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principles of democracy were being developed. In Athens, an early limited
democracy, citizens met in the Assembly to make civic and political
decisions; they also served as jurors at trials. Those arguing for or against
an issue or a person made public speeches in the Assembly. Because each
case varied, rhetoricians needed to develop flexible, situation-oriented
strategies designed to achieve specific purposes.
Modern rhetorical practices derive from these ancient necessities. A
rhetorical approach to communication encourages writers to think in terms
of purpose and effect. Rather than providing “rules” about how texts
should be organized and developed, rhetoric encourages writers to draw on
their commonsense understanding of communication—an understanding
they have developed as speakers, listeners, writers, and readers—to make
local, situated decisions about how they can best communicate their ideas.
As the revised Chapter 2, “Reading Rhetorically,” indicates, a rhetorical
approach can also help students make appropriate decisions about how
deeply they must interact with texts and how best to access them, given
their rhetorical situation.
In keeping with these principles, the rhetorical approach in The
Academic Writer encourages writers to think—and act—like problem
solvers. In its discussion of rhetoric and of the rhetorical situation, The
Academic Writer shows students how best to respond to a particular
challenge, whether they are writing an essay exam, designing a Prezi
presentation for work, reading a difficult text for class discussion, writing
an email to their teacher or supervisor, or conducting research. “Thinking
Rhetorically” icons that appear throughout the book highlight the
rhetorical advice, tips, and strategies that will help them do so efficiently
and effectively.

Organization
PART ONE, “WRITING AND RHETORIC IN ACTION,” provides the foundation
for the book. In addition to introducing the principles of rhetoric—with
particular emphasis on the rhetorical situation— Part I focuses on two
central concepts:

1. Writing as design
2. The rhetorical nature of reading

8
 Increasingly, scholars of rhetoric and writing argue that the most
productive way to envision the act of composing texts is to think of it as a
kind of design process: Among other things, both activities are open-
ended, creative, persuasive, and problem solving in nature. In fact, given
the extent to which visual and multimedia elements are now routinely
incorporated into composition classrooms and other writing spaces, the
distinctions between what was traditionally conceived of as “design” and
what was traditionally conceived of as “writing” are disappearing. The
Academic Writer draws on this research, and it does so in a clear, user-
friendly manner. This discussion creates bridges between students’ self-
sponsored writing on such social networks as Facebook and Pinterest
(where they literally design self-representations) and the writing they
undertake as college students. It also creates bridges between the diverse
ways that students now create and consume texts—in print or on their
smartphone, iPad, or computer—and the reading and writing they do as
students.
A substantially revised chapter on reading rhetorically emphasizes the
extent to which reading and writing are parallel processes. As with
reading, students must learn to construct meaning within the context of the
community by learning to embed themselves in the ongoing conversation
in the disciplines. Doing so requires the same habits of mind needed to
write successfully in college: curiosity, openness, creativity, engagement,
persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition. The Academic
Writer draws on current research in reading to provide students with a
rhetorical context for reading as well as practical strategies they will need
as they confront challenging academic texts.

PART TWO, “WRITING IN COLLEGE,” focuses, as its title suggests, on the

demands that contemporary students face. Analysis, synthesis, argument,
and research are central to academic writing, and this section provides
coverage of each of these topics as well as a chapter on writing in the
disciplines.

PART THREE, “PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR COMPOSING TEXTS,”

provides concise, reference-friendly advice for students on the writing
process: invention, planning, drafting, revising, editing, and
proofreading. It also includes a new chapter on multimodal composing,
with strategies that are versatile and eminently practical for writers
producing texts in our fluid, ever-changing technological present.

9
Key Features
Every feature of the text, in every chapter, reinforces the book’s
primary aim: to help students learn to think rhetorically. The text
as a whole encourages transfer by emphasizing decision making over
rules. In other words, as the old trope goes, it teaches students to fish
rather than presenting them with a fish. “Thinking Rhetorically”
icons flag passages where rhetorical concepts are explained and
exemplified, and “For Exploration,” “For Collaboration,” and
“For Thought, Discussion, and Writing” activities encourage
students to apply and extend what they have learned.
A wide range of model student essays includes a multipart case
study and eleven other samples of student writing—including a new
essay by Elizabeth Hurley—that serve both to instruct students and to
inspire them.
Thoughtful discussions of visuals and of writing as design in
Chapters 1, 2, and 11 suggest strategies for reading, writing, and
designing multimodal texts.
Strong coverage of reading, research, and writing in the
disciplines in Chapters 1, 2, and 5 through 10 emphasizes the
importance of consuming and creating texts rhetorically and enables
students to succeed as academic readers and writers.
Guidelines and Questions boxes present key processes in flowchart
format, reinforcing the importance of decision making and active
engagement in the processes of writing, thinking, and reading and
helping students easily find what they need.

New to This Edition

Careful attention to multimodal composing is infused throughout
the text to help today’s students employ all the resources available to
them—words, images, design, media—effectively. In this edition, I
have now also added a new Chapter 11, “Strategies for Multimodal
Composing,” to provide thoughtful strategies for analyzing the
rhetorical situation when composing or creating multimodal texts,
including considerations of design and the practical demands of
composing with multiple modes and media.

10
A revised Chapter 2, “Reading Rhetorically,” foregrounds the
importance of reading rhetorically. This chapter pulls together all
the reading coverage from previous editions into a single chapter that
focuses on helping students become active, critical readers by
teaching them to develop and apply rhetorical sensitivity to their
reading, to use practical strategies for reading actively and critically,
and to “read” visuals in a rhetorically sensitive way. New to this
edition is an extensive discussion of how medium and device
influence the reading process and how students can make rhetorically
appropriate decisions about their reading.
A new section on the habits of mind for academic success in
Chapter 2 draws on the Framework for Success in Postsecondary
Writing developed by the National Council of Teachers of English,
the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and the National
Writing Project. Although habits of mind (such as curiosity,
openness, flexibility, and responsibility) can help students become
more active and reflective writers, they are particularly important in
relation to reading because students encounter reading demands that
are not only more stringent but are different in kind from what they
experienced in high school.
New discussions of the role of kairos (the ability to respond to a
rhetorical situation in a timely or appropriate manner) now appear in
Chapter 1, where I have added a discussion of kairos and the
rhetorical situation; Chapter 3, which now includes a discussion of
kairos and the appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos; and Chapter 5,
where I include kairos as a tool for critical reading and analysis.
More attention to practical strategies for writing now appears in
Part Three. To make this text more useful to instructors and students
using The Academic Writer on its own, I’ve added coverage of
drafting, revising, and editing, with new emphasis on drafting
paragraphs and proofreading, to Chapters 9 and 10.
Streamlined advice for conducting academic research appears in
Chapter 7, “Doing Research: Joining the Scholarly Conversation.”
This chapter was written in conjunction with Anne-Marie Deitering,
an expert on research and learning technologies, who revised the
chapter to highlight the importance of academic habits of mind to
successful research and to provide up-to-date coverage of research
tools, from using filters and facets of databases to staying organized
with citation managers.

11
The Instructor’s Edition of The Academic
Writer
We have designed The Academic Writer to be as accessible as possible to
the wide variety of instructors teaching composition, including new
graduate teaching assistants, busy adjuncts, experienced instructors, and
writing-program administrators. To that end, we provide detailed
Instructor’s Notes, written by Lisa Ede and Sara Jameson (also of Oregon
State University). This material, bound together with the student text in a
special instructor’s edition (ISBN 978-1-319-03724-6), includes
correlations to the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Outcomes
Statement, multiple course plans, practical tips for meeting common
classroom challenges and for teaching key concepts, detailed advice for
working with each chapter in the text, and ten sample student writing
projects. These new Instructor’s Notes are also available for download by
authorized instructors from the instructor’s tab on The Academic Writer’s
catalog page at macmillanlearning.com.

