The Book of This and That Part 4

XIV

ON INDIGNATION

There is nothing in which the newspapers deal more generously than indignation. There is enough indignation going to waste in the columns of the London Press to overturn the Pyramids in ruins and to alter the course of the Danube. We have had a characteristic flow of popular indignation over the execution of Mr Benton, a British citizen, in Mexico. Probably not one Englishman in a million had ever heard of Mr Benton before, but no sooner was he executed and in his grave than he rose, as it were, the very impersonation of British citizens.h.i.+p outraged by foreigners. On the whole, there is nothing healthier than group-indignation of the kind that sees in an injury to one an injury to all--that demands just dealing for even the poorest and least distinguished member of the group. It is the sort of pa.s.sion it would be pleasant to see trained and developed. My only complaint against it is that in the present state of the world it is too often reserved for foreigners and for those semi-foreigners, the people who belong to a different political party or social cla.s.s from your own. One would have thought, for instance, that the group-indignation which denounced the execution of Mr Benton without a fair trial might also have denounced the expulsion of the labour leaders from South Africa with no trial at all. The fact that it did not and that several of the London capitalist papers treated the whole South African episode as a good joke at the expense of Labour is evidence that to a good many Englishmen the maltreatment of British citizens is not in itself an objectionable thing, provided it happens within the British Empire. It seems to me that this is an entirely topsy-turvy kind of patriotism.

For every British citizen who is likely to be badly treated abroad, there must be thousands who are in danger of being badly treated in the British Empire itself. Is not the killing of an Englishman by an English railway company, for instance, as outrageous a crime as the killing of an Englishman by a foreign general? There is also this to be remembered: your indignation against the criminal in your own country is more likely to bear fruit than your indignation against the criminal in a foreign country. You can catch your English railway-director with a single policeman; you may not be able to catch your foreigner without an international war. Thus, though I do not question the occasional value of indignation against wicked foreigners, I contend that a true economy of indignation would lead to most of its being directed against wicked fellow-countrymen.

It may be retorted that Englishmen certainly do not limit their indignation to foreigners, and that the Marconi campaign is a proof that a good Englishman can always become righteously indignant against a bad Englishman--at least when the latter happens to be a Welshman or a Jew. But the Marconi campaign was only another example of group-indignation against persons who were outside the group. It was not, in this instance, a national or Imperial group: it was a party group. What I am arguing for is the direction of group-indignation, not against outsiders, but when necessary against the members of the group. I should like to see Conservatives becoming really indignant about Conservative scandals, Liberals becoming really indignant about Liberal scandals, Socialists becoming really indignant about Socialist scandals. As it is, indignation is usually merely a form of sectarian excitement It is always easy to find something about which to become indignant in your political opponent, if it is only his good temper.

His crime of crimes is that he is your political opponent--you use his minor crimes merely as rods to punish him for that. Our indignation against our opponents, to say truth, is usually ready long before the happy excuse comes which looses it like a wild beast into the arena.

One sees a good example of this leashed indignation in the Ulster Unionist att.i.tude to Nationalist Ireland. There is a silly scuffle about flags at Castledawson between a Sunday-school excursion party and a Hibernian procession, both of which ought to have known better.

