On Bath

Ihappen to have been wandering about in the ancient and modern city of Bath. As it happens, it is in a rather special sense ancient and modern j it is not in a visible sense very mediaeval. Those correspondents who imagine that I am never happy except when embracing a gargoyle or enacting the ceremonial of a guild would picture me as forlorn in a place so classical 3 but I am feeling very cheerful, thank you. Bath is indeed associated with one grand gargoyle as great as a cathedral. The Wife of Bath is a figure as formidable as Mrs. Gamp, and conceived in truth with greater charity than that of Charles Dickens. But, in the main, Bath is, as I have said, a city of the Romans and of the rationalist eighteenth century, with something of a valley of oblivion in between. Yet I do not sit down and weep by the waters of Bath as by the waters of Babylon, or hang my mediaeval harp on an eighteenth-century poplar, or ask how I am to sing mediaeval carols in a strange land.

The truth is that I, for one, feel a great sympathy not only for the place, but for the period. I do not say that I model myself on Beau Nash in every detail of dress and demeanour, but I pick up with great interest all the stories about him, and all that was typical of his time. And I think the thing most typical of his time was that famous order given by Beau Nash that no swords were to be worn in Bath. It marks a paradox of the time and its relation to our own time. We do not wear swords, but we should like to. Whenever we get a chance of doing it in the Pageant of Putney or the historical procession of the Crusaders of Croydon, we do. Whenever we can do it in private theatricals or a fancy-dress ball we do. And when we can only call up the image of a man with a sword by writing or reading a romance about the eighteenth century, we do. But the real man of the eighteenth century did it and wished he didn't. He was beginning to feel a fool with a lethal weapon dangling round his legs. He felt as if he had an antiquated battle-axe hung round his neck or a battering-ram carried under his arm. Beau Nash expressed the inmost spirit of his time, which worshipped civilization and good sense, when he imposed a policy of disarmament on the city of pleasure.

Exactly the same spirit may be noted in "The Rivals." We write romantic plays and novels about Bath in the eighteenth century, glittering with rapiers and even moderately sprinkled with gore. But Sheridan's play shows a spirit of curious coldness to the romantic side of the duel, and a lively sense of the ridiculous side. The hero fights — or, rather.

is ready to fight — as a matter of dull convention 5 but there is no attempt to use the duel to make the hero more heroic. But, while it is possible to have a great deal of sympathy with this sanity, it is essential to realize that there was in it something of simplicity. The age of reason was in some ways an age of innocence. It had more illusions than the ages of faith.

When Voltaire told man to cultivate his garden, he did not realize how near the garden was to the Garden of Eden. I do not deny that Voltaire was in a sense the serpent in his own Eden. But even he was in some ways a very innocent snake. I mean that he saw the whole problem as much simpler than it has since become — or, rather, than it has since proved itself to be. Voltaire would certainly have agreed with Beau Nash that sensible men might very well leave off wearing swords. But certainly Voltaire, and possibly Beau Nash, would have been considerably puzzled to find that the later period of dropping rapiers was by no means a period of abandoning armaments. The very age in which a man thought it as crazy to wear a sword as to wave a firebrand was, nevertheless, the age in which the world was most ruthlessly and widely swept with fire and sword. We do not make ourselves ridiculous by wearing toy swords at tea-parties 3 we do not carry useless weapons on harmless occasions. No indeed 5 there is nothing useless about our weapons. Wastes of carnage and cart-loads of dead attest and advertise their utility. We kill millions of men with new instruments far too horrible to be worn as a part of evening dress. But I doubt whether Voltaire would have been relieved to hear that the tortures of the Inquisition and the poison of the Borgias were being hurled through the air against whole populations, as the price we pay for getting rid of a few jewelled sword-hilts or gilded scabbards. I doubt whether even Beau Nash would be completely happy in the reflection that nobody now dreams of wearing a sword when taking the waters, if it were accompanied by the reflection that (in the great war) men poisoned not only the waters, but even the very air.

What I mean by the innocence of the eighteenth-century rationalists is the fact that they really had no notion how short a time their own more rational mood would last. For it must be remembered that these new monstrosities really were new 3 they arose, if only indirectly, out of the new philosophy. They were not merely the old tyrannies and superstitions against which the philosophers had protested. It was not that the Inquisition managed to survive Voltaire. It was not that the luxury of the Borgias managed to linger in the lighter dandyism of Beau Nash. It was science, it was the natural philosophy encouraged by the Encyclopsedists, which begat Zeppelins and mustard gas. It was the French Revolution that produced the conscription of whole peoples j that produced first Napoleon and then Moltke and then Foch. I do not merely deplore this militant development in the sense that pacifists deplore it. But I do say that Voltaire and his school would deplore it. They would all the more deeply deplore it if they realized that they had done a good deal to produce it. If the scientific satirists of the Inquisition had seen some scenes of the Great War they would have hesitated between the hell they had denounced and the hell they had created.

But war is only one fact that illustrates this interlude of innocence. It felt itself to be more polished than anything that had gone before j but we must realize that in some ways it was more polished than what has come after — ^just as the smooth stream of the verse of Pope flows, as it were, between two more rugged banks — between the rocks of Browning and the rocks of Donne. Yet it was not, as is often supposed, artificial. There really was a certain youthful freshness about it which cannot be recovered any more than youth. For instance, its scepticism was a form of optimism j while ours is generally a form of pessimism.

These men believed in sweeping superstitious ruins off the green fresh bosom of their mother earth. But they believed she was a mother and not a stepmother^ and they believed that the more superstitions a philosopher swept away, the greener and fresher he would find her.

Alas! it was the philosopher who was fresh and green. But for this very reason where his philosophy failed as philosophy, it had all the more of a certain unconscious poetry. It believed it was abolishing ruins, but in truth it was building ruins j and there is no ruin so antiquated or so picturesque as that broken classical column on which was inscribed: ^^Deo erexit VoltalreP

That was why, for instance, it called what we call science by the name of natural philosophy. It lingers in a certain light and aerial quality in the word "naturalist," which sounds so much breezier and brighter than "biologist." It was before science had begun to meddle with morbid moral questions, making them more morbid than before. It was before the scientist had begun to vivisect living creatures or living creeds. It was before he had begun to put poisons into the body for inoculation and into the mind for instruction. It was before he had begun to pose as a martyr and while he was still as cheerful as a saint. We think of the eighteenth-century naturalist as a big boy with a big butterfly-net j perhaps he was more expert with the butterfly-net than with the pin and cork. But that is exactly why there is breeze and bright sunlight in the picture of him, and why the landscape is the landscape of Gains-borough or of Greuze. He is out in the meadows, following a butterfly as he might follow a kite — or a cloud. He is not cramped and crushed in that tiny cell that is called the scientific universe.