Acknowledgments
Before I wrote The Academic Writer, acknowledgments sometimes struck
me as formulaic or conventional. Now I recognize that they are neither;
rather, acknowledgments are simply inadequate to the task at hand.
Coming at the end of a preface—and hence twice marginalized—
acknowledgments can never adequately convey the complex web of
interrelationships and collaborations that make a book like this possible. I
hope that the people whose support and assistance I acknowledge here not
only note my debt of gratitude but also recognize the sustaining role that
they have played, and continue to play, in my life and in my work.
I would like to begin by thanking my colleagues in the School of
Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University who supported
me while I wrote and revised this text. I am indebted to my colleagues
Chris Anderson, Vicki Tolar Burton, Anita Helle, Sara Jameson, Tim
Jensen, and Ehren Pflugfelder for their friendship and their commitment to
writing. I am especially grateful for Sara Jameson’s and my ongoing
collaboration on the Instructor’s Notes for The Academic Writer. I also
owe a great debt of gratitude to another friend and teacher, Anne-Marie
Deitering, who is at the cutting edge of all things involving digital

12
literacies, writing, research, and undergraduate learning. I am deeply
grateful for her work on the chapter on research for The Academic Writer.
For this edition, I particularly thank the reviewers who advised me as I
revised Chapter 2, “Reading Rhetorically,” and wrote Chapter 11,
“Strategies for Multimodal Composing”: Alice Horning, Oakland
University; Brittany Stephenson, Salt Lake Community College; Patricia
Ericcson, Washington State University; and Jason Dockter, Lincoln Land
Community College. Alice and Brittany provided much useful feedback
and thoughtful criticism on the revisions I made to Chapter 2, and Patty
and Jason were indispensable as I drafted the new Chapter 11 on
multimodal composing. I also want to thank Janine Morris of Nova
Southeastern University, who shared her dissertation research on reading
in digital environments with me, and Rachel Chapman of Texas Christian
University, who similarly shared her innovative multimodal composition
course materials. Thanks to Janine and Rachel, and the previously
mentioned reviewers, Chapters 2 and 11 are stronger and more
pedagogically useful.
I would also like to thank the many dedicated teachers of composition I
have worked and talked with over the years. By their example, comments,
suggestions, and questions, they have taught me a great deal about the
teaching of writing. A number of writing instructors took time from their
teaching to look carefully at The Academic Writer as well as drafts of this
edition. Their observations and suggestions enriched and improved this
book. These reviewers include the following instructors: Thomas
Bonfiglio, Arizona State University; Patricia DeMarco, Ohio Wesleyan
University; Anita DeRouen, Millsaps College; Jason Dockter, Lincoln
Land Community College; Martha Dolly, Frostburg State University;
Joanne Hash, Whittier College; Emily Isaacson, Heidelberg University;
Erica Jeffrey, Yuba Community College; Justin Jory, Salt Lake
Community College; Lynn Kilpatrick, Salt Lake Community College; Joal
Lee, Spokane Falls Community College–Pullman; Edie-Marie Roper,
Washington State University; Jerald Ross, Southwestern Illinois College;
Shillana Sanchez, Arizona State University; Ron Schwartz, Pierce
College–Fort Steilacoom; Brittany Stephenson, Salt Lake Community
College; April Strawn, Washington State University; Susan Waldman,
Leeward Community College; Ivan Wolfe, Arizona State University; and
Sam Zahran, Fayetteville Technical Community College.
Colleagues and students play an important role in nurturing any
project, but so do those who form the intangible community of scholars
that is one’s most intimate disciplinary home. Here, it is harder to
determine who to acknowledge; my debt to the composition theorists who

13
have led the way or “grown up” with me is so great that I hesitate to list
the names of specific individuals for fear of omitting someone deserving
of credit. I must, however, acknowledge my friend and frequent coauthor
Andrea Lunsford, who writes with me even when I write alone.
I wish to thank the dedicated staff of Bedford/St. Martin’s. Any
textbook is an intensely collaborative effort, and I count myself
particularly fortunate in having had Jane Carter, executive development
manager, as the development editor on this project. From start to finish, I
have valued Jane’s expertise and insight. In particular, I value her ability to
keep the big picture always in view while also carefully attending to local
details and to ask tough but essential questions. I am sure that The
Academic Writer is a better book as a result. In addition, I want to thank
senior project editor Peter Jacoby, whose patient attention to detail proved
especially valuable; editorial assistant Suzanne Chouljian, who kept us
organized and on track; acquisitions editor Molly Parke, whose frequent
reminders about the needs of instructors and students were always
appreciated; and marketing manager Emily Rowin, whose knowledge and
enthusiasm for English composition informs this text.
Finally, I want to (but cannot adequately) acknowledge the support of
my husband, Gregory Pfarr, whose passionate commitment to his own
creative endeavors, and our life together, sustains me.

Lisa Ede

Get the Most Out of Your Course with

The Academic Writer
Bedford/St. Martin’s offers resources and format choices that help you and
your students get even more out of your book and course. To learn more
about or to order any of the following products, contact your Bedford/St.
Martin’s sales representative, e-mail sales support
([email protected]), or visit the Web site at
macmillanlearning.com.

CHOOSE FROM ALTERNATIVE FORMATS OF THE ACADEMIC

WRITER
Bedford/St. Martin’s offers a range of affordable formats, allowing
students to choose the one that works best for them.

14
 Paperback To order the paperback edition, use ISBN 978-1-319-
03720-8.
Popular e-book formats For details of our e-book partners, visit
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SELECT VALUE PACKAGES

Add value to your text by packaging one of the following resources with
The Academic Writer. To learn more about package options for any of the
following products, contact your Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative
or visit macmillanlearning.com.

Writer’s Help 2.0 is a powerful online writing resource that helps students
find answers whether they are searching for writing advice on their own or
as part of an assignment.

Smart search
Built on research with more than 1,600 student writers, the smart
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students use novice terms, such as flow and unstuck.
Trusted content from our best-selling handbooks
Choose Writer’s Help 2.0, Hacker Version, or Writer’s Help 2.0,
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Student access is packaged with The Academic Writer at a significant

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Instructors may request free access by registering as an instructor at

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For technical support, visit macmillanhighered.com/getsupport.

15
LaunchPad Solo for Readers and Writers allows students to work on
whatever they need help with the most. At home or in class, students learn
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LaunchPad Solo for Readers and Writers features:

Pre-built units that support a learning arc

Each easy-to-assign unit is comprised of a pre-test check, multimedia
instruction and assessment, and a post-test that assesses what students
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grammar, style, and mechanics, and includes help for multilingual
writers.
A video introduction to many topics
Introductions offer an overview of the unit’s topic, and many include
a brief, accessible video to illustrate the concepts at hand.
Adaptive quizzing for targeted learning
Most units include LearningCurve, a game-like adaptive quizzing
program that focuses on the areas in which each student needs the
most help.
The ability to monitor student progress
Use our Gradebook to see which students are on track and which need
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Writer Key Built around best practices for feedback and revision,
WriterKey puts student writers at the center of your course. Robust review
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Students use the same tools to reflect, ask for feedback on specific areas,
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INSTRUCTOR RESOURCES
macmillanlearning.com
You have a lot to do in your course. Bedford/St. Martin’s wants to make it
easy for you to find the support you need—and to get it quickly.

The Instructor’s Notes for The Academic Writer is available bound into
the instructor’s edition of the text and as a PDF that can be downloaded
from the Bedford/St. Martin’s online catalog at the URL above. In addition
to chapter overviews and teaching tips, the instructor’s manual includes
sample syllabi, correlations to the Council of Writing Program
Administrators’ Outcomes Statement, and classroom activities.

JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!