Not a woman or child is injured, according to the verdict of a judge on the bench, but the Ulster Unionists, armed to the teeth with indignation in advance, denounce the affair as though it were on the same level of villainy with the September Ma.s.sacres. Not long afterwards real outrages break out in Belfast, and Catholics and Socialists are kicked and beaten within an inch of their lives. Here was a test of the reality of the indignation against outrages on human beings. Did the Ulstermen then come forward in a righteous fury against the wrongdoers on their own side? Not a bit of it. Sir Edward Carson did disown them in the House of Commons. But the Ulster Unionists, as a whole, raised not a breath of indignation. Being average human beings, indeed, they invariably retort to any charges made against them with an angry _tu quoque_ to the South. It is not long, for instance, since a Special Commission sat to investigate the facts about sweated women workers in Belfast, and issued a report in which the prevalence of sweating was demonstrated beyond the doubt of any but a blind man. Instead, however, of directing their indignation against the evils of a system in their own midst, the Ulster Unionists--at least, one of their organs in the Press--straightway sent one of their representatives down into the South of Ireland to prove how bad wages and conditions of life were there. What a waste of indignation all this was! Munster was full of indignation against the disease of sweating in Belfast, which it could not cure. Ulster, on the other hand, was full of indignation against the disease of bad housing in Dublin, which it could not cure. There is a flavour of hypocrisy in much of this anger against sins that are outside the circle of one's own responsibility. I do not mind how many sins a man is angry with provided they include the sins he is addicted to himself and that are at his own door. There is little credit in a rich manufacturer's indignation against the evils of the land system if he is indifferent to the evils of the factory system, and landlords who denounce industrial evils but see nothing that needs redressing in the lot of the agricultural labourer are in the same boat. Perhaps, in the end, the world is served even by this outside virtue. The landlords, in order to distract attention from their own case, have more than once brought a useful indignation to bear on the case of the manufacturers, and _vice versa_, and ultimately the bewildered, ox-like public has begun to drink in a little of the truth. On the other hand, this is an unhealthy atmosphere for public virtue. It gives rise to cynical views such as are expressed in the proverb, "When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own," and in the lines concerning those who

Compound for sins they are inclined to By d.a.m.ning those they have no mind to.

We all do it, unfortunately. The Presbyterian speaks with horror of the way in which the Catholic breaks the Sabbath, and the Catholic thinks it a terrible thing that the Presbyterian should go to a theatre on Good Friday. Montaigne, who was by inclination a sensualist, looked with disgust on the man who drank too much, and the drunkard retorts that every vice except his own is selfish and anti-social. Even when we admit our own sins we are half in love with them. It seems a less intolerable crime in oneself to rob the poor-box than in one's neighbour to have an unwashed neck. Englishmen never began to sing the praises of cleanliness as the virtue that makes a nation great until they had themselves taken to the bath. True, they often wash, as they govern themselves, not directly but by proxy; but, even so, cleanliness has been exalted into a national virtue till the very people of the slums, where the bath is used only for the storage of coal, have learned to shout "Dirty foreigner!" as the most indignant thing that can be said at a crisis.

There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that some one else is an evildoer. Our scandal about our neighbours is nearly all a muttered tribute to our own virtue. It fills us with a new pride in ourselves that it was not we who gambled with trust money or made love to our neighbour's wife or ran away in battle. By kicking our neighbours down for their sins we secure for ourselves, it seems, a better place on the ladder. The object of all religion is to destroy this self-satisfied indignation with our neighbours--to make us feel that we ourselves are no better than the prost.i.tute or the foreigner.

Similarly philosophy bids us know ourselves instead of following the line of least resistance and d.a.m.ning others. That is why one would like to see Englishmen concerned about injuries done to Englishmen by Englishmen, even more than about injuries done to Englishmen by foreigners. Indignation against the latter, necessary though it may be, is apt to become a mere melodramatic subst.i.tute for native virtue.

There are crimes enough at home for any Englishman to practise his indignation upon without ever letting his eye wander further than Dover--crimes of underpayment, crimes of overwork, crimes of rotten houses, crimes that are murder in everything but swiftness and theft in everything except illegality. It is fine, no doubt, that Englishmen should become hot with anger at the news of a Benton murdered in Mexico as it is fine that the democracies of Europe should be inflamed with indignation at the murder of a Ferrer in Spain. These things are evidence of large brotherhoods, of an extension of those family charities which are at the back of all advance in civilisation. On the other hand, can none of this pa.s.sionate fraternity be spared for John Smith, aged fourteen, done to death by the half-time system, or for his father killed on the line as the result of the need of making dividends for railway shareholders, or for his mother working for a halfpenny an hour in a narrow room the filth of which is trans.m.u.ted into gold for some rich man? These, too, are your brothers and sisters, and deserve the angry eloquence of an epitaph. Here is subject enough for indignation--not a weak and ineffectual indignation against foreigners, but indignation knocking terribly at your own doors.

