VANDALISM

Vandalism is of two kinds, the negative and the positive; as in the Vandals of the ancient world, who destroyed buildings, and the Vandals of the modern world, who erect them. A long procession of those typically modern thinkers, who are too tired to think, has already left behind a trail or tradition of language; by which it is vaguely suggested that whatever is constructive is good and only what is destructive is bad. Anyone wishing to lose himself in mazes of such logic, or rather illogicality, may put to himself some particular proposition; as that it is good to construct a stake, with faggots, for burning a man alive, and yet bad to destroy a growing plantation or cut down trees, which is the only possible way of doing it. But in the particular case of Vandalism, it is very specially necessary to remember that the real argument is all the other way. Of two bad things, it is better to be the barbarian who destroys something, which for some reason he dislikes or does not understand, and who may yet sincerely like other things that he does understand, rather than to be the vulgarian who erects something exactly expressive of what he likes; and in that act rears a colossal image of the smallness of his soul. Destructive Vandalism, though a very great evil at the present time, and indeed through all history, has not been in all history so bad as it is now; and certainly not so bad as many more constructive things that exist now.

It is important to remember that there are two kinds of mere destructiveness; neither on the noblest level of human culture, but neither on the most ignoble. First, of course, the Vandal may be the Iconoclast. He may destroy certain artistic creations because they are really opposed to his moral convictions. Thus a Puritan fanatic from America might conceivably think himself commanded by the Lord to dynamite Westminster Abbey, because it is full of idols; that is of images with a religious character. Curiously enough, he would be half right. It is full of idols; but they are not images of a religious character. Anybody can see at a glance that medieval figures of saints and angels are not worshipped; for the perfectly simple reason that they are themselves represented in the act of worshipping. But the eighteenth-century statues of statesmen and generals really are idols. They are manifestly set up, not to the glory of God, but to the glory of the men there represented; who are to be directly worshipped for their own sake; as the Pagans worshipped demigods and heroes. Lord Polkerton and Admiral Bangs are not themselves represented in the act of worshipping; but in the act of being worshipped. For the eighteenth century, which has been called the Age of Reason, was the real Age of Idolatry. This, however, is a parenthesis. The point is that the American fanatic would be a much finer fellow than the American chain-store man who finds half London in the chains of his cheap and tawdry stores. If the dynamite of the Iconoclast caved in the whole front of Westminster Abbey, I should be far less horrified than I am at a project of a Yankee shopkeeper for building a tower with bells, taller than Westminster Cathedral. It is curious to reflect on the few stray nerves of criticism and sensibility that still remain. I fancy that if an American erected immediately opposite Windsor Castle, on the other side of the river, another castle of exactly the same castellated form and plan, only a little bigger (being made of cheap and rotten material) and then flew the flag of his own ancient family in direct defiance of the personal flag of the King, there would be a good many people in society who would tell the American, however rich he was, that this was going a bit too far. Which shows how much safer it is to insult religion than to insult royalty.

Secondly, in the great moral philosophy of being fair to Vandals, we must remember that there is a certain element in life which has even a right to its place in life, though that place may not always be easy to find, without displacing better things. We talk of positive and negative, of creation and destruction; but in a sense the association is incorrect. Destruction is not negation; at least it is not always and of necessity negation. There is a positive pleasure in destruction, which can be harmless and is certainly real. It is innocent, for it is felt strongly by children when they first tear up paper or break sticks. But I trust that few of us have so entirely lost our innocence, as to be unable to drink deep joy from smashing up the happy home. Breathes there a man with soul so dead that he has never, when standing in a respectable parlour, felt a wild desire to seize a pot and plant and send it crashing through the bow windows into the front-garden or the street? These things are not entirely to be sterilised; these things also are from God. It is all explained in a ballade which my friends and I composed years ago, after I had shattered a great tumbler all over the carpet. It has the refrain: "I like the noise of breaking glass." And though I should not like the glass of Chartres Cathedral to be broken merely to gratify this taste, I can imagine two types of human beings who might break it and remain human. A lunatic might do it because he thought it unChristian to make pictures of the life of Christ; and a boy might do it because he liked the noise of breaking glass. So much for the defence of the more dignified Vandalthe Destroyer.

But the new sort of Vandal is much more indefensible. The crude creative Vandal is much more of a pestilence and a peril. There is more to be said for the conqueror, who makes a solitude and calls it peace, than for the other who makes a pandemonium and calls it progress. For he brands upon the eye in memory the positive and vivid picture of his own meanness and stupidity. The barbarians who laid waste the world may have prevailed in so far that some good things were forgotten, but they did not insist that their own base and barbarous things should be remembered. But that is exactly what the "constructive" vulgarian does. That is exactly what the Modern Vandal does. It is a gloomy pleasure to think that if a dissolving civilisation brings in forces more like those of the Ancient Vandals, if vagabond tribes from Asia or Eastern Europe drift in with the old-world, animal, almost automatic destructiveness of the Huns or the Bashi-Bazouks, they at least will wreck and ruin all the new Civilisation without any pretence of reconstructing it; and that towering and glaring flats, or long leagues of flashy glass shop-windows, will lie in rubbish-heaps side by side with better things.