Dr. Stiggins: His Views and Principles

Front matter

Dr. Stiggins

BOOKS BY ARTHUR MACHEN

The House of Souls The Secret Glory The Hill of Dreams Far Off Things Things Near and Far Hieroglyphics The Three Impostors Dog and Duck Ornaments in Jade The London Adventure Dr. Stiggins The Shining Pyramid

Introduction

Introduction

In the year 1906 "The House of Souls" was issued by the firm of E. Grant Richards. The publisher, I know not why, thought the book ought to have a preface, and so I wrote one. This preface had nothing very much to do with the contents of the volume; it served me as a vehicle for the expression of my hatreds. I find that I disliked many things in 1906. I abhorred the notion that literature should be "practical," or utilitarian; the notion that made Macaulay condemn the Platonic philosophy because it had not led to the invention of anything useful to man, materially useful, that is. Then, I detested "big business" in all its ways. Big business meant to me a nest of horrible factories and appalling chimneys, rows of mean streets, staring or deplorable, the pleasant country laid waste, the rivers running black as ink. Again, Puritanism, with its successor modern Protestantism, to me was the abomination of desolation. It was not only that I regarded it as a theological blasphemy and an intellectual folly; it offended that part of the man which does not reason, but only feels. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has put the matter admirably in his notes on Dickens' violent dislike of Dissenters. He says that Dickens was in this exactly like his character Kit, in "The Old Curiosity Shop." Dickens knew no more of the intellectual, historical, or theological rights and wrongs of Dissent than did ignorant Kit; both took up Dissent as a man takes up a noisome fungus, smells it, makes an inarticulate noise of disgust, and throws it away. It offends; it is no sweet and natural growth of the good earth; it is foul in all its circumstances. And I was thoroughly with Kit and Dickens in this matter.

There were a few other hatreds: the serious novels of George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward; all wearisome, stodgy, careful, lifelike, untransfigured books, the books that are so long and lifelike that when you have finished reading one of them you almost feel that you have spent twenty years with these deplorable people, that you have, indeed, ridden with the Mudshire Pack, listened to interminable senseless gabble of the Mudshire drawing rooms, been solemnly cut by Lady Muddiman, or perhaps have entered into the heart of the spiritual storm that shook George Muddiman when he decided that he could no longer contest North Mudshire as a Conservative. Nay, you feel that you have listened to the last sermon preached by the Reverend Ezekiel Mudd at Ebenezer Chapel, Great Mudford, just before that estimable minister threw in his lot with Haeckel. That was the sort of book I detested; and all that was the subject of my Preface to "The House of Souls."

I liked saying all this so much that I went to a publisher and suggested a little book which should be, practically, this preface in an extended form. He assented, and forthwith I set about writing "Dr. Stiggins." It was published and at no attention whatever. I am inclined to think that by far the greater part of the edition was pulped.

This was eighteen years ago. I have glanced over the book again and find no single article that I would wish to recant. Everything that I hated in 1906 I hate now; if possible, with greater heartiness. But the old fighting spirit has gone from me. I realize definitely that I belong to the beaten cause; not so much theologically as materially. Popular Protestantism, it seems likely, will behave in every respect after the fashion of the toadstool to which Mr. Chesterton compared it. It will deliquesce and drip and cease to be. There may be an unpleasant mess for a while, but that will pass. But the dreadful wheel of material progress will not cease to revolve, and to that wheel all the world is bound, willy-nilly.

In America, as I suppose, the wheel has gone much faster than here in England. Still, we do what we can; we follow in your steps; as if the village idiot were to do his best to imitate the antics and con of the metropolitan maniac. I go down to my native town, Caerleon-on-Usk; in my day a little place of dreams and wonder and quiet. Now I find the white road from Newport scarred with villas, red and rancid; I find, instead of the green brake that hung over the river, a smear of red villas, as it were, a bleeding sore. The first object to greet the eye is a huge red lunatic asylum, the second object is a huge red factory: the madhouse and the factory are the two great marks of progress; the one feeds the other. Here, in London, every day sees a comely house destroyed, a green tree cut down, the foundation-stone laid of some monstrous affliction. The Strand, that street of delights, is gone; Regent street, all gaiety, is gone. Ugly stupid nonsense in steel and stone has taken their place. Day by day London reeks more foully of progress and vulgarity. Now and then American correspondents write to me of coming over to see London and England. I tell them to come quickly, lest they find that both, in their true life and spirit, have departed for ever; lest they find nothing but a shabby imitation of the worst features of their native country: skyscrapers that are not nearly high enough to be terrific, but high enough to be horrible.

