s, to strong and primitive literatures, to
find the praise of strength and the justification of tyranny. But he
could not find it. It is not there. The primitive literature is shown
in the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is all
in praise of the weak. The rude old tales are as tender to minorities
as any modern political idealist. The rude old ballads are as
sentimentally concerned for the under-dog as the Aborigines Protection
Society. When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks
and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only
two kinds of songs. The first was a rejoicing that the weak had
conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for
once in a way, conquered the weak. For this defiance of the statu quo,
this constant effort to alter the existing balance, this premature
challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature and inmost secret of the
psychological adventure which is called man. It is his strength to
disdain strength. The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the
only real hope of mankind. 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 h