But though topsy-turveydom may be attained with comparative ease, it performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use. Our moral ideals grow mouldy if preached too much; our stories stale if told too often. Conventionality is but a living death. The other side of everything must be shown, the reverse of the medal, the silver side of the shield as well as the golden. Convex things are equally concave, and concave things convex. The world was made round so that one man's "up" should be another man's "down." The world is the Earthly Paradox, with four cardinal points of mutual contradiction, all equally N., S., E., and W.'tisthus a symbol of all paradoxes, of all propositions in which mutually contradictory things are true. Nay, paradox is the only truth, for it cannot be denied; including, like the world, its own contradiction. Topsy-turveydom unfolds our musty ideas to the sun and spreads them out the other way. The man who reverses the Fifth Commandment and says that parents should honour their children is not a flippant jester, but a philosophic thinker. This is the true inwardness of the topsy-turvey humourist.
Topsy-turveydom has played a prodigious part in the progress of thought. The history of philosophy and science is merely a tale of development by topsy-turveydom, every new thinker simply contradicting his predecessor. Thales said water was the primitive principle of all things; so Anaximander said it was air, whereupon Anaximenes said it was matter. This made Pythagoras maintain it was not concrete matter but abstract number; whereupon Xenophanes would have it that it was not number but pure monistic being, and his disciple Zeno invented some delightful and immortal paradoxes to prove that time and motion and number and change have no existence, and only existence exists. Up comes Heraclitus, proving that existence doesn't exist, and there is nothing in the world but becoming: that so far from change not existing, nothing exists but change. It was now about time to return to earth, and so Empedocles and Democritus came along with their Atoms; thereby provoking Anaxagoras into bringing in Soul to explain things. Things were going on thus satisfactorily when the Sophists appeared on the scene to say that we didn't really know anything, because all our knowledge was subjective, so Socrates insisted that it didn't matter, because conduct was three-fourths of life. Plato retorted that it did matter, and he invented an archetypal universe of which this was a faint and distorted copy. Naturally Aristotle must contradict him by founding empirical science, which concerns itself only with this world. On his heels came the Stoics, who would have nothing to do with science except in so far as it made men virtuous, and who wanted to live soberly and severely. This provoked the neo-Platonists into craving for ecstatic union with the supernatural. The transition period from ancient philosophy to modern was one long fight between Nominalists and Realises, the one school teaching the exact opposite of the other.
But it is in the history of Modern Philosophy and Modern Science that one finds the strongest examples of this progress by paradox. The triumph of topsy-turveydom was when Galileo, the Oscar Wilde of Astronomy, declared that the earth went round the sun-a sheer piece of inversion. Darwin, the Barry Pain of Biology, asserted that man rose from the brutes, and that, instead of creatures being adapted to conditions, conditions adapted creatures. Berkeley, the Lewis Carroll of Metaphysics, demonstrated that our bodies are in our minds, and Kant, the W. S. Gilbert of Philosophy, showed that space and time live in us. In Literature it is the same story. To credit the scholars, Homer is no longer a man, nor the Bible a book. As for Zechariah, it was written before Genesis. This topsy-turveydom is a valuable organon of scientific discovery. Take any accepted proposition, invert it, and you get a New Truth. Any historian who wishes to make a name has but to state that Ahab was a saint and Elijah a Philistine-that Ananias was a realist and George Washington a liar-that Charles I. was a Republican hampered by his official position, and that the Armada defeated Drake-that Socrates died of drinking, and that hemlock was what he gave Xantippe. In fact, there is no domain of intellect in which a judicious cultivation of topsy-turveydom may not be recommended. Ask why R. A.'s are invariably colour-blind, and you become a great art critic, while a random regret that Mendelssohn had no ear for music will bring you to the very front in musical circles. For the tail shall always wag the dog in the end, and Aristides will never be able to remain in Athens if men will call him "the Just." Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. We are bored-and then comes the topsy-turveyist's opportunity. "To every action there is an equal and contrary reaction" is a sure law of motion, and in the seesaw of speculation the "down" of to-day is the "up" of tomorrow. Next century we shall be sick of science; and indeed the spooks are already returning for the funeral of this. I shall end with
AN APOLOGY TO A CELEBRATED CHARACTER
As a synonym for sin,
Jezebel, I 'll no longer drag you in,
Jezebel. Now I know your glorious mission was to spread
the truths Phoenician, Metaphoric life anew you shall begin,
Jezebel; Metaphoric life anew you shall begin,
Cultured Baalite, loyal wife,
Jezebel, Martyr in a noble strife,
Jezebel; Protestant for light and sweetness 'gainst the
narrow incompleteness Of Elijah and Elisha's view of life,
Jezebel; Of Elijah and Elisha's view of life.
XVI. GHOST-STORIES
Why do ghosts walk at Christmas? What seduction hath Yule Tide for these phantastic fellows, that it lures them from their warm fireplaces? Is it that the cool snow is grateful after the fervours of their torrid zone, where even the pyrometer would fail to record the temperature? Is it that Dickens is responsible for the season, and that Marley's ghost has set the fashion among the younger spooks? The ghost of Hamlet's father was not so timed: he walked in all weathers. Perhaps it is the supernatural associations of Christmas that create the atmosphere in which ghosts live and move and have their being. Or perchance it is at the season of family reunion that the thoughts turn most naturally to vacant chairs and the presences that once filled them. Or is it that the ghosts walk for me alone, by reason that Christmas always brings me haunting thoughts of them? For my youth was nursed upon the "penny dreadfuls" of an age that knew not "Chums," nor the "Boys' Own Paper." They were not so very dreadful, those "penny dreadfuls," though dreadfully disrespectful to schoolmasters, who were wont to rend them in pieces in revenge. The heroes of the stories began to urge on their wild career in the school-room, where they executed practical jokes that would have gladdened the heart of Mr. Gilbert's merry Governor; the jokers were never found out unless they confessed to spare another boy's feelings, and then the schoolmaster was so touched that he spared theirs. After passing through five forms and upsetting them all, they arrived at the sixth form, which demanded a new volume to itself, called, let us say, "Tom Tiddler's School-days Continued," and mainly devoted to cigars and flirtation. "Tom Tiddler at College" followed-all "wines" and proctor-baiting, with Tom Tiddler as stroke in the victorious 'Varsity eight. "Tom Tiddler Abroad" was the next title, for the chronicle of a popular hero would run on for years and years; and in this section red Indians and wild beasts were rampant. 'T were long to trace the fortunes of Tom Tiddler in all their thrilling involutions; but when he had painted the globe red he married and settled down. And then began "Young Tom Tiddler's School-days," "Young Tom Tiddler's Schooldays Continued," "Young Tom Tiddler Abroad," and all the weekly round of breathlessness; and never was proverb truer than that the young cock cackles as the old cock crows. By the time interest palled in the son a new generation of readers had arisen, and the unblushing paper commenced to run "Tom Tiddler's School-days" again. So went the whirligig. But at Christmas, when the blue-nosed waifs carol in the cold and boys have extra pennies, Tom Tiddler himself slunk into the background, lost in the ample folds of a "Double Number," the same blazoned impudently, as though it did not demand double money. But the extra pennyworth was all ghosts: ghosts, ghosts, ghosts; full measure, pressed down and running over; not your Ibsenian shadows of heredity, but real live ghosts, handsomely appointed, with chains and groans and wavy wardrobes. They lived in moated granges and ivy-wreathed castles, and paced snowy terraces or dark, desolate corridors. There was no talk then of psychic manifestations, or auras, or telepathy, or spiritual ether. Ghosts were solid realities in those days of the double number.