Vicisti: thou hast conquered, O Industrial Pig.

I: Protestantism and Preserved Meat—Moral and Political Dignity of the United States of America

I HAVE been watching for some time past, and with considerable anxiety, the discussion of the so-called "Meat-Packing Scandals" in America. You, as an earnest Liberal and as a Free Churchman, must have seen the reports to which I allude, for I am sure you agree with me that the rivers of printer's ink are not the least amongst those which, the Inspired Writer tells us, make glad the City of God. No; you are right; I am far from using the phrase in any of the superstitious senses dear to the mediævalists or pseudo-primitive writers. Holy Writ, as has been well observed, is not only a kernel but a shell, not only an eternal message, but a local and (shall we say?) a temporary pronouncement. The author of these words was, no doubt, thinking of Jerusalem, a city whose largely imaginary glories would not compensate a modern thinker for the lack of the elements of sanitation and of democratic government. The dogmas of the writer were no doubt clearly enough defined—to us, of course, they would be impossible—but we have no reason to suppose that his drains were in the like case. Indeed, it is highly improbable that such things existed in any form at the period in which these words were written, and I need scarcely remind you that the sense of Liberalism and of the Free Churches is not uncertain on the point of Dogma versus Drains. The "City of God" then, as the Inspired Writer viewed it, was, probably, something very different from the City of God to which modern progress is daily approximating; and I need scarcely say that the visions of mediæval dreamers, of men who lived in the heated opium den of Catholicism and Feudalism, are still less likely to image forth the Model City of to-day. The old Hebrew who used the phrase thought of Jerusalem, the centre of Jew Patriotism, the seat of the Temple with its Holy of Holies, its hidden rites performed by a sacerdotal hierarchy; the writer of the Middle Ages had in his mind some pinnacled and climbing town that rose roof by roof, gable by gable, spire by spire to the vast far-lifted towers of the cathedral, where the idolatrous mass was daily offered: we, wiser far than Jew or Catholic, read the words and think of Manchester or Leeds or Sheffield. Why do you start? You are surely not deluded by what has been called the superstition of antiquity, by the false glamour which a few writers have unfortunately woven about past centuries and forgotten arts? The mediæval city was dirty and insanitary in a high degree, liberty was unknown, cruelty was rampant, a degrading superstition had usurped the place of true religion, Free Churchmen were unheard of. Can such a place as this symbolize to us the City of God? Surely not. Again, I say, Manchester must present a far more appropriate image of that ideal to which creation moves. Flourish and prosperous, surrounded by the princely mansions of those whom honest toil, business instincts, and enlightened piety have raised to a high place, watered by streams whose refreshing blackness testifies that they no longer minister to the selfish pleasures and the cruel sports of the feudal lord: this, surely, is the true Civitas Dei to which the old Hebrew unconsciously looked forward. The æsthete will tell you Manchester is smoky. It is true that it is veiled, but so was the Temple of Jerusalem. The jets of steam that shoot out from apertures in those sturdy walls whisper to me the names of Cobden and Bright, Cobden and Bright; and these, let me tell you, were truer and holier saints than any that Rome commemorates in her storied calendars. Jerusalem was on a hill; it was aristocratic; Manchester stands on a democratic plain. Walk through her ways, note how street is a facsimile of street and house of house. No proud castle scowls from its sullen battlements on the peaceful citizens, no flaunting spire rises high above every roof denying with each stone the great Evangel of Equality; even Owen's College does not oppress the humble workman with a superhuman (and therefore offensive) sense of beauty. On every side the busy hum of labour; to our ears more solemn than the rolling organ, holier than the sound of the harps in the strange vision of the Jewish fakir which closes our Bibles; more solemn and more holy because every rattle of the improved machinery tells us that some supporter of enlightened policy and Liberal religious organizations is getting richer and richer every moment. Here, indeed, we have the true City of God; and this is the city which, as I observed, is made glad by those inky rivers which flow through the columns of a free press.

