Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 998
To find expression in emblem and established ritual for feelings that are most difficult to express in words is not merely a salute to the departed; it is also a liberating gesture for the living. It is even especially an expression of the life of the living. The practical alternative to it is not speech but silence; not simplicity, but merely embarrassment. Not one man in a thousand ever says any thing worthy of the dead, or even at all adequate to his own emotions about the dead. It is a far fuller release for his feelings to do something; and especially something that is not too unusual or unnatural to do. The motions that men have always made, uncovering, bowing the head, scattering flowers on the grave, are in the real sense individual actions. They are not only more dignified, but more direct than official speech or extempore prayer. They are not only more serious, but more spontaneous than the ghastly mummery of ‘saying a few appropriate words’. A man would be more likely to do such things than to say such things even if he were left entirely to himself, without tradition or culture, even if he were a savage or an utterly unlettered peasant. Ritualism is more natural than rationalism about these things. It is a living necessity for those who survive; sometimes almost a necessity to enable them to survive. It is almost the first gesture of awakening, by which they show that they have not also been struck by the thunderbolt. ‘Funeral ceremonies are not a tribute to the dead, but to the living.’
Christmas is a festival of joy and a national funeral is a festival of sorrow; but they both bring in this problem of the present which has always been the practice of the past. And indeed there is more connexion between the two ideas than many suppose, especially of those who are largely out of touch with the present, through being entirely out of touch with the past. For a man without history is almost in the literal sense half-witted. He is only in command of a part even of his own mind. He does not know what half his own words mean, or what half his own actions signify. And in the great human past there was a profoundly human connexion between days of mourning and days of merriment. The same words were used about both — or, what will seem to some still more strange, the words were interchanged and the phrase that seems to us appropriate to one was specially applied to the other. In ancient times a funeral had many of the elements of a feast. In ancient times a dance could have much of the gravity of a divine service. They used the word ‘banquet’ about the tragic occasion. They used the word ‘solemnity’ about the frivolous occasion. Achilles, mourning over Patroclus, summons the heroes to take part in games, as on a school holiday devoted to sports. Theseus in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, cracking jokes and watching burlesques, at his wedding feast, says; ‘A fortnight keep we this solemnity.’ And though our civilization has grown in some ways more complex and cannot express these truths with quite the same unconscious sincerity and natural tact, it is well not to forget altogether that our fathers felt this comradeship in their grief and this religion in their merriment.
The ancient world conceived that pagan gods presided over every social function and every activity of daily life; and much of the position that had been given to pagan gods was afterwards very wisely given to patron saints. But there has arisen in modern times a mood that is not so much influenced by pagan gods as by godless paganism. Its funerals are not feasts; and, in a very different sense, its feasts are funerals. The old Christian saint bade men be sorry, not as men without hope. The new pagan sage rather bids them to be merry as men without hope. The frivolity of the pessimists, of the sceptics, and the decadents has been something that connects gaiety with piety by getting rid of both of them. It cannot create any of those symbolic forms of beauty that remain permanent as ritual or even as revelry. Funeral ceremonies are a tribute not to the dead but to the living. But these men are not living; they are of the sort that would scorn equally the little pieties of the poor about mourning, even public mourning, and the traditional games and jokes of a festival like Christmas. Just as they do not understand how much life there is in the cult of the dead, so they do not understand how much truth there is in the repetition of the joke. They are not subtle enough to understand what is simple, nor have they the insight or intelligence to understand the plain and popular things.
The tamest person following tradition is a little more in the main stream of life than that. He may not be an exceptional person, but at least he understands what is meant by an exceptional occasion. He may be a little like a vegetable or a plant that only flowers or comes to life at certain regular seasons. But at least he is not like a stone that never comes to life at all. And the cheap stoic or superior person is none the less as lifeless as a stone, because he generally regards himself as a precious stone and falls into the not uncommon geological error of sup posing that he is the only pebble on the beach. Compared with him, there is something like movement in the mere mass of pebbles that are rolled to and fro by the sea.
When, therefore, we watch some popular pomp go by, especially a pomp of lamentation, let us think not only of the virtues of the dead, but of the living; and above all of that universal human virtue of veneration for the dead. Grief is a thing really popular; that fact, if we consider it, will appear very notable and impressive; and when we have understood it we may understand why the great voice that said of old upon the mountain ‘Blessed are the poor,’ added but a moment afterwards: ‘Blessed are ye that mourn.’
THE INSIDE OF LIFE
THE news that some Europeans have been wrecked on a desert island is gratifying, in so far as it shows that there are still some desert islands for us to be wrecked on. Moreover, it is also interesting because these, the latest facts, also support the oldest stories. For instance, superior critics have often sniffed at the labours of Robinson Crusoe, specifically upon the ground that he depended so much upon stores from the sunken wreck. But these actual people shipwrecked a few weeks ago depended entirely upon them; and yet the critics might not have cared for the billet. A few years ago, when physical science was taken very seriously, a clever boys’ book was written, called ‘Perseverance Island’. It was written in order to show how ‘Robinson Crusoe’ ought to have been written. In this story, the wrecked man gained practically nothing from the wreck. He made everything out of the brute materials of the island.