At Bedford, providing support to teachers and their students who choose
our books and digital tools is our first priority. The Bedford/St. Martin’s
English Community is now our home for professional resources, featuring
Bedford Bits, our popular blog site offering new ideas for the composition
classroom and composition teachers. Connect and converse with a growing
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among others.
In addition, you’ll find an expanding collection of resources that
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17
 Contents

Preface for Instructors

Writing and Rhetoric in Action

1 Writing Rhetorically
Understanding the Impact of Communication Technologies on Writing
Writing and Rhetoric
Composing—and Designing—Texts
Developing Rhetorical Sensitivity
Note for Multilingual Writers
Rhetorical Sensitivity and Kairos
Note for Multilingual Writers
For Thought, Discussion, and Writing

2 Reading Rhetorically
Applying Rhetorical Sensitivity to Your Reading
Understanding Your Purposes as a Reader
Understanding How Genre Affects Your Reading
Understanding How Medium and Device Affect Your Reading
QUIZ: READING ON PAGE OR SCREEN

18
 Note for Multilingual Writers
Understanding the Text’s Rhetorical Situation
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYZING A TEXT’S RHETORICAL
SITUATION
Note for Multilingual Writers
Developing the Habits of Mind Needed for Academic Reading
Developing Critical Reading Skills
Previewing
Note for Multilingual Writers
QUESTIONS FOR PREVIEWING A TEXT
• Frank Rose, “The Selfish Meme”
Annotating
QUESTIONS FOR ANNOTATING A TEXT
Summarizing
Analyzing a Text’s Argument
GUIDELINES FOR SUMMARIZING A TEXT
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYZING A TEXT’S ARGUMENT
Reading Visual Texts
Note for Multilingual Writers
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYZING VISUAL TEXTS
For Thought, Discussion, and Writing

3 Analyzing Rhetorical Situations

Learning to Analyze Your Rhetorical Situation
The Rhetorical Situation
Note for Multilingual Writers
Using Your Rhetorical Analysis to Guide Your Writing
Setting Preliminary Goals
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYZING YOUR RHETORICAL
SITUATION
Alia Sands’s Analysis
• Alia Sands, “A Separate Education”

19
 Using Aristotle’s Appeals
Brandon Barrett’s Analysis
• Brandon Barrett, “The All-Purpose Answer”
Analyzing Textual Conventions
CHARACTERISTICS OF AN EFFECTIVE ACADEMIC ESSAY
Observing a Professional Writer at Work: Comparing and Contrasting
Textual Conventions
• Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me (Excerpt)
• Jean M. Twenge, “Generation Me on Trial”
• Jean M. Twenge, et al., “Generational Differences in Young Adults’
Life Goals, Concern for Others, and Civic Orientation, 1966–2009”
(Excerpt)
Note for Multilingual Writers
Using Textual Conventions
For Thought, Discussion, and Writing

4 Academic Writing: Committing to the Process

Managing the Writing Process
Identifying Composing Styles
COMPOSING STYLES: ADVANTAGES AND
DISADVANTAGES
Note for Multilingual Writers
Analyzing Your Composing Process
Note for Multilingual Writers
QUIZ: ANALYZING YOUR COMPOSING PROCESS
Writing Communities
Finding a Community
Working Collaboratively
GUIDELINES FOR GROUP WORK
For Thought, Discussion, and Writing

Writing in College

20
5 Analyzing and Synthesizing Texts
Understanding the Centrality of Reading to Academic Writing
Considering Analysis and Synthesis in the Context of the Academic
Community
Understanding Your Audience
• Hope Leman, “The Role of Journalists in American Society: A
Comparison of the ‘Mirror’ and ‘Flashlight’ Models”
Understanding How Analysis Works
Establishing a Purpose for Your Analysis
Developing an Appropriate Method for Your Analysis
QUESTIONS FOR DEVELOPING AN APPROPRIATE METHOD
FOR ANALYSIS
Understanding the Relationship between Analysis and Argument
Analyzing Academic Arguments
Determining the Question at Issue
STASIS QUESTIONS
• Amitai Etzioni, “Less Privacy Is Good for Us (and You)”
Identifying an Author’s Position on a Question
QUESTIONS FOR CRITICAL READING AND ANALYSIS
Note for Multilingual Writers
Using Aristotle’s Three Appeals
Recognizing Fallacies
Putting Theory into Practice I: Academic Analysis in Action
GUIDELINES FOR IDENTIFYING FALLACIES
• Stevon Roberts, “The Price of Public Safety”
Understanding How Synthesis Works
Putting Theory into Practice II: Academic Synthesis in Action
QUESTIONS FOR SYNTHESIZING TEXTS
• Elizabeth Hurley, “The Role of Technology in the Classroom: Two
Views”
For Thought, Discussion, and Writing

21
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
rather provide the liveries of a hundred footmen than be bothered with the
love-affairs of one. They would rather take the salutes of a hundred soldiers
than try to save the soul of one. They would rather serve out income-tax
papers or telegraph forms to a hundred men than meals, conversation, and
moral support to one. They would rather arrange the educational course in
history or geography, or correct the examination papers in algebra or
trigonometry, for a hundred children, than struggle with the whole human
character of one. For anyone who makes himself responsible for one small
baby, as a whole, will soon find that he is wrestling with gigantic angels and
demons.
In another way there is something of illusion, or of irresponsibility, about
the purely public function, especially in the case of public education. The
educationist generally deals with only one section of the pupil’s mind. But
he always deals with only one section of the pupil’s life. The parent has to
deal, not only with the whole of the child’s character, but also with the
whole of the child’s career. The teacher sows the seed, but the parent reaps
as well as sows. The schoolmaster sees more children, but it is not clear that
he sees more childhood; certainly he sees less youth and no maturity. The
number of little girls who take prussic acid is necessarily small. The boys
who hang themselves on bed-posts, after a life of crime, are generally the
minority. But the parent has to envisage the whole life of the individual, and
not merely the school life of the scholar. It is not probable that the parent
will exactly anticipate crime and prussic acid as the crown of the infant’s
career. But he will anticipate hearing of the crime if it is committed; he will
probably be told of the suicide if it takes place. It is quite doubtful whether
the schoolmaster or schoolmistress will ever hear of it at all. Everybody
knows that teachers have a harassing and often heroic task, but it is not
unfair to them to remember that in this sense they have an exceptionally
happy task. The cynic would say that the teacher is happy in never seeing
the results of his own teaching. I prefer to confine myself to saying that he
has not the extra worry of having to estimate it from the other end. The
teacher is seldom in at the death. To take a milder theatrical metaphor, he is
seldom there on the night. But this is only one of many instances of the
same truth: that what is called public life is not larger than private life, but
smaller. What we call public life is a fragmentary affair of sections and
seasons and impressions; it is only in private life that dwells the fullness of
our life bodily.
 Strikes and the Spirit of Wonder

