In the coarsest ballads of the greenwood men are admired most when
they defy, not only the king, but what is more to the point, the hero.
The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of Superman, that moment
the chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor tinker
whom he thought to thrust aside. And the chivalrous chronicler
makes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration.
This magnanimity is not a product of modern humanitarianism;
it is not a product of anything to do with peace.
This magnanimity is merely one of the lost arts of war.
The Henleyites call for a sturdy and fighting England, and they go
back to the fierce old stories of the sturdy and fighting English.
And the thing that they find written across that fierce old
literature everywhere, is "the policy of Majuba."



VI. Christmas and the Aesthetes


The world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and pessimism
have been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way up.
The difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good and
evil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly from
the fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what evil.
Hence the difficulty which besets "undenominational religions."
They profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds, but they
appear to many to have collected all that is dull in them.
All the colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white.
Mixed together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and a
thing very like many new religions. Such a blend is often something much