If
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
BY
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
AUTHOR OF " VARIED TYPES," "CHARLES DICKENS," " TKEMENDOCS TRIFLES." ETC.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BT DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Published, October, 1910
DEDICATION
To C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M. P. MY DEAR CHARLES,
I originally called this book "What is Wrong," and it would have satisfied your sar- donic temper to note the number of social mis- understandings that arose from the use of the title. Many a mild lady visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, " I have been doing *What is Wrong' all this morning." And one minister of religion moved quite sharply in his chair when I told him (as he understood it) that I had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in a minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannot conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself ; and that is, of having written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthy to be dedicated to you. TAs far
DEDICATION
as literature goes, this book is what is wrong, and no mistake.
It may seem a refinement of insolence to present so wild a composition to one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of the moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who can make the map of England crawl with life; a most creepy and enviable, accomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which, even if it achieves its object (which is monstrously un- likely) can only be a thundering gallop of theory?
Well, I do it partly because I think you poli- ticians are none the worse for a few inconvenient ideals ; but more because you will recognise the many arguments we have had ; those arguments which the most wonderful ladies in the world can never endure for very long. And, perhaps, you will agree with me that the thread of com- radeship and conversation must be protected be- cause it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred, it must not be snapped, because it is not worth tying together again. It is exactly because argu-
DEDICATION
ment is idle that men (I mean males) must take it seriously; for when (we feel), until the crack of doom, shall we have so delightful a difference again? But most of all I offer it to you be- cause there exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing, called friendship; an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which, please God, will never break. Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
CONTENTS
PART I THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN
CHAPTER PAQK
I THE MEDICAL MISTAKE .... 1
II WANTED: AN UNPRACTICAL MAN . 8
III THE NEW HYPOCRITE .... 18
IV THE FEAR OF THE PAST .... 29 V THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE ... 44
VI THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY . . ,. 54
VII THE FREE FAMILY 61
VIII THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY . 69
IX HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE . 77
X OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM ... 86
XI THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES . . 91
PART II
IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN
I THE CHARM OF JINGOISM . . . 101
II WISDOM AND THE WEATHER . . . 108
III THE COMMON VISION 119
IV THE INSANE NECESSITY 126
CONTENTS
PART III .FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE . . 141
II THE UNIVERSAL STICK .... 146
III THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY 157
IV THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT . . . 168 V THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE . . . 178
VI THE PEDANT AND SAVAGE . . . 186
VII THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN 192
VIII THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS . 198
IX SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS . . 204
X THE HIGHER ANARCHY .... 209
XI THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES 217
XII THE MODERN SLAVE 220
PART IV
EDUCATION, oa THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD
I THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY . . . 229
II THE TRIBAL TERROR 234
III THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT . . 239
IV THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION . . 242 V. AN EVIL CRY ....... 247
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
VI AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE . . 252
VII THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY . 260
VIII THE BROKEN RAINBOW .... 268
IX THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS . . 275
X THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 280
XI THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES . . 2Q1
XII THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS 301
XIII THE OUTLAWED PARENT .... 308
XIV FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION .., . 314
PART V THE HOME OF THE MAN
I THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT . . 323 II THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA
STAND. . . ...... 335
III THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE . 343
IV A LAST INSTANCE 348
V CONCLUSION 350
THREE NOTES
I ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE . . . ... 861
II ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION . 364
III ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP . 366
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
PART I THE HOMELESSNESS OE MAN
THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
A BOOK of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables of population, decrease of crime among Con- gregationalists, growth of hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a chapter that is generally called "The Remedy." It is almost wholly due to this careful, solid, and scientific method that "The Remedy" is never found. For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder; the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.
The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that I
THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
come from the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This has pro- duced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about " young nations " and " dying nations," as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a mustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar applications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the in- creasing size of national possessions, a simple
THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short in sub'tlety of the parallel of a hu- man body. They do not even ask whether an empire is growing taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its old age. But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us : the habit of exhaustively describing a social sick- ness, and then propounding a social drug.
Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape in which it should be built up again. No doc- tor proposes to produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less : but it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra. Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks to restore it. 3
THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
But social science is by no means always content with the normal human soul; it has all sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a social idealist will say " I am tired of being a Puritan ; I want to be a Pagan," or " Beyond this dark probation of Individualism I see the shining paradise of Collectivism." Now in bodily ills there is none of this difference about the ulti- mate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine; but he certainly wants health. No one says " I am tired of this headache ; I want some toothache," or "The only thing for this Russian influenza is a few German measles," or "Through this dark probation of catarrh I see the shining paradise of rheumatism." But exactly the whole difficulty in our public prob- lems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies ; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea of property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw I
THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
property is not a tooth, but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to intro- duce German efficiency ; and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would rather have rheumatics.
This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern social discussion ; that the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the aim. We agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear each other's eyes out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad thing. We should not by any means all admit than an active aristocracy would be a good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood ; but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one. Everyone is indignant if our army is weak, including the people who would be even more indignant if it were strong. The social case is exactly the opposite of the medical case. We do not dis- agree, like doctors', about the precise nature of the illness, while agreeing about the nature of 5
THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half would call blooming health. Public abuses are so promi- nent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree about the bad public-house. It would be pre- cisely in front of the good public-house that our painful personal fracas would occur.
I maintain, therefore, that the common socio- logical method is quite useless : that of first dis- secting abject poverty or cataloguing prosti- tution. We all dislike abject poverty; but it might be another business if we began to dis- cuss independent and dignified poverty. We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to dis- cuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness;
6
THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
but what is national sanity? I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.
IT WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
THERE is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless and useless arguments of philosophers ; I mean the joke about which came first, the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood, it is so futile an inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter on those deep metaphysical and theolog- ical differences of which the chicken and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. The evolutionary materialists are appropri- ately enough represented in the vision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and mon- strous oval germ that had laid itself by acci- dent. That other supernatural school of thought (to which I personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by a sacred unbegotten bird ; the mystic 8
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
dove of the prophets. But it is to much hum- bler functions that I here call the awful power of such a distinction. Whether or no the liv- ing bird is at the beginning of our mental chain, it is absolutely necessary that it should be at the end of our mental chain. The bird is the thing to be aimed at — not with a gun, but a life-bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is this : that the egg and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic occurrences recurring alternatively forever. They must not become a mere egg and bird pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One is a means and the other an end; they are in different mental worlds. Leaving the compli- cations of the human breakfast-table out of ac- count, in an elemental sense, the egg only ex- ists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself. Now our modern 9
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness ; for- gctfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of nothing but useful men and working institu- tions ; that is, we only think of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking to breed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever we hap- pen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and the embryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes doubt- ful and even morbid ; poison enters the embryo of everything; and our politics are rotten eggs. Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence. Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to pok- ing before we discuss its suitability for wife- beating; that we should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before we decide that the egg is bad enough for prac- tical politics. But I know that this primary pursuit of the theory (which is but pursuit of 10
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
the aim) exposes one to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning. A school, of which Lord Rosebery is representative, has endeavored to substitute for the moral or social ideals which have hitherto been the motives of politics a general coherency or completeness in the social system which has gained the nick- name of " efficiency." I am not very certain of the secret doctrine of this sect In the mat- ter. But, as far as I can make out, " effi- ciency " means that we ought to discover every- thing about a machine except what it is for. There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily prac- tice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome 11
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
It is then necessary to drop one's daily ag- nosticism and attempt rerum cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it. But, if it is seri- ously ill, it is all the more likely that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be dragged out of a college or a laboratory to analyze the evil. The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases, no one but the man (probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could possibly say what was the matter with it.
" Efficiency," of course, is futile for the same reason that strong men, will-power and the superman are futile. That is, it is futile be- cause it only deals with actions after they have been performed. It has no philosophy for incidents before they happen ; therefore it has no power of choice. An act can only be
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
successful or unsuccessful when it is over; if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong. There is no such thing as backing a winner ; for he cannot be a winner when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation has oc- curred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the murder was efficient. A trop- ical sun is as efficient in making people lazy as a Lancashire foreman bully in making them energetic. Maeterlinck is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But it all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery, being a modern skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being -an orthodox Christian, prefer the jam. But both are efficient when they have been ef- fected; and inefficient until they are effected. A man who thinks much about success must be the drowsiest sentimentalist; for he must be always looking back. If he only likes victory IS
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
he must always come late for the battle. For the man of action there is nothing but idealism. This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our existing English trou- ble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the present chaos is due to a sort of gen- eral oblivion of all that men were originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires ; each man demands what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really wanted first ; and after a successful and vigorous polit- ical life, he forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a pande- monium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliabil- ity does not merely prevent any heroic con- sistency; it also prevents any really practical compromise. One can only find the middle dis- tance between two points if the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement be- tween two litigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they will not even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restau- rant would much prefer that each customer
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
should give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical calcula- tions about how much food there can be on the premises. Most of us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their perverse un- selfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost clamor for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat. Most of us have known parties or expeditions full of this seeth- ing fuss of self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such admirable women, our practical politicians keep things in the same confusion through the same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favor of secular education, but think it hopeless to •work for it; who desire total prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret compulsory education, but resignedly 15
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
continue it; or who want peasant proprietor- ship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If our statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we asked for something in the abstract we might get something in the concrete. As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it is impossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainly like a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in the old bargain- ing has wholly vanished. We forget that the word " compromise " contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word "promise." Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The middle point is as fixed as the extreme point.
If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate and I differ. 16
AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which the plank tips up. My common-sense ends just before that instant; the pirate's common-sense begins just beyond it. But the point itself is as hard as any geometrical dia- gram; as abstract as any theological dogma.
17
m
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
BUT this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the old English compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an improve- ment merely because it is complete. They call it Utopian and revolutionary that anyone should really have his own way, or anything be really done, and done with. Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.
As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pre- tended that they were religious. The new 18
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
hypocrite is one whose aims are really reli- gious, while he pretends that they are wordly and practical. The Rev. Brown, the Wes- leyan minister, sturdily declares that he cares nothing for creeds, but only for education ; meanwhile, in truth, the wildest Wesleyanism is tearing his soul. The Rev. Smith, of the Church of England, explains gracefully, with the Oxford manner, that the only question for him is the prosperity and efficiency of the schools ; while in truth all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him. It is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these reverend gentlemen do themselves wrong; I think they are more pious than they will ad- mit. Theology is not (as some suppose) ex- punged as an error. It is merely concealed, like a sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theo- logical atmosphere as much as Lord Halifax; only it is a different one. If Dr. Clifford would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainly for Catholicism, something might be done for them. We are all, one 19
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
hopes, imaginative enough to recogtaize the dignity and distinctness of another religion, like Islam or the cult of Apollo. I am quite ready to respect another man's faith ; but it is too much to ask that I should respect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and fictions, his political bargain and make-believe. Most Nonconform- ists with an instinct for English history could see something poetic and national about the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is when he does the rational British statesman that they very justifiably get annoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for pluck and simplicity could admire Dr. Clifford as a Baptist minister. It is when he says that he is simply a citizen that nobody can possibly believe him.
