Without Prejudice

Tolstoi would need, after converting the German Emperor! And despite St. Francis, and his doctrine of brotherhood with birds and fishes, we go on with our cannibal cookery, and even his own Church still teaches that animals have no souls, though that is perhaps because they have no soldi. And despite Tolstoi and his tracts, the people who stop will not think and the people who think will not stop. For to convert the world is the one miracle that the saints have never compassed. Yet is the sunshine of these sweet souls never lost, and the gentle mien of the old Franciscan made me feel at peace even with my sandolier when I found him sound asleep in his boat, wrapped up in my cloak.

And these are the types of character Nietzsche would destroy. They are degenerative, forsooth! They make against life and the joy thereof. Ah, but the joy of life is not only the joy of self-assertion: there is the joy of self- effacement, which is only another form of self-expression, the assertion of a higher self. That was the secret of Jesus, of Buddha. Whereas the doctrine of Nietzsche-c'est le secret de Polichinelle. The man in the street needs no encouragement to enjoyment. It is only by the travail of the centuries that he has been taught to prefer to his own pleasure somebody else's absence of pain. Human nature is like Venice or Holland-a province slowly wrested from the sea, and secured by dams and dykes. Woe to him who makes a breach in the sea-walls! And yet Nietzsche is to be read, though'tisa pity he is to be translated into English for the seduction of unripe minds. The desuetude of Latin as a common language for scholars is to be regretted; it kept the thinkers of Europe in touch, and kept out the profanum vulgus. As I have often pointed out, a truth grows so stale that it is almost a lie, and to invert any conventionality is to produce what is almost a truth. Truth is convex as well as concave.

This method of inversion is Nietzsche's main weapon: as earnest as any of our pulpiteering Puritans, he wears his morality inside out. He denies the copy-book, as Luther denied the infallibility of the Pope. He transposes all moral values, finds virtue often weakness and vice often strength, girds at all the cloud-spinning philosophers, and is one of the most brilliant and suggestive of modern writers, full of epigram and whimsy, and wielding the clumsy German tongue with rare grace and dexterity. But, as might be expected of the son of a parson, he pursues his reaction against conventional cant beyond the bounds of legitimate paradox, replacing the narrow by the narrower. Nietzsche was necessary; some one had to call a spade a spade. The great forces of modern thought, which have been gathering for centuries, had to find shameless expression; and Nietzsche's scorn for those who have tried to patch up hollow truces with bygone beliefs, and dress up new heresies in old Sunday clothes, is amply justified. But what is not justified is his admiration of himself-an admiration so pronounced that it has landed him in a lunatic asylum. Our systems of chronology ought to be recast, cries he; and even as men have dated from A.D., so are they to date from A.N., the year of Nietzsche. Not that he expects immediate recognition: 'Erst das Uebermorgen gehort mir. Einige werden posthum geboren.' But the bulk of what he tells us is really involved in all modern conceptions of the cosmus-it could have been found long ago in Herbert Spencer.

Anti-Christ he calls himself, and beats the drum and invites you to inspect the greatest philosophy on earth. 'Now hold your breath with awe,' he has the air of saying, 'or if you are not strong enough to hear this fearsome truth, go home to the nursery and read Hegel.' And after this fanfaronade, lo! some commonplace that you shall find in a hundred modern poets or philosophers.'tislike the clown in the circus who works himself up with a mighty pother to mount the bare-backed steed, and then hangs on to the tail. No, no, good Herr Nietzsche, we want our Saints Francis as well as our Napoleons. The one kind is as much in the uorder of nature' as the other; and pity and humility, if they are the virtues of 'nations in their decline,' are preferable to the vices of nations at their zenith. And, good Count Tolstoi, a universe of Saints Francis would be an intolerable bore. The cowl does not cover all the virtues, nor the dress-coat all the sins. 'T is a world we live in, not a monastery; and it is amid the clash of mighty opposites that the music of the spheres is beaten out.

'Everything in Venice is delivered up to the Evil One now,' writes John Buskin to Father Jacopo of the Armenian monastery; and such has been the immemorial language of prophets. I sometimes suspect the Evil One deserves more gratitude than he gets. Where would be the play without the villain of the piece? No, the devil is not so black as he is painted, nor the angel so white. And hence these incessant swings of the philosophical pendulum as one truth or the other is perceived. The true ethics of the future will give the devil his due, and deduct a discount from the angel.

The Armenian monastery which has posted up Ruskin's letter is paradoxically proud of its association with Lord Byron, who studied Armenian there; and visitors come there in consequence, and buy books that the monks print. So that Satan has his uses, and Scripture can quote the devil for its own purposes. The book I bought was a charming collection of Armenian folk-songs, and it contains one delicious poem whose refrain has haunted me ever since:

ON THE PARTRIDGE.

The sun boats from the mountain's top,

Pretty, pretty.

The partridge comes from her nest:

She was saluted by the flowers,

She flew and came from the mountain's top,

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge!

Only the highest genius-and what is higher than the folk-genius?-would dare to be so naive:

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge!

VENTNOR

I did not get to Ventnor without a struggle. Everybody that I met held up hands of horror. 'What! Going to Ventnor? You will be roasted before your time.' My friends grieved, my very publishers wrung their hands, my newsvendor took me aside and besought me to live on a high hill. Yet through the whole of August I sat coolly writing on a low terrace. There is a superstition about Ventnor, and none of the people who talk glibly about its temperature have ever been there. But I think I have discovered the origin of the great Ventnor myth. The place is a winter resort of consumptives; and Mr. Frederick Greenwood, who was the chief charm of Ventnor, told me that you may take coffee on your lawn in November. The town, then, is warm in winter. The popular mind, with its hasty logic, thinks that this is tantamount to saying it is broiling hot in summer. I fancy there is a similar fiction about Bournemouth. But as a rule the British climate pays no heed to guide-books. By the natives, Ventnor, though as beautiful as a little Italian town, seems to be regarded as a good place to go away from, for every other man keeps a coaching establishment (I don't mean a school), and you cannot walk two yards without being accosted by a tout, who resents your walking the next two. Its regatta is a puerile affair, its own boating crews going off by preference to rival regattas. But in illuminations it comes out far better than Cowes, whose loyal inhabitants throw all the burden of fireworks upon the royal and other yachts anchored in the bay. And besides, Ventnor has a carnival, which I saw in the shop-windows in the shape of comic masks.

Bonchurch, the suburb of Ventnor, which plumes itself upon a very artificial pond, furnished in the best style with sycamores, Scotch firs, elms and swans, is more interesting for containing the old churchyard by the sea which received the bones of John Sterling and inspired the best poem of Philip Bourke Marston:-

Do they hear, through the glad April weather,

The green grasses waving above them?

Do they think there are none left to love them,

They have lain for so long there together?

Do they hear the note of the cuckoo,

The cry of gulls on the wing,

The laughter of winds and waters,

The feet of the dancing Spring?

I was married in Ventnor. At least so I gather from the local newspapers, in whose visitors' lists there figures the entry, 'Mr. and Mrs. Zangwill.' I do not care to correct it, because, the lady being my mother, it is perfectly accurate and leads to charming misconceptions. 'There, that's he,' loudly whispered a young man, nudging his