On Books for Pessimists

write. The mere fact that I did begin to write, naturally, will be used as another argument on the side of the pessimist.

Nevertheless, there is a real issue involved. When I was a boy, the world really was divided into optimists and pessimists. Neither of the two terms is very philosophical; and perhaps neither of the two types were very real philosophers. But both the types were very-real persons. You could not have made Walt Whitman a pessimist except by murdering the real Walt Whit-man. You could not have turned Thomas Hardy into an optimist except by torturing him Into something totally different from Thomas Hardy. A real fight was fought, a real controversy was engaged, in that Victorian era which some imagine to have been so stolid and unanimous. It was not, on the surface, a religious controversy. It prided itself, so to speak, on being an entirely irreligious controversy. Whitman was quite as much of a Freethinker as Hardy. He had the same facts of the material world before him; he had the same disdain of invoking any immaterial facts to assist him. The question was, quite simply: "Is Life worth living?'* Even if Life is only what is involved in the word Biology. Putting aside immortality, is Life worth living? Putting aside heaven, is earth worth living in? Now, when I was young, there were a number of writers who would say (in Mr. Asquith's famous phrase) that the answer is in the affirmative. They only depended slightly and indirectly, or at least in very different degrees, on any help outside this world. Browning was certainly on the side of religious belief, on the whole. Meredith was certainly against religious belief, on the whole. Stevenson, though he often used phrases expressing his sympathy with religion, did, on the whole, base his confidence on ideas apart from religion. But the point is that, in that older literary atmosphere, I should instantly have answered anybody who was depressed by saying, "Read Stevenson!" or "Read Browning!" or "Read Meredith!" And something suddenly told me, in the silence of the barber's shop, that it is no longer any good to tell pessimistic people to read these optimistic writers. Not that there is anything the matter with the optimistic writers. What is the matter is with the pessimistic people. But what is the matter with them?

It looks as if the old inquirers, from Job to John Galsworthy, wanted to be convinced that it was all right. It looks to me as if many modern inquirers only want to be convinced that it is all wrong. To bring them good news is to bring them bad news. For instance, suppose we could prove to the interminable procession of young Pacifists, who tell us that the Great

War was an act of horrible cruelty, that it was an act of really unavoidable human necessity. I do not mean that I propose to prove it now, though I could make out a much stronger case for it than they imagine. But suppose, merely logically, and for the sake of an abstract argument, that it could be proved. Would the young pessimists be pleased? Would they instantly become young optimists? Would their refined features light up with joy and jollification; and would they be instantly reconciled to nationality and normal living? I fancy not. I fancy that the modern young man (after my alarm in the barber's shop, I avoid the topic of the modern young woman) really wants to be a pessimist. Now I do not believe that Thomas Hardy really wanted to be a pessimist. On the contrary, it seems to me that he took every incidental opportunity to avoid being a pessimist. Whenever he could describe the glories of the glowing southern landscape of England, he described it for the sake of its own beauty; he made his hills and valleys even more vivid than his men and women. There are passages in his novels which I still remember, alas! long after I have forgotten the novels. I can remember an impression of sweeping and splendid pasturage, ending with a line of noble and uplifted trees. But to the new pessimist it would seem a stretch of flat vegetation, ending in some unusually large vegetables. That, it seems to me, is the trouble just now; not that so many people have found reasons for discontent, as there are always reasons for discontent, but that so ttiany people wish to be discontented. So many people are discontented unless they can be discontented. Little as I know of the original private problem mentioned in the barber's shop, I know it is not a case of this kind. I took it merely as a text for a wandering speculation; and the speculation has wandered very far. Nevertheless, I think it is one worth pursuing, in the hope of finding its logical end, which I do not profess to have found here. To put the matter very crudely: in the Victorian time even the atheists could be optimists. In the present Georgian time, the atheists are resolved to be pessimists. A man of genius like George Meredith could essentially, if not avowedly, pit Nature against God. A man of genius like Mr. Aldous Huxley is much more annoyed with Nature than he is with God. When I was a boy, I would have told any girl who was depressed to read Treasure Island and cheer up; therein doubtless underrating the complexity, nay, perversity, of girls. But I should have supposed that the fighting spirit of Stevenson was a real angle of attack upon life. What is much more important, Steven-son certainly thought it was a real angle of attack upon life. If I had been looking for optimists to answer pessimists like Schopenhauer and Hardy, I could instantly have turned to Browning or Whitman. And I will confess that, while I have myself found what I hold to be deeper justification of the glory of living, I still think that those jolly pagans of the Victorian time, like Whit-man and Meredith, made out a good case for life. What I want to know is why those who are now boys, as I was then a boy, are so strangely and stubbornly twisted towards making a case against life? We also were morbid, because we were boys; we also were maniacs, because we were boys; we were quite capable of killing ourselves, because of the positive beauty of a particular woman; we also were quite capable of killing somebody else, because of the positive justice of a particular revolution. But it was always because of the positive goodness of a particular good thing. Why is it that so many people only want to make a case for the negative badness, not only of a bad thing, but of all things as being bad? The present generation has had more pleasure and enjoyment than any previous generation. Is that the right way of stating the riddle? Or is that the answer?

