The Three Kinds of Men
Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world.
The first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably
the most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on,
the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we
come to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves.
The second class may be called for convenience the Poets;
they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally speaking,
a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors
or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people;
and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and
also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps,
like all classification. Some good people are almost poets and
some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows
lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly.
It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest
reflection and research.
The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride,
attach ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions,
which are called "commonplaces," as that children are charming,
or that twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting
three is a fine sight. Now, these feelings are not crude;
they are not even simple. The charm of children is very subtle;
it is even complex, to the extent of being almost contradictory.
It is, at its very plainest, mingled of a regard for hilarity and a
regard for helplessness. The sentiment of twilight, in the vulgarest
drawing-room song or the coarsest pair of sweethearts, is, so far
as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It is strangely balanced between
pain and pleasure; it might also be called pleasure tempting pain.
The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a man
fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it means
many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight
in experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really
very subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly.
In fact, it does not express them at all, except on those occasions
(now only too rare) when it indulges in insurrection and massacre.
Now, this accounts for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existence
of Poets. Poets are those who share these popular sentiments,
but can so express them that they prove themselves the strange
and delicate things that they really are. Poets draw out the shy
refinement of the rabble. Where the common man covers the queerest
emotions by saying, "Rum little kid," Victor Hugo will write "L'art
d'etre grand-pere"; where the stockbroker will only say abruptly,
"Evenings closing in now," Mr. Yeats will write "Into the twilight";
where the navvy can only mutter something about pluck and being
"precious game," Homer will show you the hero in rags in his own hall
defying the princes at their banquet. The Poets carry the popular
sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch; but let it always be
remembered that it is the popular sentiments that they are carrying.
No man ever wrote any good poetry to show that childhood was shocking,
or that twilight was gay and farcical, or that a man was
contemptible because he had crossed his single sword with three.
The people who maintain this are the Professors, or Prigs.
The Poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them.
Of course, most of the Poets wrote in prose--Rabelais, for instance,
and Dickens. The Prigs rise above the people by refusing
to understand them: by saying that all their dim, strange
preferences are prejudices and superstitions. The Prigs make
the people feel stupid; the Poets make the people feel wiser
than they could have imagined that they were. There are many
weird elements in this situation. The oddest of all perhaps
is the fate of the two factors in practical politics. The Poets
who embrace and admire the people are often pelted with stones
and crucified. The Prigs who despise the people are often loaded
with lands and crowned. In the House of Commons, for instance,
there are quite a number of prigs, but comparatively few poets.
There are no People there at all.
By poets, as I have said, I do not mean people who write poetry,
or indeed people who write anything. I mean such people as,
having culture and imagination, use them to understand and share
the feelings of their fellows; as against those who use them
to rise to what they call a higher plane. Crudely, the poet
differs from the mob by his sensibility; the professor differs
from the mob by his insensibility. He has not sufficient
finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob. His only
notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut across it, in
accordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell
himself that, whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong.
He forgets that ignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of
innocence.
Let me take one example which may mark out the outline of the contention.
Open the nearest comic paper and let your eye rest lovingly upon
a joke about a mother-in-law. Now, the joke, as presented for
the populace, will probably be a simple joke; the old lady will be
tall and stout, the hen-pecked husband will be small and cowering.
But for all that, a mother-in-law is not a simple idea.
She is a very subtle idea. The problem is not that she is big
and arrogant; she is frequently little and quite extraordinarily nice.
The problem of the mother-in-law is that she is like the twilight:
half one thing and half another. Now, this twilight truth,
this fine and even tender embarrassment, might be rendered,
as it really is, by a poet, only here the poet would have to be
some very penetrating and sincere novelist, like George Meredith,
or Mr. H. G. Wells, whose "Ann Veronica" I have just been reading
with delight. I would trust the fine poets and novelists
because they follow the fairy clue given them in Comic Cuts.
But suppose the Professor appears, and suppose he says (as he almost
certainly will), "A mother-in-law is merely a fellow-citizen.
Considerations of sex should not interfere with comradeship.
Regard for age should not influence the intellect. A mother-in-law
is merely Another Mind. We should free ourselves from these tribal
hierarchies and degrees." Now, when the Professor says this
(as he always does), I say to him, "Sir, you are coarser than Comic Cuts.
You are more vulgar and blundering than the most elephantine
music-hall artiste. You are blinder and grosser than the mob.
These vulgar knockabouts have, at least, got hold of a social shade
and real mental distinction, though they can only express it clumsily.
You are so clumsy that you cannot get hold of it at all.
If you really cannot see that the bridegroom's mother and the bride
have any reason for constraint or diffidence, then you are neither
polite nor humane: you have no sympathy in you for the deep
and doubtful hearts of human folk." It is better even to put
the difficulty as the vulgar put it than to be pertly unconscious
of the difficulty altogether.
The same question might be considered well enough in the old
proverb that two is company and three is none. This proverb
is the truth put popularly: that is, it is the truth put wrong.
Certainly it is untrue that three is no company. Three is
splendid company: three is the ideal number for pure comradeship:
as in the Three Musketeers. But if you reject the proverb altogether;
if you say that two and three are the same sort of company;
if you cannot see that there is a wider abyss between two
and three than between three and three million--then I regret
to inform you that you belong to the Third Class of human beings;
that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall
be alone in a howling desert till you die.
