The Defendant

character of King John or the domestic virtues of the prairie-dog. He is
one who defends himself, a thing which the present writer, however
poisoned his mind may be with paradox, certainly never dreamed of
attempting.

Criticism upon the book considered as literature, if it can be so
considered, I should, of course, never dream of discussing--firstly,
because it is ridiculous to do so; and, secondly, because there was, in
my opinion, much justice in such criticism.

But there is one matter on which an author is generally considered as
having a right to explain himself, since it has nothing to do with
capacity or intelligence, and that is the question of his morals.

I am proud to say that a furious, uncompromising, and very effective
attack was made upon what was alleged to be the utter immorality of this
book by my excellent friend Mr. C.F.G. Masterman, in the 'Speaker.' The
tendency of that criticism was to the effect that I was discouraging
improvement and disguising scandals by my offensive optimism. Quoting
the passage in which I said that 'diamonds were to be found in the
dust-bin,' he said: 'There is no difficulty in finding good in what
humanity rejects. The difficulty is to find it in what humanity accepts.
The diamond is easy enough to find in the dust-bin. The difficulty is to
find it in the drawing-room.' I must admit, for my part, without the
slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in
drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But
I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few
sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and
progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the
pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth
that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is
also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into
decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did,
and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an
ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some
fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the
dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a
goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for
Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the
subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not
good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are
revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These
essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet
ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be
loved first and improved afterwards.

G. K. C_.

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THE DEFENDANT

INTRODUCTION

In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes
that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a
level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping
roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with
loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose.
The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It
is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come
together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination
conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is
always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The
scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a
prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are
more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words--words that seemed
shameful and tremendous--and the world, in terror, buried him under a
wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of an ancient fear.

If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to
imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth
that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried
under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare.
Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more
commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation--it is
a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of
minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that
our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we
weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what
is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he
was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang
in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has
not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the
pointing out of the earth.

Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope--the
telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For
the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and
as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of
human history--that men are continually tending to undervalue their
environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves.
The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the
tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible
humility.

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the
ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his
environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself.
This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a