But indeed the case is yet more curious than this. The one argument that used to be urged for our creedless vagueness was that at least it saved us from fanaticism. But it does not even do that. On the contrary, it creates and renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to
so
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
itself. This is at once so strange and so true that I will ask the reader's attention to it with a little more precision.
Some people do not like the word " dogma." Fortunately they are free, and there is an alter- native for them. There are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of any- thing should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal. Now a direc- tion is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general recom- mendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might walk along the frontier of France and 21
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
Germany, one on the one side and one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our mod- ern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.
It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men — so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chiv- alrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel. "I say God is One," and " I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds into tendencies. It would tell the Trin- itarian to follow multiplicity as such (because it was his " temperament "), and he would turn up later with three hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
intellectual fall. It would force that previ- ously healthy person not only to admit that there was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like the Dong) they would appear again ; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other than before.
It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a Tory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is Socialism. But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime atmosphere, a noble, in- definable tendency, why, then he keeps out of its way; and quite right too. One can meet an assertion with argument; but healthy big- otry is the only way in which one can meet a tendency. I am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenly pressing,
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons for disliking the Japanese civilization. To use surrender as a weapon is the very worst spirit of the East. But cer- tainly there is no force so hard to fight as the force which it is easy to conquer ; the force that always yields and then returns. Such is the force of a great impersonal prejudice, such a.9 possesses the modern world on so many points. Against this there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a resolution not to listen to fads, and not to be infected by diseases.
In short, the rational human faith must ar- mor itself with prejudice in an age of prej- udices, just as it armored itself with logic in an age of logic. But the difference between the two mental methods is marked and un- mistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudices are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bump into each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other's way. A creed is a collective thing, 24
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a private thing, and even its tolerance is mis- anthropic. So it is with our existing divisions. They keep out of each other's way; the Tory paper and the Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other. Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a com- mon audience, has become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never interrupts ; he listens to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the enemy's arrangements. But if you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent ; and that is called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism. In neither case is there any controversy ; for the
its
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
whole object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot.
The only logical cure for all this is the as- sertion of a human ideal. In dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental as is consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we have some doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolu- tion may turn them into uses. It will b'e easy for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future. Evolution has produced the snail and the owl ; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground ; he will soon become an underground animal, like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep seas; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to alter conditions; conditions will so 20
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
soon alter men. The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fet- ters off the slave ; knock the slave until he for- gets the fetters. To all this plausible modern argument for oppression, the only adequate an- swer is, that there is a permanent human ideal that must not be either confused or destroyed. The most important man on earth is the per- fect man who is not there. The Christian re- ligion has specially uttered the ultimate sanity of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the incarnate and human truth. Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but sim- ply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick and the dead.
Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissen- sions ; rather a doctrine alone can cure our dis- sensions. It is necessary to ask, however, roughly, what abstract and ideal shape in state or family would fulfill the human hunger ; and this apart from whether we can completely ob- 27
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
tain it or not. But when we come to ask what is the need of normal men, what is the desire of all nations, what is the ideal house, or road, or rule, or republic, or king, or priesthood, then we are confronted with a strange and ir- ritating difficulty peculiar to the present time ; and we must call a temporary halt and ex- amine that obstacle.
IV
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
THE last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to mis- understand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will hap- pen— which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer preserves the memoirs of his great-grandfather; but he is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biog- raphy of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist ro- mance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: "Late on a winter's evening two
horsemen might have been seen ." The
new story has to begin : " Late on a winter's
evening two aviators will be seen ." The
movement is not without its elements of charm ; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of to- morrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.
But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesi- tate to maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even its pugnacity is fundamentally fright- ened ; and the Jingo is contemptible not because he is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why modern armaments do not inflame 30
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
the imagination like the arms and emblazon- ments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical ugliness or beauty. Some battle- ships are as beautiful as the sea; and many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric ugliness that sur- rounds our scientific war is an emanation from that evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consola- tion of the braver. The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout, a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is impossible to im- agine a mediaeval knight talking of longer and longer French lances, with precisely the quiv- ering employed about larger and larger Ger- man ships. The man who called the Blue Water School the J< Blue Funk School" uttered a psychological truth which that school itself would scarcely essentially deny. Even the two- power standard, if it be a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has 31
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
more alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden de- fenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored not so much by the creed that we were doing something right, as by the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong; driving us (as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said that the war was a feather in his cap ; and so it was : a white feather.
Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of so- ciety. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not un- mixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time ; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past ; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the un- bearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate ; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to es- cape, as Henley said, into the Street of By- and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes ; the past I find already cov- ered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napo- leon. I can make the future as narrow as my- self ; the past is obliged to be as broad and tur-
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
bulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this : that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, be- cause they are afraid to look back.
Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger than this : that all the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very word proves my case. The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great mediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the yncdern Catholic movement has looked back to /pajtHstic times. But that mod- ern movement whjch tnany would count the most
„.
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
anarchic of all is in this sense the most con- servative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little re* publics of antiquity with the complete confi- dence of one who invokes the gods. The Sans- culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past; some might call it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a {graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshappen monster, with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigan- tic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with im- becility, which some call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mir- rored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen 85
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predesti- nation, were turned to stone. The modern so- ciological scientists (with their excruciating1 Eugenics) are turned to stone. The only dif- ference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists somewhat amusing, statues.
But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this feature- less future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes aban- doned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy to a restless and rather morbid gen- eration ; and they maintain a strange silence about them — sometimes amounting to an un- scrupulous silence. They keep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of their history books. For example, they will often tell you (in their praises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United States of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away from a United 86
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
States of Europe; that such a thing existed literally in Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that the international hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent, the mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great rising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that France made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the world allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone can test this for himself. Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets advocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popes or Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of es- says and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them praise the old Jaco- bins who created democracy and died for it. 37
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
These colossal ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished cities. They are un- finished, not always through enmity or acci- dent, but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought to have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to do.
It is very currently suggested that the mod- ern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. I know not what to say in an- swer to this, except to ask the reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man — in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you 'and I are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to 38
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by the Manchester Yeo* manry or shot in the '48? Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos con- tain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we decline (in a marked man- ner) to fly the red flag and fire across a barri- cade like our grandfathers, are we really de- clining in deference to sociologists — or to soldiers ? Have we indeed outstripped the war- rior and passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing.
This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new ideas, the limiting ef- fect of the future. Our modern prophetic ideal- ism is narrow because it has undergone a per- sistent process of elimination. We must ask for 59
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
new things because we are not allowed to ask for old things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution.
We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyran- nies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free- thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been ; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this ab- stract independence. If I am to discuss what 40
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this : the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond ; they are always saying, " You can't put the clock back." The simple and ob- vious answer is " You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it " ; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it ; but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim : the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solu- 41
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
tion the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that should seem to eliminate the larg- est number of evils. It certainly would elimi- nate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles ; we could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous illusions about men or measures which are nourished by the great national or international newspapers. You could not persuade a city state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman, or Mr. Dillon aj3esperado, any more than you could persuade a Hampshire village that the village drunkard was a teetotaler or the village idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose that Clapham should declare its
THE FEAR OF THE PAST
independence. I merely declare my independ- ence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe ; and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they have been used.
43
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
THE task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world. If a man says that the Young Pre- tender would have made England happy, it is hard to answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England happy, I hope we all know what to answer. That which was pre- vented is always impregnable; and the only perfect King of England was he who was smothered. Exactly because Jacobitism failed we cannot call it a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief or incidental. Few people 44
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
realize how many of the largest efforts, the facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full design and come down to us as gi- gantic cripples. I have only space to allude to the two largest facts of modern history: the Catholic Church and that modern growth rooted in the French Revolution.
When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black ad- miration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his brains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realize what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great mediaeval conception that the church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Jus- tice. And his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself sub-judlce. The kings were themselves in the dock. The 45
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
idea was to create an invisible kingdom, with- out armies or prisons, but with complete free- dom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of the earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society we cannot affirm definitely; because the church never was a su- preme church. We only know that in Egland at any rate the princes conquered the saints. What the world wanted we see before us ; and some of us call it a failure. But we cannot call what the church wanted a failure, simply be- cause the church failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England had not yet made the great Protestant discovery that the king can do no wrong. The king was whipped in the cathe- dral ; a performance which I recommend to those who regret the unpopularity of church-going. But the discovery was made ; and Henry VHI. scattered Becket's bones as easily as Tracy had scattered his brains.
Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried ; plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not 46
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
tire of the church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monies, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet the me- diaeval system began to be broken to pieces in- tellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together. The Prus- sians, for instance, were not converted to Chris- tianity at all until quite close to the Reforma- tion. The poor creatures hardly had time to be- come Catholics before they were told to become 47
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case of the gen- eral truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle !Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Chris- tian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult ; and left untried.
It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was the de- cisive battle of the West, and in another Trafal- gar. We have, indeed, destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a free peas- antry in almost all Christian countries except England; of which we shall say more anon. But representative government, the one uni- yersal relic, is a very poor fragment of the 48
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
full republican idea. The theory of the French Revolution presupposed two things in govern- ment, things which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed to its imi- tators in England, Germany, and America. The first of these was the idea of honorable poverty ; that a statesman must be something of a stoic ; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it was that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best answer is that they were admired for being poor — poor when they might have been rich.
No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute politique of this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is actually based on exactly the opposite argu- ment; it is based on the theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no tempta- tion to financial trickery. Whether the history of the English aristocracy, from the spoliation of the monasteries to the annexation of the 49
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
mines, entirely supports this theory I am not now inquiring; but certainly it is our theory, that wealth will be a protection against politi- cal corruption. The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is our faith in this pro- tection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting our empire in the hands of families which inherit wealth without either blood or manners. Some of our political houses are parvenue by pedigree ; they hand on vulgarity like a coat-of-arms. In the case of many a modern statesman to say that he is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is at once inadequate and excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his mouth. But all this only illustrates the English theory that poverty is perilous for a politician.
It will be the same if we compare the condi- tions that have come about with the Revolu- tion legend touching publicity. The old 50
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
democratic doctrine was that the more light that was let in to all departments of State, the easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptly against wrong. In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses, (that mobs might throw stones. Again, no admirer of existing English politics (if there is any admirer of existing English politics) will really pretend that this ideal of publicity is exhausted, or even attempted. Obviously public life grows more private every day. The French have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing secrets and making scandals ; hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we, not in sin, but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus might have happened in England; it is exactly the second trial that would have been legally impossible. But, in- deed, if we wish to realize how far we fall short of the original republican outline, the sharpest way to test it is to note how far we fall short even of the republican element in the older r£- gime. Not only are we less democratic than 51
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
Danton and Condorcet, but we are in many ways less democratic than Choiseuil and Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt were needy middle-class people compared with our Rothschilds and Roseberys. And in the matter of publicity the old French monarchy was infinitely more democratic than any of the monarchies of to-day. Practically anybody who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as the people possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they can sprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press is free for criticism it is only used for adulation. The substantial difference comes to something uncommonly like this : Eighteenth century tyranny meant that you could say " The K — of Br rd is a prof- ligate." Twentieth century liberty really M
THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
means that you are allowed to say " The King of Brentford is a model family man."
