MORAL EQUI VOCALS.

THERE is a feature in the literary taste of to-day that is almost unique in English letters and deserves the attention of the psychologist. "Paradox" is the usual non- analytic description ; but all great literature contains an element of paradox, and this particular phase is peculiar to the opening of the twentieth century.

Is there any explanation of the unique whim that loves to

bear Mr. Chesterton say, " I should regard any civilization which was without a universal habit of uproarious dancing as

being, from the full human point of view, a defective civiliza-

tion," or Mr. Bernard Shaw's dictum that "people are not the worse for a change" of wives or husbands ? On inquiry you find that the most enthusiastic admirers regard these state- ments as only "pretty Fanny's way," and would at once demand the interference of the police if Mr. Shaw took a

second wife or Mr. Chesterton danced a pas seul in the City

Temple. You must not interpret the prophet so solemnly as all that. As a matter of prosaic conviction, the admirers of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Chesterton dislike the ethics and speculative standards of Polynesia just as much as you do; in truth, they regard the failure to take these authors in a Pickwickian sense as a hopeless want of culture on your part. The reviewer who said that "it is not easy to understand what the book means ; probably the author himself does not under- stand," expresses their point of view exactly.

There is no parallel to this among the great Victorians. When Thackeray attacked snobbishness, or Dickens brutality, they had no admirers who declared that they "didn't mean

it." People liked or disliked them, but both admirers and contemners held them to a prosaic meaning. The habit of

regarding an author as the last word in up-to-date cleverness because his avowed opinions are so silly that you prove your dullness by refuting them with due gravity, is a development of the last twenty years.

An increase of tolerance is probably the first explanation that leaps into the inquirer's mind. Half the wild and whirling paradoxes are "riders" upon popular, or at least, tolerable opinions. There is no more marked feature of the commonplace "educated" man of our era than a terror of being thought narrow. He never dreams of thinking Mr.

Bernard Shaw right; but he feels that to listen to speculation like this is a duty to the possibilities of civilization. It is just conceivable that the future will regard the sexual customs of the Marquesas Islands as an improvement upon those of Victorian England. It is conceivable, too, that the

British Association of 2000 A.D. will regard the Central African medicine-man as wiser than Professor Huxley. The modern man seems nervous of being caught out in this fashion.

Bat behind the increase of tolerance the most careless eye can diagnose an increase of levity. George Eliot would have felt for our makers of speculative rockets that explode among the most valuable spiritual inheritances of the race something of the hatred Tom Tulliver had for bankrupts, or the contempt Charles Dickens felt for Skinapole. Our kindly generation allows these speculative Skirnpoles to perform, sometimes even pretends that they are "leaders of thought," and asks no

awkward questions of their private sincerity. We enjoy the sense of escape from commonplace decency and respectability. Reading these things is like camping out or going barefooted at the seaside. For a brief holiday you get back to the irresponsible mind of the child.

But, one often wonders, is there any permanent influence upon the mind of to-day from this topsy-turvy literature ?

Every now and then we find Mr. Shaw spoken of as a "pioneer," and his magnetic influence in killing some vener- able form of thought or emotion is trumpeted with screaming emphasis. It may reasonably be doubted if his writings have any revolutionary effect. The "paradoxical" method, by its very nature, is always cutting its own throat. If you do not mean what other people mean by religion and morality, we do not know whether you mean a compliment or a disparagement when you call Jones immoral or a church a "petulantly irreligious club." It is quite useless for Mr. Shaw to tell us that the English home is neither pure, nor holy, nor honour- able, nor in any creditable sense distinctively English. We simply look up the Shavian vocabulary, and find that Shelley was "purer" than Arnold of Rugby, and Goethe "holier" and more virtuous than Bishop Butler or Mr. Gladstone. The invective at once cancels out into nothing, with the result that if Mr. Shaw has anything to teach, his vocabulary effectively prevents him from teaching it.

It may be questioned whether the scintillating author of " Orthodoxy " has any more permanent influence. Mr.

Chesterton is brilliantly successful in exposing Mr. Shaw's materialistic Toryism and Mr. Wells's philosophic confusion. But the dogma that orthodox Christianity has much to say

for itself, from the standpoint and canons of fairyland, does not really come into collision with any belief or disbelief. It is, of course, quite true that a believer in fairyland may be called a " freethinker " and "broad-minded," compared with the hide-bound restrictions and intellectual hesitations of a. modern scientist or sensible man of the world. In precisely the same fashion a very uneducated Tariff Reformer is too "broad-minded" to trouble about economic law, and feels a certain "mystic freedom" from the narrowing ties of cause and effect. But is it worth while putting a, new image and superscription upon the usual conventions of the English language for the sake of results like these ? The solid merit of Mr. Chesterton's work would be enhanced, or at least made more manifest, if he sowed with the hand and not with the whole sack. The edge of this kind of cleverness is all too easily dulled by over-use. The essence of his method is that it needs a conventional background to throw it into relief. When this is wanting, it is the most tedious of all styles. To say that drunkenness is really a spiritual sin may arrest our attention for once. Continue this euphemism for a little while, and you are simply changing the places of the words " spiritual " and " material."

Is any of the literature of the "equivocal" school likely to find a place in the permanent roll of English letters ? We think not. Some really vital humour (or at least humour not felt at first to be mechanical) is produced by Mr. Shaw's electric brain. But it is difficult to avoid the shrewd suspicion that these saucy flings at conventional morality and decency will be as dreary to a future generation as Congreve is to us to-day. The great permanent humorist is "juicy "—the roots of him are deep-sunk in the primitive emotions of humanity. There is nothing of this in Mr. Shaw—nothing of Falstaff's or -Uncle Toby's sense of riotous enjoyment. The joie de vivre is wanting.

In the long run, the moral equivocal falls between two stools. If we take prosaically his oft-repeated "serious con- victions" we cannot laugh at his humour. If Mr. Shaw really felt a prophet's call to uproot the sexual morality of Christian civilization, the " humorous " scenes of "Man and Superman" would be unendurable even to himself. If Mr. Chesterton really visualized the supernatural universe of "Orthodoxy," his war-dances over Mr. McCabe would be too brutal for words. The world preserves its liking and respect for moral equivocals by refusing to take them at their word.