I have just seen a newspaper paragraph which, whether it refers to a fact or merely a suggestion, seems to me to go down pretty well into that depth of mindlessness which calls itself the modern mind. It is said that influence is being brought to bear on the American Government to induce them to break a bottle of water instead of a bottle of champagne when they christen a battleship. Now it is not easy to deal adequately with the rich stupidity of that. It is about five follies thick, stupidity obscuring stupidity until one reader can hardly see more than one of the jokes at a time. There is something almost fascinating in the idea of trying to disentangle them.
First Stupidity. Note the notion that there is something so intrinsically and supernaturally evil about an intoxicant that the pure temperance man will not touch it even when it cannot intoxicate anybody. It is as if a man were to insist on having a teetotal boot-polish or a teetotal printing-ink. A cup of tea, or even of hot milk, becomes diabolic if you have boiled the kettle with methylated spirit. Eau-de-Cologne is a blackguard indulgence, though you use it only to scent your handkerchief. A liquor containing alcohol (such as ginger-beer) is simply and superstitiously an accursed thing, which is not only not to be touched with the lips, but not to be touched with the hands. After this case, the more intemperate “Temperance” people cannot pretend any longer that their proposal is merely a social reform; it is obviously and literally a mystical taboo. I do not see what right such people have to mock at the savage’s fear of a fetish, still less at the peasant’s respect for the relic of a saint. There might surely be such a thing as holy water, if it be so certain that there is such a thing as unholy water.
Second Stupidity. The extraordinary confusion by which it becomes not only wicked to possess wine (though you never drink it), but becomes wicked even to destroy it. This goes, I think, much further than this queer materialist madness has yet gone. If a champagne bottle is smashed to smithereens over the prow of a ship, I should have thought the most logical teetotaller would merely have been glad that there was one champagne bottle less in the world. As he would probably not be a person with any special sympathy with the old ceremonials of revelry, that is the only possible way in which I can imagine the thing affecting him. We in England used to think we could trace a slight streak of fanaticism in good Mrs. Carrie Nation, who used to go about breaking other people’s wine and spirit bottles with her little hatchet. But now it would appear that Mrs. Carrie Nation was a wobbler, one weakly compromising with the fiend of fermented drink, perhaps nobbled by the Liquor Trade—or, worse still, verging on the loathly state of a moderate drinker. She ought to have been summoned before a tribunal of these New Teetotallers and condemned for ever having gone near enough to a bottle to touch it, even with a hatchet; condemned for having so much as hung about the hellish tavern, where the very fumes of its fiery poisons might have mounted to her head. The principle is an interesting one, and might be extended to many cases. Thus, when the common hangman burned a book of treason or heresy, he may be supposed to have been infected by the intellectual errors it contained. Thus when a censor blacks out a paragraph in a newspaper, he may be held to have sinned even in looking to see where the paragraph was. This, apparently, is the new barbaric fancy: that certain vegetable drinks are so demonic that we not only are wrong when we drink them, but are wrong when we do our best to render them undrinkable.
Third Stupidity. The curious deadness of the mind in such men is illustrated at the next stage; that of clinging convulsively to a mere form; and not only not knowing, but not so much as wondering—first, whether the idea is worth preserving; and, secondly, whether they are preserving it. The mark of this dead and broken traditionalism is always two-fold. It can be seen in these two facts: that men alter a thing as if it had no sense in it; and yet they never have the sense to abolish what is for them a senseless thing. I can see much dignity in absolute austerity and the refusal of symbol; I can see some dignity even in dingy utilitarianism and the refusal of art. I could respect the perfect plainness of an early Quaker like Penn when he would not take his hat off in the palace, because it was an idle form. I do not despise him because he came afterwards (I believe) to see that keeping your hat on is just as much of a form as taking it off; and took off his hat like other people. But if Penn had strictly confined himself, say, to taking off his hatband with laborious care, every time he entered the Royal presence, I should say that he had lost both his Quakerism and his sociability. He would have lost the independence that refuses recognition to the world, and he would not have gained the disputable substitute of good manners. Similarly, I could respect (though I could not envy) the flinty old Manchester manufacturers who regarded all expenditure on arms, especially on drums, flags, or trumpets, as so much babyish waste of money. But I should not even have respected them if they had proposed that the British Army should fly the White Flag in every battle because it was cheaper than a coloured one. Why have a flag at all, if it comes to that? Or, again, I can understand the unconverted Scrooge with his bowl of gruel; and I like the converted Scrooge with his bowl of punch. But if Scrooge had insisted every Christmas on having a punch-bowl with no punch in it, I should not understand at all.
