III

  Unless I am much mistaken, modern people are going to have a reaction against democracy before they have tried it. We are always being told that the present system in highly organized industrial states is democracy; and that being so, it is hardly to be wondered at that democracy has become unpopular. But it is not really true that popular government has become unpopular. It is rather that people have ceased to think that in either sense our government is popular. The truth is that those who developed the democratic doctrine in modern times did not intend it for anything at all resembling the modern world, perhaps the most ancient of all possible worlds. They thought of the agricultural commonwealths of antiquity, and went back past even the Roman Empire to find the Roman Republic. But Rome was a republic when Rome was a village. Those eighteenth-century idealists often actually lived in villages; always in countries that were dotted with villages. They did not know what sort of a world of steam and steel their descendants were going to inherit. The French Revolution came before the Industrial Revolution. They were perpetually talking about the citizen, but they thought of him as a citizen and not merely as something in the city. They certainly had no conception of the colossal and complicated thing that we now mean by a city.

  It is highly characteristic of the tone of the eighteenth century that they generally talked of London as ‘the town’. They said: ‘All the town is talking about my Lord Banglebury’s duel with Mr Pickles.’ In the sound and sense of the word there was something compact and comfortable; as of a world still small enough to know itself, like a village. When these people talked about democracy they did indeed mean the government of the people, by the people, for the people. But they meant the government of people they knew, by people they knew, for people they knew. They meant the government of people who knew each other, by people who knew each other, for people who knew each other. I think it highly doubtful whether any of the eighteenth-century democratic theorists, whether Payne or Jefferson or Condorcet, would have expected a vast and vague society like ours to be a democracy. I think they would have thought it, however reluctantly, a case for Caesar and the panem et circenses. But it is not, of course, merely the material side of society that has upset such calculations. It is much more the moral factor; which is also, in every sense, alas! a very material factor. It is what the scientific, or those who think themselves scientific, always call the economic factor. It can be expressed better in one word; and that word is not democracy but plutocracy.

  It must always be remembered that the scale of financial action was then smaller even for the rich. The Court of Versailles did not handle such sums as any stockjobber will now waste on a week’s luxury. Kings and queens were richer relatively and not positively. And the size of economic operations today is a new and abnormal power in the history of the world. It covers much more of the surface of the world. It is international where the old luxury was almost local. But this vulgar and sprawling plutocracy does not deserve to be called a democracy, even by one who uses it as a term of abuse. The old classic spirit of democracy is much more present in the independent citizen who is ready to resist it, who in this respect is much more like the Stoic and Tribune admired by the Fathers of the Republic.

  THE VICTORIANS

  I HAVE been wandering about in the South of France, reading hardly anything except French newspapers; which, by the way, are almost invariably worth reading. It is doubtless a Latin eccentricity; but they attach more importance to how a thing is written than to how it is printed. But everyone will understand, and certainly the French themselves would be the first to understand, that anything coming to such a wanderer, however indirectly, from his own country has an instant and imperious challenge to the emotions, which mere internationalism can never destroy or even define. And I found in a remote hotel, with a reaction amounting to tears, an ancient copy of a very modern London weekly paper, largely devoted to literary reviews; and raising a question for which I am always seeking the answer. I have no idea how old the issue was; but it was certainly subsequent to Queen Victoria’s Coronation, and even to her death; because a prominent feature was a review on a book about ‘The Victorians’. And naturally we never called ourselves Victorians while we really were Victorians. On the other hand, since I neglected to note the date, it may really have been a quite recent date; and the book in question may be the very latest work on the subject. At least it may be the latest; but I rather doubt whether it will be the last. For the Victorians, whatever else they were, were people whom the new generation may have managed to despise, but have certainly never managed to dismiss. The same age which boasts of having broken away finally from Victorianism is the age which it seems impossible to restrain from writing plays about Browning, books about Brontës, lives of such very limited and localized Victorians as Palmerston and Disraeli; and, above all, a permanent Victorian torrent of books about Queen Victoria herself. In the days dismissed as Victorian, nobody could ever have dreamed that Prince Albert would ever become so important an historical figure again. Look up the early volumes of Punch, and see what the writers made of the Prince Consort then; and you will hardly find it credible to read what Miss Sitwell, or Mr Laurence Housman, or even the late Lytton Strachey, have made of him now.

