“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”
THE full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it bystorm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something — war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.
THE old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth. The new realists torture men morally for a physical truth.’ Tremendous Trifles.’
OUR wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love.
OUR fathers were large and healthy enough to make a thing humane, and not worry about whether it was hygienic. They were big enough to get into small rooms.
THE rare strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross obvious thing is to miss it. Chaos is dull; because in chaos a train might go anywhere — to Baker Street or Bagdad. But man is a magician and his whole magic is in this that he does say ‘Victoria,’ and lo! it is Victoria.
THE personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal: rather the impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common personality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of God.
THE world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists;it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds. . . Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing; that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.
A CRIME is like any other work of art. Don’t look surprised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop. But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable mark — I mean that the centre of it is simple, however the entourage may be complicated.
A TURKEY is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, He has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.
CHRIST did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved men.Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure to think of an equally distributed love is that their love of humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.’
WITH all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing happily that no man knows: whether the world is old or young.
YOU cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it. Introduction to ‘Nicholas Nickleby.’
A MAN may look into the eyes of his lady-love to see that they are beautiful. But no normal lady will allow that young man to look into her eyes to see whether they are beautiful. The same variety and idiosyncrasy has been generally observed in gods. Praise them or leave them alone; but do not look for them unless you know they are there. Do not look for them unless you want them.‘All Things Considered.’
A GREAT man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing it. The things he describes are types because they are truths. Shakespeare may or may not have ever put it to himself that Richard the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether an artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that a critic should be allegorical. Introduction to ‘Great Expectations.’
SERIOUSNESS is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice, It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity. ‘Orthodoxy.’
EVERY detail points to something, certainly, but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree. It is only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up — only the green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars.‘The Club of Queer Trades.’
WE talk of art as something artificial in comparison with life. But I sometimes fancy that the very highest art is more real than life itself. At least this is true : that in proportion as passions become real they become poetical; the lover is always trying to be the poet. All real energy is an attempt at harmony and a high swing of rhythm; and if we were only real enough we should all talk in rhyme.
ANYONE could easily excuse the ill-humour of the poor. But great masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be excused. Their cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a miracle play; and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of a romance. Introduction to’Christmas Stories.’
MODERN women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well and that is why they ought not to do it.‘What’s Wrong with the World.
SOME of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.
IN a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.
TRUTH must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
OUR modern mystics make a mistake when they wear long hair or loose ties to attract the spirits. The elves and the old gods when they revisit the earth really go straight for a dull top-hat. For it means simplicity, which the gods love.
THE only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
BRAVE men are all vertebrates: they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
THE teetotaller has chosen a most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when he says that the drunkard is making a beast of himself. The man who drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself. The man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself. But nothing connected with a human and artistic thing like wine can bring one nearer to the brute life of Nature. The only man who is, in the exact and literal sense of the words, making a beast of himself is the teetotaller.
AN error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes. . . A free lover is worse than a profligate. For a profligate is serious and reckless even in his shortest love; while a free lover is cautious and irresponsible even in his longest devotion.
PESSIMISM says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance.
WAR is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably — numbers and an unnatural valour. One does discover the two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead.
IT is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, ‘What laws shall we make?’ In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, ‘What laws can we obey?’
A MAN’S good work is effected by doing what he does: a woman’s by being what she is.
PHILOSOPHY is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the more awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it? ‘George Bernard Shaw.’
KEEPING to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. ‘Orthodoxy.’
ONE Sun is splendid: six Suns would be only vulgar. One Tower of Giotto is sublime: a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature, in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love, in following the single woman; the poetry of religion, in worshipping the single star. ‘Tremendous Trifles.’
THE full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something — war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.
HIS soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. All doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase — he will be always ‘taken in.’ To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance. With torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life. And the sceptic is cast out by it. ‘Charles Dickens.’
YOU cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson felt an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will — will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But humanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we have willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels .’Orthodoxy.’
HOW high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low human happiness sank in the twentieth century, our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men to a banquet with spears.‘George Bernard Shaw.’
IF a god does come upon the earth, he will descend at the sight of the brave. Our prostrations and litanies are of no avail our new moons and sabbaths are an abomination. The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him .’Charles Dickens.’
THERE is no such thing as fighting on the winning side: one fights to find out which is the winning side.
IF Americans can be divorced for ‘incompatibility of temper,’ I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
OF a sane man there is only one safe delinition: he is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
THE wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lovely they are.
IT is a great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies men. Love diversifies them, because love is directed towards individuality. The thing that really unites men and makes them like to each other is hatred. The more modern nations detest each other the more meekly they follow each other; for all competition is in its nature only a furious plagiarism.
RED is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire which destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of our religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in first love.