And this brings me back to the point from which I set out. I took it for granted that you are a diligent student of the newspaper, and, such being the case, you must have followed the reports of what are called the Chicago Packing Scandals; and I hope I shall convince you of the very bad effect those reports must have had. I may surprise you by saying that I wish it had been found possible to suppress or at least to minimize the whole affair. I may perhaps surprise you still more by saying that I wish with still greater fervour that a body of representative Free Churchmen could be appointed to regulate in some measure the publication of news and comment that is likely to be harmful to the best interests of the people. The Freedom of the Press! My dear friend, do not let us be slaves either to a phrase or to a false appearance of consistency; do not let us be the slaves of anything or anybody, but "Liberals," Free Men, in deed and word. I agree with you with all my heart in reprobating any system which remotely resembles the censorship of the press and of that free speech which is every Englishman's birthright. Remember that every Free Churchman is a descendant of Milton; I rejoice in it, I make my boast of it all the day long, but remember also that the great Milton, that "mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies," that prophet who saw the day of the Divorce Court from afar off and was glad; remember, I say, that Milton served a Government—England's noblest Government—that made the recitation of the Prayer Book, the "mass in masquerade," a penal offence. You see, don't you, the wide distinction between the censorship of tyrants and bigots such as Charles and Laud, with their detestable Star Chamber, and the wise restraints of England's great Captain Cromwell? But I am afraid that if you are not quite clear upon this point, you must have failed to grasp those basic principles which lie at the root of all true Liberalism and Protestantism. Let us go a little farther back in the past: the ordinary observer sees, perhaps, but little difference between Queen Mary's executions by fire and Queen Elizabeth's executions by tearing the heart from the living man. But if we are Protestants we know that the former were the monstrous cruelties of devils in human form, while the latter were entirely justifiable punishments. Again, the Liberal knows that the severities of the feudal law in France were the work of fiends, while the so-called massacres in the prisons during the Revolution were a melancholy necessity, and the wholesale executions under what has been called "The Terror" in reality deeds of mercy. I hope I have convinced you of the need of being on your guard against confusing things which are really essentially distinct in spite of surface similarities. Perhaps a more modern instance may be helpful: your blood must often have boiled at the way in which the late government packed the magistracy with Tories. But you surely do not see any resemblance between this most flagitious proceeding and the efforts of the friends of the present administration to ensure that Liberalism shall be efficiently represented on the Bench? Good; then I hope you will not confuse my proposition for a Board of Press Overseers with the tyrannical and abominable system of the censorship.

Besides, we have already the elements of such a system worked in a rough and ready way by the editors themselves. You must have noticed that few Liberal journals devote much space to meetings of Tories and Churchmen, and every effort is very properly made to minimize the importance of such gatherings—a proceeding which, I need not tell you, is entirely different from the boycotting tactics of the Conservative Press. I say, then, that this most salutary system should be extended and regulated; and I do not think that Englishmen need be afraid to entrust the liberties of the press to the hands of a committee chosen from the Free Church Council, seeing that they have virtually already entrusted their whole destinies to the care of the great Evangelical bodies.