But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical purpose of show- ing that the great democratic dream, like the great mediaeval dream, has in a strict and prac- tical sense been a dream unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England it is not that we have carried out too literally, or achieved with disappointing completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket or the equality of Marat. Now I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of ten thousand other cases; the world is full of these unful- filled ideas, these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins ; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a de- serted cemetery.
VI
THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
BUT it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessary on the very thresh- old of the definition of ideals. For owing to that historic fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers will expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun ; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done 54
ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
with the ideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning thunderbolt to fulfill the law than to destroy it. It is true of both the cases I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored purity: Athene, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began defiantly to practice purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion of the poor man uppermost; it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella to Whitting- ton, by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal, but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was that the people did. The French Revo- lution, therefore, is the type of all true revo- lutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but its fulfillment almost as fresh, as 65
ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
miraculous, and as new as the New Jerusa- lem.
But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice ; they have wearied of waiting for it.
Now, for the purpose of this book, I pro- pose to take only one of these old ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the prin- ciple of domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like the church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfill it. Num- berless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having 56
ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
known the house. Generally speaking, the cul- tured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as the working class is shout- ing to be let into it.
Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations or the idea. God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the com- bination of creation with limits. Man's pleas- ure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them ; to be half- controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions ; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious busi- ness, and making a hero out of an envelope is 57
ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
almost out of the sphere of practical politics. This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy entertainment of an edu- cated class, goes by the name of Art. But the mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of invisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic crea- tion can only be expressed by an idea un- popular in present discussions — the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden ; and though he ar- ranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist ; because he has chosen. The average man can- not paint the sunset whose colors he admires ; but he can paint his own house with what color he chooses, and though he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist ; be- cause that is his choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image 58
ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits ; properly with limits that are strict and even small.
I am well aware that the word " property " has been defied in our time by the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limita- tions. They do not want their own land; but other people's. When they remove their neigh- bor's landmark, they also remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought to love it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith's garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown's. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neigh- 59
ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
foor*s. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in, one harem.
60
VII
THE FREE FAMILY
As I have said, I propose to take only one central instance; I will take the institution called the private house or home ; the shell and organ of the family. We will consider cosmic and political tendencies simply as they strike that ancient and unique roof. Very few words will suffice for all I have to say about the family itself. I leave alone the speculations about its animal origin and the details of its social re- construction; I am concerned only with its palpable omnipresence. It is a necessity for mankind; it is (if you like to put it so) a trap for mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignor- ing of a huge fact can anyone contrive to talk of " free love " ; as if love were an episode like lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Sup- pose whenever a man lit a cigarette, a tower- ing genie arose from the rings of smoke and 61
THE FREE FAMILY
followed him everywhere as a huge slave. Sup- pose whenever a man whistled a tune he " drew an angel down" and had to walk about for- ever with a seraph on a string. These catas- trophic images are but faint parallels to the earthquake consequences that Nature has at- tached to sex; and it is perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied man. The sec- ond element that creates the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual ; the cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph. Thence arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-operation ; and thence arises the family in its full educational sense.
It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed or cor- rupted by indefinable forces of custom or kin- ship. This is not to be understood as meaning that the State has no authority over families;
THE FREE FAMILY
that State authority is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most normal cases of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry. It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that the law cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own backbone. Small and near mat- ters escape control at least as much as vast and remote ones; and the real pains and pleas- ures of the family form a strong instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the police- man cannot procure the moon — but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so close to each other as a husband and wife, or a mother and children, have powers of making each other happy or miserable with which no public co- ercion can deal. If a marriage could be dis- solved every morning it would not give back his night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtain lecture ; and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where he only wants a
THE FREE FAMILY
little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfect mother ; the mother may be de- voted to the most unworthy children ; in such relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found; as many a be- wildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation by taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's heart because her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tool deli- cate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in between them. The man and the woman are one flesh — yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchic intimacy, types of government have little or no effect; it is happy or unhappy, by its own sexual whole- someness and genial habit, under the republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even 64
THE FREE FAMILY
a republic in Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins.
The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt under the freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of man- kind has not believed in freedom in this matter, but rather in a more or less lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about the occasions on which we may loosen the bond, but they all agree that there is a bond to be loosened, not a mere universal detachment. For the pur- poses of this book I am not concerned to dis- cuss that mystical view of marriage in which I myself believe: the great European tradition which has made marriage a sacrament. It is enough to say here that heathen and Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not normally to be sundered. Briefly, this hu- man belief in a sexual bond rests on a principle of which the modern mind has made a very in- adequate study. It is, perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind in walking.
65,
THE FREE FAMILY
The principle is this : that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him ; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender.
In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead. Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite another matter, it is amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a fixed thing, dissolution of 66
THE FREE FAMILY
which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy. The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty min- utes at a dance, or for twenty years in a mar- riage. In both cases the point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppress- ive, because it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper, and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for " in- compatibility of temper" I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known 6T
THE FREE FAMILY
many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incom- patibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
vni
THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
IN the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is called the problem of pov- erty, especially the dehumanized poverty of modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the difficulty is not the prob- lem of poverty, but the problem of wealth. It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life. Some experience of modern movements of the sort called " advanced " has led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I have already spoken ; the idea of sexu- ality as a string of episodes. That implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor car in which to wander looking for others ; it also implies money for
WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own wife, let alone other people's. And the success with which nuptial estrangements are depicted in modern "prob- lem plays " is due to the fact that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict — * that is a hard day's work. I could give many other instances of this plutocratic assumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase " Why should woman be economically depend- ent upon man ? " The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn't; except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her. 'A hunter has to tear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has to catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quite clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere " pretty clinging parasite," "a plaything," etc., arose through the somber contemplation of some rich bank- ing family, in which the banker, at least, went to the city and pretended to do something, 70
WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
while the banker's wife went to the Park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers interviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one of them economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty parasite clinging to Stough- ton ? Was Marshall a mere plaything for Snel- grove ?
But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say) is dead decorum and routine; out- side is adventure and variety. This is indeed a rich man's opinion. The rich man knows that his own house moves on vast and sound- less wheels of wealth, is run by regiments of servants, by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand, every sort of vagabondage of ro- mance is open to him in the streets outside. He has plenty of money and can afford to be a tramp. His wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel's tamest adven- 71
WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
ture may end in a police-court. If he smashes a window he can pay for it; if he smashes a man he can pension him. He can (like the mil- lionaire in the story) buy an hotel to get a glass of gin. And because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all " advanced " and " progressive " thought, we have almost forgotten what a home really means to the over- whelming millions of mankind.
For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter ar- rangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an A. B. C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing-gown and slippers in his house; while 72
WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy, though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to. When a man spends every night stagger- ing from bar to bar or from music-hall to music- hall, we say that he is living an irregular life. But he is not ; he is living a highly regular life, under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of such places. Sometimes he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars ; and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls. Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress ; and theaters may be defined 73
WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only picnic at home.
Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working model for the present inquiry. Whether we can give every Englishman a free home of his own or not, at least we should desire it ; and he desires it. For the moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he expects to get. He wants, for instance, a separate house; he does not want a semi-detached house. He may be forced in the commercial race to share one wall with an- other man. Similarly he might be forced in a three-legged race to share one leg with an- other man; but it is not so that he pictures himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again, he does not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a flat ; he can eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train. But a railway train is not a house, because it is a house on wheels. And a flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts. An idea of 74
WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation and independence, is a part of this instructive human picture.
I take, then, this one institution as a test. 'As every normal man desires a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires a house of his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof above him and a chair below him; he wants an objective and visible kingdom; a fire at which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can open to what friends he chooses. This is the normal appetite of men; I do not say there are not exceptions. There may be saints above the need and philan- thropists below it. Opalstein, now he is a duke, may have got used to more than this; and when he was a convict may have got used to less. But the normality of the thing is enormous. To give nearly everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody; that is what I assert without apology. Now in modern England (as you eagerly point out) it is very difficult to give nearly everybody 75
WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
houses. Quite so; I merely set up the desider- atum; and ask the reader to leave it standing there while he turns with me to a consideration of what really happens in the social wars of our time.
76
IX
HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE
THERE is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery in Hoxton, dripping with disease and honey- combed with crime and promiscuity. There are, let us say, two noble and courageous young men, of pure intentions and (if you prefer it) noble birth ; let us call them Hudge and Gudge. Hudge, let us say, is of a bustling sort; he points out that the people must at all costs be got out of this den ; he subscribes and col- lects money, but he finds (despite the large fi- nancial interests of the Hudges) that the thing will have to be done on the cheap if it is to be done on the spot. He, therefore, runs up a row of tall bare tenements like beehives; and soon has all the poor people bundled into their little brick cells, which are certainly better than their old quarters, in so far as they are weather proof, well ventilated and supplied 77
HUDGE AND GUDGE
with clean water. But Gudge has a more deli- cate nature. He feels a nameless something lacking in the little brick boxes ; he raises num- berless objections ; he even assails the celebrated Hudge Report, with the Gudge Minority Re- port; and by the end of a year or so has come to telling Hudge heatedly that the people were much happier where they were before. As the people preserve in both places precisely the same air of dazed amiability, it is very difficult to find out which is right. But at least one might safely say that no people ever liked stench or starvation as such, but only some peculiar pleasures entangled with them. Not so feels the sensitive Gudge. Long before the final quarrel (Hudge v. Gudge and Another), Gudge has succeeded in persuading himself that slums and stinks are really very nice things; that the habit of sleeping fourteen in a room is what has made our England great ; and that the smell of open drains is absolutely essential to the rearing of a viking breed.
But, meanwhile, has there been no degenera- 78
HUDGE AND GUDGE
tion in Hudge? Alas, I fear there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life, grow every day more and more lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed of defending, except as crude necessities, things like common kitchens or infamous asbestos stoves, begin to shine quite sacredly before him, merely because they reflect the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the aid of eager little books by Socialists, that man is really happier in a hive than in a house. The practical difficulty of keeping to- tal strangers out of your bedroom he describes as Brotherhood ; and the necessity for climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare say he calls Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is this : that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more indefensible slum-landlords; while the other has come to treating as divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge is now a corrupt and apoplectic old 79
HUDGE AND GUDGE
Tory in the Carlton Club ; if you mention pov- erty to him he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice something that is conjectured to be "Do 'em good ! " Nor is Hudge more happy ; for he is a lean vegetarian with a gray, pointed beard and an unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling everybody that at last we shall all sleep in one universal bedroom ; and he lives in a Garden City, like one forgotten of God.
Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely introduce as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a model dwelling. The second desire is, naturally, to get away from the model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery. But I am neither a Hudgian nor a Gudgian; and I think the mis- 80
HUDGE AND GUDGE
takes of these two famous and fascinating per- sons arose from one simple fact. They arose from the fact that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians.
We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis about the praise of the future and the failures of the past. A house of his own being the obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask (taking this need as typical of all such needs) why he hasn't got it ; and whether it is in any philosophical sense his own fault. Now, I think that in some philosophical sense it is his own fault; I thinlc in a yet more philosophical sense it is the fault of his philosophy. And this is what I have now to attempt to explain.
Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think, that an Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertain- ing; for as it happens the Englishman is al- 81
HUDGE AND GUDGE
most the only man in Europe whose house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of peasant proprietorship ; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is only lord of his own land. Making the land- lord and the tenant the same person has cer- tain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work. But I am not concerned with the defense of small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it exists almost everywhere except in Eng- land. It is also true, however, that this estate of small possession is attacked everywhere to- day ; it has never existed among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors. We have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human affairs generally, and in this domestic ideal in particular, that has really ruined the natural human creation, especially in this country.
Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden ; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. B*
HUDGE AND GUDGE
Every man has a house somewhere in the elabo- rate cosmos ; his house waits for him waist deep in slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has always been looking for that home which is the subject matter of this book. But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his de- sires. For the first time in history he begins really to doub't the object of his wanderings on the earth. He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.
Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies (or in other words, under the pres- sure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man has really become bewildered about the goal of his efforts ; and his efforts, therefore, grow feebler and feebler. His simple notion of hav- ing a home of his own is derided as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicably Christian, tinder various verbal forms he is recommended to go on to the streets — which is called In- 83
HUDGE AND GUDGE
dividualism; or to the work-house — which is called Collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat more carefully in a moment. But it may be said here that Hudge and Gudge, or the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern phrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot re- fuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him the three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the cow on grounds of humanitarianism.
And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day's newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper 84
HUDGE AND GUDGE
he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Ac- land. If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it la being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences.
85
OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
BUT we are not here concerned with the nature and existence of the aristocracy, but with the origin of its peculiar power; why is it the last of the true oligarchies of Europe; and why does there seem no very immediate prospect of our seeing the end of it? The explanation is simple though it remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of aristocracy often praise it for preserving ancient and gracious traditions. The enemies of aristocracy often blame it for clinging to cruel or antiquated customs. Both its enemies and its friends are wrong. Gener- ally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad traditions; it does not pre- serve anything except game. Who would dream of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might as well look for an old costume! The god of the aristo- 86
OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
crats is not tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition. If you wanted to find an old-world Norwegian head-dress, would you look for it in the Scandinavian Smart Set? No ; the aristocrats never have customs ; at the best they have habits, like the animals. Only the mob has customs.
The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the opposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is called Progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quite easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a luxury verging on a ne- cessity. They, above all, are so bored with the past and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, for the future.
But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it was their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was being most 87
OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
talked about among university dons or fussy financiers. Thus they were on the side of the Reformation against the Church, of the Whigs against the Stuarts, of the Baconian science against the old philosophy, of the manufactur- ing system against the operatives, and (to-day) of the increased power of the State against the old-fashioned individualists. In short, the rich are always modern; it is their business. But the immediate effect of this fact upon the ques- tion we are studying is somewhat singular.
In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, for some particular reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morning and discovered that the public things, which for eight hundred years he had used at once as inns and sanctu- aries, had all been suddenly and savagely abol- ished, to increase the private wealth of about six or seven men. One would think he might have been annoyed at that; in many places he was, and was put down by the soldiery. But it was not merely the army that kept him quiet. 88
OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the soldiers ; the six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor told him that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth. So whenever a seventeenth century noble was caught pulling down a peasant's fence and stealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I. or James II. (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) and thus diverted the simple peasant's attention. The great Puritan lords created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land. They saved their poorer coun- trymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money, by taking from them the plow money and spade money which they were doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme has immortalized this easy aristocratic habit — •
You prosecute the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the larger felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose, one can only say that he was a great goose to stand it. The truth is that they reasoned with the goose; they explained to him that all this was needed to get the Stuart fox over seas. So in the nineteenth century the great nobles who became mine-owners and railway directors earnestly assured everybody that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a newly discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous politicians of our own generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at by everybody as outrageous feudal- ism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism. For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying to live to-morrow.
90
XI
THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
THUS the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has (in England at least) always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Eng- lishman has been duped out of his old pos- sessions, such as they were, and always in the name of progress. The destroyers of the ab- beys took away his bread and gave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white pebble of the Lord's elect. They took away his maypole and his original rural life and promised him instead the Golden Age of Peace and Commerce inaugurated at the Crys- tal Palace. And now they are taking away the little that remains of his dignity as a house- holder and the head of a family, promising him instead Utopias which are called (appropri- ately enough) " Anticipations " or " News from Nowhere." We come back, in fact, to the 91
HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
main feature which has already been men- tioned. The past is communal: the future must be individualist. In the past are all the evils of democracy, variety and violence and doubt, but the future is pure despotism, for the future is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know I was a human fool, but to-morrow I can easily be the Superman.
The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should be perpetually kept out, for one reason after another, from the house in which he had meant his married life to begin. This man (Jones let us call him) has always desired the divinely ordinary things ; he has married for love, he has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat; he is ready to be a great grandfather and a local god. And just as he is moving in, something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly debars him from the home ; and he has to take his meals in the front garden. A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, the man who turned him out) pauses, and lean- 93
HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
ing elegantly on the railings, explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of nature which will be the life of the sublime future. • He finds life in the front gar- den more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out), happening to call at these lodgings, with the probable intention of raising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the real life of mercan- tile endeavor; the economic struggle between him and the landlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, the wealth of na- tions can come. He is defeated in the eco- nomic struggle, and goes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him out (happen- ing at that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind ; he is in an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the State and ruled by public officers ; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime future.
03
HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
Nevertheless, there are signs that the irra- tional Jones still dreams at night of his old idea of having an ordinary home. He asked for so little, and he has been offered so much. He has been offered bribes of worlds and sys- tems ; he has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house ; and that has been refused him.
Such an apologue is literally no exaggera- tion of the facts of English history. The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house on to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of progress. They did literally force them into factories and the mod- ern wage-slavery, assuring them all the time that this was the only way to wealth and civili- zation. Just as they had dragged the rustic from the convent food and ale by saying that the streets of heaven were paved with gold, so now they dragged him from the village food and ale by telling him that the streets of London were paved with gold. As he entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered 94.
HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
the gloomy porch of Industrialism, being told that each of them was the gate of the future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison to prison, nay, into darkening prisons, for Cal- vinism opened one small window upon heaven. And now he is asked, in the same educated and authoritative tones, to enter another dark porch, at which he has to surrender, into unseen hands, his children, his small possessions and all the habits of his fathers.
Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old openings of Puri- tanism and Industrialism can be discussed later. But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed upon Eng- land it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to " adminis- ter" Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism ; in some ways Buch a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them. It will not be so hard as 95
HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
some innocent Socialists seem to suppose to induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to take over the milk supply as well as the stamp supply — at an increased salary. Mr. Bernard Shaw has remarked that rich men are better than poor men on parish councils because they are free from "financial timidity." Now, the English ruling class is quite free from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will be quite ready to be Administrator of Sussex at the same screw. Sir William Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correcty. "We" (that is, the aristocracy) "are all Socialists now."
But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end. My main contention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism and Collectivism have been accepted as neces- sities— not as naked ideals or desires. Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the only way of producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured as the only way of preventing poverty. Nobody's real heart is in the idea of preventing a free 96
HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
man from owning his own farm, or an old woman from cultivating her own garden, any more than anybody's real heart was in the heartless battle of the machines. The purpose of this chapter is sufficiently served in indicat- ing that this proposal also is a pis oiler, a des- perate second best — like teetotalism. I do not propose to prove here that Socialism is a poi- son ; it is enough if I maintain that it is a medi- cine and not a wine.
The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still fami- lies, of domesticity democratic but still domes- tic, of one man one house — this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's desire.
97
PART n
IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN
THE CHARM OF JINGOISM
I HAVE cast about widely to find a title for this section ; and I confess that the word " Imperial- ism " is a clumsy version of my meaning. But no other word came nearer ; " Militarism " would have been even more misleading, and " The Superman " makes nonsense of any dis- cussion that he enters. Perhaps, upon the whole, the word " Csesarism " would have been better ; but I desire a popular word ; and Im- perialism (as the reader will perceive) does cover for the most part the men and theories that I mean to discuss.
This small confusion is increased, however, by the fact that I do also disbelieve in Im- perialism in its popular sense, as a mode or theory of the patriotic sentiment of this coun- try. But popular Imperialism in England has very little to do with the sort of Ca?sarean Im- 101
CHARM OF JINGOISM
perialism I wish to sketch. I differ from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes and Kipling; but I do not think, as some of its opponents do, that it is an insolent creation of English harsh- ness and rapacity. Imperialism, I think, is a fiction created, not by English hardness, but by English softness ; nay, in a sense, even by Eng- lish kindness.
The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental as the most sentimental reasons for believing in heaven. New South Wales is quite literally regarded as a place where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest ; that is, a paradise for uncles who have turned dishonest and for nephews who are born tired. British Columbia is in strict sense a fairyland; it is a world where a magic and irrational luck is supposed to at- tend the youngest sons. This strange opti- mism about the ends of the earth is an English weakness ; but to show that it is not a coldness or a harshness it is quite sufficient to say that no one shared it more than that gigantic Eng- 103
CHARM OF JINGOISM
lish sentimentalist — the great Charles Dickens. The end of " David Copperfield " is unreal not merely because it is an optimistic ending, but because it is an Imperialistic ending. The de- corous British happiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes would be embar- rassed by the perpetual presence of the hope- less tragedy of Emily, or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them with no conceiv- able cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomes contented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of a sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo. To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only objection is that it is an illusion of comfort ; that an Empire whose heart is failing should be specially proud of the ex- tremities, is to me no more sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose brain is gone should still be proud of his legs. It consoles men for the evident ugliness and apathy of England 103
CHARM OF JINGOISM
with legends of fair youth and heroic strenuous- ness in distant continents and islands. A man can sit amid the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on the veldt. Just so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbi- ton. Brixton and Surbiton are " new " ; they are expanding ; they are " nearer to nature," in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile. The only objection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton are not young giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets, singing with the sweet energy of the spring. Nor are the people of the Col- onies when you meet them young giants or pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys who have lost their last music of real things by getting out of the sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a man of real though decad- ent genius, threw a theoretic glamour over them which is already fading. Mr. Kipling is, in a precise and rather startling sense, the ex- 104
CHARM OF JINGOISM
ception that proves the rule. For he has im- agination, of an oriental and cruel kind, but he has it, not because he grew up in a new country, but precisely because he grew up in the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted in a past — an Asiatic past. He might never have written "Kabul River" if he had been born in Melbourne.
