Now, if there is one thing of which I have been certain since my boyhood, and grow more certain as I advance in age, it is that nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze. All this talk of waiting for experiences in order to write is simply a confession of incapacity to experience anything. It is a confession of never having felt the big facts in such experiences as babyhood and the baby. A paralytic of this deaf-and-dumb description imagines he can be healed in strange waters or after strange wanderings; and announces himself ready to drink poisons, that they may stimulate him like drugs. But it is futile for him to suppose that this sort of quackery will teach him how to be a writer, for he has been from the first admittedly blind to everything that is worth writing about. He will find nothing in the wilderness but the broken shards or ruins of what should have been sacred in his own home; and if he can really make nothing of the second he will certainly make nothing of the first. The whole theory rests on a ridiculous confusion by which it is supposed that certain primary principles or relations will become interesting when they are damaged, but are bound to be depressing when they are intact. None of those who are perpetually suggesting this view ever states it thus plainly; for they are incapable of making plain statements, just as they are incapable of feeling plain things. But the point they have to prove, if they really want their Experience Philosophy accepted by those who do not care for catchwords, is that the high perils, pleasures, and creative joys of life do not occur on the high road of life, but only in certain crooked and rambling by-paths made entirely by people who have lost their way. As yet they have not even begun to prove it; and in any case, and in every sense, it could be disproved by a baby.

  XXXI. On Sightseeing

  I HAVE often done my best to consider, in various aspects, what is really the matter with Sightseeing. Or rather, I hope, I have done my best to consider what is the matter with me, when I find myself faintly fatigued by Sightseeing. For it is always wiser to consider not so much why a thing is not enjoyable, as why we ourselves do not enjoy it. In the case of Sightseeing, I have only got so far as to be quite certain that the fault is not in the Sights and is not in the Sightseers. This would seem to drive the speculative philosopher back upon the dreadful and shocking conclusion that the fault is entirely in me. But, before accepting so destructive a deduction, I think there are some further modifications to be made and some further distinctions to be drawn.

  The mere fact that a mob is going to see a monument ought not in itself to depress any imaginative and sympathetic mind. On the contrary, such a mind ought to perceive that there is something of the same mystery or majesty in the mob as in the monument. It is a weakness to fail in feeling that a statue standing on a pedestal above a street, the statue of a hero, carved by an artist, for the honour and glory of a city, is, so far as it goes, a marvellous and impressive work of man. But it is far more of a weakness to fail in feeling that a hundred statues walking about the street, alive with the miracle of a mysterious vitality, are a marvellous and impressive work of God. In so far as that ultimate argument affects the matter, the sightseer might almost as well travel to see the sightseers as to see the sights. There are, of course, vulgar and repulsive sightseers. There are, for that matter, vulgar and repulsive statues. But this cannot be a complete excuse for my own lamentable coldness; for I have felt it creeping over me in the presence of the most earnest and refined sightseers, engaged in inspecting the most classical and correct statues. Indeed (if I must make the disgraceful confession in the interests of intellectual discovery), I will own that I have felt this mysterious wave of weariness pass over me rather more often when the elegant and distinguished Archdeacon was explaining the tombs to the Guild of Golden Thoughts than when an ordinary shouting showman was showing them to a jolly rabble of trippers with beer bottles and concertinas. I am very much troubled with this unnatural insensibility of mind; and I have made many attempts, none of them quite successful, to trace my mental malady to its origin. But I am not sure that some hint of the truth may not be found in the first popular example that I gave — the example of a statue standing in a street.