T HERE is a story which pleases me so much that I feel sure I have

repeated it in print, about an alleged and perhaps legendary lady
secretary of Madam Blavatsky or Mrs. Besant, who was so much
delighted with a new sofa or ottoman that she sat on it by preference when
resting or reading her correspondence. At last it moved slightly, and she
found it was a Mahatma covered with his Eastern robe and rigid in prayer,
or some more impersonal ecstasy. That a lady secretary should have a seat
any gentleman will approve; that a Mahatma should be sat on no Christian
will deny; nevertheless, there is another possible moral to the fable which is
a reproach rather to the sitter than the seat. It might be put, as in a sort of
vision or allegory, by imagining that all our furniture really was made thus
of living limbs instead of dead sticks. Suppose the legs of the table were
literally legs—the legs of slaves standing still. Suppose the arms of an
armchair really were arms—the arms of a patient domestic permanently
held out, like those of an old nurse waiting for a baby. It would be
calculated to make the luxurious occupant of the easy-chair feel rather like
a baby; which might do him good. Suppose every sofa were like that of
Mrs. Besant’s secretary—simply made of a man. They need not be made
merely of Theosophists or Buddhists—God forbid. Many of us would
greatly prefer to trust ourselves to a Moslem or Turk. This might, with strict
accuracy, be called sitting on an Ottoman. I have even read, I think, of some
oriental potentate who rejoiced in a name sounding like “sofa.” It might
even be hinted that some of them might be Christians, but there is no
reason, of course, why all of them should not be praying. To sit on a man
while he was praying would doubtless require some confidence. It would
also give a more literal version of the possession of a Prie-Dieu chair. It
would be easy to expand the extravagance into a vision of a whole house
alive, an architecture of arms and legs, a temple of temples of the spirit. The
four walls might be made of men like the squares in military formation.
There is even, perhaps, a shadow of the fantasy in the popular phrases that
compare the roof to the human head, that name the chimney-pot hat after
the chimney, or lightly allude to all modern masculine head-dresses as
“tiles.” But the only value of the vision, as of most visions—even the most
topsy-turvy ones—is a moral value. It figures forth, in emblem and enigma,
the truth that we do treat merely as furniture a number of people who are, at
the very least, live stock. And the proof of it is that when they move we are
startled like the secretary sitting on the praying man; but perhaps it is we
who should begin to pray.
In the current criticisms of the Strikes there is a particular tone, which
affects me not as a matter of politics, but rather of philosophy, or even of
poetry. It is, indeed, the servile spirit expressed, if not in its poetry, at least
in its rhetoric. But it is a spirit I can honestly claim to have hated and done
my best to hammer long before I ever heard of the Servile State, long before
I ever dreamed of applying this test to Strikes, or indeed of applying it to
any political question. I felt it originally touching things at once elemental
and every day—things like grass or daylight, like stones or daisies. But in
the light of it, at least, I always rebelled against the trend or tone of which I
speak. It may roughly be described as the spirit of taking things for granted.
But, indeed, oddly enough, the very form of this phrase rather misses its
own meaning. The spirit I mean, strictly speaking, does not take things for
granted. It takes them as if they had not been granted. It takes them as if it
held them by something more autocratic than a right; by a cold and
unconscious occupation, as stiff as a privilege and as baseless as a caprice.
As a fact, things generally are granted, ultimately by God, but often
immediately by men. But this type of man is so unconscious of what he has
been given that he is almost unconscious of what he has got; not realizing
things as gifts, he hardly realizes them as goods. About the natural things,
with which I began, this oblivion has only inward and spiritual, and not
outward and political, effects. If we forget the sun the sun will not forget us,
or, rather, he will not remember us to revenge himself by “striking” at us
with a sunstroke. The stars will not go on strike or extinguish the
illumination of the universe as the electricians would extinguish the
illumination of the city. And so, while we repeat that there is a special
providence in a falling star, we can ignore it in a fixed star. But when we at
once ignore and assume thousands of thinking, brooding, free, lonely and
capricious human creatures, they will remind us that we can no more order
souls than we can order stars. This primary duty of doubt and wonder has
nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of special industrial quarrels. The
workmen might be quite wrong to go on strike, and we should still be much
more wrong in never expecting them to go on strike. Ultimately, it is a
mystical but most necessary mood of astonishment at everything outside
one’s own soul—even one’s own body. It may even involve a wild vision in
which one’s own boots on one’s own feet seem to be things distant and
unfamiliar. And if this sound a shade fantastic, it is far less fantastic than the
opposite extreme—the state of the man who feels as if he owned not only
his own feet, but hundreds of other human feet like a huge centipede, or as
if he were a universal octopus, and all rails, tubes and tramlines were his
own tentacles, the nerves of his own body, or the circulation of his own
blood. That is a much worse nightmare, and at this moment a much
commoner one.
Tennyson struck a true note of the nineteenth century when he talked
about “the fairy-tales of science and the long result of time.” The Victorians
had a very real and even childlike wonder at things like the steam-engine or
the telephone, considered as toys. Unfortunately the long result of time, on
the fairy-tales of science, has been to extend the science and lessen the
fairy-tale, that is, the sense of the fairy-tale. Take for example the case of a
strike on the Tubes. Suppose that at an age of innocence you had met a
strange man who had promised to drive you by the force of the lightning
through the bowels of the earth. Suppose he had offered, in a friendly way,
to throw you from one end of London to the other, not only like a
thunderbolt, but by the same force as a thunderbolt. Or if we picture it a
pneumatic and not an electric railway; suppose he gaily promised to blow
you through a pea-shooter to the other side of London Bridge. Suppose he
indicated all these fascinating opportunities by pointing to a hole in the
ground and telling you he would take you there in a sort of flying or falling
room. I hope you would have agreed that there was a special providence in
a falling room. But whether or no you could call it providential, you would
agree to call it special. You would at least think that the strange man was a
very strange man. You would perhaps call him a very strange and special
liar, if he merely undertook to do it. You might even call him a magician, if
he did do it. But the point is this, that you would not call him a Bolshevik
merely because he did not do it. You would think it a wonderful thing that it
should be done at all; passing in that swift car through those secret caverns,
you would feel yourself whirled away like Cinderella carried off in the
coach that had once been a pumpkin. But though such things happened in
every fairy-tale, they were not expected in any fairy-tale. Nobody turned on
the fairies and complained that they were not working, because they were
not always working wonders. The press in those parts did not break into big
headlines of “Pumpkins Held Up; No Transformation Scenes,” or “Wands
Won’t Work; Famine of Coaches.” They did not announce with horror a
“Strike of Fairy Godmothers.” They did not draw panic-stricken pictures of
mobs of fairy godmothers, meeting in parks and squares, merely because
the majority of pumpkins still continued to be pumpkins. Now I do not
argue that we ought to treat every tube-girl as our fairy godmother; she
might resent the familiarity, especially the suggestion of anything so near to
a grandmother. But I do suggest that we should, by a return to earlier
sentiments, realize that the tube servants are doing something for us that we
could not do for ourselves; something that is no part of our natural
capacities, or even of our natural rights. It is not inevitable, or in the nature
of things, that when we have walked as we can or want to, somebody else
should carry us further in a cart, even for hire: or that when we have
wandered up a road and come to a river, a total stranger should take us over
in a boat, even if we bribe him to do so. If we would look at things in this
plain white daylight of wonder, that shines on all the roads of the fairy-tales,
we come to see at last the simplest truth about the Strikes, which is utterly
missed in all contemporary comments on them. It is merely the fact that
Strikers are not doing something: they are doing nothing. If you mean that
they should be made to do something, say so, and establish slavery. But do
not be muddled by the mere word “strike” into mixing it up with breaking a
window or hitting a policeman on the nose. Do not be stunned by a
metaphor; there are no metaphors in fairy-tales.
 A Note on Old Nonsense

