PREFACE

I COULD wish that this string of loose papers, if it was to bear some such name, had been called after the conventional version of the Elizabethan stage-direction, and named "Alarums and Excursions." If I were constrained to put my moral philosophy in one sentence, I could not do it more satisfactorily (to myself) than by saying that I am in favour of alarums and against alarms. It is vain to tell me that these two words were the same once and come from a common derivation. The people who trust to derivations are always wrong: for they ignore the life and adventures of a word, and all that it has done since it was born. People of that sort would say that every man who lives in a villa is a villain. They would say that being chivalrous is the same as being horsey.

The explanation is very simple; it is that in the modern world authors do not make up their own titles. In numberless cases they leave the title to the publisher, as they leave the bindingthat far more serious problem. I had purposed to call this book "Gargoyles"; traces of such an intention can still be detected (I fear) in the second essay. Some time ago I tried to write an unobtrusive sociological essay called "What Is Wrong." Somehow or other it turned into a tremendous philippic called "What's Wrong with the World," with a photograph of myself outside; a photograph I swear I had never seen before and am far from anxious to see again. Such things arise from the dulness and languor of authors, as compared with the hope and romantic ardour of publishers. In this case the publisher provided the title: and if he had provided the book too I dare say it would have been much more entertaining.

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CONTENTS

0: THE FADING FIREWORKS

1: ON GARGOYLES

2: THE SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY

3: THE NIGHTMARE

4: THE TELEGRAPH POLES

5: A DRAMA OF DOLLS

6: THE MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER

7: THE APPETITE OF EARTH

8: SIMMONS AND THE SOCIAL TIE

9: CHEESE

10: THE RED TOWN

11: THE FURROWS

12: THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING

13: A CRIMINAL HEAD

14: THE WRATH OF THE ROSES

15: THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY

16: THE FUTURISTS

17: DUKES

18: THE GLORY OF GREY

19: THE ANARCHIST

20: HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN

21: THE NEW HOUSE

22: THE WINGS OF STONE

23: THE THREE KINDS OF MEN

24: THE STEWARD OF THE CHILTERN HUNDREDS

25: THE FIELD OF BLOOD

26: THE STRANGENESS OF LUXURY

27: THE TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY

28: THE WHEEL

29: FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE

30: ETHANDUNE

31: THE FLAT FREAK

32: THE GARDEN OF THE SEA

33: THE SENTIMENTALIST

34: THE WHITE HORSES

35: THE LONG BOW

36: THE MODERN SCROOGE

37: THE HIGH PLAINS

38: THE CHORUS

39: A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES

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The Fading Fireworks

IN the frosty grey of winter twilight there comes a crackle and spurt of bluish fire; it is waved for an instant in a sort of weak excitement, and then fizzles out into darkness: and by the blue flash I can just see some little boys lurching by with a limp bolster and a loose flapping mask. They attempt to light another firework, but it emits only a kind of crackle; and then they fade away in the dark; while all around the frosted trees stand up indifferent and like candelabras of iron. It is the last Guy; perhaps the last in all England; for the custom has been dwindling to nothing in all parts of the country. It is as sad as the last oracle. For with it passes the great positive Protestant faith which was for three centuries a real religion of the English. The burning of that image has been as central and popular as the jubilee procession, as serious as the Funeral of the King. Guido of Vaux has taken three hundred years to burn to ashes; for much of the time the flare of him lit up the whole vault of heaven, and good men as well as bad, saints as well as statesmen, warmed their hands at that gigantic fire. But now the last gleam of red dies in the grey ashes: and leaves English men in that ancient twilight of agnosticism, which is so natural to menand so depressing to them. The echo of the last oracle still lingers in my ears. For though I am neither a Protestant nor a Pagan, I cannot see without sadness the flame of vesta extinguished, nor the fires of the Fifth of November: I cannot but be touched a little to see Paganism merely a cold altar and Protestantism only a damp squib.

The old Protestant English who sustained this strange festival for three centuries, were at least so far Christian that they tended to be Frivolous. They were still sufficiently at one with the old religious life of Europe to exhibit one of its most notable peculiarities; the slow extraction of pleasurable associations from terrible or even painful dates and names. Nothing so stamps the soul of Christendom as the strange subconscious gaiety which can make farces out of tragedies, which can turn instruments of torture into toys. So in the Catholic dramas the Devil was always the comic character; so in the great Protestant drama of Punch and Judy, the gallows and the coffin are the last and best of the jokes. So it is also with even the nobler solemnities. St. Valentine was a priest and denied himself the love of women; but his feast has been turned into a day for love-making. In certain indifferent lands and epochs this has doubtless gone too far; there are too many people who connect Good Friday only with hot cross buns; there are many who at Michaelmas think only of the wings of a goose, and never of the wings of an Archangel. But broadly speaking, this tendency is a real tribute to the healthful and invigorating quality in the Christian faith. For if the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel, even the terrors of the good can grow kindly. And there is certainly no stronger instance of the thing than this quaint English survival; which has interpreted the most hideous of deaths in terms of a hilarious half-holiday; and has changed the fires of Smithfield into fireworks.

Quaintly enough, among the fireworks that light up this Protestant festival, there are some that have almost papistical names; but they also bear witness to the mystical levity which turns gibbets and faggots into playthings. When little boys dance with delight at the radiant rotation of a Catherine wheel, they seldom (I imagine) suppose themselves to be looking at the frightful torments of a virgin martyr celebrated in Catholic art; yet this must surely be the origin of the title. We might imagine a symbolic pageant of the faiths and philosophies of mankind carried in this vivid art or science of coloured fires; in such a procession Confucianism, I suppose, would be typified by Chinese crackers; but surely there would be little doubt of the significance of Roman candles. They are at least somewhat singular things to brandish when one is renouncing the Pope and all his works; unless we do it on the principle of the man who expressed his horror of cigars by burning them one at a time.

And, indeed, speaking of Confucianism, I have heard it said that the whole art of fireworks came first from the land of Confucius. There is something not inappropriate in such an origin. The art of coloured glass can truly be called the most typically Christian of all arts or artifices. The art of coloured lights is as essentially Confucian as the art of coloured windows is Christian. Aesthetically, they produce somewhat the same impression on the fancy; the impression of something glowing and magical; something at once mysterious and transparent. But the difference between their substance and structure is the whole difference between the great western faith and the great eastern agnosticism. The Christian windows are solid and human, made of heavy lead, of hearty and characteristic colours; but behind them is the light. The colours of the fireworks are as festive and as varied; but behind them is the darkness. They themselves are their only illumination; even as in that stern philosophy, man is his own star. The rockets of ruby and sapphire fade away slowly upon the dome of hollowness and darkness. But the kings and saints in the old Gothic windows, dusky and opaque in this hour of midnight, still contain all their power of full flamboyance, and await the rising of the sun.

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On Gargoyles

ALONE at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused abbey I found half sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of those graven monsters that made the ornamental water-spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or striped by recent fungus, but still looking like the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval hero. And as I looked at it, I thought of the meaning of the grotesque, and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art.

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