  Now, men have stuck up statues in streets as part of the general and ancient instinct of popular monumental art, which they exhibited in erecting pillars, building pyramids, making monoliths and obelisks, and such things, from the beginning of the world. And the conception may be broadly stated thus — that this sort of sight was meant for two different kinds of sightseers. First, the monument was meant to be seen accidentally; it was actually set up purposely in order to be seen accidentally. In other words, a striking tower on a hill, an arresting statue on a pedestal, a remarkable relief over an archway, or any other piece of public art, was intended for the traveller, and even especially for the chance traveller. It was meant for the passer-by, perhaps in the hope that he would not merely pass by; perhaps in the hope that he would pause, and possibly even meditate. But he would be meditating not only on something that he had never seen before, but on something that he had never expected to see. The statue would almost spring out upon him like a stage brigand. The archway would arrest him and almost bar his path like a barricade. He would suddenly see the high tower like a sort of signal; like a rocket suddenly sent up to convey a message, and almost a warning. This is the way in which many popular monuments have been seen; and this, some may agree with me in thinking, is pretty much the best way to see them. No man will ever forget the sights he really saw when he was not a sightseer. Every man remembers the thing that struck him like the thunderbolt of an instant, though it had stood there waiting for him as the memorial of an aeon. But, whether or no this be the best way of treating popular memorials, it is not the only way, and certainly has not been the only popular way. Historic relics, as a whole, have been treated differently in history as a whole. But, in history as a whole, the other way of seeing such sights was not what we commonly call sightseeing.

  We might put the point this way: that the two ways of visiting the statue or the shrine were the way of the Traveller and the way of the Pilgrim. But the way of the Pilgrim almost always involved the way of the Pilgrimage. It was a ritual or ceremonial way: the way of a procession which had indeed come to see that shrine, but had not come to see anything else. The pilgrim does not feel, as the tourist does often quite naturally feel, that he has had his tour interrupted by something that does not happen to interest him. The pilgrimage must interest him, or he would never have been a pilgrim. He knows exactly what he wants to do; and, what is perhaps even more valuable, he knows for certain when he has done it. He cannot be dragged on from one thing to another; from one thing that interests him mildly to another thing that bores him stiff. He has undertaken a certain expedition with a certain logical end: an end both in the sense of a purpose and in the sense of a termination. For a certain mystical reason of his own he wanted to visit a certain monument or shrine; and, now lie has visited it, he is free to visit the nearest public-house or any other place he pleases.

  But all this is altered, because we have passed from the age of monuments to the age of museums. We have been afflicted with the modern idea of collecting all sorts of totally different things, with totally different types of interest, including a good many of no apparent interest at all, and stuffing them all into one building, that the stranger may stray among a hundred distracting monuments or the pilgrim be lost among a hundred hostile shrines. When the traveller saw the statue of the hero, he did not see written on the pedestal: ‘This way to the Collection of Tropical Fungi’, in which he possibly felt no interest at all. When the pilgrim found his way to the shrine, he did not find that the priest was eagerly waving him on to a glass case filled with the specimens of the local earthworms. Fungi and earthworms may be, and indeed are, exceedingly interesting things in themselves; but they are not things which men seek in the same mood which sends them to look at the statues of heroes or the shrines of saints. With the establishment of that entirely modern thing, the Museum, we have a new conception, which, like so many modern conceptions, is based on a blunder in psychology and a blindness to the true interests of culture. The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal. It is meant for the mere Sightseer, the man who must see all the sights.

  Of course, I am only speaking of this kind of sight as it affects this kind of sightseer. I do not deny that museums and galleries and other collections serve a more serious purpose for specialists who can select special things. But the modern popular practice of which I complain is bad, not because it is popular, but because it is modern. It was not made by any of the ancestral instincts of mankind; either the instinct that erected the crucifix by the wayside, to arrest the wayfarer, or the instinct that erected the crucifix in the cathedral to be the goal of the worshipper. It is not a product of popular imagination, but of what is called popular education; the cold and compulsory culture which is not, and never will be, popular.