OF all the tests by which the good citizen and strong reformer can be distinguished from the vague faddist or the inhuman sceptic, I know no better test than this — that the unreal reformer sees in front of him one certain future, the future of his fad; while the real reformer sees before him ten or twenty futures among which his country must choose, and may in some dreadful hour choose the wrong one. The true patriot is always doubtful of victory; because he knows that he is dealing with a living thing; a thing with free will. To be certain of free will is to be uncertain of success.Introduction to ‘American Notes.’
IN this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small things: rather we go on and discover big things. It is the detail that we see first; it is the design that we only see very slowly, and some men die never having seen it at all. We see certain squadrons in certain uniforms gallop past; we take an arbitrary fancy to this or that colour, to this or that plume. But it often takes us a long time to realize what the fight is about or even who is fighting whom. So in the modern intellectual world we can see flags of many colours, deeds of manifold interest the one thing we cannot see is the map. We cannot see the simplified statement which tells what is the origin of all the trouble.
MEN talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something specialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of being vulgar, to the point, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They alone admit all matters they alone lie open to all attacks.There is no detail from buttons to kangaroos that does not enter into the gayconfusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the death of a donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and sing in, in the glorious carnival of theology.
THE educated classes have adopted a hideous and heathen custom of considering death as too dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain a secret for each person, like some private malformation. The poor, on the contrary, make a great gossip and display about bereavement; and they are right. They have hold of a truth of psychology which is at the back of all the funeral customs of the children of men. The way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. The way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel important. In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilization; and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of Hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games of Patroclus.
A MAN ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a large frame to sustain. A man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake. And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love, and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated. The food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues. The exercise will really get him into training so long as he is thinking about something else. And the marriage will really stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement. It is the first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities they should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything that can be managed with care. But in the name of all sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail.
‘Heretics.’
EVERYTHING is military in the sense that everything depends upon obedience. There is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. But we are glad that the net-maker did not make the net in a fit of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a child’s rocking-horse for a joke. But we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke. ‘Heretics.’
IN these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest or our wife or ourself. It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition; it is either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.
‘All Things Considered.’
IT is currently said that hope goes with youth and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.
DO you see this lantern? Do you see the cross carved on it and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron, and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall now destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.
THIEVES respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.
THE average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is, the difficulty with English democracy at all elections is that it is something less than itself. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.
IT is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that the moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters ‘Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,’ or ‘Mr. Jones of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.’ They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority. ‘
OF all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Anyone who knows anybody knows how it would work; anyone who knows anyone from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon — anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world, firstly, in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inward, hut to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
WHATEVER makes men feel old is mean — an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great — a great war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire — of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that men have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by Nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks there have been such things as children. To people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires.
‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
SOLDIERS have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit: they are never worshippers of Force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious: the might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They learn to obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons on a coat, a title, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may be unreasonable things; they may, if you will, be wicked things: but they are not weak things. They are not Force, and they do not look like Force. They are parts of an idea, of the idea of discipline; if you will, of the idea of tyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could possibly say that his own bayonets were his authority. No soldier could possibly say that he came in the name of his own bayonets. It would be as absurd as if a postman said that he came inside his bag. I do not, as I have said, underrate the evils that really do arise from militarism and the military ethic. It tends to give people wooden faces and sometimes wooden heads. It tends, moreover (both through its specialization and through its constant obedience), to a certain loss of real independence and strength of character. This has almost always been found when people made the mistake of turning the soldier into a statesman, under the mistaken impression that be was a strong man. The Duke of Wellington, for instance, was a strong soldier and therefore a weak statesman. But the soldier is always, by the nature of things, loyal to something. And as long as one is loyal to something one can never be a worshipper of mere force. For mere force, violence in the abstract, is the enemy of anything we love. To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune; and when a soldier has accepted any nation’s uniform he has already accepted its defeat. ‘All Things Considered.’
DISTRIBUTE the dignified people and the capable people and the highly businesslike people among all the situations which their ambition or their innate corruption may demand, but keep close to your heart, keep deep in your inner councils the absurd people; let the clever people pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise you, but let the fools alone influence you; let the laughable people whose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really inside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your lonely march towards the last impossibility.Introduction to ‘David Copperfield.’
FAIRY-TALES do not give a child his first idea of bogy.What fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairytale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy-tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops. But fairy-tales restored my mental health. For next day I read an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart.
SUPPOSE that a great commotion arises in the street about something — let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached on the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, ‘Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good — – — ‘ At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamppost is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmedieval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gaslamp we must now discuss in the dark. ‘Heretics.’
I HAVE often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water — an excellent thing if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water — which is a fuss about
nothing. Mr. Bernard Shaw’s philosophy is exactly like black coffee — it awakens, but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one’s contempt for it in stronger terms than that. Sometimes one may come across something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy — the milk of human kindness. You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is everywhere dying out. ‘William Blake.’
COURAGE is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire tolive taking the form of a readiness to die. This paradox is the whole principle of courage even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier, surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so.