XV

THE HEART OF MR GALSWORTHY

Mr Galsworthy has been writing to the _Times_ on "the heartlessness of Parliament." The _Times_, always noted for its pa.s.sion for humane causes, ranges itself behind him and a.s.serts that Englishmen have now learned to speak of the politician "with intellectual contempt, as of one who is making a game of realities, who fiddles a dull tune while Rome is burning." Both Mr Galsworthy and the _Times_ are apparently agreed that the measures which Parliament has for some time past been discussing are matters of trivial significance and, in so far as they take up time which might be devoted to better things, are an outrage upon the conscience of (to use the odd phrase of the newspaper) "those who are most interested in the spectacle of life and the future of mankind." Mr Galsworthy, wearing his heart in his ink-pot not only denounces the indifference of politicians to vital things, but goes on to lay down an alternative programme--a programme of the heart, as he might call it, in contrast to the programme of the hustings. He begins his list of things which ought to be legislated about with the sweating of women workers and insufficient feeding of children, and he ends it with live instances of--in an even odder phrase than that quoted from the _Times_--"abhorrent things done daily, daily left undone."

Export of horses worn-out in work for Englishmen--save the mark! Export that for a few pieces of blood-money delivers up old and faithful servants to wretchedness.

Mutilation of horses by docking, so that they suffer, offend the eye, and are defenceless against the attacks of flies that would drive men, so treated, crazy.

Caging of wild things, especially wild song-birds, by those who themselves think liberty the breath of life, the jewel above price.

Slaughter for food of millions of creatures every year by obsolete methods that none but the interested defend.

Importation of the plumes of ruthlessly slain wild birds, mothers with young in the nest, to decorate our gentlewomen.

Probably ninety-nine readers out of a hundred will sympathise with Mr Galsworthy's bitter cry against a Parliament that has so long left these and other wrongs unrighted. Let Mr Galsworthy take any one of his cases of inhumanity by itself, and he is sure of the support of nearly all decent people in demanding that an end shall be put to it.

The human conscience has developed considerably in recent years in regard to the treatment both of human beings and of animals, and, though conscience is frequently dumb in the impressive presence of economic interests, it has still the power to get things done, as witness, for example, the establishment of minimum-wage boards in certain sweated trades. Mr Galsworthy, however, does not ask you to consider each of his desired reforms on its merits. He asks you, in effect, to put them in place of the reforms which politicians are at present discussing. "Almost any one of them," he declares of his brood of evils, "is productive of more suffering to innocent and helpless creatures, human or not, and probably of more secret harm to our spiritual life, more damage to human nature, than, for example, the admission or rejection of Tariff Reform, the Disestablishment or preservation of the Welsh Church, I would almost say than the granting or non-granting of Home Rule."

It seems to me that Mr Galsworthy is doing his cause, or causes, no service in making comparisons of this sort. He is like a man who would go before Parliament, when it was discussing some big project like the nationalisation of the railways and deny its right to legislate on such a matter till it had pa.s.sed a measure forbidding the sticky sort of fly-papers. One might sympathise heartily with his desire to abolish the slow torture of flies, and I for one detest with my whole soul those filthy fly-traps in which the insects go dragging their legs out till they die. But it is obvious that the question of cruelty to flies is one which must be dealt with on its merits. To weigh it in the balance against such a thing as nationalisation of the railways is merely to invite a humorous rather than a serious treatment of the question. It is not a comic question in itself: it may easily become comic as a result of some ridiculous comparison.