Fourth Stupidity. Besides this general deadness, there is a strange special deadness to the human sentiment behind that special sort of ceremony. Don’t express the sentiment if you think it a silly sentiment; but don’t so express it as to prove that you haven’t got it. That sentiment is the ancient sentiment of sacrifice. The thing sacrificed may be anything: wine, as on the battleship; gold, as when the Doge threw his ring into the sea; an ox or a sheep, as among the ancient pagans; and very occasionally, when tribes savage or civilized are seized with Satanist panic, a man. But it must be something valuable, or the particular thrill, wholesome or unwholesome, is not obtained. It was generally the best sheep or the best ox; and in the rare cases of human sacrifice, generally somebody like the King’s daughter. Like all human appetites, it is both good and evil; it has many roots, a gesture of generosity, an appeal to the unknown, a guarantee against arrogance, a dim idea of not taking all one’s advantage from fortune: but they all depend on the value, and these men evidently understand none of them, when they fill the bottle with water.
On Historical Novels
It is very easy, of course, to smile at such schoolboy fiction as the novels of Mr. Henty, in which the same very English and modern young gentleman from Rugby or Harrow turns up again and again as a Young Greek, a Young Carthaginian, a Young Scandinavian, a Young Gaul, a Young Visigoth, a Young Ancient Briton, and almost everything short of a Young Negro. But Mr. Henty had the merits of his industry and fecundity; and one of them was that he did take a boy’s imagination into many and varied parts of human history, however conventional the figure he followed through them might be. The English boy will not find out as much about the soul of Carthage from the Young Carthaginian as a lover of letters may from Salammbô; but at least he will know that Carthage was conquered—and that is (for various reasons) a good thing for English people to know. And since the Henty period our historical novels have fallen with terrible sameness into two or three grooves. We might almost say that a man is not allowed to write an historical novel except about four different historical periods, about six different historical characters; and even about them he is not allowed to take any view except that taken by the other romances on the same subject. Now, considering the countless millions of marvellous, amusing, unique, and picturesque things that have thronged on top of each other through all our wonderful three thousand years of European history, this state of affairs is as Byzantine and benighted as if no landscape painter ever painted anything but a larch tree, or as if none of our sculptors could model anything except the left leg.
You may write a novel about the time of Henry of Navarre—in fact, it might almost be said that you must write a novel about the time of Henry of Navarre. If you go in for writing historical novels at all, somebody—the publisher or the office-boy—makes you do this. In this novel, Huguenots must be gallant gentlemen, with a touch of bluffness; Catholics must also be gallant gentlemen, with a touch of slyness. All important political questions must be settled by duels fought with long rapiers at wayside inns. You must stick to one side of the quarrel; but even in that you must not bring any of the charges that a person of the period might really have brought. For instance, the Court must be perpetually engaged in plotting to stab the bluff Huguenot: but you must not insist that the Huguenot was a Puritan, and his objection to the Court would largely be that it was a Renaissance Court. You must not, however delicately, bring in that presence of florid pagan sensuality and princely indecorum which we feel in Brantome or the Tales of the Queen of Navarre. The Latins must stick to assassination. There must be no people to speak of in Paris, though it was the people of Paris who, for good or evil, changed the whole course of the history. Men like Sully may be introduced; but their talents must be entirely occupied in serving the Prince in his personal love-affairs and in his duels in inns. Above all, slap in the very middle of the Wars of Religion, nobody must seem to have any clear idea of what his own religion is about. You may also write a novel about the time of Richelieu. But it must be governed by the same principles. Richelieu must be a sinister yet magnanimous enemy of the hero. He must try to kill the hero, and unaccountably fail. At this stage of the writing of historical novels, it is important to be an imitator of Dumas. There are critics who maintain that Dumas was largely written by imitators of Dumas. This is an exaggeration; but, at the worst, they were good imitators. There are chapters in the triple tale of the Musketeers of which I can only say that, if anyone but he wrote them, he could hire hearts and heads as well as hands. But my warning to the young writer of entirely useless historical novels is this: He must not go outside France, or treat that country otherwise than as an insulated elfland. He must not carry off General Monk in a box. Think what a frightful mistake would have been made—from the English Puritan point of view—if d’Artagnan had carried off General Cromwell by mistake! All this happened in the time of Mazarin and not Richelieu, but the principle will be found reliable. The principle is that neither Richelieu nor anybody else should show the faintest interest in the future of France.