T HE Suffragettes have found out that they were wrong; I might even be
so egotistical as to say they have found out that we were right. At least
they have found out that the modern plutocratic parliamentary franchise
is what I for one always said it was. In other words, they are startled and
infuriated to find that the most vital modern matters are not settled in
Parliament at all, but mostly by a conflict or compromise between Trusts
and Trade Unions. Hence Mrs. Flora Drummond actually cries aloud that
she is being robbed of her precious vote; and says dramatically “We women
are being disenfranchized”—apparently by “Soviets.” It is as if somebody
who had just spent half a million on a sham diamond, that ought never to
have deceived anybody, should shriek from the window that thieves had
stolen the real diamond that never existed at all.
Whether or no there are Soviets, there are undoubtedly Strikes; and I do
not underrate the difficulty or danger of the hour. There is at least a case for
blaming men for striking right and left, illogically and without a system;
there is a case for blaming them for striking steadily and logically in
accordance with a false system; there is a case for saying that “direct
action” implies such a false system. But there is no case whatever for
blaming them for having depreciated the waste paper of the Westminster
ballot-box; for that was depreciated long before the war, and long before the
word “Soviet” came to soothe and satisfy the mind of Mrs. Drummond. It is
absurd to blame the poor miners for discrediting the members of
Parliament, who could always be trusted to discredit themselves. It was not
the wild destructive Soviet which decided that Parliament should not know
who paid the bills of its own political parties; it was Parliament itself. It was
not a mad Bolshevist addressing a mob who said that the men of the
parliamentary group have to treat charges of corruption among themselves
differently from those outside; it was the greatest living parliamentarian in a
great parliamentary debate. Miners had no more to be with it than
missionaries in the Cannibal Islands; it was not because men could not get
coal that they wanted to get coronets; and the empty coal-scuttle did not fill
the party chest. But in any case the policy of people like Mrs. Drummond
seems to require explanation. I can only fall back on the suggestion I have
already made; that she and her friends insisted on taking shares in a rotten
concern. They were quite sincere; so far as anybody can be quite sincere
who flatly refuses to listen to reason. They have no right to complain if
those who had to listen to their lawlessness will not listen to their legalism.
As a fact such a lady is rather contemptuous than complaining. She says
the miners do not want Nationalization; which may or may not be true. But
she explains the demand by the old disdainful allusion to agitators; or
Labour leaders who “have to beat the big drum or lose their jobs.” Nobody
of course could possibly connect Mrs. Flora Drummond with the idea of a
big drum; any more than with a big horse or a uniform or a self-created
military rank. But this particular school of Feminists must not be too
fastidious in the present case. The miners are poor and rudely instructed
men; and cannot be expected to have that touch of quiet persuasiveness and
softening courtesy, by which the Militant Suffragettes did so much to
defend the historic dignity of their sex. They have to fall back on something
only too like a big drum, having no skill in the silvery flutings of the
W.S.P.U., or that tender lute which Miss Pankhurst touched at twilight. But
under all the disadvantages of the coarser sex, the advocates of
Nationalization have not yet used all the methods that precedent might
suggest to them. Mr. Smillie has not cut up any Raphaels or Rembrandts at
the National Gallery; nor even set fire to any of the theatres he may happen
to pass when he is out for a walk. Mr. Bonar Law, on returning home at
evening, does not find Mr. Sidney Webb, a solitary figure chained to his
railings. One of the Suffragettes distinguished herself by getting inside a
grand piano; but it is seldom that we open our own private piano and find a
large coal-miner inside the instrument. The coal-miner may be better at the
big drum than the grand piano; but he remains on the outside of both; and
his drum is really smaller than some. The big drum, however, is rather a
convenient metaphor for something obvious and loud and hollow; and the
true moral in the matter is that recent English history was a procession led
far too much by the big drum; and the agitation about mere Parliamentary
votes was one of the most recent and most remarkable examples of it.
What will be the future of the present industrial crisis I will not
prophesy; but I do know that every element in the past, which has led to this
impasse in the present, has been thus glorified as a mere novelty by such a
noisy minority. It was just because sanguine and shallow people found it
easier to act than to write, and easier to write than to think, that every one of
the changes came which now complicate our position. The very
industrialism which makes us dependent on coal, and therefore on coal-
miners and coal-owners, was forced on us by fussy efficient fools, for
whom anything fresh seemed to be free. Neither miners nor mine-owners
could have put out the fire by which Shakespeare told his Winter’s Tale.
The unequal ownership, which has justly alienated the workers, was hurried
happily through because the owners were new, and it did not matter that
they were few. The blind hypocrisy with which our press and publicists
hardened their hearts in the great strikes before the war, was made possible
by loud evasions about political progress and especially by the big drum of
Votes for Women. I have begun this essay on a controversial note, with the
echo of an old controversy; and yet I do not mean to be merely provocative.
The Suffragettes are only doing what we all do; and I have only put them
first as an example of accumulated abuses for which we are all responsible.
I do not mean to blame the Suffragettes as they blame the Socialists; but
only to point to an impasse of impenitence for which we are all to blame.
I am more and more convinced that what is wanted nowadays is not
optimism or pessimism, but a sort of reform that might more truly be called
repentance. The reform of a state ought to be a thing more like the reform of
a thief, which involves the admission that he has been a thief. We ought not
to be merely inventing consolations, or even merely prophesying disasters;
we ought, first and foremost, to be confessing our own very bad mistakes. It
is easy enough to say that the world is getting better, by some mysterious
thing called progress—which seems to mean providence without purpose.
But it is almost as easy to say the world is getting worse, if we assume that
it is only the younger generation that has just begun to make it worse. It is
easy enough to say that the country is going to the dogs, if we are careful to
identify the dogs with the puppies. What we need is not the assertion that
other people are going to the dogs, but the confession that we ourselves
have only just come back from the swine. We also are the younger
generation, in the sense of being the Prodigal Son. As somebody said, there
is such a thing as the Prodigal Father. We could purchase hope at the
dreadful price of humility. But all thinkers and writers, of all political
parties and philosophical sects, seem to shrink from this notion of admitting
they are on the wrong road and getting back on to the right one. They are
always trying to pretend, by hook or crook, that they are all on the same
somewhat meandering road, and that they were right in going east
yesterday, though they are right in going west to-day. They will try to make
out that every school of thought was an advance on the last school of
thought, and that no apology is due to anybody. For instance, we might
really have a moderate, cautious, and even conservative reform of the evils
affecting Labour, if we would only confess that Capitalism itself was a
blunder which it is very difficult to undo. As it is, men seem to be divided
into those that think it an achievement so admirable that it cannot be
improved upon, and those who think it an achievement so encouraging that
it can be improved upon. The former will leave it in chaos, and the latter
will probably improve it into slavery. Neither will admit what is the truth—
that we have got to get back to a better distribution of property, as it was
before we fell into the blunder of allowing property to be clotted into
monstrous monopolies. For that involves admitting that we have made a
mistake; and that we none of us have the moral courage to do.
I suggest very seriously that it will do good to our credit for courage and
right reason if we drop this way of doing things. The conversions that have
converted the world were not effected by this sort of evolutionary curve. St.
Paul did not pretend that he had changed slowly and imperceptibly from a
Pharisee to a Christian. Victor Hugo did not maintain that he had been very
right to be a Royalist, and only a little more right to be a Republican. If we
have come to the conclusion that we have been wrong, let us say so, and
congratulate ourselves on being now right; not insinuate that in some
relative fashion we were just as right when we were wrong. For in this
respect the progressive is the worst sort of conservative. He insists on
conserving, in the most obstinate and obscurantist fashion, all the courses
that have been marked out for progress in the past. He does literally, in the
rather unlucky metaphor of Tennyson, “let the great world spin for ever
down the ringing grooves of change.” For anyone who changes in that
fashion has only got into a groove. There is no obligation on anybody to
invent evolutionary excuses for all these experiments. There is no need to
be so much ashamed of our blunders as all that. It is human to err; and the
only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have
ever erred.
 Milton and Merry England