That is, more or less, what one feels in regard to Mr Galsworthy's implied comparison between the importance of Free Trade and the importance of putting an end to the "export of horses worn-out in work for Englishmen--save the mark! Export that for a few pieces of blood-money delivers up old and faithful servants to wretchedness." In so far as the export of horses leads to cruelty and wretchedness I agree with Mr Galsworthy that it ought to be stopped. Not because the horses are "worn out in work for Englishmen," not because they are "old and faithful servants"--that is mere sentimentalising and rhetoric--but because they are living creatures which ought not to be subjected to any pain that is not necessary. On the other hand, is not Mr Galsworthy rather unimaginative in failing to see that Tariff Reform might conceivably lead in present circ.u.mstances to intense pain and distress in every town and county in England? The imposition or non-imposition of a tariff may seem, at a superficial glance, to belong to the mere pedantry of politics. But consider the human consequences of such a thing. Every penny taken out of the pockets of the poor owing to an increase in the price of goods means the disappearance of a potential pennyworth of food from the poor man's home. Obviously, in a country where hundreds of thousands of people are living on the edge of starvation--and over it--even a slight rise in the cost of things might produce the most calamitous results.

Starvation and disease and the anguish of those who have to watch their children suffer, an increase in crime and insanity and wretchedness--these are all quite conceivable results of a sudden change in the poor man's capacity to buy the necessaries of life. That is the humane Free Trader's case for Free Trade. The humane Tariff Reformer's case for Tariff Reform, on the other hand, is that a change in the fiscal system would increase wages and employment and quickly put an end to the present abominations of starvation, sweating, and unemployment. I am not concerned for the moment with the comparative merits of Free Trade and Tariff Reform. I am concerned merely with pointing out that Mr Galsworthy's theory that such a thing as the export of worn-out horses causes "more suffering to innocent and helpless creatures" than would be caused by an error in fiscal policy, affecting millions of men and women and children, does not bear a moment's examination.

Take, again, Mr Galsworthy's comparison of the case of the Home Rule Bill with the case of the caging of wild song-birds. Is not Mr Galsworthy in this instance also lacking in imagination? Had he read Irish history he would have learned a little about the "suffering to innocent and helpless creatures" that logically flows from the denial of a country's right to self-government. I will give the cla.s.sic example. In the late forties of the nineteenth century, the Irish potato crop failed. The crops of corn were abundant, cattle were abundant, but the potatoes everywhere rotted in the fields under a mysterious blight. As the potato was the staple food of the people, this would have been sufficiently disastrous, even in a self-governed country. But, if Ireland had had self-government in 1847, does any one believe that her Ministers would have allowed corn and cattle to go on being exported from the country while the people were starving? Right through the Famine Ireland went on exporting grain and cattle to the value of seventeen million pounds a year so that rents might be paid.

Many leading Irishmen urged the Government to pa.s.s a temporary measure prohibiting the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while the Famine lasted. This step had been taken by the Governments of Belgium and Portugal in similar circ.u.mstances. Had it been taken in Ireland--as it is incredible that it would not if the Union had not been in existence--between half a million and a million men, women, and children would have been saved from the torture of death by starvation and typhus fever. Not only this, but does not Mr Galsworthy also overlook those multiplied agonies of exile, eviction, and agrarian crime, which living creatures in Ireland would have been spared--in great measure, at least--if the country had possessed self-government?