This granted, then, I want to show you what infinite harm might have been avoided if such a committee had been in existence lately, for I cannot doubt that it would have reduced the reports of the so-called scandals of Chicago to a very modest compass—if indeed it allowed any mention of this most unfortunate matter to appear at all. You think these reports were for the general good, that their publication tended to check the poisoning of the public, that the "Trusts" which make vast fortunes by selling indescribable filth as food should be "shown up"? Are you quite sure that you see the direction in which you are tending? Where did these alleged scandals take place? In America. And what is the government of that favoured land? You surely can not be ignorant of the fact that it is perhaps the only country in existence which enjoys the inestimable blessings of a pure democracy. France, it is true, is Republican; but France is an old country bound by the galling chains of history and tradition, bound still more grievously by the chains of that accursed system of clericalism which, as one of our most respected leaders observed the other day, is indeed "the enemy." In spite of the crowning mercy of the Revolution, in spite of the work accomplished by such heroes as Danton, Marat, Robespierre, one must fear that the past is not altogether blotted from the National Memory; the chimer glories of knights and nobles and kings still linger, I am afraid, in the minds of the people; those great decorated rubbish heaps called cathedrals still cumber the land, witnesses to the hypocrisy and superstition and wastefulness of the past; and cunning bigoted priests such as Francis of Sales and Fénelon, with hysterical women of doubtful character like Joan of Arc, still have their deluded votaries. England, certainly, has many blessings—at the present moment her destinies are practically guided by our good friend Dr. Clifford, and a Sunday afternoon in London is always a cheering and a helpful spectacle—but how much of what I have said of France applies to our own country! We, too, have our wretched traditions of kings, and knights, and "saints," we too have our cathedrals and our churches, survivals from a Reformation that was far too lax in its work, and I am afraid I must add, we have a sovereign who countenances that awful institution called the Turf. No; it is in America alone that one may ob the fine flavour of democracy, untainted, and unalloyed. The great States have no history of rapine, plunder, adultery, and cruelty to dazzle their eyes under the specious name of chivalry. No "kings" or "knights" freed that happy country; but stern men of business with an eye to the main chance. Nay; let us go further back into history: in Mexico and in South America the poor Indian still survives to bear witness to the Popish cruelty which was exercised on his ancestors; but vainly will you seek for the nation of the Massachusetts in the neighbourhood of Boston; the Pilgrim Fathers scorned to use the "devildoms of Spain," and saw that swift extermination was the greatest mercy to the unhappy race of whose country they had taken possession. The Englishman blushes, unless he is a flunkey, at the "Dieu et Mon Droit" which denies Democracy from the walls of every Police Station. How much nobler were the device: "Simple Bible-teaching and the London County Council"; how much nobler is the American motto: "The Spoils to the Victors." Ah! there are no murderous Edwards or Henrys, no tyrant Charleses or Jameses on the roll of American Presidents: there you see names like Jackson and Pierce and Buchanan, which make the cheek glow and the heart beat high. They talk of the statesmanship, of the power of kings: what statesmanship, what power can compare with Lincoln's great action when with a stroke of the pen he transmuted a race of ignorant, incapable, "impossible" Negroes into free American citizens with votes to give or to sell, with heads which, though woolly, were as high as the heads of any white man? I know that there is a legend to the effect that the Negroes turned the Legislatures into orgies, and ruined the finances of the Southern States for years; but I need scarcely point out that this cannot be true, since if it were so, all men would not be equal—which is absurd, and a proposition which would land us in the inexpressibly grotesque conclusion that there may be something to be said for our House of Lords.