M R. FREEMAN, in contributing to the “London Mercury” some of

those critical analyses which we all admire, remarked about myself
(along with compliments only too generous and strictures almost
entirely just) that there was very little autobiography in my writings. I hope
the reader will not have reason to curse him for this kindly provocation,
watching me assume the graceful poses of Marie Bashkirtseff. But I feel
tempted to plead it in extenuation or excuse for this article, which can
hardly avoid being egotistical. For though it concerns one of those problems
of literature, of philosophy and of history that certainly interest me more
than my own psychology, it is one on which I can hardly explain myself
without seeming to expose myself.
That valuable public servant, “The Gentleman with the Duster,” has
passed on from Downing Street, from polishing up the Mirrors and
polishing off the Ministers, to a larger world of reflections in “The Glass of
Fashion.” I call the glass a world of reflections rather than a world of
shadows; especially as I myself am one of those tenuous shades. And the
matter which interests me here is that the critic in question complains that I
have been very unjust to Puritans and Puritanism, and especially to a certain
ethical idealism in them, which he declares to have been more essential than
the Calvinism of which I “make so much.” He puts the point in a genial but
somewhat fantastic fashion by saying that the world owes something to the
jokes of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, but more to the moral earnestness of John
Milton. This involves rather a dizzy elevation than a salutary depression;
and the comparison is rather too overwhelming to be crushing. For I
suppose the graceful duster of mirrors himself would hardly feel crushed, if
I told him he did not hold the mirror up to Nature quite so successfully as
Shakespeare. Nor can I be described as exactly reeling from the shock of
being informed that I am a less historic figure than Milton. I know not how
to answer, unless it be in the noble words of Sam Weller: “That’s what we
call a self-evident proposition, as the cats'-meat-man said to the housemaid
when she said he was no gentleman.” But for all that I have a controversial
issue with the critic about the moral earnestness of Milton, and I have a
confession to make which will seem to many only too much in the personal
manner referred to by Mr. Freeman.
My first impulse to write, and almost my first impulse to think, was a
revolt of disgust with the Decadents and the æsthetic pessimism of the
’nineties. It is now almost impossible to bring home to anybody, even to
myself, how final that fin de siècle seemed to be; not the end of the century
but the end of the world. To a boy his first hatred is almost as immortal as
his first love. He does not realize that the objects of either can alter; and I
did not know that the twilight of the gods was only a mood. I thought that
all the wit and wisdom in the world was banded together to slander and
depress the world, and in becoming an optimist I had the feelings of an
outlaw. Like Prince Florizel of Bohemia, I felt myself to be alone in a
luxurious Suicide Club. But even the death seemed to be a living or rather
everlasting death. To-day the whole thing is merely dead; it was not
sufficiently immortal to be damned. But then the image of Dorian Gray was
really an idol, with something of the endless youth of a god. To-day the
picture of Dorian Gray has really grown old. Dodo then was not merely an
amusing female; she was the eternal feminine. To-day the Dodo is extinct.
Then, above all, everyone claiming intelligence insisted on what was called
“Art for art’s sake.” To-day even the biographer of Oscar Wilde proposes to
abandon “art for art’s sake,” and to substitute “art for life’s sake.” But at the
time I was more inclined to substitute “no art, for God’s sake.” I would
rather have had no art at all than one which occupies itself in matching
shades of peacock and turquoise for a decorative scheme of blue devils. I
started to think it out, and the more I thought of it the more certain I grew
that the whole thing was a fallacy; that art could not exist apart from, still
less in opposition to, life; especially the life of the soul, which is salvation;
and that great art never had been so much detached as that from conscience
and common sense, or from what my critic would call moral earnestness.
Unfortunately, by the time I had exposed it as a fallacy, it had entirely
evaporated as a fashion. Since then I have taken universal annihilations
more lightly. But I can still be stirred, as man always can be by memories of
their first excitements or ambitions, by anything that shows the cloven hoof
of that particular blue devil. I am still ready to knock him about, though I no
longer think he has a cloven hoof or even a lame leg to stand on. But for all
that there is one real argument which I still recognize on his side; and that
argument is in a single word. There is still one word which the æsthete can
whisper; and the whisper will bring back all my childish fears that the
æsthete may be right after all. There is one name that does seem to me a
strong argument for the decadent doctrine that “art is unmoral.” When that
name is uttered, the world of Wilde and Whistler comes back with all its
cold levity and cynical connoisseurship. The butterfly becomes a burden
and the green carnation flourishes like the green bay-tree. For the moment I
do believe in “art for art’s sake.” And that name is John Milton.
It does really seem to me that Milton was an artist, and nothing but an
artist; and yet so great an artist as to sustain by his own strength the idea
that art can exist alone. He seems to me an almost solitary example of a
man of magnificent genius whose greatness does not depend at all upon
moral earnestness, or upon anything connected with morality. His greatness
is in a style, and a style which seems to me rather unusually separate from
its substance. What is the exact nature of the pleasure which I, for one, take
in reading and repeating some such lines, for instance, as those familiar
ones:
 Dying put on the weeds of Dominic
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.

So far as I can see, the whole effect is in a certain unexpected order and
arrangement of words, independent and distinguished, like the perfect
manners of an eccentric gentleman. Say instead “Put on in death the weeds
of Dominic,” and the whole unique dignity of the line has broken down. It
is something in the quiet but confident inversion of “Dying put on” which
exactly achieves that perpetual slight novelty which Aristotle profoundly
said was the language of poetry. The idea itself is at best an obvious and
even conventional condemnation of superstition, and in the ultimate sense a
rather superficial one. Coming where it does, indeed, it does not so much
suggest moral earnestness as rather a moralizing priggishness. For it is
dragged in very laboriously into the very last place where it is wanted,
before a splendidly large and luminous vision of the world newly created,
and the first innocence of earth and sky. It is that passage in which the
wanderer through space approaches Eden; one of the most unquestionable
triumphs of all human literature. That one book at least of “Paradise Lost”
could claim the more audacious title of “Paradise Found.” But if it was
necessary for the poet going to Eden to pass through Limbo, why was it
necessary to pass through Lambeth and Little Bethel? Why should he go
there viâ Rome and Geneva? Why was it necessary to compare the débris of
Limbo to the details of ecclesiastical quarrels in the seventeenth century,
when he was moving in a world before the dawn of all the centuries, or the
shadow of the first quarrel? Why did he talk as if the Church was reformed
before the world was made, or as if Latimer lit his candle before God made
the sun and moon? Matthew Arnold made fun of those who claimed divine
sanction for episcopacy by suggesting that when God said “Let there be
light,” He also said “Let there be Bishops.” But his own favourite Milton
went very near suggesting that when God said “Let there be light,” He soon
afterwards remarked “Let there be Nonconformists.” I do not feel this
merely because my own religious sympathies happen to be rather on the
other side. It is indeed probable that Milton did not appreciate a whole
world of ideas in which he saw merely the corruptions: the idea of relics
and symbolic acts and the drama of the deathbed. It does not enlarge his
place in the philosophy of history that this should be his only relation either
to the divine demagogy of the Dogs of God or to the fantastical fraternity of
the Jugglers of God. But I should feel exactly the same incongruity if the
theological animus were the other way. It would be equally disproportionate
if the approach to Eden were interrupted with jokes against Puritans, or if
Limbo were littered with steeple-crowned hats and the scrolls of
interminable Calvinistic sermons. We should still feel that a book of
“Paradise Lost” was not the right place for a passage from Hudibras. So far
from being morally earnest, in the best sense, there is something almost
philosophically frivolous in the incapacity to think firmly and
magnanimously about the First Things, and the primary colours of the
creative palette, without spoiling the picture with this ink-slinging of
sectarian politics. Speaking from the standpoint of moral earnestness, I
confess it seems to me trivial and spiteful and even a little vulgar. After
which impertinent criticism, I will now repeat in a loud voice, and for the
mere lust of saying it as often as possible:

Dying put on the weeds of Dominic

Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.