As a matter of fact, of course, it is quite unfair to compare ‘Robinson Crusoe’ with such boys’ books as ‘Perseverance Island’, or even ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’, not only because it is much greater literature, but because it is literature with an entirely different aim. To lump it with the others because they all occurred on a desert island is no better than comparing ‘Wuthering Heights’ with ‘Northanger Abbey’ because both concern an old country house; or bracketing ‘Salem Chapel’ with ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ because they are both about a church. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is not a story of adventure; rather it is a story of the absence of adventure — that is, in the first and best part of it. Twice Crusoe runs away to sea in disobedience, and twice escapes with wreck or other peril; the third time we feel that he is set apart for some strange judgement by God. And the strange judgement is the great central and poetical idea of ‘Robinson Crusoe’. It is a visitation not of danger but of a dreadful security. The salvage of Crusoe’s goods, the comparative comfort of his life, the natural riches of his island, his human relations with many of the animals — all this is an exquisitely artistic setting for the awful idea of a man whom God has cast out from among men. A mere scurry of adventures would have left Crusoe no time for thinking; and the whole object of the book is to make Crusoe think. It is true that, later in the story, Defoe entangles him with Indians and Spaniards; and for that very reason I think the story loses the naked nobility of its original idea. It is absurd to compare a book like this with ordinary stories about schooners and palm-trees, cutlasses and scalps. It was not an adventurous life but an unadventurous life that was the doom and curse of Crusoe.
But this, perhaps, is wandering from the subject — if there is a subject. Let us try to get back to the desert island and the moral to be drawn from all the happy Australians and their adventure. The first and most important point is this: that when one reads of these forty-five persons tipped out into an empty island in the Pacific, one’s first and instantaneous flash of feeling is one of envy. Afterwards one remembers that there would doubtless be inconveniences; that the sun is hot, that awnings give you no shelter until you have put them up; that biscuits and tinned meat might begin to taste monotonous, and that the most adventurous person, having got on to the island, would before very long begin to turn his thoughts to the problem of getting off again. But the fact remains that before all these reflections the soul of man has said like the snap of a gun, ‘How jolly!’ I think this instinct in humanity is somewhat interesting; it may be worth while to analyse this secret desire to be wrecked on an island.
The feeling partly arises from an idea which is at the root of all the arts — the idea of separation. Romance seeks to divide certain people from the lump of humanity, as the statue is divided from the lump of marble. We read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer. Instead of the humming swarm of human beings, relatives, customers, servants, postmen, afternoon callers, tradesmen, strangers who tell us the time, strangers who remark on the weather, beggars, waiters, and telegraph-boys — instead of this bewildering human swarm which passes us every day, fiction asks us to follow one figure (say the postman) consistently through his ecstasies and agonies. That is what makes one impatient with that type of pessimistic rebel who is always complaining of the narrowness of his life and demanding a larger sphere. Life is too large for us as it is: we have all too many things to attend to. All true romance is an attempt to simplify it, to cut it down to plainer and more pictorial proportions. What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity; people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humorist, or a murderer, or a man who had seen a ghost.
I do not believe that there are any ordinary people. That is, I do not believe that there are any people whose lives are really humdrum or whose characters are really colourless. But the trouble is that one can so quickly see them all in a lump, like a land surveyor, and it would take so long to see them one by one as they really are, like a great novelist. Looking out of the window, I see a very steep little street, with a row of prim little houses breaking their necks downhill in the most decorous single file. If I were landlord of that street, or a visiting philanthropist making myself objectionable down that street, I could easily take it all in at a glance, sum it all up and say, ‘Houses at £40 a year.’ But suppose I could be father confessor to that Street, how awful and altered it would look! Each house would be sundered from its neighbour as by an earthquake and would stand alone in a wilderness of the soul. I should know that in this house a man was going mad with drink, that in that a man had kept single for a woman, that in the next a woman was on the edge of abysses, that in the next a woman was living an unknown life which might in more devout ages have been gilded in hagiographies and made the fountain of miracles. People talk much of the quarrel between science and religion; but the deepest difference is that the individual is so much bigger than the average, that the inside of life is much larger than the outside.
Often when riding with three or four strangers on the top of an omnibus I have felt a wild impulse to throw the driver off his seat, to drive the omnibus far out into the country and tip them all out into a field, and say, ‘We may never meet again in this world; come, let us under stand each other.’ I do not affirm that the experiment would succeed, but I think the impulse to do it is at the root of all the tradition of the poetry of wrecks and islands.
