MORAL EQUIVOCALS,

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1687, 1 March 1913, Page 11

MORAL EQUIVOCALS,

There is a feature in tho literary taste of to-day that'is almost unique, in English .letters and deserves ..the attention .of the psychologist. ' "Paradox" is t'ho'usual non-analytio description; but Jail l • great literature contains au clement, of paradox, and this.; .particular phase is-.peculiar to the,-opening of the twentieth century. Is there any explanation of tho unique whim that loves to hear Mr. Chesterton gay, "I should regard any civilisation which . was without a universal habit of uproarious' dancing as being, from the full human pointy of view, a defective civilisation;" or. Mr. Bernard Shaw's dictum that ."ptople are .not the worse for a cbango -of'.wives or husbands? On. inquiry you ftnd that tho mast enthusiastic admirers regard these statements as only "pretty iFanny's ways," and. would at once demand the interference of tho police if Mr. Shaw took a second wife . or Mr. Chesterton, danced a pas soul in the City Temple. Ton must not interpret'the prophet so solemnly as all that. As'a matter of prosaic conviction, tho admirers of, Mr. Shaw and .Mr.. Chesterton dislike;the ethics and speculative standards of Polynesia just as much, as you do;, in truth, they regard, the :failure .to take' these authors, in a Pickwickian sense as i a hopeless want of culture on your part. The reviewer who' said that'• "it is not ; easy to understand what the book means; probably the author himself does not understand," expresses their point of view exactly. ■ _ There is no parallel to this among tho great Victorians. When Thackeray attacked snobbishness, or Dickens brutality, they had no admirers who declared that they "didn't menn it." People liked or disliked them, but both admirers and contemners held them to a prosaic meaning. Tho habit of regarding an author is the last word in up-to-date cleverness

becauso-his avowed/opinions are so silly that yoif provo your? dullness by refuting theLi with due gravity, is a development ox tho last twenty years. An increase of tolerance is probably the first explanation that leaps into tho inquirer's mind, i Half the wild and whirling paradoxes aro "riders" upon popular, or at least, tolerable opinions. There is no morey marked feature of the commonplace "educated" 'man'of our era than a terror ofbeing ' thought narrow. Ho never dreams ;of thinking .Mr. Bernard Shaw right; but he feels, that to listen to speculation liko this is. a' duty to the possibilities of civilisation. It is'just conceivable that thjo future will regard tho sexual customs of tlie Marquesas Islands as an-improvement,upon those of Victorian England. It is conceivable, too, that the British Association of 2000 A.D. will regard the Central African medicine-man as wiser than Professor Huxley. The iriode'rn man, seems nervous .ofbeing caught out in this fashion. ' ' ■ .