Well, we all know what a great country America is; and we know that it is great because it is at once Protestant and Democratic. It is great because in place of our parasitical Establishment it has a powerful Oil Trust under the control of a professed member of the Baptist Church, it is great because instead of a hereditary monarch it has a President who relies on no ancestral claims or storied pedigree, but on judicious arrangements with the benevolent Trust I have mentioned. It is great because instead of a corrupt House of Lords it has a Senate and a Congress composed entirely of professional politicians whose incomes depend on the acuteness of their business instincts; it is great because it produces a larger proportion of lunatics than any country on earth; and if you have read your Wendell Holmes you will remember that a high lunacy rate is an unfailing test of a country's intellectual supremacy. You are right; all Protestant countries shew their mental superiority to Popery in this striking and convincing manner. And what a moral dignity the Americans have! You remember how the whole land rose in its righteous indignation over the long martyrdom of the unhappy Cubans. There was no counting the cost, no dread of the haughty power of Spain; it was enough for America that the Cuban rebels were not given exactly what they wanted, and at such devilish cruelty as this the heart of the States grew hot. What do you say of the Filipinos? Don't you know that they had groaned for centuries under the hideous Spanish yoke, and that America set them free? My dear friend, if you doubt such a proposition as that, you will end by doubting that every monastery communicated by a secret passage with a nunnery, you will deny the well known fact that in these nunneries the walling-up of live nuns was a part of the daily routine of the establishment, you will hesitate to say that every confessor is a monster of cunning and debauchery. Do you know or do you not know that the San Francisco earthquake and the Tory Press are alike the work of the Jesuits; whose motto is, as you are aware, "the end justifies the means"? Well, that being so, I repeat that America freed the Filipinos from Spanish tyranny. They didn't want to be free after the American pattern of freedom? So much the worse for them. What they want is not of the slightest consequence to anybody. Haven't you seen it laid down by a consensus of Liberal journalists and politicians that the Chinese coolies in South Africa are miserable slaves who pant for freedom? It is true that the coolies themselves decline to be free; but that, as you will have seen, does not affect the question in the least. So, if the Filipinos, as you say, object to be free citizens of the greatest country in the world, they must be convinced of their error by such methods of suasion as are available. But I do not believe for a moment in the report that the American soldiers tortured their prisoners; and if large quantities of water were poured down the throats of these misguided persons with the very laudable object of gaining important information, I am sure that the water in question was of very superior quality to any fluid used in a somewhat similar manner in the dungeons of the accursed Inquisition. In fact you may depend upon it that the Inquisitors never employed anything so innocent as water in their devilries. The great Temperance Movement has never flourished (how could it?) under the Upas Tree of Romanism, and I should not be surprised to hear that many a martyr's torments were aggravated by the diabolical refinement of compelling him to swallow enormous quantities of the best sherry.

But we were considering the moral dignity of the United States of America. I don't think there is anything grander in history than the American People rebuking Russia for its cruel treatment of the Jews. Let me tell you there is no common or customary greatness here. You have doubtless read the very interesting accounts of the summary executions of Negroes in the Southern States—"lynchings" I think they are called in the purer, more vivid English of the Great Republic. Well, I have no doubt that these summary executions are a necessity, though perhaps a painful one. Indeed, they must be both necessary and justifiable, for they are the will of the people. You know the adage: Vox populi vox Dei, you know as well as I do that the People are always right. It is for that reason that we are Liberals, that we base all our principles upon the absolute, eternal, infallible supremacy of the people's will. Ergo, as the old logicians say, if the people of America choose to burn Negroes alive with what some would call refinements of slow and lingering torment: then the people of America must be right in doing so. But mark: while the left hand, as it were, of this great nation dribbles a little more kerosene on the slowly carbonizing form of its free and equal (but coloured) citizen, the other, raised aloft in all the awfulness of intense moral dignity, rebukes the cruelties of guilty Russia and takes the poor hunted Jew under the protecting folds of the banner of the Great Republic! Am I not right? Is not such a picture unique in the world's history?

The Higher Criticism teaches us that the collection known popularly as "Isaiah" was in reality written by fifty-two persons of the same name, who all prophesied many years after the event. But could the whole fifty-two, with the assistance of "Ezekiel" and "Jeremiah," ever have reached such a splendid height of denunciation as that to which I have drawn your attention?

I do not know whether I need elaborate the greatness of this splendid Democracy. You know what the marriage law of America is like: there are variations, of course, in the different States, and I am told that in one commonwealth divorce is as restricted as the cunning priests would have it in England. Still, in most States the law stands as though Milton had framed it. The good sense, the inspiration rather, of the people has triumphed, and vice has shrunk back affrighted to her accustomed haunts of clericalism and re

for who would be a libertine in a land where a divorce is as easily obtainable as a dog license, who would risk the shame, the moral degradation, the expense of keeping a mistress when all the worldly advantages of such a course can be obtained by going through a holy and harmless ceremony? You understand now the moral altitude of every American; you comprehend the height from which the citizen of New York and of San Francisco looks down on the deplorable corruption of our effete aristocracy. The fellow-countrymen of Tweed and Oakey Hall carry their own moral atmosphere with them; they would perish else when they condescend to visit the gilded infection of our House of Lords.

