It is an old story that names do not fit things;it is an old story that the oldest forest is called the New Forest,and that Irish stew is almost peculiar to England.But these are traditional titles that tend,of their nature,to stiffen;it is the tragedy of to-day that even phrases invented for to-day do not fit it.The forest has remained new while it is nearly a thousand years old;but our fashions have grown old while they were still new.
The extreme example of this is that when modern wrongs are attacked,they are almost always attacked wrongly.People seem to have a positive inspiration for finding the inappropriate phrase to apply to an offender;they are always accusing a man of theft when he has been convicted of murder.They must accuse Sir Edward Carson of outrageous rebellion,when his offence has really been a sleek submission to the powers that be.
They must describe Mr.Lloyd George as using his eloquence to rouse the mob,whereas he has really shown considerable cleverness in damping it down.It was probably under the same impulse towards a mysterious misfit of names that people denounced Dr.Inge as "the Gloomy Dean."Now there is nothing whatever wrong about being a Dean;nor is there anything wrong about being gloomy.The only question is what dark but sincere motives have made you gloomy.What dark but sincere motives have made you a Dean.Now the address of Dr.Inge which gained him this erroneous title was mostly concerned with a defence of the modern capitalists against the modern strikers,from whose protest he appeared to anticipate appalling results.Now if we look at the facts about that gentleman's depression and also about his Deanery,we shall find a very curious state of things.
When Dr.Inge was called "the Gloomy Dean"a great injustice was done him.He had appeared as the champion of our capitalist community against the forces of revolt;and any one who does that exceeds in optimism rather than pessimism.A man who really thinks that strikers have suffered no wrong,or that employers have done no wrong--such a man is not a Gloomy Dean,but a quite wildly and dangerously happy Dean.A man who can feel satisfied with modern industrialism must be a man with a mysterious fountain of high spirits.And the actual occasion is not less curious;because,as far as I can make out,his title to gloom reposes on his having said that our worker's demand high wages,while the placid people of the Far East will quite cheerfully work for less.
This is true enough,of course,and there does not seem to be much difficulty about the matter.Men of the Far East will submit to very low wages for the same reason that they will submit to "the punishment known as Li,or Slicing";for the same reason that they will praise polygamy and suicide;for the same reason that they subject the wife utterly to the husband or his parents;for the same reason that they serve their temples with prostitutes for priests;for the same reason that they sometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexual perversion.They do it,that is,because they are Heathens;men with traditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and the gestures of self-respect.They may be very much better than we are in hundreds of other ways;and I can quite understand a man (though hardly a Dean)really preferring their historic virtues to those of Christendom.
A man may perhaps feel more comfortable among his Asiatic coolies than among his European comrades:and as we are to allow the Broadest Thought in the Church,Dr.Inge has as much right to his heresy as anybody else.
It is true that,as Dr.Inge says,there are numberless Orientals who will do a great deal of work for very little money;and it is most undoubtedly true that there are several high-placed and prosperous Europeans who like to get work done and pay as little as possible for it.
But I cannot make out why,with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and traditions,the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West.If some thousands of years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge admires,and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets,the obvious deduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathen Chinese.