i But behind. theincrease of tolerance the most careless eye can diagnose an increase of levity. George-Eliot would havo felt for our makers'of speculative rockets that explode among the most valuablo spiritual inheritances of tho, race something of hatred Tom Tulliver had for "bankrupts, or the contempt Charles Dickens felt for Skimpole. Our kindly; generation allows' these speculative Skimpoles to perform',-"sometimes even pretends that they are "leaders of- thought," and asks no awkward questions >of their private sincerity.-; Wo enjoy .the senso of escape from- commonplace decency and respectability. Heading fhese things is like camping out or going barefooted at the seaside._ For a brief holiday you get back to tho irresponsible mind of tho child. But, one often wonders, is there any permanent influence upon the mind of to-day from this topsy-turvy literature ? Every now and then we find Mr. Shaw 6poken of as a "pioneer," and his magnetic influence in killing some venerable form of thought or emotion is trumpeted with screaming emphasis. It may reasonably bo doubted if his writings have any revolutionary effect. The "paradoxical" method, by its very nature, is always cutting its own throat. If you do not mean .what other people mean by religion and morality, we do, not know whether you mean a compliment ,or a disparagement when'you call. Jones immoral or a church a "petulantly irreligious club." It is quite useless'for Mr.' Shaw to tell us that the English home is neither pure, nor holy, nor honourable, nor :in any creditable sense distinctively English. /We •simply, look up the Shavian vocabulary,.' and find that Shelley was "purer" than Arnold of Rugby, and Goethe "holier" and more virtuous than Bishop Butler or Mr. Gladstone. The invective at once cancels out into nothing, with the result that if Mr. Shaw has anything to teach, his vocabulary effectively prevents him from teaching it. . It may bo questioned whether the scintillating author of "Orthodoxy" has any more-permanent influence. Mr. Chesterton is brilliantly successful in exposing Mr. Shaw's materialistic Toryism and Mr. Well?'s philosophic confusion. But the dogma that orthodox Christianity has much to say for itself, from the standpoint and canons of fairyland, docs not really come into ( collision with any belief or disbelief. It is, of course, quite true that a believer in fairyland may be called a'j "freethinker" and "broad-minded," compared with the hide-bound restrictions and intellectual hesitations of a modern scientist or sensible man of tho world. In precisely the same fashion a very uneducated Tariff Reformer is too "broadminded" to trouble about economic law, and feels a certain "mystic freedom" from the harrowing ties of cause and effect. ; But is it worth while putting a new image and superscription upon the usual conventions of the English language for the sake of ;results like these? ~The solid merit of Mr. Chesterton's work would bo enhanced, or at least.made more manifest, if lie sowed 'with -the hand and not'with the whole j sack. The edgo of this,kind of cleverness is all too easily dulled by over-use. The essence of his method is that it needs a conventional background, to throw it into relief. When this is wanting, it is the most tedious of all styles. '.'.'.To say that drunkenness is really a spiritual sin may arrest our attention for onoe. .Continue this euphemism for a little while, and you aro simply, changing the places of the words "spirit-. , ual" and "material." Is any of the literature of the "equivocal" school likely to. find a place in the ' permanent roll of English letters? Wo ■ think not. Some really vital humour (or I at least humour not felt at first to be mechanical) is produced; by Mr. Shaw's i electric brain. But'it is difficult to avoid : the'shrewd suspicion that these saucy ; flings at conventional morality and decency will be as dreary to a future generation as Ckmgrevo is .to us'to-day. The great permanent humorist is, "juicy"— ] the roots' of him aro deep-sunk .in the • .primitive emotions of' humanity. There 1 is nothing of this in Mr. Shaw—nothing 1 of Falstaff's or Uncle ; Toby's. sense of ! riotous enjoyment.' The jo'ie do vivre is wanting. : •' ] In the long run, the- moral equivocal ; falls between two stools. If' we take pro- 1 saically his:'oft-repeated "serious .convie-. ' tions we cannot laugh at his humour. ' If. Mr. Shaw really felt a prophet's call to uproot the sexual morality of Christian civilisation, the "humorous" scenes of "Man and Superman" would be unendurable even to himself. 'If Mr. Chesterton really visualised the supernatural universe of "Orthodoxy," his war-dances •{ over Mr. M'Cabe would be too brutal for < words. The world preserves its liking and: ( respect for moral equivocals by refusing • to rake them at their .word.—"Spectator., \

BACON ORSHAKESPEARE AGAIN

Writing from Eatisbon in the 'eighties— the 'eighties of tho seventeenth centurySir George'Etherege.aniuses his friend the Duke of Buckingham by suggesting how very differently life might be conducted if we wero able to reckon our years according to the Patriarchs. Etherege, .if he had lived at any time within the last half-century, would undoubtedly have added tho Bacon-Shakespeare controversy to the list of things that become reasonable' and possible in a life of nine, hundred years. But, as tho generations at present go, "Bacon or Shakespeare?" is one of those questions which most of us put aside for consideration at some future time, Some of you may one day or another have been put into a corner by this or that ardent Baconian, who said: HON OIiIFICABILITUDINIT AT IB US - 8 14 13 li 17 9 G 9 3 1 2 9 11 9 19 20 4 9 13 ■9 19 1 19 9 2 20 18-287 To which you discrectly answered: "Very possibly. . One day, when I have attended to 6ome rather pressing public or private business, I will look into it." But the years pass: "Bacon or Shakespeare?" still lurks reproachfully at the back of your mind; and in momonts of more than usual sincerity you realise that at the momeuts of death "Bacon or Shakespeare?" will be one of a great host of tilings too long neglected. But Andrew Lang, in a crowded life, found tiine.for Bacon or Shakespeare.- I find a tristful irony in tho circumstance' that his flual verdict upon this controversy. was the work of his last years, pub-' lished posthumously. It lies before me as I write, a solemn reminder that even lie, who in his fino manner of mingled pleasantry and scholarship took all know-, ledgo for his province, was in this instance very nearly intercepted. "Now or never," this volume seems to say, "if you honestly intend to go into Bacon or Shakespeare, is the time to do so/ .Moreover, this book of Lang is more than a memento mori for tho literary conscience. It is a warning; but it is also a bribe. Not only lias Lang written a oloselyreasoned and a very valuable introduction to the minutiae of a subject l/lioso demands on a reader's erudition aro usually quite appalling. He has also manuged to give us an extremely entertaining book. Lang, apart from hi 3 rare gift for lively exposition, knew the full value of an occasional discreet diversion from (he narrow way. Thus, Baconians have constructed some very ingenious arguments upon the absenco df any' striking local tradition as to tho illiterate Will,in.his nativo town of Stratford. Why, Lang has asked in his liveliest manner, shculd this'absence ;of. local'tradition in an unfettered town, which Will abandoned in early youth and returned to in uneventful middle-age, be held ill any way remarkable? He continues:—