Yes! America is Democracy triumphant; the goal to which we are pressing here, the ideal towards which all noble hearts are striving. But—how long can we proclaim the glad tidings of liberty if the offensive and doubtless exaggerated details to which I have alluded are made public in the press? You and I are staunch, I know; I am sure that there is not a member of the Free Church Council who would not see his friends eating ordure, poisoned rat, preserved Lithuanian packer, spittle, diseased meat, and noxious chemicals gladly, joyfully, thankfully; knowing, as he would know, that Protestantism was making a handsome profit, that the Eagles of the Great Rebublic were laughing consumedly. Yes, yes; the Free Churches have always been on the side of Free Trade, and I am sure that they always will be. Cobden and Bright did not live and work in vain, and so long as a mixture of glucose and vitriol is called beer, while tallow and beastliness in general is sold as butter, while thousands of superfluous babies fall yearly victims to interesting and complicated chemical formulæ disguised as milk, while gangrened sausages shew the way to glory (and a pretty profit)—so long shall their names be "freshly remembered" in flowing bowls of substitutes. "Adulteration is a form of competition": the man who denies that great axiom is certainly a Tory, and prob a Churchman or a Romanist. Those were the words of honest John Bright; and so long as England emblazons them on her banner all will be well with her.

But how about the thoughtless masses? Have they the self-sacrifice, the moral strength, the confidence in Liberal principles that are requisite in such a crisis? Can we not imagine them declaring that if democracy implies the poisoning and adulteration of every conceivable article of food and drink they would rather be without democracy? Here, they may say, is a great free nation, a great commonwealth of sovereign citizens; without king or lords or Established Church; a government for the people, by the people, through the people. And the result seems to be that the sovereign citizens in question have to feed on dung, poisoned rat, and tuberculous cow; while the representatives of the sovereign citizens aforesaid grow rich on the bribes administered by the purveyors of these delicacies. Cannot you see the deplorable results that may follow from this specious though falla reasoning? I am older than you, and I have learned to dread the devilish strength of the forces of reaction. Believe me, the enemy is always on the alert; there are not wanting those who have read the annals of Popery and Tyranny with, I am afraid, no honest aims. In the bad old days, in the ages described so justly as dark, they tell us that adulteration was a crime, that "making a corner" was a felony, that our worthy friends in Chicago would certainly have been hanged to the nearest tree. Ah, I see you shudder, and you do well; but have you forgotten the fleshpots of Egypt, after which some writer (who lived many centuries after the probably mythical Moses) tells us the children of Israel lusted? Believe me, the old Hebrew Book has not lost its freshness; here in England, as in some possible desert which could not have been near Sinai, we have many who are willing and ready to lust after the fleshpots, to clamour for beef which is not tuberculous, to scorn the poisoned but spicy rat, to murmur against fragments of their brother men appearing on the breakfast table under the comely disguise of chicken and tongue. The fleshpots of Egypt! Yes, my friend, even though the Higher Criticism should inform us that Egypt in the traditional sense never existed, that the Red Sea is a forgery of P1 J2 L4 and P6, that Moses was either a Stone Pillar or the Midnight Sky (all of which conclusions seem to me, I confess, infinitely nobler than the traditional view): even then how true the moral remains. Yes; now, as then, the people are a stiff-necked generation, ready, as ever, to place their carnal appetites above their eternal gain. The so-called Israelites in the old fable wearied of the Heavenly Manna, and forgot the Promised Land: and so the mob to-day may weary of the gifts of Packingtown: formaldehyde has ceased, they may say, to charm our palates, glucose is sweet for us no longer, oil of vitriol and gangrened pork will not serve our dainty and luxurious taste, we are weary of the dung of rats. We should like healthy beef, not potted Scandinavian, we want real milk in our tea, we wish for beer with our dinner, not chemical reactions, we are anhungered for pork which is not green with gangrene—in a word, for the fleshpots of Egypt. And at last they may declare that if Chicago and its products are the results of Liberalism and Protestantism then they would rather not be Protestants or Liberals!