It may be doubted, whether all the wild song-birds that have ever existed since the Garden of Eden have endured among them such an excess of misery as fell to the lot of the Irish people in the half century following the Famine--much of it preventable by a simple change in the machinery of the const.i.tution. Nor can one easily measure the amount of suffering in England indirectly due to the fact that the political intellect of the country was so occupied with the Irish question that it had not the time or the energy left to tackle scores of pressing English questions. Housing, poor law reform, half-time--these and a host of other matters have been thrust out of the way till statesmen, released from the woes of Ireland, might have time to consider them. Many Socialists have a way of forgetting the social meaning of const.i.tutional changes. They regard const.i.tutional reform as something that delays social reform, whereas it may be something that enables the public, if it so desires, to speed up social reform. That is why Home Rule, the abolition of the veto of the House of Lords, and a dozen comparable matters, must be as eagerly ensued by Socialists as by Radicals. The underfed child, the sweated woman--even the maltreated animal, I imagine--will benefit as a result of changes which, to say the least, take some of the impediments out of the way of the social reformer. Meanwhile, let Mr Galsworthy and those who think with him redouble their efforts on behalf of humanity, whether towards man or beast. But let them not seek to destroy a good thing that is being done in order to call attention to a good thing that is not being done. Let them not try to persuade us that it is more important for the Russian people to abolish mouse traps than to get a const.i.tutional monarch and sound Parliamentary inst.i.tutions. I have the sincerest respect for Mr Galsworthy's heart--for the generous pa.s.sion with which he stands up for all the lame dogs in the world. I agree heartily with every separate cause he advocates in his letter to the _Times_. It is only his table of values with which I quarrel, and the destructive use he makes of it. I believe that an overwhelming case could be made out against Parliament on the score of its heartlessness, but Mr Galsworthy has not made it.

XVI

SPRING FAs.h.i.+ONS

In spite of the progress of civilisation, there are still women to whom the returning Spring is mainly a festival of dresses. It is pleasant to know that there is, after all, a remnant of primitive humanity surviving. Women will before long be the only savages. Long after the last anthropologist has departed from the last South Sea Island in despair, when the people have all become Christians and have no manners and customs left, the race of fas.h.i.+onable women will still march its feathered regiments up and down under the sun, a puzzle and an exasperation to the scientific inquirer. Like all really primitive people, women will go on refusing to believe in or bow down to the laws of Nature. Nature may tell them, for instance, of the correct position of the human waist; but they will not listen to her; they will insist that the human waist may be anywhere you like between the neck and the knees, according to the fas.h.i.+on of the moment, and Nature may as well put her fingers in her ears and go home. Savages, we are told, do not even believe in the manifest generalisation of death: they regard each new death as an entirely surprising event, due not to natural, but to accidental causes. Similarly, the fas.h.i.+onable woman regards the body each Spring as an entirely new body, subject to none of the generalisations which seemed appropriate to the body of even a year before. This is the grand proof she offers us of her superiority to the animals. She will have no commerce with the monotony of their ways. She will not submit herself to the regular gait of the sheep, the horse, or the cow, which is the same this year as it was in the year of Waterloo, or, for that matter, in the year of Salamis. She claims for her body the liberty to move one year with the long stride of a running fowl, and the next at a hobble like a spancelled goat. It might be said of her that she is not one animal, but all the animals.

She will borrow from all Nature, dead and alive, indeed, as greedily as a poet. She will colour her hair to look like a gorse-bush and her lips to look like a sunset. She will capture the green from the gra.s.s, the purple from the hills, the blue from Eastern seas, the silver from the mists, as it suits her fancy. One year she will demand of life that it shall be gorgeous in hue as a baboon's courts.h.i.+ps; the next, that it shall be as colourless as a rook's funeral. She enters upon the labour of life as though it were a long series of disguises.

Probably it was her success in pa.s.sing from form to form that led the ancient Greeks to suspect the presence of nymphs now in trees, now in running water, and now even in the hills. Everywhere in Nature man sees evasive woman. There is nothing anywhere, from a mountain valley in flower to a chestnut tree glistening into bud, which does not remind him of something about her--her hats, her cloaks, or her ribbons. Such a plunderer of beauties would, one cannot but feel, become a great artist if only she possessed some standards. But she dresses without standards, without philosophy: there is nothing but appet.i.te in it all, and a capricious appet.i.te at that. She has no settled principle but the principle of change. She flies from grace to ugliness lightheartedly, indiscriminately. She is like the kind of b.u.t.terfly which you could get only in a fairy tale--a b.u.t.terfly that could change itself into a mouse, and from a mouse into a dandelion, and from a dandelion into a camel, and from a camel into a gra.s.shopper, and from a gra.s.shopper into a cat, and so on through a thousand transformations. Her world leaves us giddy like the transformation scene in a pantomime. In her artistic ideals she is a follower, not of Orpheus, but of Proteus.