"In 186G I was an undergraduate of a .year's standing at 13alliol College, Oxford, certainly not an unlettered academy. In that year tie early and the best'poems of a considerable Balliol poet wero'published: lie had' 'gono down' snmo eight yoar3 before. 1 Being s'oung and green. 1 eagerly soiiglit for traditions aljout Mr. Swinburne. One of his oontem oorario,

who tpok, a First in the final classical schools, told me that ho was a 'smug.' J nother, that, as Mr. Swinburne and his friend (later a Scotch prolessor) were not crickoters, they proposed that tne'y should combine to pay but a single subscription to the Cricket Club. A tliird,' a tutor of the highest reputation as a moralist and metapliysician, merely smiled at my early enthusiasm—and tola lue nothing. A white-haired coliego servant said that 'Mr. Swinburne was a very quiet gentleman'

J "A very; humble parallel may follow. - Some foolish person went seeking early - anecdotes at my native town Selkirk on 3 tho iittrick. From an intelligent townss man he gathered much that was truo and - interesting about my younger brothers, t who delighted in horses and dogs, hunted, 1 shot, and fished, and played cricket; one 1 of them bowled for Gloucestershire and 3 Oxford. But about mo tho inquiring ' literary snipe only heard that 'Andra was aye the stupid ano o' tho fam'ly.' Yet I, too, had bowled for the local club, nou sine gloria Even that was forgotten." Obviously a book upon Shakespeare or Bajoon, with diversions (not impertinent to the argument: no good diversions are) as pleasant as these, may be read as much for pleasure as for duty. Here, in fact, is the chance so dear to Mr. Bernard Shaw's Englishman of laying up treasure simultaneously upon earth and in heaven. Personally I have read for pleasure. Bacon or Shakespeare is still, for mo, one of the many enormous problems that I prefer for the moment to put aside. But there are two particular assumptions of the Baconians, ably dealt with in this book of Andrew Lang, which seem to me very clearly to point one or two necessary morals of this unhappy time. i'irst, there is the impious assumption that no good thing could possibly come out of Stratford. The Baconians argue that unlettered, barbarian Will, a poacher, who held horses in London, and was a vagabond under the Act, and at most had no more Latin and Greek than could ', bo driven into him at a country grammar school—that this disreputablo oaf could no more havo written "Hamlet" than Bottom the ass. Discounting the abuse which the Baconians persistently shower upon poor Will, a player in the company of Burbage, for daring to have stood between illustrious Verulam and his just renown, this particular lino 1 of argument amounts to an assumption that, genius is necessarily made, not born,-'that, if any one of us would write "Hamlet" or "Macbeth", it must needs be that a University . education has shaped our ends, rough-hew them how we will.' This theory of the Divine Right of Secondary Eduoation, emerging in the late nineteenth century, is now so firmly rooted in our midst that many Baconians solemnly begin their contention that Bacon is Shakespeare with the assumption that only a ,B;A. who moved in tho very best society could successfully have furnished forth the folio of 1623. They openly appeal to a generation which really .believes that miracles are ceased. , " Such, if, for our moral's sake, wo accept the Baconian view of the life and character of unfortunate Will, is tho.first staggering assumption of the Baconians— namely, that souls are to be saved with a syllabus; that genius is only to bo frund above the wool-sack, or upon a platform, or in the chair of a duly elected Professor of English Poetry; that, because the Stratford "peasant" had neglected .the Hundred Best Books, therefore it is necessary to look for tho author of "Hamlet" somewhere else. Tho second assumption is equally wonderful. It has to do with what tho Baconians have called the SILENCE about Shakespeare. Is it not strange, they say, that so little can bo discovered about the man iwlio wrote these wonderful plays? Why did he make so small a splash in the world? Consider how little we can discover about him. Is it not very 6trnngo?

Granted. In the view of this twentieth century that,has .discovered the uses of advertisement, that trumpets the reputation of its little great ones on every possible occasion and writes their biographies before $hcy havo decently expired, it is exceeding strange—a strangeness that, oddly enough, began to strike people at about the same time as that other miraclo concerning the Shakespeare mystery which we liave already examined. Perhaps I may at' this point recommend to the no'of»l.l*isn'oK in io6 reacuiv that tho world was always very much as we know it to-dny a. case equally strange and disconcerting. Sir George Etherege, whose name I happened to mention at the head of this article, was the founder of tho English comedy of manners. Nobody knows where he ,was born; when or where he was married; when ho died; why ho began to write comedies in lfiGl; or why ho left off writing them in 1675.

Needless to.say, when I really make up my mind to go into this Bacon or Shakespeare business, I shall neither admit that miracles are ceased nor assume that a great personage has always of necessity employed a Press agent. And I only hope, l without any very sanguine expectation'of success, that .when the time comes I,may keep my head and my temper as imperturbably as Andrew Lang, and write a book one-half as agreeable.—John Palmer,'inthe "Saturday Review."