TRICKS OF MEMORY
THERE are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture, perhaps, was imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrances. There is many a man who thinks he can recall the works of Swift or of Goldsmith; but, indeed, he himself is the principal author of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ or ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’, which he recalls. Macaulay, with his close reading and miraculous memory, was quite certain that the Blatant Beast was killed at the end of ‘The Faerie Queene’; but it was not. A brilliant and scholarly friend of mine quoted a stanza as one in which not one word could safely be altered — and quoted it wrong. Hundreds of highly educated people are quite fixed in false versions touching facts that they could easily verify. The editor of a Church newspaper (in rebuking Radicals) asseverated again and again, after contradiction and challenge, that the Catechism commands a child ‘to do his duty in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call him’. Of course the Catechism says no such thing, but the editor was so certain that he would not even open his prayer-book to see. Hundreds of people are sure that Milton wrote, ‘Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new’. Hundreds of people are sure that Jesuits preached that the end justifies the means; many of them are sure that they have seen some Jesuit’s statement to that effect; but they have not.
But it is a stranger thing still that memory can thus trick us about the main artistic effect of really fine books. Until about a year ago I believed that I had a vivid recollection of ‘Robinson Crusoe’, So, indeed, I had, of certain images of the wreck and island; above all of the admirable fact that Crusoe had two swords instead of one. That is one of the touches of the true Defoe; the very inspired poetry of the accidental and the rough-and-tumble; the very romance of the unromantic. But I found I had completely forgotten the really sublime introduction to the tale, which gives it all its spiritual dignity — the narrative of Crusoe’s impiety; his two escapes from shipwreck and opportunities for repentance; and, finally, the falling upon him of this strange judgement: food, security, silence — a judgement stranger than death.
With this case in mind I am in no position to exult over my fellow-critics when they prove that they have not read properly the books that, as it happens, I have read properly. But I have been somewhat singularly impressed with the most cultivated and authoritative criticisms of the dramatic version of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, in so far as they refer to Stevenson’s original romance. Of the play I cannot speak, but with the romance I am very well acquainted, which is more than can be said of those who have lightly and gracefully criticized it on the present occasion. Most of them said that Stevenson was a charming artist but no philosopher; that his inadequacy as a thinker was well represented in the tale of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, which they proceeded to describe with the wildest inaccuracy of detail and a complete oblivion of the design. One idea, above all, has established itself firmly in their minds and I daresay in many other people’s. They think that in Stevenson’s tale Jekyll is the good self and Hyde the bad self; or, in other words, that the protagonist is wholly good when he is Jekyll and wholly bad when he is Hyde.
Now, if Hamlet had killed his uncle in the first act, if Othello had appeared as a mari complaisant, it could not have upset the whole point of Shakespeare’s story more than this upsets the whole point of Stevenson’s story. Stevenson’s story has nothing to do with pathological pedantries about ‘dual personality’. That was mere machinery; and as he himself seems to have thought, even unfortunate machinery. The business of the powders I think he himself thought clumsy; but he had to make the tale a modern novel and work the transformations by medicine, unless he was prepared to tell it as a primeval fairy-tale and make them by magic. But he did not care a jot about either compared with the mystical idea in the transformation itself; and that had nothing to do with powders or dual personalities, but only with heaven and hell — like ‘Robinson Crusoe’.
Stevenson goes out of his way to emphasize the fact that Jekyll, as Jekyll, was by no means perfect but was rather a morally damaged piece of goods. He had ‘a sly cast’, in spite of his handsome presence; he was nervous and secretive though not ill-natured. Jekyll is not the good man; Jekyll is the ordinary mixed, moderately humane man, whose character has begun to suffer from some evil drug or passion. Now, that which is thus sucking and draining him is the habit of being Hyde; and it is here that the fine moral of Stevenson comes in, a moral as superior as it is opposite to that popularly put into his mouth. So far from preaching that man can be success fully divided into two men, good and evil, he specifically preached that man cannot be so divided, even by monstrosity and miracle; that, even in the extravagant case of Jekyll, the good is still dragged down by the mere existence of the bad. The moral of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is not that man can be cut in two; it is that man cannot be cut in two.
Hyde is the innocence of evil. He stands for the truth (attested by a hundred tales of hypocrites and secret sins) that there is in evil, though not in good, this power of self-isolation, this hardening of the whole exterior, so that a man becomes blind to moral beauties or deaf to pathetic appeals. A man in pursuit of some immoral mania does attain an abominable simplicity of soul; he does act from one motive alone. Therefore he does be come like Hyde, or like that blood-curdling figure in Grimm’s fairy-tales, ‘a little man made of iron’. But the whole of Stevenson’s point would have been lost if Jekyll had exhibited the same horrible homogeneity. Precisely because Jekyll, with all his faults, possesses goodness, he possesses also the consciousness of sin, humility. He knows all about Hyde, as angels know about devils. And Steven son specially points out that this contrast between the blind swiftness of evil and the almost bewildered omniscience of good is not a peculiarity of this strange case, but is true of the permanent problem of your conscience and mine. If I get drunk I shall forget dignity; but if I keep sober I may still desire drink. Virtue has the heavy burden of knowledge; sin has often something of the levity of sinlessness.