Yet who can disparage her April ritual? She is in league with the whole singing earth, which once a year sets out on its long procession of praise. Her new fas.h.i.+ons are but an item in the general rejoicing over the infinite resurrections of Nature. Every thorn-bush gowns itself in green, a ghost of beauty. Every laurel puts forth new leaves like little green flames. There is a glow in the gra.s.s as though some spirit lurked behind it deeper a million times than its roots.

Everywhere Nature has relit the sacred fire. She has given us back warmth--the warmth in which food increases and birds sing; and we can no more escape her gladness than if we had been rescued from the perils and privations of a siege. This is the time when men wake up to find they are alive, and their exultation makes them poets. One of the first things of which man seems to have become conscious in the world about him was the renewal of life each spring.

The earth does like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn.

Once a year he beheld the coming of the golden age again. He wors.h.i.+pped the serpent as the emblem of endless life long before he learned to suspect it as the devil. He may have been an infidel as he s.h.i.+vered in the winter rains, but the lark leaping into the sun awakened the old splendid credulity again. He knows that Persephone will rise. Hence the divine madness that possesses him year by year at this season--a madness which nowadays expresses itself largely in throwing hard b.a.l.l.s at coconuts. Possibly this symbolises the contemptuous smas.h.i.+ng of the winter's fears, for is there anything which looks more like a withered fear than one of those grisly brown bearded fruits? And do not the showman's cries and his bell-ringings at the coconut saloon make up a clamour like the clamour of the savage beating forth the flock of his superannuated terrors? He is the incarnation of the boastful faith that has returned to us. Perhaps, too, the coconuts may be symbols of the h.o.a.rded food supply of the winter--the supply which we were continually in dread might come to a slow close, and which we can now rail at and insult in our revived confidence in the green world.

Certainly this enthusiasm of ours for the spring is not all so disinterested as it appears. We are hungry animals before we are poetical animals, and we are often praising the promise of our food when we seem to be most exalted in our raptures. It may be that even the pleasure we take in the singing of birds is simply a relic of the pleasure which primitive man felt as he heard the voice of many dinners making its way back to him at the turn of the year. But the appeal of music and colour need not be so detailedly stomachic as that. Man may not have loved the lark's song because he wanted in particular to eat the lark, or, indeed, any bird. He may have loved it merely as a significant voice amid the chorus and banners of the returning hosts of eatable things. If it were not so, many of our tastes would be different. Among the smells and colours of spring those we love most are not the smells and colours of eatable things, but of inculinary things, like roses, and if we loved the music of birds by some standard of the stomach, it is the crowing of the c.o.c.k and not the song of the lark that would inspire us to poetry. It is the grunting of the pig and not the cuckoo's call which would startle in us the thrill of romance.

There is, on the other hand, just a chance that natural man does respond more sympathetically to the voice of the c.o.c.k and the pig than to the speech of the cuckoo and the skylark. The difference between the farmer's and the artist's taste in landscape is proverbial. When man looks at the world and sums it up in terms of food, he is indifferent to ma.s.ses of colour and runs of music. His favourite colour is the colour of a good crop of corn or a field of gra.s.s that will fatten the cattle. He cares less for silver streams than for the drains in his turnip-fields. Whether the love of the more ornamental things--the useless songs of the birds and the scent of flowers, which is a prosaic thing only to the bees--is an advance on this pa.s.sion for utility may be questioned by the advocates of the simple life.