  XXXII. On Condiments and Conduct

  I HAVE always wondered why there is no New Religion forbidding the use of salt and pepper; not to mention the more monstrous case of mustard. I cannot understand how it is that no Moral Movement, no deeper stirring of social consciousness, no wave of higher citizenship and devotion to the ideal of Service, has appeared to start some people interfering with other people in the use of condiments — of all those pungent luxuries with which an effete and self-indulgent civilization has hitherto complicated its meals; taking salt with eggs, mustard with beef, pepper with mutton, and all sorts of strange, unnatural sauces with everything else. Surely there ought to be a Crusade against these things, since a Crusade is now commonly held to mean an attack upon some habit of Christian civilization. Very little would be needed to set the Puritans, who are above all Manicheans, denouncing these things exactly as they now denounce beer or tobacco, and are, indeed, already beginning to denounce coffee and tea. In contradiction of the advertisement recently so common, we should see the town plastered with the words ‘Join the No-Mustard Club’. By a slight emendation of Scripture (which is nothing to the devout Puritan) we should be told that the salt which has not lost its savour is fit only to be cast forth and trampled under foot of men.

  Such a Puritan version of salt in the Gospel would be far less impudent than the Puritan version of wine in the Gospel. In a hundred ways we should be assured of the corrupting and degrading character of these condiments; and terrible stories would be told of ruined families weltering in anchovy sauce as if in gore, or darker stories of that darker drug, the sauce that bears the name of Worcester. I could myself, on the spur of the moment, easily make up all sorts of arguments and illustrations as convincing against condiments as others are against convivial liquors. I could point out that the old proverb about taking strange stories ‘with a grain of salt’ was itself an evidence of the connexion between strange substances and strange delusions, and bring out the result that salt is really a sort of opium. I could point out that the very fact of mustard being hot in the mouth is analogous to the old phrase about ginger being hot in the mouth, which has come to be a sort of euphemism for vice or violent self-indulgence. I could point out that pepper is actually used by criminals as something to fling in the faces of their pursuers, to blind and choke them. So that the pepper-pot takes its place in the police museum as being both a weapon of crime and an instrument of torture.

  It seems as sensible to argue that some criminals make a bad use of pepper as to argue that some drunkards make a bad use of port wine. For those who sneer at tobacco may be expected, in the same sense, to sniff at snuff, and presumably to snivel over pepper, for a great part of their moral eloquence consists of sniffing and snivelling. Nothing is needed, for most of their moral movements, but a sort of gesture of priggish repugnance and small-minded superiority; and it would be just as easy for a moralist to make that sort of face over a jar of pickles as over a pot of porter. A curious mixture of the snobbish sneering of the middle classes against the working classes, with the more morbid snarling of the invalid against the healthy man, has made a large number of things that are simply common appear merely coarse. So perhaps we may look forward to fresh purifications of society, purging it of all the poisons of pepper and salt and sauce, and reducing it to plain living by this remarkable course of high thinking. Vinegar would be forbidden by the teetotallers, because of its wicked past when it was wine. Mustard would arouse a similar Moslem or Judaic fury, because it is generally eaten with ham. The equality of the sexes, in eternal ethics, would be asserted by saying that there shall be no sauce, either for the goose or for the gander.

  By the way, though the point is a parenthesis, what a remarkable anticipation that proverb is of modern muddle-headedness about the sexes! It is, in fact, often used, in the sex controversy, as a metaphor meaning that one sex or sort must in all things be treated like the other. But nothing could be more unlucky than the metaphor, whatever we may think of the moral. If there is one thing to which this argument of sameness or assimilation does not apply, it is to the question of sex in connexion with the solemn question of supper. Suppose the sauce is egg-sauce; am I to wait patiently for eggs from the cock, as an alternative to eggs from the hen? I will not eat cow-beef if I can help it, merely on the ground that what is mustard for the bull is mustard for the cow. Nor will I look for milk from the bull, however much I may recognize the general necessity of milk rather than mustard. It is some thing rather typical of the way these things are treated that people should express their view in proverbs rather than principles. The scientific course is obviously to begin by clearing up the question of what is the real difference between a goose and a gander, and then pointing out that it does not affect the question of sauce, though it may very much affect the question of something else. But this laborious method is very unpopular with a generation which thinks that self-assertion is a complete substitute for self-criticism, or, indeed, for any other sort of criticism. In that world we are well acquainted with the sort of goose who possesses very little except sauce.