I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion), that Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both weak and perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create a kind of sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, which it can only share. It is a love of living with one's inferiors. The notion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is a dream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shape and in almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent and conservative people; therefore they embodied that attempt at Em- pire in long and lingering dynasties. The 105
CHARM OF JINGOISM
French are a violent people, and therefore they twice conquered that Empire by violence of arms. The English are above all a poetical and optimistic people; and therefore their Em- pire is something vague and yet sympathetic, something distant and yet dear. But this dream of theirs of being powerful in the utter- most places, though a native weakness, is still a weakness in them; much more of a weakness than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. If ever we were in collision with our real brothers and rivals we should leave all this fancy out of account. We should no more dream of pitting Australian armies against German than of pit- ting Tasmanian sculpture against French. I have thus explained, lest anyone should accuse me of concealing an unpopular attitude, why I do not believe in Imperialism as commonly un- derstood. I think it not merely an occasional wrong to other peoples, but a continuous feeble- ness, a running sore, in my own. But it is also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism that is an amiable delusion partly in order to 106
CHARM OF JINGOISM
show how different it is from the deeper, more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have been forced to call Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter. In order to get to the root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism we must cast back and begin anew with a more general discussion of the first needs of human intercourse.
107
II
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
IT is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace. Birth is cov- ered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to every- body, can stop one's heart with the very thought of them. But while this is granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely true that these universal things are strange ; it is moreover true that they are sub- tle. In the last analysis most common things- will be found to be highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it : thus, they will call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct of self-preserva- tion. But this is only getting over the difficulty of describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That there is a strong 108
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
physical element in both romance and the Me- mento Mori makes them if possible more, baffling than if they had been wholly intellectual. No man could say exactly how much his sexuality was colored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere boyish itch for irrevocable adventures, like running away to sea. No man could say how far his animal dread of the end was mixed up with mystical traditions touching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things are animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part and go home to their tea.
It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore it is not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing- room song of my youth which began " In the gloaming, D, my darling," was vulgar enough as a song; but the connection between human passion and the twilight is none the less an exquisite and even inscrutable thing. Or to take another obvious instance: the jokes about 109
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
a mother-in-law are scarcely delicate, but the problem of a mother-in-law is extremely deli- cate. A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the twilight. She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things — law and a mother. The caricatures misrepresent her; but they arise out of a real human enigma. " Comic Cuts " deals with the difficulty wrongly, but it would need George Meredith at his best to deal with the difficulty rightly. The nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this: it is not that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.
But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argu- ment, the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls It " the very nadir and scoff of good conversationalists." Now there are very deep reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. (First of all it is a gesture of primeval worship. 110
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
The sky must be invoked; and to begin every- thing with the weather is a sort of pagan way of beginning everything with prayer. Jonea and Brown talk about the weather: but so do Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary idea in politeness — equality. For the very word politeness is only the Greek for citizenship. The word politeness is akin to the word policeman; a charming thought. Properly understood, the citizen should be more polite than the gentleman ; perhaps the police- man should be the most courtly and elegant of the three. But all good manners must obvi- ously begin with the sharing of something in a simple style. Two men should share an um- brella; if they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share the rain, with all its ricK potentialities of wit and philosophy. " For He maketh His sun to shine . . ." This is the second element in the weather; its recognition of human equality in that we all have our hats under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the universe. Arising out of this is the third 111
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
wholesome strain in the custom ; I mean that it begins with the body and with our inevitable bodily brotherhood. All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recogni- tion of rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are already prigs and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet man- kind.
Briefly, in the mere observation " a fine day " there is the whole great human idea of comrade- ship. Now, pure comradeship is another of those broacl and yet bewildering things. We all enjoy it; yet when we come to talk about it we almost always talk nonsense, chiefly be- cause we suppose it to be a simpler affair than it is. It is simple to conduct ; but it is by no means simple to analyze. Comradeship is at the most only one half of human life ; the other half is Love, a thing so different that one might fancy it had been made for another universe. 113
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
And I do not mean mere sex love ; any kind of concentrated passion, maternal love, or even the fiercer kinds of friendship are in their nature alien to pure comradeship. Both sides are es- sential to life ; and both are known in differing degrees to everybody of every age or sex. But very broadly speaking it may still be said that women stand for the dignity of love and men; for the dignity of comradeship. I mean that the institution would hardly be expected if the males of the tribe did not mor at guard over it. The affections in which women excel have so much more authority and intensity that pure comradeship would be washed away if it were not rallied and guarded in clubs, corps, col- leges, banquets and regiments. Most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love, seeking to de- stroy Comradeship.
All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have remarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has 113
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we are all under the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the "winged rock" of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bond as the essen- tial one; for comradeship is simply humanity seen in that one aspect in which men are really equal. The old writers were entirely wise when they talked of the equality of men; but they were also very wise in not mentioning women. Women are always authoritarian; they are al- ways above or below; that is why marriage Is a sort of poetical see-saw. There are only three things in the world that women do not under- stand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But men '(a class little understood in the modern world) find these things the breath of their nostrils ; and our most learned ladies will not even begin to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of cool camarade- rie. Lastly, it contains the third quality t>f the weather, the insistence upon the body and its indispensable satisfaction. No one has even
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only; hoggish. You may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdi- ness there is a sort of mad modesty ; a desire to melt the separate soul into the mass of unpre- tentious masculinity. It is a clamorous con- fession of the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.
The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word " affinity." There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members, men and women, call each other " Comrade." I have no serious emotions, hos- tile or otherwise, about this particular habit : at 115
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
the worst it is conventionality, and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only to point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers together, lilies and dahlias and tu- lips and chrysanthemums and call them all daisies, you will find that £ou have spoiled the very fine word daisy. If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if you include under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman who baffles him, the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl who is impudent and innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most mountainous love ; if you are going to call all these comradeship, you will gain nothing; you will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and universal and open ; but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is obvious and univer- sal and open ; but it is only one kind of affec- tion ; it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows 116
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
that it is impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it " speaking to the question." Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five best friends under heaveri and forgotten who was in the room while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men ; men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one remembers after a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a visionary multitude ; a mystical cloud, that is called the club.
It is obvious that this cool and careless qual- ity which is essential to the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers. It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these things so long as it is honorable ; comradeship must be in some degree ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male 11T
WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
friendship, the nostrils are stopped with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must be physically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure ; and that is the strict discipline of a mon- astery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young idealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash and living on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live without women, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of artificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an army also has to be in many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy without chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These have a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common-sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women. 118
in
THE COMMON VISION
Now this masculine love of an open and level camaraderie is the life within all democracies and attempts to govern by debate; without it the republic would be a dead formula. Even as it is, of course, the spirit of democracy fre- quently differs widely from the letter, and a pothouse is often a better test than a Parlia- ment. Democracy in its human sense is not arbitrament by the majority; it is not even arbitrament by everybody. It can be more nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody. I mean that it rests on that club habit of taking a total stranger for granted, of assuming cer- tain things to be inevitably common to your- self and him. Only the things that anybody may be presumed to hold have the full author- ity of democracy. Look out of the window and notice the first man who walks by. The 119
THE COMMON VISION
Liberals may have swept England with an over- whelming majority; but you would not stake a button that the man is a Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools and respected in all law courts ; but you would not bet a straw that he believes in the Bible. But you would bet your week's wages, let us say, that he believes in wearing clothes. You would bet that he be- lieves that physical courage is a fine thing, or that parents have authority over children. Of course, he might be the millionth man who does not believe these things ; if it comes to that, he might be the Bearded Lady dressed up as a man. But these prodigies are quite a different thing from any mere calculation of numbers. People who hold these views are not a minority, but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have full democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody. What you would observe before any newcomer in a tavern — that is the real English law. The first man you see from the window, he is the King of England.
120
THE COMMON VISION
The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay of democracy, has undoubt- edly weakened this masculine spirit of equality. I remember that a roomful of Socialists liter- ally laughed when I told them that there were no two nobler words in all poetry than Public House. They thought it was a joke. Why they should think it a joke, since they want to make all houses public houses, I cannot imag- ine. But if anyone wishes to see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is necessary (to males, at least) he can find it as well as anywhere in the great old tavern disputes which come down to us in such books as Boswell's Johnson. It is worth while to mention that one name espe- cially because the modern world in its morbidity has done it a strange injustice. The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was " harsh and despotic." It was occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic. Johnson was not in the least a des- pot; Johnson was a demagogue, he shouted against a shouting crowd. The very fact that he wrangled with other people is proof that 121
THE COMMON VISION
other people were allowed to wrangle with him. His very brutality was based on the idea of an equal scrimmage, like that of football. It is strictly true that he bawled and banged the table because he was a modest man. He was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed or even overlooked. Addison had exquisite man- ners and was the king of his company; he was polite to everybody; but superior to every- body; therefore he has been handed down for- ever in the immortal insult of Pope —
" Like Cato, give his little Senate laws And sit attentive to his own applause."
Johnson, so far from being king of his com- pany, was a sort of Irish Member in his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was hated. Johnson was an insolent equal and therefore was loved by all who knew him, and handed down in a marvelous book, which is one of the mere miracles of love.
This doctrine of equality is essential to con-
THE COMMON VISION
versation ; so much may be admitted by anyone who knows what conversation is. Once argu- ing at a table in a tavern the most famous man on earth would wish to be obscure, so that his brilliant remarks might blaze like stars on the background of his obscurity. To anything worth calling a man nothing can be conceived more cold or cheerless than to be king of your company. But it may be said that in mascu- line sports and games, other than the great game of debate, there is definite emulation and eclipse. There is indeed emulation, but this is only an ardent sort of equality. Games are competitive, because that is the only way of making them exciting. But if anyone doubts that men must forever return to the ideal of equality, it is only necessary to answer that there is such a thing as a handicap. If men exulted in mere superiority, they would seek to see how far such superiority could go ; they would b'e glad when one strong runner came in miles ahead of all the rest. But what men like is not the triumph of superiors, but the
THE COMMON VISION
struggle of equals; and, therefore, they intro- duce even Into their competitive sports an arti- ficial equality. It is sad to think how few of those who arrange our sporting handicaps can be supposed with any probability to realize that they are abstract and even severe republicans. No; the real objection to equality and self- rule has nothing to do with any of these free and festive aspects of mankind ; all men are democrats when they are happy. The philo- sophic opponent of democracy would substan- tially sum up his position by saying that it " will not work." Before going further, I will register in passing a protest against the assumption that working is the one test of humanity. Heaven does not work; it plays. Men are most themselves when they are free; and if I find that men are snob's in their work but democrats on their holidays, I shall take the liberty to believe their holidays. But it is this question of work which really perplexes the question of equality; and it is with that that we must now deal. Perhaps the truth
THE COMMON VISION
can be put most pointedly thus : that democracy has one real enemy, and that is civilization. Those utilitarian miracles which science has made are anti-democratic, not so much in their perversion, or even in their practical result, as in their primary shape and purpose. The Frame-Breaking Rioters were right; not per- haps in thinking that machines would make fewer men workmen; but certainly in thinking that machines would make fewer men masters. More wheels do mean fewer handles ; fewer han- dles do mean fewer hands. The machinery of science must be individualistic and isolated. A mob can shout round a palace ; but a mob can- not shout down a telephone. The specialist appears and democracy is half spoiled at a stroke.
