6. Christmas and the Aesthetes
The world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and pessimism
have been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way up.
The difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good and
evil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly from
the fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what evil.
Hence the difficulty which besets "undenominational religions."
They profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds, but they
appear to many to have collected all that is dull in them.
All the colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white.
Mixed together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and a
thing very like many new religions. Such a blend is often something much
worse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the Thugs.
The error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is really
the good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion.
And this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who have
the misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the parts
commonly counted good are bad, and the parts commonly counted
bad are good.
It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admire
it in a photographic negative. It is difficult to congratulate all
their whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness.
This will often happen to us in connection with human religions.
Take two institutions which bear witness to the religious energy
of the nineteenth century. Take the Salvation Army and the philosophy
of Auguste Comte.
The usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army is
expressed in some such words as these: "I have no doubt they do
a great deal of good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style;
their aims are excellent, but their methods are wrong."
To me, unfortunately, the precise reverse of this appears to be
the truth. I do not know whether the aims of the Salvation Army
are excellent, but I am quite sure their methods are admirable.
Their methods are the methods of all intense and hearty religions;
they are popular like all religion, military like all religion,
public and sensational like all religion. They are not reverent any more
than Roman Catholics are reverent, for reverence in the sad and delicate
meaning of the term reverence is a thing only possible to infidels.
That beautiful twilight you will find in Euripides, in Renan,
in Matthew Arnold; but in men who believe you will not find it--
you will find only laughter and war. A man cannot pay that kind
of reverence to truth solid as marble; they can only be reverent
towards a beautiful lie. And the Salvation Army, though their voice
has broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape, are really
the old voice of glad and angry faith, hot as the riots of Dionysus,
wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism, not to be mistaken for a philosophy.
Professor Huxley, in one of his clever phrases, called the Salvation
Army "corybantic Christianity." Huxley was the last and noblest
of those Stoics who have never understood the Cross. If he had
understood Christianity he would have known that there never has been,
and never can be, any Christianity that is not corybantic.
And there is this difference between the matter of aims and
the matter of methods, that to judge of the aims of a thing like
the Salvation Army is very difficult, to judge of their ritual
and atmosphere very easy. No one, perhaps, but a sociologist
can see whether General Booth's housing scheme is right.
But any healthy person can see that banging brass cymbals together
must be right. A page of statistics, a plan of model dwellings,
anything which is rational, is always difficult for the lay mind.
But the thing which is irrational any one can understand.
That is why religion came so early into the world and spread so far,
while science came so late into the world and has not spread at all.
History unanimously attests the fact that it is only mysticism
which stands the smallest chance of being understanded of the people.
Common sense has to be kept as an esoteric secret in the dark temple
of culture. And so while the philanthropy of the Salvationists and its
genuineness may be a reasonable matter for the discussion of the doctors,
there can be no doubt about the genuineness of their brass bands,
for a brass band is purely spiritual, and seeks only to quicken
the internal life. The object of philanthropy is to do good;
the object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment,
amid a crash of brass.
And the same antithesis exists about another modern religion--I mean
the religion of Comte, generally known as Positivism, or the worship
of humanity. Such men as Mr. Frederic Harrison, that brilliant
and chivalrous philosopher, who still, by his mere personality,
speaks for the creed, would tell us that he offers us the philosophy
of Comte, but not all Comte's fantastic proposals for pontiffs
and ceremonials, the new calendar, the new holidays and saints' days.
He does not mean that we should dress ourselves up as priests
of humanity or let off fireworks because it is Milton's birthday.
To the solid English Comtist all this appears, he confesses, to be
a little absurd. To me it appears the only sensible part of Comtism.
As a philosophy it is unsatisfactory. It is evidently impossible to
worship humanity, just as it is impossible to worship the Savile Club;
both are excellent institutions to which we may happen to belong.
But we perceive clearly that the Savile Club did not make the stars
and does not fill the universe. And it is surely unreasonable to attack
the doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism,
and then to ask men to worship a being who is ninety million persons
in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comte
was wisdom. In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought
of as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible,
he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of mummery.
He saw that while the brutes have all the useful things, the things
that are truly human are the useless ones. He saw the falsehood
of that almost universal notion of to-day, the notion that rites
and forms are something artificial, additional, and corrupt.
Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and much
wilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things does
not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say;
it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do.
The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples,
and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing
green carnations and burning other philosophers alive.
But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn,
and man was a ritualist before he could speak. If Comtism had spread
the world would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy,
but by the Comtist calendar. By discouraging what they conceive
to be the weakness of their master, the English Positivists
have broken the strength of their religion. A man who has faith
must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.
It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions
when he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them.
I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that I would not
read the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever.
But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting
a bonfire on Darwin Day.
That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded.
There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy.
Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily
bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and
brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy.
Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again
over the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set up
a single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to.
They have not given a name or a new occasion of gaiety.
Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday
of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive
of the infancy of Ibsen outside people's doors in the snow.
In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains
out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth.
Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian,
when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it.
In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.
The strange truth about the matter is told in the very word "holiday."
A bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy.
A half-holiday means, I suppose, a day on which a schoolboy is only
partially holy. It is hard to see at first sight why so human a thing
as leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin.
Rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and give
each other presents in honour of anything--the birth of Michael
Angelo or the opening of Euston Station. But it does not work.
As a fact, men only become greedily and gloriously material about
something spiritualistic. Take away the Nicene Creed and similar things,
and you do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages.
Take away the strange beauty of the saints, and what has
remained to us is the far stranger ugliness of Wandsworth.
Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.
And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter. There are in the modern
world an admirable class of persons who really make protest on behalf
of that antiqua pulchritudo of which Augustine spoke, who do long
for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.
William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter were
the dark ages than the age of Manchester. Mr. W. B. Yeats frames
his steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice
to forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear. Mr. George Moore
collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness
of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved.
There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garments
who pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games.
But there is about these people a haunting and alarming something
which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas.
It is painful to regard human nature in such a light,
but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore does
not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight.
It is even possible that Mr. W. B. Yeats never pulls crackers.
If so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions?
Here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plying
a roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar.
if this is so, let them be very certain of this, that they are
the kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thought
the maypole vulgar; who in the time of the Canterbury pilgrimage
would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the time
of the Olympian games would have thought the Olympian games vulgar.
Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that they were vulgar.
Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech,
rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy drinking,
vulgarity there always was wherever there was joy, wherever there was
faith in the gods. Wherever you have belief you will have hilarity,
wherever you have hilarity you will have some dangers. And as creed
and mythology produce this gross and vigorous life, so in its turn
this gross and vigorous life will always produce creed and mythology.
If we ever get the English back on to the English land they will become
again a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people.
The absence from modern life of both the higher and lower forms of faith
is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds.
If we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips.
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