GEORGE MEREDITH DIED THE trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out into deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening was so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all to itself. I went along that road according to directions that had been given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling, beyond which the wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious courtesy and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from him upon the valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of that quality which the old English called ‘faerie’; it is the quality which those can never understand who think of the past as merely brutal: it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees. I went through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table, looking smallish in his big chair. He was already an invalid, and his hair and beard were both white; not like snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even fierce; rather they were white like white thistledown. I came up quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand, and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young. He was the one great man of the old world whom I have met who was not a mere statue over his own grave. He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked about the books he had not written. He unrolled a purple bundle of romances which he had never had time to sell. He asked me to write one of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he had been talking to the milkman. It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort of astronomical farce. It was all about a man who was rushing up to the Royal Society with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped up at every other minute by his own weaknesses and vanities; how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling. That is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more. Another, I dimly remember, was a version of the fall of Parnell; the idea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love of secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went out of that garden with a blurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature. The feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood is a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere. I really had the feeling that I had seen the creative quality; which is supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls the Old Man of the Forest: I had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind my path; I have never seen him again; and now I shall not see him, because he died last Tuesday.
HIS soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. All doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase — he will be always ‘taken in.’ To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance. With torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life. And the sceptic is cast out by it.
Excerpts from essay on “Maniac”
Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world. Once I remember walking with a prosperous Publisher, who made a remark I had heard before: “That man will get on. He believes in himself “.
I said to him: “Shall I tell you where the men are, who believe most in themselves? The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a backroom, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.
Actors, who can’t act, believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself.’
Complete Self-Confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-Confidence is a weakness. It is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity as in itself attractive. Oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time. This is also why old fairy tales endure forever.
It makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling. They are startling because he is normal. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.
There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man’s mental balance. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but also very business-like. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what breeds insanity is REASON. Poets do not go mad, CHESS PLAYERS do. Mathematicians go mad and cashiers. But creative artists, very seldom.
I am not, in any sense, attacking logic. I only say that this danger lies in logic, not in imagination.Moreover it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid, it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, was morbid. Not because he was poetical but because he was especially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: The only great English poet went mad. COWPER. And he was definitely driven mad by logic. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. The general fact is simple:
POETRY IS SANE BECAUSE IT FLOATS EASILY IN AN INFINITE SEA.REASON SEEKS TO CROSS THE INFINITE SEA, AND SO MAKE IT FINITE.
The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise. To understand everything is a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heaven. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is head that splits.
If the Madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Everyone who has had the misfortune to talk with people on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely possible that you will get the worst of it. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed the common phrase for insanity is in this respect, a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete and often in a purely rational sense, satisfactory. Or to speak more strictly, the insane explanation if not conclusive is at least unanswerable. If a man says that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators, which is what exactly the conspirators will do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad. For if he were the King of England that might be the wisest thing for the authorities to do. Or if a man says he is Jesus Christ .It is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.
Nevertheless he is wrong. But if he attempted to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this; that his mind moves in a perfect but small circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle.
There is such a thing as narrow universality, a small and cramped eternity. You may see it in many modern religions. Now speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination of a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. Suppose we could express our deepest feelings against his obsession, we should begin by saying something like this:
“All Right. Perhaps you know that you are the King of England, but what do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the Kings of the Earth.” Or
“So you are the creator and redeemer of the World, but what a small world it must be. How sad it must be to be God, and an inadequate God, at that. How much happier you would be if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men, to look up as well as down. “
Hence curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil. Such is the madman of experience. He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea; he is sharpened to one painful point. He has the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense.
Take the first more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything and everything does not seem worth understanding.
His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cogwheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the Earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples, proud mothers, first love, or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
Materialists and Madmen never have any doubts. The men who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with sun and stars; they are both unable to get out. The one into the health and happiness of Heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of Earth.
We may say in summary, that the chief mark and element of insanity is reason used without root, reason in a void. But we may ask in conclusion, if this were what drives men mad, what is it that keeps them sane?
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery, you have health. When you destroy mystery, you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because he has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his Gods; but free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight as stereoscopic: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.
Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the Kingdom of Heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the Kingdom of earth. He admired Youth because it was young and Age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man.
The whole secret of mysticism is this; THAT MAN CAN UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING BY THE HELP OF WHAT HE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.
As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and health.Buddhism is centripetal. But Christianity is centrifugal; it breaks out. The cross, though it has at its heart, a collision and contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering shape. Because it has a paradox at its center, it can grow without changing. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.
And another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well, the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing, which we cannot look at, is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the Sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is all moonshine; for it is the light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the God of both imagination and of sanity. For he was both a patron of poetry and the patron of healing. The Transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as a kind of splendid confusion; it is both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the Circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has rightly given to them all her name
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rasAyana 