under one hood; but the one face might be that of Friar Francis as well as of Friar Tuck. A halo round a hood did not seem queer, like a halo round a hat, for those who think only of modern hats. There had been plenty of preposterous fashions among the rich in Chaucer’s time, but their very limitations to the rich had left the landscape and colour-scheme of medievalism more or less what it is in the simplest medieval pictures. There was preposterous costume in that age, but he did not think all costume preposterous because it was of that age. He was as ready to be humorous in verse as any serious poet who ever lived, but his head was not filled with an endless, derisive echo of ‘Where Did You Get that Hood?’

  XXIII. On the Later Portions of Poems

  SOMETIMES I have a dark suspicion that there are many poems, and perhaps prose competitions also, which people think they know when they know only the first few lines. Possibly this might explain the sinister haste and eagerness with which the great Epic Poets cram into the first few lines a statement of the whole story, which they intend to tell in the ensuing twelve books. They always begin with a summary of this kind, perhaps because they have a craven fear that many of their readers will not read any more. Everybody knows the first three lines of Paradise Lost:

  Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit

  Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

  Brought death into the world and all our woe.

  But I strongly suspect that there is a sudden and enormous falling off in the numbers of those who could quote the fourth line. And Milton may himself have paused at that point, and heaved a sigh of relief, to think that he had got the whole story packed pretty thoroughly into the three lines, even if all his readers refused to read him any more. He had successfully informed the public of the incident called ‘The Fall of Man’, had explained its connexion with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and attached to it all the results of the doctrine of Original Sin. He did not, however, stop here, and leave this little trifle as a sort of epigram or short lyric. He went on for quite a long time; and it must have been with a sense of relief, not unmingled with fatigue, that he reached at last that quiet and beautiful ending, and saw the exiles, hand in hand, with faltering steps and slow, through Eden take their solitary way. It is perhaps an advantage to the epic poets that their story, as a rule, is already more or less known to the public; just as a considerable number of people have heard the story of Adam and Eve. All adventure stories, in Stevenson’s phrase, begin to end well; and in the greatest of adventure stories Ulysses is obviously meant to get home at last; nor are there many people who need to read to the end of the Iliad to find out what happened to Hector. In the case of longer and more elaborate, not to say more entangled, poems, like those of Ariosto and Spenser, it is legitimate to doubt whether everybody does know what happened to anybody. Lord Macaulay was the most persistent of readers, with the most perfect of memories; yet it is admitted that he came a cropper, or fell out of the race, in the forests of the Faërie Queene. He said that few readers were in at the death of the Blatant Beast, and if he had been there himself he would have known that the Beast does not even die. But while this lack of final perseverance is common in the case of the complicated epics, and not uncommon in that of the simpler epics, it may seem almost cynical to suggest that it is sometimes true even of shorter poems. It seems heartless to suggest that somebody may have fainted before he got to the end of ‘We Are Seven’. It is awful to think that some critic may have been so fastidious as to be unable to support more than two lines of ‘The Village Blacksmith’. And yet I fancy there are cases in which something like this is true; and I came across one recently, or rather I only recently fancied that I saw the true meaning of it.