Ornament, they may contend, especially in woman's dress, is simply mannikin's vainglory. Woman was first hung or robed with precious things, not in order that she might be happy, but in order that man might be able to boast of her among his neighbours. She was as sure a sign of his power as a string of enemies' heads hanging from his waist. She was the advertis.e.m.e.nt of his riches. Before long woman became happy in her golden slavery. Wisely so, perhaps, for in the end she was able to make use of the man's fatuous love of boasting to exact high terms for aiding him in his conspiracy of magnificence. She studied the science of surprise, and applied it to the labour of dressing herself in such a way as to make him slavishly regard her as the most wonderful being on earth. If we may trust the testimony of Mrs Edith Wharton's novels, woman has so subjugated man with this chameleon brilliance of hers in modern America that he thinks himself quite happy if she makes use of him as the hodman of her charms. Thus in the spring fas.h.i.+ons we may see the triumph of a s.e.x rather than a hymn of colour to the revival of Nature. It is a lamentable declension in theory, and therefore I do not entirely believe it. I still hold to the conviction that the gaiety of women's Easter dress is in some manner allied to the gaiety of the earth. It is but a decrepit gaiety compared to what it might be. But that is because of its long a.s.sociation with all sorts of alien things--the necessity of the man--hunt, the pride of the church parade, and the rest of it. When woman meets man on equal terms she will, one hopes in one's credulous moments, cultivate beauty more and fas.h.i.+on less. She will no longer be estranged from the morning stars that sing together and the little hills that clap their hands. Her feet will be beautiful in Bond Street, and Regent Street shall have cause to shout for joy.

XVII

ON BLACK CATS

It is easy to imagine the enthusiasm of the audience at Manchester when a black cat walked on to the platform at a meeting of Sir Edward Carson's. Lord Derby, who presided, hailed it as an omen of the success of the Ulster cause. He went on to tell the audience that the last Unionist victory in Manchester had been presaged by the appearance of a black cat in some polling booth or other. That, you may be sure, was the most convincing argument in the night's speech-making. People who will stumble over the logic of politics for a lifetime can appreciate the logic of the black cat in a fraction of a second. Black cats, indeed, are one of the very few things in which a good many unbelievers nowadays believe. These are the subst.i.tute for the angels and devils of our grandfathers. We are sceptics in everything but our superst.i.tions. The most superst.i.tious people of all are often to be found among those who do not believe in G.o.d, and who would not dream of entering a church-gate unless there was no other way of avoiding walking under a ladder. These it is who pick up pins with the greatest enthusiasm, and who become downcast if a dog howls, and who had rather not sleep at all than sleep in a room numbered thirteen. They will deride the cherubim and the seraphim, but they will not risk offending the demon to whom they throw an oblation of the salt they have just spilt on the table. It is as though each man carried his own little firmament of immortals about with him, and sacrificed to them on his own infinitesimal altars. This is not, I suspect, because he loves them, but because he fears them. He regards them as a species of blackmailers--the Scottish way of looking at fairies. Nearly every portent is to him a portent of misfortune. The number thirteen, the spilling of salt, the bay of a dog, the sight of a red-haired man first thing on New Year's morning, dreams about babies--these things cast a gloom over his world deeper than midnight; and of this kind are nearly all the portents which wriggle like little snakes in the superst.i.tious imagination.

It is the distinction of the black cat that he is one of the few cheerful superst.i.tions left to us. Why he should be so no one can tell us, and he has not been considered so in all times or in all places.

He has even been regarded on occasion as the false shape of a witch.

Perhaps, the origin of all our care of him was the tenderness of fear.

He may be like the black G.o.d wors.h.i.+pped by the ancient Slavs who were indifferent to his white brother-G.o.d. They did this, we are told, because they thought that the white G.o.d was so good that they had nothing to fear from him in any case. But the black G.o.d one could not trust, and so one had to buy his goodwill. It seems not improbable that the veneration of the black cat may have begun in much the same way. The smile with which our ancestors first greeted him was, I fancy, a nervous, doubting smile, like the smile with which many of us try to cajole snarling dogs. Then, gradually, as he did not leap upon them and destroy them, they came to believe less and less in his will to do evil, and in the end he was canonised, and now he has been accepted as a sound English Tory, which is generally admitted to be the highest type of animal that Nature has produced.