And the exuberant joy I take in it is the nearest thing I have ever known
to art for art’s sake.
In short, it seems to me that Milton was a great artist, and that he was
also a great accident. It was rather in the same sense that his master
Cromwell was a great accident. It is not true that all the moral virtues were
crystallized in Milton and his Puritans. It is not true that all the military
virtues were concentrated in Cromwell and his Ironsides. There were
masses of moral devotion on the other side, and masses of military valour
on the other side. But it did so happen that Milton had more ability and
success in literary expression, and Cromwell more ability and success in
military science, than any of their many rivals. To represent Cromwell as a
fiend or Milton as a hypocrite is to rush to another extreme and be
ridiculous; they both believed sincerely enough in certain moral ideas of
their time. Only they were not, as seems to be supposed, the only moral
ideas of their time. And they were not, in my private opinion, the best moral
ideas of their time. One of them was the idea that wisdom is more or less
weakened by laughter and a popular taste in pleasure; and we may call this
moral earnestness if we like. But the point is that Cromwell did not succeed
by his moral earnestness, but by his strategy; and Milton did not succeed by
his moral earnestness, but by his style.
And, first of all, let me touch on the highest form of moral earnestness
and the relation of Milton to the religious poetry of his day. “Paradise Lost”
is certainly a religious poem; but, for many of its admirers, the religion is
the least admirable part of it. The poet professes indeed to justify the ways
of God to men; but I never heard of any men who read it in order to have
them justified, as men do still read a really religious poem, like the dark and
almost sceptical Book of Job. A poem can hardly be said to justify the ways
of God, when its most frequent effect is admittedly to make people
sympathize with Satan. In all this I am in a sense arguing against myself;
for all my instincts, as I have said, are against the æsthetic theory that art so
great can be wholly irreligious. And I agree that even in Milton there are
gleams of Christianity. Nobody quite without them could have written the
single line: “By the dear might of Him that walked the waves.” But it is
hardly too much to say that it is the one place where that Figure walks in
the whole world of Milton. Nobody, I imagine, has ever been able to
recognize Christ in the cold conqueror who drives a chariot in the war in
heaven, like Apollo warring on the Titans. Nobody has ever heard Him in
the stately disquisitions either of the Council in Heaven or of Paradise
Regained. But, apart from all these particular problems, it is surely the
general truth that the great religious epic strikes us with a sense of
disproportion; the sense of how little it is religious considering how
manifestly it is great. It seems almost strange that a man should have
written so much and so well without stumbling on Christian tradition.
Now in the age of Milton there was a riot of religious poetry. Most of it
had moral earnestness, and much of it had splendid spiritual conviction. But
most of it was not the poetry of the Puritans; on the contrary, it was mostly
the poetry of the Cavaliers. The most real religion—we might say the most
realistic religion—is not to be found in Milton, but in Vaughan, in Treherne,
in Crashaw, in Herbert, and even in Herrick. The best proof of it is that the
religion is alive to-day, as religion and not merely as literature. A Roman
Catholic can read Crashaw, an Anglo-Catholic can read Herbert, in a direct
devotional spirit; I gravely doubt whether many modern Congregationalists
read the theology of “Paradise Lost” in that spirit. For the moment I
mention only this purely religious emotion; I do not deny that Milton’s
poetry, like all great poetry, can awaken other great emotions. For instance,
a man bereaved by one of the tragedies of the Great War might well find a
stoical serenity in the great lines beginning “Nothing is here for tears.” That
sort of consolation is uttered, as nobly as it could be uttered, by Milton; but
it might be uttered by Sophocles or Goethe, or even by Lucretius or
Voltaire. But supposing that a man were seeking a more Christian kind of
consolation, he would not find it in Milton at all, as he would find it in the
lines beginning “They are all gone into the world of light.” The whole of
the two great Puritan epics do not contain all that is said in saying “O holy
hope and high humility.” Neither hope nor humility were Puritan
specialities.
But it was not only in devotional mysticism that these Cavaliers could
challenge the great Puritan; it was in a mysticism more humanistic and even
more modern. They shine with that white mystery of daylight which many
suppose to have dawned with Wordsworth and with Blake. In that sense
they make earth mystical where Milton only made heaven material. Nor are
they inferior in philosophic freedom; the single line of Crashaw, addressed
to a woman, “By thy large draughts of intellectual day,” is less likely, I
fancy, to have been addressed by Adam to Eve, or by Milton to Mrs.
Milton. It seems to me that these men were superior to Milton in
magnanimity, in chivalry, in joy of life, in the balance of sanity and subtlety,
in everything except the fact (not wholly remote from literary criticism) that
they did not write so well as he did. But they wrote well enough to lift the
load of materialism from the English name; and show us the shining fields
of a paradise that is not wholly lost.
Of such was the Anti-Puritan party; and the reader may learn more about
it from the author of “The Glass of Fashion.” There he may form a general
idea of how, but for the Puritans, England would have been abandoned to
mere ribaldry and licence; blasted by the blasphemies of George Herbert;
rolled in the mire of the vile materialism of Vaughan; tickled to ribald
laughter by the cheap cynicism and tap-room familiarities of Crashaw and
Treherne. But the same Cavalier tradition continued into the next age, and
indeed into the next century; and the critic must extend his condemnation to
include the brutal buffooneries of Bishop Ken or the gay and careless
worldliness of Jeremy Collier. Nay, he must extend it to cover the last
Tories who kept the tradition of the Jacobites; the careless merriment of
Dean Swift, the godless dissipation of Dr. Johnson. None of these men were
Puritans; all of them were strong opponents of political and religious
Puritanism. The truth is that English literature bears a very continuous and
splendid testimony to the fact that England was not merely Puritan. Ben
Jonson in “Bartholomew Fair” spoke for most English people, and certainly
for most English poets. Anti-Puritanism was the one thing common to
Shakespeare and Dryden, to Swift and Johnson, to Cobbett and Dickens.
And the historical bias the other way has come, not from Puritan
superiority, but simply from Puritan success. It was the political triumph of
the party, in the Revolution and the resultant commercial industrialism, that
suppressed the testimony of the populace and the poets. Loyalty died away
in a few popular songs; the Cromwellians never had any popular song to
die. English history has moved away from English literature. Our culture,
like our agriculture, is at once very native and very neglected. And as this
neglect is regrettable, if only as neglect of literature, I will pause in
conclusion upon the later period, two generations after Milton, when the
last of the true Tories drank wine with Bolingbroke or tea with Johnson.
The truth that is missed about the Tories of this tradition is that they were
rebels. They had the virtues of rebels; they also had the vices of rebels.
Swift had the fury of a rebel; Johnson the surliness of a rebel; Goldsmith
the morbid sensibility of a rebel; and Scott, at the end of the process,
something of the despair and mere retrospection of a defeated rebel. And
the Whig school of literary criticism, like the Whig school of political
history, has omitted or missed this truth about them, because it necessarily
omitted the very existence of the thing against which they rebelled. For
Macaulay and Thackeray and the average of Victorian liberality the
Revolution of 1688 was simply an emancipation, the defeat of the Stuarts
was simply a downfall of tyranny and superstition; the politics of the
eighteenth century were simply a progress leading up to the pure and happy
politics of the nineteenth century; freedom slowly broadening down, etc.,
etc. This makes the attitude of the Tory rebels entirely meaningless; so that
the critics in question have been forced to represent some of the greatest
Englishmen who ever lived as a mere procession of lunatics and ludicrous
eccentrics. But these rebels, right or wrong, can only be understood in
relation to the real power against which they were rebelling; and their
titanic figures can best be traced in the light of the lightning which they
defied. That power was a positive thing; it was anything but a mere negative
emancipation of everybody. It was as definite as the monarchy which it had
replaced; for it was an aristocracy that replaced it. It was the oligarchy of
the great Whig families, a very close corporation indeed, having Parliament
for its legal form, but the new wealth for its essential substance. That is why
these lingering Jacobites appear most picturesque when they are pitted
against some of the princes of the new aristocratic order. That is why
Bolingbroke remains in the memory, standing in his box at the performance
of “Cato,” and flinging forth his defiance to Marlborough. That is why
Johnson remains rigid in his magnificent disdain, hurling his defiance at
Chesterfield. Churchill and Chesterfield were not small men, either in
personality or in power; they were brilliant ornaments of the triumph of the
world. They represented the English governing class when it could really
govern; the modern plutocracy when it still deserved to be called an
aristocracy also. And the whole point of the position of these men of letters
is that they were denying and denouncing something which was growing
every day in prestige and prosperity; which seemed to have, and indeed
had, not only the present but the future on its side. The only thing it had not
got on its side was the ancient tradition of the English populace. That
populace was being more and more harried by evictions and enclosures,
that its old common lands and yeoman freeholds might be added to the
enormous estates of the all-powerful aristocracy. One of the Tory rebels has
himself made that infamy immortal in the great lines of the “Deserted
Village.” At least, it is immortal in the sense that it can never now be lost
for lovers of English literature; but even this record was for a long time lost
to the public by under-valuation and neglect. In recent times the “Deserted
Village” was very much of a deserted poem. But of that I may have
occasion to speak later. The point for the moment is that the psychology of
these men, in its evil as well as its good, is to be interpreted not so much in
terms of a lingering loyalty as of a frustrated revolution. Some of them had,
of course, elements of extravagance and morbidity peculiar to their own
characters; but they grew ten times more extravagant and more morbid as
their souls swelled within them at the success of the shameless and the
insolence of the fortunate. I doubt whether anybody ever felt so bitter
against the Stuarts. Now this misunderstanding has made a very regrettable
gap in literary criticism. The masterpieces of these men are represented as
much more crabbed or cranky or inconsequent than they really were,
because their objective is not seen objectively. It is like judging the raving
of some Puritan preacher without allowing for the fact that the Pope or the
King had ever possessed any power at all. To ignore the fact of the great
Whig families because of the legal fiction of a free Parliament is like
ignoring the feelings of the Christian martyrs about Nero, because of the
legal fiction that the Imperator was only a military general. These fictions
do not prevent imaginative persons from writing books like the
“Apocalypse” or books like “Gulliver’s Travels.”
I will take only one example of what I mean by this purely literary
misunderstanding: an example from “Gulliver’s Travels” itself. The case of
the under-valuation of Swift is a particularly subtle one, for Swift was really
unbalanced as an individual, which has made it much easier for critics not
to keep the rather delicate balance of justice about him. There is a
superficial case for saying he was mad, apart from the physical accident of
his madness; but the point is that even those who have realized that he was
sometimes mad with rage have not realized what he was in a rage with. And
there is a curious illustration of this in the conclusion of the story of
Gulliver. Everyone remembers the ugly business about the Yahoos, and the
still uglier business about the real human beings who reminded the returned
traveller of Yahoos; how Gulliver shrank at first from his friends, and would
only gradually consent to sit near his wife. And everybody remembers the
picturesque but hostile sketch which Thackeray gives of the satire and the
satirist; of Swift as the black and evil blasphemer sitting down to write his
terrible allegory, of which the only moral is that all things are, and always
must be, valueless and vile. I say that everybody remembers both these
literary passages; but, indeed, I fear that many remember the critical who do
not really remember the creative passage, and that many have read
Thackeray who have not read Swift.
Now it is here that purely literary criticism has a word to say. A man of
letters may be mad or sane in his cerebral constitution; he may be right or
wrong in his political antipathies; he may be anything we happen to like or
dislike from our own individual standpoint. But there is one thing to which
a man of letters has a right, whatever he is, and that is a fair critical
comprehension of any particular literary effect which he obviously aims at
and achieves. He has a right to his climax, and a right not to be judged
without reference to his climax. It would not be fair to leave out the
beautiful last lines of “Paradise Lost” as mere bathos; without realizing that
the poet had a fine intention in allowing that conclusion, after all the
thunder and the trumps of doom, to fall and fade away on a milder note of
mercy and reasonable hope. It would not be fair to stigmatize the incident
of Ignorance, damned at the very doors of heaven at the end of Bunyan’s
book, as a mere blot of black Calvinist cruelty and spite, without realizing
that the writer fully intended its fearful irony, like a last touch of the finger
of fear. But this justice which is done to the Puritan masters of imagination
has hardly been done to the great Tory master of irony. No critic I have read
has noticed the real point and climax of that passage about the Yahoos.
Swift leads up to it ruthlessly enough, for an artist of that sort is often
ruthless; and it is increased by his natural talent for a sort of mad reality of
detail, as in his description of the slowly diminished distance between
himself and his wife at the dinner-table. But he was working up to
something that he really wished to say, something which was well worth
saying, but which few seem to have thought worth hearing. He suggests that
he gradually lost the loathing for humanity with which the Yahoo parallel
had inspired him, that although men are in many ways petty and animal, he
came to feel them to be normal and tolerable; that the sense of their
unworthiness now very seldom returns; and indeed that there is only one
thing that revives it. If one of these creatures exhibits Pride——.
That is the voice of Swift, and the cry arraigning aristocracy. It is natural
for a monkey to collect nuts, and it may be pardonable for John Churchill to
collect guineas. But to think that John Churchill can be proud of his heap of
guineas, can convert them into stars and coronets, and can carry that calm
and classic face disdainful above the multitude! It is natural for she-
monkeys to be mated somehow; but to think that the Duchess of Yarmouth
is proud of being the Duchess of Yarmouth! It may not be surprising that the
nobility should have scrambled like screaming Yahoos for the rags and
ribbons of the Revolution, tripping up and betraying anybody and
everybody in turn, with every dirty trick of treason, for anything and
everything they could get. But that those of them who had got everything
should then despise those who had got nothing, that the rich should sneer at
the poor for having no part of the plunder, that this oligarchy of Yahoos
should actually feel superior to anything or anybody—that does move the
prophet of the losing side to an indignation which is something much
deeper and nobler than the negative flippancies that we call blasphemy.
Swift was perhaps more of a Jeremiah than an Isaiah, and a faulty Jeremiah
at that; but in this great climax of his grim satire he is none the less a seer
and a speaker of the things of God; because he gives the testimony of the
strongest and most searching of human intellects to the profound truth of
the meanness and imbecility of pride.
And the other men of the same tradition had essentially the same
instinct. Johnson was in many ways unjust to Swift, just as Cobbett was
afterwards unjust to Johnson. But looking back up the perspective of history
we can all see that those three great men were all facing the same way; that
they all regretted the rise of a rapacious and paganized commercial
aristocracy, and its conquest over the old popular traditions, which some
would call popular prejudices. When Johnson said that the devil was the
first Whig, he might have merely varied the phrase by saying that he was
the first aristocrat. For the men of this Tory tradition, in spirit if not in
definition, distinguished between the privilege of monarchy and that of the
new aristocracy by a very tenable test. The mark of aristocracy is ambition.
The king cannot be ambitious. We might put it now by saying that
monarchy is authority; but in its essence aristocracy is always anarchy. But
the men of that school did not criticize the oligarch merely as a rebel
against those above; they were well aware of his activities as an oppressor
of those below. This aspect, as has already been noted, was best described
by a friend of Johnson, for whom Johnson had a very noble and rather
unique appreciation—Oliver Goldsmith.
A recent and sympathetic critic in the Mercury used the phrase that Mr.
Belloc had been anticipated by Disraeli in his view of England as having
evolved into a Venetian oligarchy. The truth is that Disraeli was anticipated
by Bolingbroke and the many highly intelligent men who agreed with him;
and not least by Goldsmith. The whole view, including the very parallel
with Venice, can be found stated with luminous logic and cogency in the
“Vicar of Wakefield.” And Goldsmith attacked the problem entirely from
the popular side. Nobody can mistake his Toryism for a snobbish
submission to a privilege or title:

Princes and lords, the shadow of a shade,

A breath can make them, as a breath has made:
But a bold peasantry, a nation’s pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied.

I hope he was wrong; but I sometimes have a horrible feeling that he may
have been right.
 But I have here, thank God, no cause for touching upon modern politics.
I was educated, as much as my critic, in the belief that Whiggism was a
pure deliverance; and I hope I am still as willing as he to respect Puritans
for their individual virtue as well as for their individual genius. But it
moves all my memories of the unmorality of the ’nineties to be charged
with indifference to the importance of being earnest. And it is for the sake
of English literature that I protest against the suggestion that we had no
purity except Puritanism, or that only a man like the author of “Paradise
Lost” could manage to be on the side of the angels.
* * * * *
On Peace Day I set up outside my house two torches, and twined them
with laurel; because I thought at least there was nothing pacifist about
laurel. But that night, after the bonfire and the fireworks had faded, a wind
grew and blew with gathering violence, blowing away the rain. And in the
morning I found one of the laurelled posts torn off and lying at random on
the rainy ground; while the other still stood erect, green and glittering in the
sun. I thought that the pagans would certainly have called it an omen; and it
was one that strangely fitted my own sense of some great work half fulfilled
and half frustrated. And I thought vaguely of that man in Virgil, who prayed
that he might slay his foe and return to his country; and the gods heard half
the prayer, and the other half was scattered to the winds. For I knew we
were right to rejoice; since the tyrant was indeed slain and his tyranny fallen
for ever; but I know not when we shall find our way back to our own land.

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