a friend of mine, to whom i owe so much of my gossip that i sometimes think that he does the work and i only take the collection, told me the other day of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me as significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to-day. he observed two people in ecstasies before a certain landscape. it was quite a nice picture, but my friend thought their praises were extravagant. suddenly one of the two turned to the catalogue. "why, this is not the leader picture at all," said she. "it is no. so-and-so." and forthwith the two promptly turned away from the picture they had been admiring so strenuously, found no. so-and-so, and fell into raptures before that.
now i am not going to make fun of these people. i am not going to make fun of them because i am not sure that i don't suffer from their infirmity. if i don't i am certainly an exceptional person, for the people who really think for themselves are almost as scarce as virtuous people were found to be in the cities of the plain. we are most of us second-hand thinkers, and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all. those good people before the picture were not thinking their own thoughts: they were thinking what they thought was the right thing to think. they had the luck to find themselves out. probably it did not do them any good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs they were, what empty echoes of an echo they had discovered themselves to be. they had been taught—heaven help them!—to admire those vacant prettinesses of leader and they were so docile that they admired anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't his.
it reminds me of the story of the two italians who quarrelled so long and so bitterly over the relative merits of tasso and ariosto that at last they fought a duel. and as they lay dying on the ground one of them said to the other, "and to think that i have never read a line of them." "nor i either," said the other. then they expired. i do not suppose that story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit. men are always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices they have inherited from somebody else, ideas they have borrowed second-hand. many of us go through life without ever having had a genuine thought of our own on any subject of the mind. we think in flocks and once in the flock we go wherever the bellwether leads us.
it is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with this servility of mind. horace walpole was enraptured with the rowley poems when he thought they were the work of a mediæval monk: when he found they were the work of chatterton himself his interest in them ceased and he behaved to the poet like a cad. yet the poems were far more wonderful as the productions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they would have been as the productions of a man of sixty. the literary world of the eighteenth century thought ossian hardly inferior to homer; but when macpherson's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture into the deepest pit of oblivion. yet, as poetry, it was as good or bad—i have never read it—in the one case as in the other.
there is a delicious story told by anatole france which bears on this subject. in some examination in paris the military board gave the candidates a piece of dictation consisting of an unsigned page. it was printed in the papers as an example of bad french. "wherever did these military fellows," it was asked, "find such a farrago of uncouth and ridiculous phrases?" in his own literary circles anatole france himself heard the passage held up to laughter and torn to tatters. the critic who laughed loudest, he says, was an enthusiastic admirer of michelet. yet the passage was from michelet himself, from michelet at his best, from michelet in his finest period. how the great sceptic must have enjoyed that evening!
it is not that we cannot think. it is that we are afraid to think. it is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it. even some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed in thinking independently. we only succeed in getting into other flocks. think of that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us some years ago, the cubists and dottists and spottists and futurists and other cranks, who filled london with their shows, and set all the "advanced" people singing their praises. they were not real praises that expressed genuine feeling. they were the artificial enthusiasms of people who wanted to join in the latest fashion. they would rave over any imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion—rather than not be thought clever enough to find a meaning in things that had no meaning.
we are too timid to think alone, too humble to trust our own feeling or our own judgment. we want some authority to lean up against, and when we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little independent thought as children reciting the "twice-times" table. i would rather a man should think ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo. i once heard an evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, speaking of shakespeare, gravely remark that he "could never see anything in that writer." i smiled at his naïveté, but i respected his courage. he couldn't see anything in shakespeare and he was too honest to pretend that he could. that is far better than the affectations with which men conceal the poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility.
in other days the man that dared to think for himself ran the risk of being burned. giordano bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a description of the oxford of his day which shows how tyrannical established thought can be. aristotle was almost as sacred as the bible, and the university statutes enacted that "bachelors and masters who did not follow aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five shillings for every point of divergence and for every fault committed against the logic of the organon." we have liberated thought from the restraints of the policeman and the executioner since then, but in liberating it we have lost our reverence for its independence and integrity. we are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease to think at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely as we follow the fashions in hats.
the evil, i suppose, lies in our education. we standardise our children. we aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching them to be themselves—new incarnations of the human spirit, new prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world. we are more concerned about putting our thoughts into their heads than in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom. they are not in fear of the stake, but they are in fear of the judgment of the world, which has no more title to respect than those old statutes of oxford which we laugh at to-day. the truth, i fear, is that thought does not thrive on freedom. it only thrives under suppression. we need to have our liberties taken away from us in order to discover that they are worth dying for.