XXVII On the Science of Sociology

THE great Science of Finger-Prints, discovered by a brilliant French criminologist, has produced its principal or ultimate effect on the world, which is this: that whereas a gentleman was expected to put on gloves to dance with a lady, he may now be expected to put on gloves in order to strangle her. These changes in etiquette, or fine shades of fashion, may or may not correspond with an improvement in dancing or a decrease in strangling. The great Science of Criminology itself, discovered by an enterprising Italian Jew, has produced no such simple and practical result. It was conducted proudly and somewhat pompously on the following principles: that very poor men, and especially poor men more or less in the hands of the police, can safely have their ears pulled, their skulls measured, their teeth counted, tested, or pulled out, so as to establish by scientific methods a sort of composite photograph of all criminals, which was really a composite photograph of all very poor men. Whereas, if the scientific expert pays a call on an American millionaire, and says to him cheerily, "I have come to measure your ears," or "Permit me to take a cast o£ your very simian facial angle," there is generally quite a scene before the scientific expert, in American language, pays for his excessive interest in the ears of others by being thrown out on his ear. There was therefore a serious gap in the galleries of criminal types which used to be published in the magazines of popular science; the defect being the entire absence of any types of anti-social activity who had ever had more than £200 a year. Yet we know, even in retrospect, that there were anti-social persons among those whose seclusion the scientific expert was thus forced to respect. Never once did Mr. Kreuger smile on us from that Rogues' Gallery which science spread before us; friends and admirers sought in vain for the benevolent countenance of Mr. Whitaker Wright among the physical types whom an inevitable doom drove into conflict with the law: all because of their abnormal noses or the peculiar shape of their ears.

It always seemed to me, therefore, even at the time when Lombroso and his lot were taken quite seriously by those who discussed the new possibilities of science, that the science suffered from an insufficiency of data or even an unfair selection of data. The true theory of thieves could not be found in these police statistics; because the statistical method in question was bound to ignore the very heads of the profession. If a man must have one ear larger than another in order to make him steal sixpence, or in order to explain why he did steal sixpence, how vast in size and fantastic in outline must be the ear of a man who stole six millions by unscrupulous company-promoting! Surely the ears, noses, faces, and general appearance of some of these great financiers must have been hardly human, in their distortion o£ the ordinary human features; they must have been monsters and grotesque deformities hidden from the light of day. And yet their portraits, when we did see them (though not in the illustrative plates of books on criminology), were usually in the last degree smooth, bland, and serene. It was quite obvious, from a mere glance at their pictures, that no scientific expert had ever been allowed to badger them.

At about the same period in the past there was also a great Science of Sociology. I have really no notion of what has happened to that. We do sometimes see, even now, the name and nonsense of Lombroso invoked with solemnity in fourth-rate detective stories and very-antiquated atheist pamphlets. Here and there, hidden, or rather buried, in some forgotten hamlet, there may be a dear old gentleman whom pitying relatives have left under the impression that there is a Science of Criminology. They have perhaps respected his hobby, the harmless and innocent hobby of looking at diagrams which show the facial angle of a French apache or an Italian anarchist, to explain how it is that some human beings have been known to covet their neighbours' goods. But of the Science of Sociology I can gather no news; nor even make a guess about its horrid but hidden fate. I cannot even hope to find the white-bearded ancient in the hut in the lonely wood still studying Sociology, as I might find him studying Criminology or Astrology or Alchemy or the scientific results of combining the eye of the common newt with the toe of the edible frog. Even the word itself is now rarely encountered. Yet in its time it stood for a definite class of ideas; and those ideas are still hanging about in the atmosphere, under other names and in connexion with other sciences. But I doubt whether the strict and rigid meaning of Sociology, as I remember the term in the times before the Great War, will ever return in the face of present events, and of our most menacing and unstable Peace.