125
IV
THE INSANE NECESSITY
THE common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture is that men have slowly worked their way out of inequality into a state of comparative equality. The truth is, I fancy, almost exactly the opposite. All men have normally and naturally begun with the idea of equality; they have only abandoned it late and reluctantly, and always for some mate- rial reason of detail. They have never natu- rally felt that one class of men was superior to another; they have always been driven to assume it through certain practical limitations of space and time.
For example, there is one element which must always tend to oligarchy — or rather to despot- ism; I mean the element of hurry. If the house has caught fire a man must ring up the fire engines ; a committee cannot ring them up. 126
THE INSANE NECESSITY
If a camp is surprised by night somebody must give the order to fire; there is no time to vote it. It is solely a question of the physical limi- tations of time and space; not at all of any mental limitations in the mass of men com- manded. If all the people in the house were men of destiny it would still be better that they should not all talk into the telephone at once; nay, it would be better that the silliest man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an army actually consisted of nothing but Hani- bals and Napoleons, it would still be better in the case of a surprise that they should not all give orders together. Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave the orders. Thus, we see that merely military subordina- tion, so far from resting on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men. Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion that somebody is always right when everybody is wrong, and that we must discover and crown that somebody. On the contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfully rapid cir-
THE INSANE NECESSITY
cumstances, one can trust anybody so long as he is not everybody. The military spirit does Hot mean (as Carlyle fancied) obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the military spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man, obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men. Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is only servility.
Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europe is not in its ori- gin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not a system of spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the caste system of India, or even like the old Greek distinction between free-men and slaves. It is simply the remains of a military organization, framed partly to sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partly to break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam. The word Duke simply means Colonel, just as the word Emperor simply means Commander- in-Chief. The whole story is told in the single title of Counts of the Holy Roman Empire,
THE INSANE NECESSITY
which merely means officers in the European army against the contemporary Yellow Peril. Now in an army nobody ever dreams of sup- posing that difference of rank represents a difference of moral reality. Nobody ever says about a regiment, "Your Major is very hu- morous and energetic; your Colonel, of course, must be even more humorous and yet more energetic." No one ever says, in reporting a mess-room conversation, "Lieutenant Jones was very witty, but was naturally inferior to Captain Smith." The essence of an army is the idea of official inequality, founded on un- official equality. The Colonel is not obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the Colonel. Such was probably the spirit of the system of dukes and counts when it first arose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome. With the decline of those necessities it has gradually ceased to have mean- ing as a military organization, and become honeycombed with unclean plutocracy. Even now it is not a spiritual aristocracy — it is not 129,
THE INSANE NECESSITY
so bad as all that. It is simply an army with- out an enemy — billeted upon the people.
Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as comrade-like aspect ; and the case of militar- ism is not the only case of such specialist sub- mission. The tinker and tailor, as well as the soldier and sailor, require a certain rigidity of rapidity of action : at least, if the tinker is not organized that is largely why he does not tink on any large scale. The tinker and tailor often represent the two nomadic races in Europe: the Gipsy and the Jew ; but the Jew alone has influence because he alone accepts some sort of discipline. Man, we say, has two sides, the specialist side where he must have subordina- tion, and the social side where he must have equality. There is a truth in the saying that ten tailors go to make a man ; but we must remember also that ten Poets Laureate or ten Astronomers Royal go to make a man, too. Ten million tradesmen go to make Man him- self; but humanity consists of tradesmen when they are not talking shop. Now the peculiar 130
THE INSANE NECESSITY
peril of our time, which I call for argument's sake Imperialism or Caesarism, is the complete eclipse of comradeship and equality by special- ism and domination.
There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable — personal government and imper- sonal government. If my anarchic friends will not have rules — they will have rulers. Prefer- ring personal government, with its tact and flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring im- personal government, with its dogmas and defi- nitions, is called Republicanism. Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh ; at least, I know no more philo- sophic word for it. You can be guided by the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler, or by the equality and ascertained justice of one rule; but you must have one or the other, or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess. Now men in their aspect of equality and de- bate adore the idea of rules ; they develop and complicate them greatly to excess. A man finds far more regulations and definitions in 131
THE INSANE NECESSITY
his club, where there are rules, than in his home, where there is a ruler. A deliberative assem- bly, the House of Commons, for instance, car- ries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole system is stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis Car- roll. You would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a man must call his own father "my right honorable friend the member for West Birmingham." These are, perhaps, fantasies of decay: but fundamentally they answer a masculine appe- tite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal; men feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is a wild fair- ness in the thing — as there is in tossing up.
Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when critics ido attack such cases as the Commons it is always on the points (perhaps the few
THE INSANE NECESSITY
points) where the Commons are right. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop, and complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one respect in which the Com- mons are actually like the Common People. If they love leisure and long debate, it is be- cause all men love it ; that they really represent England. There the Parliament does approach to the virile virtues of the pothouse.
The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section, when we spoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the sense of counsel and community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure, laugh- ter, loud and equal argument ; but there stands a specter in our hall. We are conscious of the towering modern challenge that is called spe- cialism or cut- throat competition — Business. Business will have nothing to do with leisure; business will have no truck with comradeship; business will pretend to no patience with all the legal fictions and fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects its egalitarian 133
THE INSANE NECESSITY
ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged in the agreeable and typical task of sacking his own father, will certainly not refer to him as the right honorable clerk from the Laburnum Road, Brixton. Therefore there has arisen in modern life a literary fashion devoting itself to the romance of business, to great demigods of greed and to fairyland of finance. This popular philosophy is utterly despotic and anti-democratic; this fashion is the flower of that Caesarism against which I am concerned to protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in the possession of a brain of steel. The fact that the real millionaire is rather more often strong in the possession of a head of wood, does not alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential argument is " Specialists must be des- pots ; men must be specialists. You cannot have equality in a soap factory ; so you cannot have it anywhere. You cannot have comrade- ship in a wheat corner ; so you cannot have it at all. We must have commercial civilization; therefore we must destroy democracy." I know 134
THE INSANE NECESSITY
that plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to soar to such examples as soap or wheat. They generally confine themselves, with fine freshness of mind, to a comparison between the state and a ship. One anti-democratic writer remarked that he would not like to sail in a vessel in which the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the cap- tain. It might easily be urged in answer that many a ship (the Victoria, for instance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a cabin-boy could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply; the essential fallacy is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were all born in a state; we were not all born on a ship ; like some of our great British bankers. A ship still remains a spe- cialist experiment, like a diving-bell or a flying ship: in such peculiar perils the need for promptitude constitutes the need for autocracy. But we live and die in the vessel of the state; and if we cannot find freedom, camaraderie and the popular element in the state, we can- not find it at all. And the modern doctrine of 135
THE INSANE NECESSITY
commercial despotism means that we shall not find it at all. Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot (it says) be run without the whole brutal business of bossing and sacking, " too old at forty " and all the rest of the filth. And they; must be run, and therefore we call on Csesar. Nobody but the Superman could descend to do such dirty work. Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul. If soap-boiling is really incon- sistent with brotherhood, so much the worst for soap-boiling, not for brotherhood. If civ- ilization really cannot get on with democracy, so much the worse for civilization, not for democracy. Certainly, it would be far better to go back to village communes, if they really are communes. Certainly, it would be better to do without soap rather than to do without society. Certainly, we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical 136
THE INSANE NECESSITY
science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it will be easy.
137
PART m
FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN
THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE
IT will be better to adopt in this chapter the same process that appeared a piece of mental justice in the last. My general opinions on the feminine question are such as many suffra- gists would warmly approve ; and it would be easy to state them without any open reference to the current controversy. But just as it seemed more decent to say first that I was not in favor of Imperialism even in its practical and popular sense, so it seems more decent to say the same of Female Suffrage, in its prac- tical and popular sense. In other words, it Is only fair to state, however hurriedly, the super- ficial objection to the Suffragettes before we go on to the really subtle questions behind the Suffrage.
Well, to get this honest but unpleasant busi- ness over, the objection to the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On Ml
THE SUFFRAGETTE
the contrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a military thing; it has all the military virtues ; one of which is that it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under certain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins be- comes the government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women ; and, secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise something else ; which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not create revolution ; what they do create is anarchy ; and the differ- ence between these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its nature produces government ; anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Crom- well ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed.
THE SUFFRAGETTE
Someone conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King's head once. But you can knock off the King's hat any number of times. Destruction is finite; obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to en- force a new order) there is no logical end to it ; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only wanted to be a nuisance, he could, pos- sibly, have prevented any government arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a proceeding would not have deserved the dig- nified name of rebellion.
It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes their superficial prob- lem. The problem is that their action has none of the advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test. War is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably — numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two urgent mat- ters; how many rebels there are alive, and 143
THE SUFFRAGETTE
how many are ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever. There is also, of course, in the case of these women, the fur- ther falsity that is introduced by their sex. It is false to state the matter as a mere brutal question of strength. If his muscles give a man a vote, then his horse ought to have two votes and his elephant five votes. The truth is more subtle than that ; it is that bodily out- break is a man's instinctive weapon, like the hoofs to the horse or the tusks to the elephant. All riot is a threat of war; but the woman is brandishing a weapon she can never use. There are many weapons that she could and does use. If (for example) all the women nagged for a vote they would get it in a month. But there again, one must remember, it would be neces- sary to get all the women to nag. And that brings us to the end of the political surface of the matter. The working objection to the Suffragette philosophy is simply that over- mastering millions of women do not agree with 144
THE SUFFRAGETTE
it. I am aware that some maintain that women ought to have votes whether the major- ity wants them or not; but this is surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal democracy to the destruction of actual democracy. What should the mass of women decide if they do not decide their general place in the State? These people practically say that females may vote about everything except about Female Suffrage.
But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and possibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the matter in a slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the real roots of woman's position in the western state, and the causes of our existing traditions or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this pur- pose it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic, the mere Suffragette of to- day, and to go back to subjects which, though much more old, are, I think, considerably more fresh.
145
II
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
CAST jour eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one specialty ; that not one of them is special. Each of these ances- tral things is a universal thing ; made to supply many different needs; and while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins. The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pen- cils, to cut throats ; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man 146
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
down ; partly to point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a giant ; it is a crutch and a cudgel ; an elongated finger and an extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which the strangest modern views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man's house and that hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.
Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes al- ways answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man will wave a cigarette instead of a stick ; he will cut his pen- 147
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
cil with a little screwing pencil-sharpener in- stead of a knife ; and he will even boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have my doubts about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils ; and about hot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those other requirements that these in- stitutions answered, there opens before us the whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision a world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener; where a man must learn single-stick with a cigarette ; where a man must try to toast muf- fins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the surface of hot water pipes.
The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a comparison between the ancient and universal things and the modern and spe- cialist things. The object of a theodolite is to lie level; the object of a stick is to swing loose at any angle; to whirl like the very wheel of liberty. The object of a lancet is to lance; when used for slashing, gashing, ripping, lop- 148
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
ping off heads and limbs, it is a disappointing instrument. The object of an electric light is merely to light (a despicable modesty) ; and the object of an asbestos stove ... I won- der what is the object of an asbestos stove? If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope; and some of them might even be practical. He could tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat's-cradle, or pick oakum. He could construct a rope- ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes for a traveling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveler who should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with a telephone ; you cannot do any- thing else with it. And though this is one of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one degree from its full delirium when there is nobody to answer you. The contention is, in brief, that you must pull up a hundred roots, and not one, before you uproot any of these hoary and sim- 149
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
pie expedients. It is only with great difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see that any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method has four or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions are quadrupeds ; and some of them are centipedes.
Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation of a general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six purposes ; everywhere now there are six small things ; or, rather (and there is the trou- ble), there are just five and a half. Neverthe- less, we will not say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless or inexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone; I may any day thank God for the lancet ; and there is none of these brilliant and narrow in- ventions (except, of course, the asbestos stove) which might not be at some moment necessary and lovely. But I do not think the most aus- tere upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old, many-sided institutions an ele- 150
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
ment of unity and universality which may well be preserved in its due proportion and place. Spiritually, at least, it will be admitted that some all-round balance is needed to equalize the extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to carry the parable of the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, the im- mortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unal- terable cosmos; and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of moral- ity. She taught logic to the student and told fairy tales to the children ; it was her business to confront the nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ring- ing bells. The large uses of religion have been broken up into lesser specialties, just as the uses of the hearth have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The ro- mance of ritual and colored emblem has been 151
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
taken over by that narrowest of all trades, modern art (the sort called art for art's sake), and men are in modern practice informed that they may use all symbols so long as they mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience has been dried up into the science of ethics; which may well be called decency for decency's sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic flower. The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology, has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the ground that they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who openly advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all one wild divorce court; nevertheless, there are many who still hear in their souls the thunder of the author- ity of human habit; those whom Man hath joined let no man sunder.
This book must avoid religion, but there
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
must (I say) be many, religious and irreligious, who will concede that this power of answering many purposes was a sort of strength which should not wholly die out of our lives. As a part of personal character, even the moderns will agree that many-sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked. This bal- ance and universality has been the vision of many groups of men in many ages. It was the Liberal Education of Aristotle; the jack-of-all- trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends ; the august amateurishness of the Cava- lier Person of Quality like Sir William Temple or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared in literature in our time in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible music by Walter Pater and enunciated through a fog- horn by Walt Whitman. But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve this literal universality, because of the nature of their work in the world. Not, let it be noted, because of the existence of their work. Leon- ardo da Vinci must have worked pretty hard; 158
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
on the other hand, many a government office cleric, village constable or elusive plumber may do (to all human appearance) no work at all, and yet show no signs of the Aristotelian uni- versalism. Wha\t makes it difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. This is generally true of males from the first hunter to the last electrical engineer; each has not merely to act, but to excel. Nim- rod has not only to be a mighty hunter before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters. The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is out- stripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of the human mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the main, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed can be so limiting as that 154
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go beyond his last. So the largest and wildest shots of our world are but in one direction and with a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot go beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short ; the astronomer cannot go beyond his telescope, and his telescope goes such a little way. All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain and seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down different paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is right ; there must be people traveling to different towns ; there must be specialists ; but shall no one behold the horizon ? Shall all mankind be specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things, that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Gill-of-all-trades. It has decided, rightly or wrongly, that this 155
THE UNIVERSAL STICK
specialism and this universalism shall be di- vided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men and wisdom for women. For clev- erness kills wisdom; that is one of the few sad and certain things.
But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense) must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality. . A man must be partly a one- idead man, because he is a one-weaponed man — and he is flung naked into the fight. The world's demand comes to him direct ; to his wife indirectly. In short, he must (as the books on Success say) give "his best"; and what a small part of a man " his best " is ! His sec- ond and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth bag- pipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a foun- tain-pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of God.
156
ni
THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY
AND it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to develop one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called our competitive system, but would equally exist under any rationally conceivable kind of Col- lectivism. Unless the Socialists are frankly ready for a fall in the standard of violins, tele- scopes and electric lights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the individual that he shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It was only by men being in some degree specialist that there ever were any telescopes; they must certainly be in some de- gree specialist in order to keep them going. It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that you can prevent him thinking principally about the very difficult way he earns his wages. 157
THE EMANCIPATION
There is only one way to preserve in the world that high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfills the old vision of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected half of humanity ; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan ; one who does not " give her best," but gives her all.
Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is that it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is earning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not origi- nal and artistic tales, but tales — better tales 158
THE EMANCIPATION
than would probably be told by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to illuminate and ventilate, not by the most star- tling revelations or the wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this uni- versal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a schoolmistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator, but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, 159
THE EMANCIPATION
a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of mono- maniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come al- most as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades. But the woman's pro- fessions, unlike the child's, were all truly and almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but her universality and balance pre- vented them being merely morbid. This is the substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position. I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same time. I do not cleny that even under the old tradition women had a harder time than men ; that is why we take off our hats. I do not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating:; but I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do not pause even 160
THE EMANCIPATION
to deny that woman was a servant ; but at least she was a general servant.
The shortest way of summarizing the posi- tion is to say that woman stands for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion on ex- travagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. There must in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes a part that is un- changeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience, and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She has to be an optimist to the mor- bid husband, a salutary pessimist to the happy- go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put upon, and the bully 161
THE EMANCIPATION
from putting upon others. The French King wrote —
"Tou jours femme varie Bien fol qui s'y fie,"
but the truth is that woman always varies, an'd that is exactly why we always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its antidote in common-sense is not (as the moderns seem to think) to be in the position of a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position of Aristotle or (at the lowest) Herbert Spencer, to be a universal morality, a complete system of thought. The slave flatters ; the complete moralist rebukes. It is, in short, to be a Trim- mer in the true sense of that honorable term; which for some reason or other is always used in a sense exactly opposite to its own. It seems really to be supposed that a Trimmer means a cowardly person who always goes over to the stronger side. It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes over to the weaker side ; like one who trims a boat by sit-
THE EMANCIPATION
ting where there are few people seated. Woman is a trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous and romantic trade.
The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely diffi- cult to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior. Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure ; and second, that the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be intro- duced to a world. To put the matter shortly, 163
THE EMANCIPATION
woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination con- ceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens 164
THE EMANCIPATION
or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small im- port to the soul, then as I say, I give it up ; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, decid- ing sales, banquets, labors and holidays ; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes, and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, man- ners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to some- one? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the huge- ness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
165
THE EMANCIPATION
But though the essential of the woman's task is universality, this does not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than man that she is only one half of humanity ; but she has expressed it (if one may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three things which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason that sacred stub- bornness only proper to the primary things which a woman was set to guard. One's own children, one's own altar, ought to be a matter of principle — or if you like, a matter of preju- dice. On the other hand, who wrote Junius's Letters ought not to be a principle or a preju- dice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry. But make an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show that George III. wrote Junius, and in three months 166
THE EMANCIPATION
she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of dlomesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well ; and that is why they ought not to do it.
167
IV
THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT
THE larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things slightly more intoxicat- ing to the eye than the desk or the typewriter ; and it cannot be denied that in defending these, women have developed the quality called preju- dice to a powerful and even menacing degree. But these prejudices will always be found to fortify the main position of the woman, that she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat within small compass but on all sides. On the one or two points on which she really misun- derstands the man's position, it is almost en- tirely in order to preserve her own. The two points on which w.oman, actually and of her- self, is most tenacious may be roughly sum- marized as the ideal of thrift and the ideal of dignity.
.Unfortunately for this book it is written by 168
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
a male, and these two qualities, if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But if we are to settle the sex question at all fairly, all males must make an imaginative attempt to enter into the attitude of all good women to- ward these two things. The difficulty exists especially, perhaps, in the thing called thrift ; we men have so much encouraged each other in throwing money right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort of chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a broader and more candid consideration the case scarcely stands so.
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the matter ; for I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever since I was born. But the thing is true ; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw anything away ; it is nega-
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
tive; it is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could undertake to make use of all things in his . dustbin he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products ; when science found that colors could be made out of coal- tar, she made her greatest and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in other words, to rum- mage in the dustbin.
A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke or expedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private house on a rainy day. A man's defi- nite daily work is generally run with such rigid convenience of modern science that thrift, the j>icking up of potential helps here and there, 170
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
has almost become unmeaning to him. He comes across it most (as I say) when he is playing some game within four walls ; when in charades, a hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or a tea-cozy just do for a cocked hat; when a toy theater needs timber and cardboard, and the house has just enough firewood and just enough bandboxes. This is the man's oc- casional glimpse and pleasing parody of thrift. But many a good housekeeper plays the same game every day with ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but on the contrary, because she is magnanimous ; because she wishes her creative mercy to be over all her works, that not one sardine should be destroyed, or cast as rubbish to the void, when she has made the pile complete.
The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and other things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, lib- eral and yet come into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and liberal also. There is never a war between two sects, 171'
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
but only between two universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is the collision of one cosmos with another. So in a smaller way it must be first made clear that this female economic ideal is a part of that female variety of outlook and all-round art of life which we have already attributed to the sex : thrift is not a small or timid or provincial thing; it is part of that great idea of the woman watching on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for everything. For in the average human house there is one hole by which money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out ; man has to do with the one hole, woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginess of a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the less true that it brings her into conflict with the special kind of spiritual breadth that be- longs to the males of the tribe. It brings her into conflict with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of chaotic feasting and deafen- ing debate, which we noted in the last section. 172
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
The very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the more into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the other for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moral weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the male is normally prone to ex- pand things into a sort of eternity ; he always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always thinks of a night as lasting for- ever. When the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get their husbands home, simple- minded " social workers " always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money that is wasted in beer; they are exas- 173
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
perated also at the amount of time that is wasted in talk. It Is not merely what goeth into the mouth but what cometh out of the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man. They will raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks) the ridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wanted to make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick. But the real female prejudice on this point is not with- out a basis ; the real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but there is the necklace. rA coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to crush her, to produce a result; the coster does not argue with another coster in order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at once the sound of his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions and the sense of masculine society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness about the 174.