  That is perhaps the first and queerest thing about the present phase. It set out avowedly to be anti-Victorian, and on many points it has become more Victorian than the Victorians. Of course the arbitrary title covers such a vast variety of names and types and tendencies, that it may be said that it is futile in any case to treat it as a whole; but I think myself that in this respect there is more intelligence in the instinct both of its antagonists and its admirers. I fancy that there really was something human and historic that can really be called Victorianism; though it is very difficult to define rightly; and almost invariably defined wrongly. Certainly, in the mere modern impatience which calls it stale and stuffy, it is defined utterly wrongly. There is a wonderfully wide spread impression that the Victorian Age was very solid or stolid; either in virtue or else in hypocrisy. This is, especially over the great part of the period, quite surprisingly untrue. Whatever most of the Victorians were, they were not at rest. Of course they had their virtues, and most certainly they had their hypocrisies; but the whole point about them was that they were not at rest in either. They still had a religion; but they were always excusing it; explaining it; and very frequently explaining it away. They already had religious doubt; but only in a very few of them was the doubt ever allowed to become denial. The Englishman was patriotic even to excess; but not to the point of ease in excess; like the eighteenth-century farmer who still figures in our caricatures as John Bull. He boasted against foreigners; but he had become conscious of the existence of these horrid little creatures; and the Victorian authors really plagued him with foreigners, like a scourge of locusts or wasps. Carlyle was always throwing Germany at him; Browning was always throwing Italy at him; Matthew Arnold really threw all Europe at him, as if he were the least instructed person in Europe. He did not lose his self-satisfaction; I fear he has not lost it yet. But it was not satisfaction in the sense of security of mind. The Englishman was already puzzled, if only subconsciously, even in the time of Thackeray and Bulwer Lytton; and it seems to me that he has gone on being more and more puzzled ever since.

  In short, it was a time of tradition; and most emphatically not a time of stagnation. That is not to say that it might not have been happier in stagnation; but anyhow it was not really happy in transition. It was a very curious mixture of two things; the remains of what had hitherto been a system of Puritanism, with the incessant infiltration of what may be called Romanticism. The notion of summing up half the nineteenth century with the name of Mrs Hemans will be instantly corrected by merely mentioning the name of Mrs Browning. Mrs Browning’s verse was never completely strong and it was sometimes decidedly weak; but, whatever it was, it was not prim or pallid or composed of prunes and prisms. Sometimes she rather resembles Victor Hugo in being weak through sheer violence; through straining too much after emotional emphasis or pictorial sensationalism. She was simply one of those Victorians of Puritan origin who were swept away on the flood of the Romantics. Another great woman of the period illustrates exactly the same combination. For this is why Jane Eyre remains as a real red-hot testimony to the time; precisely because of the contrast between the prim and prosaic little governess that she was supposed to be, and the wild and almost anarchic emotion that filled her from within. But though I have used the word ‘anarchic’, it is not the right word; for she was one of those who might break a law but could not ignore it. And she recognized right and wrong, not only because she had been a Puritan; but also because she was a Romantic. That was the point about romanticism, as compared with much modern realism. A fine French critic, M. Mauriac, has said, ‘The Romantics were the corrupt children of Christianity.’ I should not put it so harshly; but it is very much more true than talking of the Victorians as smug contented Christians. The Victorian Age was really a violent collision and struggle; a meeting-place of two furious onslaughts, but so interlocked and straining, that at this distance from it, it seems to be standing still.

  THE NATIONAL SPIRIT

  THIS is written amid fields of snow within a few days of Christmas. And when last I saw snow it was within a few miles of Bethlehem. The coincidence will serve as a symbol of something I have noticed all my life, though it is not very easy to sum up. It is generally the romantic thing that turns out to be the real thing, under the extreme test of realism. It is the sceptical and even rational legend that turns out to be entirely legendary. Everything I had been taught or told led me to regard snow in Bethlehem as a paradox, like snow in Egypt. Every rumour of realism, every indirect form of rational ism, every scientific opinion taken on authority and at third hand, had led me to regard the country where Christ was born solely as a sort of semi-tropical place with nothing but palm-trees and parasols. It was only when I actually looked at it that it looked exactly like a Christmas card. It was only by the sight of my bodily eyes and against all my mental training that I realized how true is the tradition handed down in a Christmas carol. The birth and death of Christ, the whole early Christian drama, did not take place on a flat stage called the desert, covered with sand like a circus and decorated with a few pantomime palm-trees. To begin with the desert is not flat and, to go on with, the Palestinian hills are not the desert. It might well have been far more like the traditional Christmas scene than any of the learned reconstructions that conceive it as a conventional Oriental scene. The whole background was so mountainous as to be in many ways northern. The shepherds were shepherds of the hills as certainly as if they had fed their flocks on the Grampian hills, like the father of Norval. In truth, Palestine is really a strange and symbolic country; and in nothing more than its series of levels and climates. It is not so much a land as a ladder. Degrees of altitude take the place of degrees of latitude. The Jordan Valley really has the atmosphere of those tropics which seem like the suburbs of hell. But the holy mountain of Jerusalem has really an air of something lifted nearer to heaven. It has the clearness and coldness not of being nearer to the poles but of being nearer to the stars.

  Now this nameless northern element in the first landscapes of Christianity has had a certain effect on our own history. As the great creed and philosophy which united our fathers swept westward over the world, it found its different parts peculiarly fitted to different places. The men of the Mediterranean had, perhaps, a more intimate sense of the meaning of the imagery of the vine. But it succeeded in making its own imagery equally out of the northern holly and even the heathen mistletoe. And while the Latins more especially preserved the legends about the soldiers, we in the North felt a special link with the legend of the shepherds. We concentrated on Christmas, on the element of winter and the wild hills in the old Christian story. Thus Christmas is, in a special sense, at once European and English. It is European because it appeals to the religion of Europe. It is English because it specializes in those religious customs that can make even our own landscape a holy land.