The original point of calling Sociology a science was that social actions were so precisely determined that they could be precisely predicted. There was no other real meaning in talking about a social science, as apart from the ordinary thing (which men have always known), which might be called a social philosophy, or a social outlook, or a social speculation. It was bound up with that great art of Prophecy, which was the vein of mysticism running through the materialism of the world, between the war in South Africa and the war in Europe. It was then said on every side that we should soon be able to predict a crisis as easily as a comet; to calculate the time of a political explosion as well as of a chemical explosion; to foresee that the next national Cabinet would return after the Election, as we were sure that the migratory birds would return in spring. Sometimes, even in the old order, nay, even in the order of ornithology, odd things would happen; the birds would not return or the members would not be returned.

But that was the old order; and what we are facing now is not a new order, but a new disorder. I do not believe that the pretence of predicting political or social events as certain to happen will now survive the political and social events that have actually happened. I do not think the Prophet of Sociology can outlive the repeated blows of the Great War, of the Russian Revolution, of the Fascist Revolution, of the Hitlerite Revolution; not one of which the Prophet ever really prophesied. Nay, he came nearer to prophesying the earlier than the later events. A European War was always a possibility, but no scientific sociologist ever said it was a certainty. In one sense everybody knew that there might be a Russian

Revolution; indeed, there had already been a Russian Revolution. But Bolshevism was not the Russian Revolution; on the contrary, it was a new and unique thing that put an end to the Russian Revolution. And no intellectuals expected the actual thing called Bolshevism; least of all the Russian intellectuals.

The poor old Science of Sociology, however, might have survived these milder shocks. But will anybody pretend that anybody predicted Mussolini? Will any scientific sociologist say he had worked out a sociological weather-chart, dating the exact emergence and importance of Hitler? These recent revolutions or reactions, or whatever they are, depart more abruptly from the weather-chart even than the weather. Can we hope, perhaps, that all of us will begin to see what some of us can claim to have seen from the beginning: three great truths or dogmas on which all history hangs? (i) That humanity is far too complex to have such calculations made about it. (2) That humanity is afflicted with original sin. (3) That the will of man is free. Granted these three facts, it is obvious that nobody can predict that nobody will start this or that idea, will start it even if it has been unsuccessful, will start it even if it may fail again, will start it even if it is wicked, and its success therefore more wicked than its failure. There are too many men, each with too many moods, each with too many influences on them varying from instant to instant, to predict how the man will jump; for he is much more capricious than that lazy animal the cat. Let us at least thank all the rioters and brawlers and demagogues and dictators and casual despots for their one good deed in destroying the Science of Sociology. Even the Futurists themselves have made the Future free.

XXV1H On the Letter-Bag Novel

SOME are now suggesting that the Novel is near to its end; and, if so, its end is curiously like its beginning. Perhaps it is too much to say that the first childhood of fiction is now repeating itself in its second childhood. These metaphors from physical nature are among the worst monstrosities of materialism; and they are devouring monsters. There is no animal parallel in such things; and ideas do not grow grey whiskers, or heresies go bald, or truths lose their teeth. But there is a certain analogy, if we remember that it is only an analogy, touching the return of some human impulses to their original home. Much that is called modern, in the most modern fiction, resembles the crude stuff that Defoe first began to dig out of the stiff clay of fact. Few modern novels are so poetical as Robinson Crusoe; but many are much more prosaic than Moll Flanders. The most novel sort of novel is that of which we are doubtful whether it is a novel at all. And in that it really has a rough resemblance to the first rough experiment, before it was a novel at all. In theory, at least, there is nothing to prevent a modern story from wandering like