  But this, as I have said, is merely a remark in brackets, in the course of other remarks about other heresies. We are chiefly concerned with the heresy of the Manichees, which has already expressed itself in the denunciation of wine and even tobacco, and might just as well express itself, I would suggest, in the denunciation of mustard or even salt. For the essence of that idea is that every pleasure as such is suspect; or that, unless a thing can be specially shown to be morally good, it is most probable that it is morally bad. There is no real defence of a luxury except to prove that it is a necessity. Now, it would be much easier to argue, in certain cases, that wine is a necessity than that vinegar is a necessity. There are certain practical good effects sometimes produced by the tobacco plant which are very seldom produced by the pepper plant. The enemies of these drinks or drugs, as they would call them, may think that the evil of them enormously outweighs the good; so enormously as to justify their extinction as pure evils. But they could not deny that the drug is a drug; in the double sense in which a drug is normally regarded as good and evil. They could not deny that such a thing is a drug, both in the sense of something consumed by a drug-fiend and of something sold by a druggist. They may think it unwise to use it for an immediate remedy, but it is used for an immediate remedy. Smoking has been known to serve for some time as a substitute for eating, and a cigarette does sometimes soothe the nerves of a neurotic. Brandy and champagne are constantly administered in illness, except among rank and raving lunatics. But I have seldom heard of an invalid leaping to life after a draught of anchovy sauce; or of anybody eating pepper for days on end; or of people in hysterics being quieted with pickles. If it ever comes to the old Manichean controversy about useless luxuries, I think it will be harder to defend the condiments than to defend the stimulants, or even the intoxicants. I am presuming that such Puritans will carry out the moral philosophy that is really at the back of their minds; it does not affect me, for I have quite a different moral philosophy at the back of my mind. It would occupy too much space to expound it here, and I have often enough expounded it elsewhere. But it might be indicated by saying that there is a truth behind the joke of the man who said: ‘Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities’; and the truth can be more soberly stated by saying that, in one sense, human beings are not even completely human, until they are civilized.

  XXXIII. On Optimism and Scepticism

  I SUPPOSE people will go on till the crack of doom saying (as somebody said the other day) that Browning expressed the opinion that God is in His heaven and therefore all is right with the world. I could mention a number of other opinions that Browning expressed, in exactly the same method and degree. I could point out that Browning said, in his gay and careless fashion: ‘Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?’ doubtless referring to Mrs. Browning. I could note that Browning observed, when brooding on his own immediate course of action: ‘Or there’s Satan . . . one might venture pledge one’s soul to him.’ It will occur to every reader of the poet that he observed on a celebrated occasion: ‘Lo! lieth flat and loveth Setebos’, presumably prostrating himself upon the carpet in Wimpole Street. It will also be recalled that Browning, after confessing to various frauds and lies, virulently cursed the patron to whom he had confessed them, saying: ‘I only wish I dared burn down the house and spoil your sniggering.’ If these incidents in the life of the poet cause any surprise, it may be well to explain that they are, in fact, incidents in the lives of his characters; and so is the much-quoted phrase about all being ‘right with the world’. It is not a remark made by Browning, but a remark made by Pippa in the dramatic work by Browning. Even those who know that the remark occurs in a lyric do not always know that the lyric occurs in a drama. It has therefore a double right to be considered dramatic. It is a remark made by a particular dramatic character on a particular dramatic occasion, and, above all, for a particular dramatic reason. And the reason is not a desire to show that all is right with the world, but to bring out in sharp contrast the fact that there is a great deal very wrong with it.