  The tragedy of England is that she has in these things been growing less English. This would be painfully plain if we could discuss these matters in a detached and dispassionate manner, like an abstract question of art. A recognizable and recognized national character in literature and manners appears long before the end of the Middle Ages. Anybody who recognizes that Dickens is English as compared with Balzac, can also recognize that Chaucer is English, as compared with Boccaccio. As to the moment when that national soul was most supreme and secure of itself, there might be differences of opinion. But no serious observer can doubt that it has since lost its security. The fads that so easily become fashions in our own time would be choked with laughter in their very birth, if that spirit were present in its ancient strength. We recognize an Englishman in Chaucer’s Franklin in whose house ‘it snowed meat and drink’. But he would not recognize an England in which anyone could suggest that it should snow nut cutlets and temperance beverages. He would think he was in a foreign country, not to say another planet.

  When we step across the centuries from Chaucer to Dickens we find the same identical snowstorm raging in the Christmas household of Mr Wardle at Dingley Dell. And we recognize, in exactly the same way, and neither more nor less, that Mr Wardle is an Englishman. But though Wardle feels equally secure, Dickens does not feel equally secure. Though the Squire is as comfortable as the Franklin, the modern novelist is not so comfortable as the medieval poet. Dickens is already on the defensive; for he has something to defend. Dickens is not only potentially but positively scornful, for he has something to scorn. The unnatural notions have already begun to eat away the national tradition. Dickens lived to see people proposing to enforce universal teetotalism. If he had survived to see the proposals which some scientific idealists are already drawing up on paper, it may be that his feelings would have been beyond even his own powers of expression. It may be that the modern world has outstripped satire. I doubt whether even Dickens could have made it funnier than it is.

  But the point for the moment is that all this nonsense is in a special sense the loss of a national spirit. Though the progress has largely been peculiar to England, it is none the less a progress away from England. The national movement has been away from the national idea. It will be noted that nearly all the greatest Englishmen, especially the most English Englishmen, were more or less conscious of this. The other great figures between Chaucer and Dickens are nearly all figures with their faces turned to the past. It is what makes men call Shakespeare monarchical and medieval; it is what made Johnson a Tory; it is what made Cobbett so singularly reactionary a Radical. Even the exceptions have exceptional moments when they are conscious of it; a Puritan like Milton in the rustic reminiscences of ‘L’Allegro’; a Whig like Addison in the Christmas ceremonies of Sir Roger de Coverley. Those Christmas ceremonies, coming down from a time when Chaucer and his Franklin could enjoy them, have nevertheless suffered all sorts of damage from new and less liberal philosophies. They were attacked by the Puritans on theological, by the Utilitarians on economic, and now by the new Sociologists on hygienic grounds. The new Scrooge wishes to give every one else gruel.

  A nation may exaggerate itself or fall short of itself; but a nation must not contradict itself. We should all feel it if the French were to lose all concern about logic; but there is a real danger of the English losing all concern about liberty. There is a real danger that the broad farce and broad freedom which we feel in Chaucer or Dickens will actually be less apparent among us than among foreign peoples which have always had more officialism in their law and more classicism in their literature. The farce is already being thinned by a sort of tenth-rate idealism bearing the detestable American name of ‘uplift’. The freedom is already being lost in a network of police prohibition. Between the ideality and the efficiency the English liberty may well be entirely lost. I should not write this if I did not think that it may also be saved. But I could not write it without recording my own conviction that there is only one way of saving it. We have lost our national instincts because we have lost the idea of that Christendom from which the nations came. In freeing ourselves from Christianity we have only freed ourselves from freedom. We shall not now return to a merely heathen hilarity, for the new heathenism is any thing but hilarious. If we do not recover Christmas, we shall never recover Yule.

  THE RIGHTS OF RITUAL

  ST AUGUSTINE, if I remember right, said, among many other shrewd things about the relation of religious cited to social custom: ‘Funeral ceremonies are not a tribute to the dead, but to the living.’ it is part of a truth that is constantly forgotten in controversy about ceremonial and symbol. Yet it is a point upon which the Puritan is really less religious than the Pagan. If you had gone up to an ancient Greek in the time of Plato, as he stood offering sacrifice to Athene, you might very well have asked with some curiosity the question about the ancients that has never been quite satisfactorily answered by any of the moderns: ‘Do you really believe that the pure goddess of wisdom wishes you to kill or burn something on this particular stone? Does she really require this above all other things?’ But the Athenian, if he were as intelligent as most Athenians, might very well answer you by saying: ‘Whether or no Athene requires it, I am sure that I require it.’ If you went into the household temple of a Chinaman and found him burning pieces of paper to appease his great-grandfather, you might ask him what good his great-grandfather would get by that. But the Chinaman would really have the best of the argument if he answered, ‘I do not fully understand the good it does to my great-grandfather, but I do understand the good it does to me.’