On Shaw and His Black Girl

all tilings. And it seems to me that the evolutionary theists o£ the type of Mr. Bernard Shaw or Professor Julian Huxley do exactly and precisely the same thing. They manage to make a god themselves; and then somehow manage to adore it as the god that Has made them. This seems stupid to my simple mind; as it did to the simple minds of the Hebrew Prophets, of the Moslem law-givers, and the modern missionaries in Africa. It is manufacturing an artificial faith, and then expecting it to be as natural as nature and as supernatural as God. In short, this extraordinary faith-worship is so very like ordinary fetish-worship, from a rational standpoint, that I do not wonder that the Black Girl could pass so rapidly from one to the other. As an old-fashioned person, who still believes that Reason is a gift of God and a guide to truth, I must confine myself to saying that I do not want a God whom I have made, but a God who has made me. But that is not the question, the lighter and lesser question, which I meant to raise in connexion with this matter of a completed humanity. Mr. Shaw's idea is only connected with that by the thin and fantastic thread of his theory of a progress permanently incomplete.

Perhaps we might call the two antagonistic philosophies the philosophy of The Tree and the philosophy of The Cloud. I mean that a tree goes on growing, and therefore goes on changing; but always in the fringes surrounding something unchangeable. The innermost rings of the tree are still the same as when it was a sapling; they have ceased to be seen, but they have not ceased to be central. When the tree grows a branch at the top, it does not break away from the roots at the bottom; on the contrary, it needs to hold more strongly by its roots the higher it rises with its brandies. That is the true image of the vigorous and healthy progress of a man, a city, or a whole species. But when the evolutionists I speak of talk to us about change, they do not mean that. They do not mean something that produces external changes from a permanent and organic centre, like a tree; they mean something that changes completely and entirely in every part, at every minute, like a cloud. There is no core of a cloud; there is no head or tail that cannot turn into something else; it not only changes, but it is itself only a prolonged change. While Hamlet and Polonius stood looking at the cloud, it will be remembered that, in those few minutes, the prince could persuade the courtier that the cloud had a hump like a camel, that it was a weasel, and that it was a whale. That is the cosmos as understood by these cosmic philosophers; the cosmos is a cloud. It changes in every part; nor is one part more permanent or even more essential than the other. For that matter, o£ course, the cosmic philosophers change as much as their cosmic cloud. When I was a boy, the universe was conceived under the image of the sick camel of Schopenhauer; a cosmos which certainly had the hump. After that, the Will to Live, which had been mournfully accepted by Schopenhauer, was carried forward with much greater briskness and tenacity by practical thinkers such as Mr. H. G. Wells, in some respects not unlike weasels; and now it is once more assuming vaster and darker outlines, more monstrous and more mysterious, as adumbrated in Mr. Shaw and his Hebrew Prophets: very like a whale. For Mr. Shaw really gives me the impression that he is still to some extent brooding on how the whale could have swallowed Jonah, or how anybody can swallow the whale.

Now, if this merely cloudy and boneless development be adopted as a philosophy, then there can be no place for the past and no possibility of a complete culture. Anything may be here today and gone tomorrow; even tomorrow. But I do not accept that everlasting evolution, which merely means everlasting chaos. As I only accept the organic and orderly development of a thing according to its own design and nature, there is for me such a thing as a human culture that is reasonably complete. Only the modern, advanced, progressive scientific culture is unreasonably incomplete*. It is» as Stevenson said, "a dingy ungentlenumly business; it leaves so much out of a man," Now, the things chat: it leaves out of a man are almost exactly the things that a proper understanding of Christmas, and the ok! religious festivals of the race, would probably put into a man. There is the right idea of dignity, with its companion, the right idea of buffoonery; there is the real psychological understanding of the motives of mummery and masquerade. There is that; spirit, now almost entirely lost, which led our fathers to describe even their revelry and gaiety as the "high solemnities" of the festive occasion. There is the profound meaning that lies in the word "mummery/* and its connexion with the notion of being mum. There is the yet: more profound significance in the word "mystery," which also is really the Greek for being mum. In short* there is the idea that, even on the festive occasion, naturally full of talking and singing, the most sensational thing is silence. All this is full of the now neglected idea that some things are better for being kept in reserve; that the best of all games of hukxmd-seek is that in which something remains hidden; and that the solemn and religious ceremonial of hunt-the-slipper is most impressive when the slipper cannot be found. All these old ideas of silence, of sacrifice, of a secret worth keeping, inhered in the old type o£ festivity that had a religious origin; and the modern fashionable festivity is, in comparison, barren and brassy and shrill because it has an irreligious origin. It is significant that in recent days every sort of public entertainment has been called "a show," with the implication that as much as possible must be shown. Sometimes it is hoped that the show will lead to what is called a show-down, but it seems to me more probable that the whole of this modern notion of a show will end by being shown up. For its weakness is, according to the sacred philosophy o£ the tree, that it has no roots or its roots are very shallow; it is too recent to be rooted in the subconsciousness or to have anything of the dimension of depth, in the matter of memory and what is called "second nature." There is not enough of the momentum of mankind behind it, and it wavers and grows weary even before our eyes.

V On the Atheist

IT may reveal an incurable and indecent levity or frivolity m my character, but most information about Bolshevists, and especially by Bolshevists, makes me laugh. I know that some newspaper proprietors and such national leaders think that it should only make us shudder, and issue periodical summonses to the public, telling us to keep on shuddering. But I do not believe very much in shuddering as a way of fighting; I have never heard of any stupidity that was extinguished by shuddering; and I have heard of several that were extinguished by laughing. Certainly there are aspects of the case that are no laughing matter, as stated by some really responsible writers in their formulation of the case against the Bolshevists, But at least there is nothing but pure, hilarious, happy laughter for some of the Bolshevist methods of formulating the case for the Bolshevists. Thus, for instance, when I merely hear that some of the Russian atheists have pulled down a church, I am naturally distressed. But when I hear that they have turned it into something called an Anti-God Museum, then for the moment all other