On the Touchy Realist

associations and not of analysis; and it matters more what words are used than what thought is presented. The truly refined youth will turn pale green at the mention of a mother's love or be seriously unwell on hearing of a happy marriage; just as the refined of more remote days would feel very sick if they read his little poems about torture or typhus fever. I know a distinguished lady who can hardly even hear the words, "women and children," though merely as a convenient classification, without being carried fainting from the room. People are positively nervous about mentioning duty or conscience or religion, because of the high-strung and delicately poised sanity of the new sort of cynic. It is not altogether as a joke that he tells you that, if you say such words, he will scream. Often, even as you hear him casually speaking, you can tell that he is near to screaming. This is something more than a perversity; it is an inversion, and an inversion which amounts to a sort of mental malformation. If our aunts ought to have been able to hear of immorality without fainting, surely our nephews might brace themselves to hear about morality without throwing an epileptic fit. The real and reasonable question of morality and immorality awaits discussion; and it will not be best discussed by epileptics, even if they are also cynics.

All this has ended in a sort of Manichean madness against the fundamental facts of life. It is as if every humour of the human body were a disease; every organ were a cancerous growth; the whole make-up of man consisting of nothing but parasitic organisms. From many modern novels and plays, one would suppose that all maternal affection was a "possessive" tyranny of egotistical tenderness; as if all domestic contentment were a paralytic stroke of arrested mental progress; as if all natural defence of normal privacy and honour were a disease of atavistic jealousy and subhuman segregation. That there are mothers who are too possessive, or wives who are too conventional, or husbands who are too selfish or unsociable is a fact so obvious that it has been satirized by all the satirists of human history. But the modern thing I mean carries with it quite a different implication. It implies not that the fruit is sometimes rotten, but that the root is always rotten; and the further that feeling goes, the more it works backwards to a rottenness in the very roots of the tree of life. It rather resembles a sort of rage of amputation in a mad surgeon who has forgotten the difference between the malady and the man. There is nothing that needs a sense of proportion so much as amputation; and in this inhuman philosophy it has gone far beyond the cutting off of the hand, or the plucking out of the eye, which symbolize the extremes of asceticism. We may tolerate the dentist, who passes from the curing of toothache to the universal pulling out of teeth. We need not tolerate the psychologist, whose only cure for a headache is cutting off the head. It will be some time before the psychologist can provide an artificial head, as the dentist can provide an artificial set of teeth.

Meanwhile the general stampede against nature goes on, and the paradise of the future looks more and more like a world of wigs, wooden legs, glass eyes, and everything that must be right because nature must be wrong. Just as these men would have forgotten that there is such a thing as the healthy human body, which we may or may not be able to restore, so they have forgotten entirely that there is a healthy condition of the natural emotions, quite apart from whether it was perfectly attained by our immediate parents in the immediate past. Those who are now called Pagans actually do what they themselves have chiefly blamed in the Puritans: they despise the body and all the affections that lie nearest to the body. Their aestheticism, more than any asceticism, has produced a repugnance for the real facts of life. Christians renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil; the new heathens do their best to accept the devil; but they have not stomach enough really to accept either the flesh or the world.

This is a new and curious philosophical phase. In many it is not yet conscious. But for many it will be the final phase of that fury of fastidiousness which already rages in them against the mere mention of common affections or even natural habits. It is an odd thing that a movement which set out with a claim to satisfy the most perilous natural passions should end by being unsatisfied even with the most harmless natural affections. But the serpent always bites his own tail; and the whirlwind always turns upon itself; and all the emanations of evil in history have always described this strange curve and ended up by contradicting themselves. The excess of Private Judgment ended in Prussianism; the excess of Prohibitionism and Puritanism ended in a government of bootleggers and gangsters; the excess of cut-throat competition, born of the Manchester School, ended in the universal tyranny of the Monopoly and the Trust. This is not the first time in history that the excess of Paganism has led to mere Pessimism, and its name now, like its name two thousand years ago, is, or.ought to be, Manicheanism. It appears at that point when men can no longer distinguish between the leprosy that is devouring the life and the life which it devours; when their rage against the weeds that choke ^the flowers passes into a wild feeling that all flowers are weeds; when the tares and the wheat seem so hopelessly entangled that the demented farmer is more angry with the wheat than with the tares. That was the frame of mind in which many men, in the age of St. Augustine, for instance, passed from a Greek glorification of nature to an Oriental glorification of nothing; because nature herself demanded sacrifice and life itself imposes limits. By ignoring limits, they lost all sense even of the limit that divides life and death, and finally found in death the only unlimited liberty. That ancient and tragic transformation from the Pagan to the Manichee is passing through many minds, and fulfilling itself before our very eyes today; and whether there be any cure for it, deeper than the destruction itself, this is no place to inquire.

But we can protest against history and human experience being distorted by these fleeting fads and fashions. Because we know nothing at all about Cornelia, except that she loved her children and called them her jewels, we need not tolerate the nonsense of somebody who says that she must have been a "possessive" mother, devouring her children's lives with destructive affection. Because we know nothing whatever about Scaevola, except that he is said to have thrust his hand in the fire as a defiance to the enemies of his country, we need not listen to the rubbish of recent psychopathologists, who will doubtless suggest that he had a perverted sexual pleasure in feeling pain. Because there is nothing known about Absalom, except that he indulged in a very ordinary human freak of getting up against his father, we need not rush to the exploded doctrines of Freud to find an unproved jealousy about an unrecorded mother. We can keep our common sense, and know that ordinary things are so called because they often happen, and that they need no explanation but the order of things as they are.

XXX On Wordsworth

I WAS lately looking into a new book about Words-worth, which may broadly be described as a defence of Wordsworth. At first sight it might appear that Wordsworth is hardly an historical person who needs white-washing. There might almost appear to be too much of such an element about. I mean that in some versions he appears rather too white, and in other versions rather too washy. Indeed, the publisher's note affixed by the Cambridge University Press to the book in question (which is called The Later Wordsworth, by Miss Edith C. Batho) seems rather to go to the other extreme. We all know that Wordsworth's youth was the time when he sympathized with the democratic vision of the idealists in Pans; we all know that he had a youthful entanglement in France; and we all know, or most of us think, that this earlier period was the period of his most fruitful and creative poetry. Still, most of us know what we mean when we say that Wordsworth was Wordsworth; and could hardly be mistaken for Byron. In the light of this, there is something a little challenging in a note which says, "His