Two centuries or so ago Addison poured such finished contempt on all superst.i.tions of this kind that it would have been difficult to believe that men and women of intellect would still be clinging to them to-day. At the same time, their survival is the most natural thing in the world. They are bound to survive in a world in which men live not in faiths and enjoyments, but in hopes and fears. Faith is the way of religion, and enjoyment is the way of philosophy; but hopes and fears are the coloured lights that illuminate the exciting way of superst.i.tion. If we are creatures of hopes and fears we have no sun, and our lights have a trick of appearing and disappearing like will-o'-the-wisps, leading us a pretty dance whither we know not.

Every step we take we expect to unfold the secret. We find omens in the direction of straws, in the running of hares, in the flight of birds. If the girl of hopes and fears wishes to know what colour of a man she is going to marry, she waits till she hears the cuckoo in summer, and then examines the sole of her shoe in the expectation of finding a hair on it which will be the colour of her future husband's head. I will make a confession of my own. I have never listened slavishly for the cuckoo, but many years ago I had as foolish a superst.i.tion about farthings. I believed that they were luck-bringers.

At the time I was lodging in the traditional garret in Pimlico, trying more or less vainly to make a living by writing. Whenever I had sent off a ma.n.u.script I used to go out the same evening to a little shop where, when they sold a loaf, they always gave you a farthing change out of your threepence. How cheerily I used to leave the shop with the loaf under my arm and the farthing in my pocket! That farthing, I felt, could be trusted to cast a spell on the editor towards whom the ma.n.u.script was flying. It would be as effective as an introduction from one of the crowned heads of Europe. And even if, a night or two afterwards, the most loathsome of all visible objects--a returned ma.n.u.script--made the lodging-house look still more sordid than before, I abated no jot of my trust. My heart sank for the moment, but in the end I settled down to acceptance of the fact that there was a fool sitting in an editor's chair who could resist even the power of farthings. On the next day, or the day after, I would set out with revived hope for the baker's shop again. I remember the acute misery I felt on one occasion when I went into a more pretentious shop, where the girl put my loaf in the scales and asked me whether I would prefer a small roll or a part of a loaf to make up the full threepenceworth of weight. I would have given my boots, and even my old hat, to be able to say, "Please, may I have my farthing?" But my courage failed.

There are things one cannot say to a pretty shop-girl. Years afterwards I happened to be discussing superst.i.tions with a friend, and I instanced the well-known belief in the luckiness of farthings.

"But farthings aren't supposed to be lucky," said my friend, with a smile of authority: "they're supposed to be extremely unlucky." It was as though the world reeled. Here I had been steadily building up ruin for myself all that time with my miser's h.o.a.rd of farthings. I felt like the man in _The Silver King_ who cries: "Turn back, O wheels of the Universe, and give me back my yesterday!" If only I could get back some of my yesterdays, I would a.s.suredly buy my bread in that big, bright shop where the girl gives you full weight for your threepence; and never would I set foot in that little low shop where a half-blind old man wraps your loaf in a page of newspaper, and lays in your hand a dirty farthing that is only the price of your undoing.

It is, perhaps, natural that my experience should have left me rather unfriendly to superst.i.tions. I cannot believe that the universe, or even a single planet of it, is ruled by imps of chance which express themselves in the doings of crows, and in floating tea-leaves and in the dropping of umbrellas. Better join the church of the Sea-Dyaks of Borneo, if one can find nothing better to believe in than that. It is in order to protest against the heathen religion of crows and numbers and tea-leaves that I sometimes deliberately leap on to a 'bus numbered thirteen, or walk under a ladder rather than go round it.

Occasionally, I say, for my mood varies. There are days when I feel like turning a blind eye to 'bus number 13, and when a crow, sitting and cawing on the roof of the church opposite, gives me the s.h.i.+vers.