On the Man on the Spot

Ihave always mistrusted the Man On the Spot; because I fancy he is the Man In the Spotlight. It is rather like the feeling about the tourist who sends a picture postcard purchased on the spot; we have a suspicion that the spot is only too well known as a beauty spot. Particular persons and particular places are picked out by the limelight o£ publicity, in a way that is not really representative. In fact, I have always had a feeling, myself,,that the luckiest of all journeys would be to set out for some famous place, and lose your way and find yourself in another place. It would probably have all the beauties and virtues of the first place; and the virtues would not be vulgarized. You should have the huge good fortune of finding the old, original famous place, before it was famous.

It is still more true of the sort of country that is filled with a sort of controversy; where there are rival shrines or centres of learning; or competing couriers and agents of culture. In other words, the man on the spot is even more mystifying or misleading, in a country which is (so to speak) liable to come out in spots.

This sort of rash or eruption of local interest is likely to follow on any public debate about politics or religion; or anything that really matters; but it is proportionately difficult to judge the real proportions. A man who would interest us, say, in the cult of Nudism, will tell us that it is essentially Nordic; though why people should want to wear fewer clothes because they live in colder countries, I cannot imagine. He will tell you, as I learned from a book I read recently, that Sweden, or some such Scandinavian country, is the primitive and holy home of Nudism. But there must be a good many people on the spot in Sweden who would strongly object to coming out in spots in this way. In this case, as I have said, it is not a question of the spot, but of the spotlight. Cranks of this kind are advertised; they arc especially advertised by themselves. This sort of man on the spot is simply a nuisance; and, though it may be well believed that I do not exactly worship Herr Hitler, and that I am not disposed at the moment to enrol myself among the Nazis any more than among the Nudists — yet I cannot blame Herr Hitler for extinguishing the light of this particular spotlight-man; and I could understand his temptation if (in the American variant of the phrase) he really put him on the spec, In any case, our judgment of remote problems, involving other races or religions, is rather hampered than helped by the local limelight; which picks out this or that figure for a representative of the real state of things. It might almost be better to deduce the probabilities from general principles of human nature than to accept absolutely as infallible the private experiences of human beings. Indeed, I have myself come to the conclusion, on this as on many other matters, that the method most often needed is the very reverse of the modern method of what is called experiment or experience. Social experiment differs from chemical experiment, or anything that is really practical in the way of scientific experiment. It differs in this vital respect: that the students of the social science dispute, not only about what will happen, but about what did happen. Two chemists are not left quarrelling about whether there was or was not an explosion with a loud bang. If there was, both will agree that for some reason a state of unstable equilibrium did exist; and that it did happily stabilize itself and return to equilibrium with a loud bang. But two sociologists will continue to argue whether there was really an unstable social equilibrium; whether the social explosion was large or small, artificial or real, accidental or symptomatic, and whether the bang was really loud enough to be noticed. These differences of opinion exist more on the spot than anywhere else. The specialist on the spot is more of a partisan than anybody else. Thus we may be told any day that the brilliant investigator, Dr. Hugg, is a specialist on the Cannibal Islands, or what not; and people will sit at his feet as if he were not only an expert witness, but an impartial judge. But, after all, the real specialist on Cannibalism is the Cannibal. Nobody could be more swiftly and splendidly on the spot than he is, when there is any Cannibalism going forward. The objection to the Cannibal as a judge of Cannibalism is not that he is ignorant of Cannibalism, or remote from Cannibalism, or not on the spot as a specialist in Cannibalism. It is that he is just the least tiny little bit biased; and so is Dr. Hugg.

For this reason I have long tended towards the very unfashionable notion, that what may be called Theory is much more important than most modem people, who pride themselves on being practical people, are inclined to suppose. I have generally found that the practical man was almost always a partisan. But he is a partisan more than usually difficult to pin down to anything, even to his party, because he has never examined the theory of his own actions; and certainly has no notion of the theories of other people. Now I like to know the theories of other people, even if they arc theories I dislike belonging to people I dislike. When I know what principle they are supposed to be acting on, I can either deduce their activity or convince them of inconsistency. But when a man calls himself practical, because he does something and doesn't know why, then there is no relation between our minds at all. I would rather talk to a man who really understands the theory of Cannibalism than to another man so prodigiously practical that he was himself partially boiled in a pot. I will take an example about which I am really rather agnostic — or, in plain words, very ignorant. Mr. Gandhi has admittedly been a man who was for a long time very much on the spot; even, as it says in The Mikado, "a spot that is always barred." The enemies of Mr. Gandhi are also on the spot, and revolutionary change might possibly put them on the other side of the bars. But it does not help me to listen to a lady in sandals, who is a Theosophist and a Socialist, who says that she has been for years on the spot with Mr. Gandhi and knows him to be a saint — or, preferably, a Mahatma. Nor does it help me to listen to a choleric Anglo-Indian major, who says that he has been for years on the same spot, and that he knows that Gandhi is a mountebank. I think both these excellent persons are quite capable of believing what they want to believe. But if I did try to gratify my own curiosity, they would think it a most deplorably thin and theoretical and unpractical sort of curiosity. What

I should like to know is, first, what a Mahatma is; second, whether Gandhi really is a Mahatma; third, how you know he is a Mahatma; and, fourth, how all this fits in with the indubitable fact that he is by birth a Hindu; I believe of the third or commercial caste. I really inquire because I am ignorant. I only ask for information, like Socrates and Miss Dartie. Mahatmas used to be invoked by Theosophists; and Theosophists used to be presented as Esoteric Buddhists; and, ignorant as I am, I know that Buddhism is not the same as Brahmanism. If somebody would clear up the theory, even of a little thing like that, it would help me to understand India much better than the mere emotions of practical people about what they like or dislike; the mere spites or affections of the men on the spot. And it is exactly that sort of thing that is never dealc with in the newspapers, and seldom even reported by the traveller. It may be that there is a very simple explanation, but I should like to know it, because I should like to simplify the primary principles of the problem. As it stands, it does not seem to be merely a matter of likes and dislikes, but possibly of loyalties and disloyalties. Ignorant as I am of India, I know there must be any number of things to which Indians feel that they should be loyal, long before or quite apart from the political question of loyalty to the British Empire*

Now the newspapers have concentrated on that political question, because it is what is called a practical question. But, while remaining in blank ignorance (like Socrates), I rather think there is one thing that may be known about India and all Asia; and that is that it always did, and always will, concentrate largely on theoretical things. To leave out theoretical things is to be too insanely unpractical, even for a practical man.

IV On Shaw and his Black Girl

I NOTICED that in Mr. Bernard Shaw's new parable, about the Black Girl in search of God, he repeat a notion which he and others have often suggested., t is the notion of not only being an uncompleted man, but of worshipping an uncompleted God. This amused me a little, for it struck me at once that the progressive Futurist and Fabian who talks about his divinity as "not being properly made up yet," is, in fact, doing exactly what the Black Girl and all the most abject African savages are accused of doing* The Hebrew Prophets, whom Mr. Shaw almost admires, and the modern missionaries, to whom he is very nearly polite, have both of them always bombarded idolaters and fetish-worshippers with denunciations of the most illogical and grotesque fact about their faith: the fact that they "worship the work of their own hands/* The black African savage takes a handful of mud, pokes and pulls it about into a particular shape that is entirely the product of his own fancy, and then, although he knows he has just made the thing himself, manages to fall down and worship it, as if it were the maker of