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottom- less bucket; thought plunges into a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman against the Public House — that is, against the Parliament House. She is there to prevent waste; and the "pub" and the parliament are the very palaces of waste. In the upper classes the " pub " is called the club, but that makes no more difference to the reason than it does to the rhyme. High and low, the woman's ob- jection to the Public House is perfectly definite and rational ; it is that the Public House wastes the energies that could be used on the private house.
'As it is about feminine thrift against mascu- line waste, so it is about feminine dignity against masculine rowdiness. The woman has a fixed and very well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners nobody else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity, and grown-up men are quite unpre- sentable. It is true that there are many very po- lite men, but none that I ever heard of who were 175
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
not either fascinating women or obeying them. But indeed the female ideal of dignity, like the female ideal of thrift, lies deeper and may easily be misunderstood. It rests ultimately on a strong idea of spiritual isolation ; the same that makes women religious. They do not like being melted down; they dislike and avoid the mob. That anonymous quality we have re- marked in the club conversation would be com- mon impertinence in a case of ladies. I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her grand green drawing-room whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and why not. I was driven back on offering the ob- vious and sincere answer " Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade you would turn me out of the house." The only certain rule on this subject is always to deal with woman and never with women. " Women " is a profligate word ; I have used it repeatedly in this chapter ; but it always has a blackguard sound. It smells of oriental cynicism and he- donism. Every woman is a captive queen. 176
ROMANCE OF THRIFT
But every crowd of women is only a harem broken loose.
I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly all the women I have known. It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women individually ; but I think it would be quite true to say that she detests them in a confused heap. And this is not because she despises her own sex, but because she respects it; and respects especially that sanctity and separation of each item which is represented in manners by the idea of dignity and In morals by the idea of chastity.
177
THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
WE hear much of the human error which ac- cepts what is sham as what is real. But it is worth while to remember that with unfamiliar things we often mistake what is real for what is sham. It is true that a very young man may think the wig of an actress is her hair. But it is equally true that a child yet younger may call the hair of a negro his wig. Just because the woolly savage is remote and barbaric he seems to be unnaturally neat and tidy. Every- one must have noticed the same thing in the fixed and almost offensive color of all unfamil- iar things, tropic birds and tropic blossoms. Tropic birds look like staring toys out of a toy-shop. Tropic flowers simply look like artificial flowers, like things cut out of wax. This is a deep matter, and, I think, not un- connected with divinity; but anyhow it i» the 178
THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
truth that when we see things for the first time we feel instantly that they are fictive creations ; we feel the finger of God. It is only when we are thoroughly used to them and our five wits are wearied, that we see them as wild and ob- jectless; like the shapeless tree-tops or the shifting cloud. It is the design in Nature that strikes us first ; the sense of the crosses and con- fusions in that design only comes afterwards through experience and an almost eerie monot- ony. If a man saw the stars abruptly by accident he would think them as festive and as artificial as a firework. We talk of the folly of painting the lily ; but if we saw the lily with- out warning we should think that it was painted. We talk of the devil not being so black as he is painted; but that very phrase is a testimony to the kinship between what is called vivid and what is called artificial. If the modern sage had only one glimpse of grass and sky, he would say that grass was not as green as it was painted; that sky was not as blue as it was painted. If one could see the whole universe 179
THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored toy, just as the South American hornbill looks like a bright-colored toy. And so they are — both of them, I mean.
But it was not with this aspect of the star- tling air of artifice about all strange objects that I meant to deal. I mean merely, as a guide to history, that we should not be sur- prised if things wrought in fashions remote from ours seem artificial; we should convince ourselves that nine times out of ten these things are nakedly and almost indecently honest. You will hear men talk of the frosted classicism of Corneille or of the powdered pomposities of the eighteenth century, but all these phrases are very superficial. There never was an artificial epoch. There never was an age of reason. Men were always men and women women: and their two generous appetites always were the expression of passion and the telling of truth. We can see something stiff and quaint in their mode of expression, just as our descendants will see something stiff and quaint in our coars- 180
THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
est slum sketch or our most naked pathological play. But men have never talked about any- thing but important things ; and the next force in femininity which we have to consider can be considered best perhaps in some dusty old volume of verses by a person of quality.
The eighteenth century is spoken of as the period of artificiality, in externals at least ; but, indeed, there may be two words about that. In modern speech one uses artificiality as mean- ing indefinitely a sort of deceit ; and the eigh- teenth century was far too artificial to deceive. It cultivated that completest art that does not conceal the art. Its fashions and costumes positively revealed nature by avowing artifice; as in that obvious instance of a barbering that frosted every head with the same silver. It would be fantastic to call this a quaint humil- ity that concealed youth; but, at least, it was not one with the evil pride that conceals old age. Under the eighteenth century fashion people did not so much all pretend to be young, as all agree to be old. The same applies to the 181
THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
most odd and unnatural of their fashions ; they were freakish, but they were not false. A lady may or may not be as red as she is painted, but plainly she was not so black as she was patched.
But I only introduce the reader into this atmosphere of the older and franker fictions that he may be induced to have patience for a moment with a certain element which is very common in the decoration and literature of that age and of the two centuries preceding it. It is necessary to mention it in such a connection because it is exactly one of those things that look as superficial as powder, and are really as rooted as hair.
In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies especially, you will find a perpetual re- proach against woman in the matter of her coldness ; ceaseless and stale similes that com- pare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosom to snow. Now most of us have always supposed these old and iterant 182
THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
phrases to be a mere pattern of dead words, a thing like a cold wall-paper. Yet I think those old cavalier poets who wrote about the cold- ness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth missed in nearly all the realistic novels of to- day. Our psychological romancers perpetually represent wives as striking terror into their husbands by rolling on the floor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture or poison- ing the coffee ; all this upon some strange fixed theory that women are what they call emo- tional. But in truth the old and frigid form is much nearer to the vital fact. Most men if they spoke with any sincerity would agree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship, courtship or marriage, was not so much being emotional as being unemotional.
There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection of a more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the female in anger is the noli me tangere. I take this as 183
THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
the most obvious and at the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality in the female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almost immeasurably misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cant of immoralists. The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whatever else it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets and a million lovers have called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the classical, and is at least the oppo- site of the grotesque. And since we are talking here chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is highly typical of the rabid plagiar- ism which now passes everywhere for emanci- pation, that a little while ago it was common for an " advanced " woman to claim the right to wear trousers ; a right about as grotesque as the right to wear a false nose. Whether 184
THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
female liberty is much advanced by the act of wearing a skirt on each leg I do not know; perhaps Turkish women might offer some in- formation on the point. But if the western woman walks about (as it were) trailing the curtains of the harem with her, it is quite cer- tain that the woven mansion is meant for a perambulating palace, not for a perambulating prison. It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberately dress up in the rec- ognized fetters of a slave; no judge would appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes of female dignity. The whole world is under petticoat government; for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.
185
VI
THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE
WE say then that the female holds up with two strong arms these two pillars of civiliza- tion; we say also that she could do neither, but for her position; her curious position of private omnipotence, universality on a small scale. The first element is thrift; not the de- structive thrift of the miser, but the creative thrift of the peasant; the second element is dignity, which is but the expression of sacred personality and privacy. Now I know the ques- tion that will be abruptly and automatically asked by all that know the dull tricks and turns of the modern sexual quarrel. The ad- vanced person will at once begin to argue about whether these instincts are inherent and in- evitable in woman or whether they are merely prejudices produced by her history and educa- tion. Now I do not propose to discuss whether 186
PEDANT AND SAVAGE
woman could now be educated out of her habits touching thrift and dignity; and that for two excellent reasons. First it is a question which cannot conceivably ever find any answer: that is why modern people are so fond of it. From the nature of the case it is obviously impossi- ble to decide whether any of the peculiarities of civilized man have been strictly necessary to his civilization. It is not self-evident (for in- stance), that even the habit of standing up- right was the only path of human progress. There might have been a quadrupedal civiliza- tion, in which a city gentleman put on four boots to go to the city every morning. Or there might have been reptilian civilization, in which he rolled up to the office on his stomach ; it is impossible to say that intelligence might not have developed in such creatures. All we can say is that man as he is walks upright; and that woman is something almost more up- right than uprightness.
And the second point is this : that upon the whole we rather prefer women (nay, even men) 187
PEDANT AND SAVAGE
to walk upright; so we do not waste much of our noble lives in inventing any other way for them to walk. In short, my second reason for not speculating upon whether woman might get rid of these peculiarities, is that I do not want her to get rid of them ; nor does she. I will not exhaust my intelligence by inventing ways in which mankind might unlearn the violin or forget how to ride horses ; and the art of domesticity seems to me as special and as valu- able as all the ancient arts of our race. Nor do I propose to enter at all into those formless and floundering speculations about how woman was or is regarded in the primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savage countries which we cannot understand. Even if these people segregated their women for low or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons barbaric ; and I am haunted with a tenacious suspicion that these people's feelings were really, under other forms, very much the same as ours. Some impatient trader, some super- ficial missionary, walks across an island and 188
PEDANT AND SAVAGE
sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely because women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the wo- man works because she has told the man to work, and he hasn't obeyed. I do not affirm that this is the whole truth, but I do affirm that we have too little comprehension of the souls of savages to know how far it is untrue. It is the same with the relations of our hasty and surface science, with the problem of sexual dignity and modesty. Professors find all over the world fragmentary ceremonies in which the bride affects some sort of reluctance, hides from her husband, or runs away from him. 189
PEDANT AND SAVAGE
The professor then pompously proclaims that this is a survival of Marriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil thrown over the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether women ever were married by capture. I think they pretended to be; as they do still. It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift and dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness, the waste- fulness, and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of masculine companionship. Wise women allow for the thing; foolish women try to crush it; but all women try to counteract it, and they do well. In many a home all round us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is reversed. The queen is in the counting-house, counting out the money. The king is in the parlor, eating bread and honey. But it must be strictly understood that the king has cap- tured the honey in some heroic wars. The quarrel can be found in moldering Gothic carv- ings and in crabbed Greek manuscripts. In every age, in every land, in every tribe and 190
PEDANT AND SAVAGE
village, has been waged the great sexual war between the Private House and the Public House. I have seen a collection of mediaeval English poems, divided into sections such as "Religious Carols," "Drinking Songs," and so on ; and the section headed, " Poems of Domestic Life" consisted entirely (literally, entirely) of the complaints of husbands who were bullied by their wives. Though the Eng- lish was archaic, the words were in many cases precisely the same as those which I have heard in the streets and public houses of Battersea, protests on behalf of an extension of time and talk, protests against the nervous impatience and the devouring utilitarianism of the female. Such, I say, is the quarrel ; it can never be any- thing but a quarrel ; but the aim of all morals and all society is to keep it a lovers' quarrel.
191
vn
THE MODERN" SURRENDER OF W O M A X
BUT in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all ap- pearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended ; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the be- ginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surren- dered to the man. She has seriously and offi- cially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house ; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female wor- shipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but en- 192
THE MODERN SURRENDER
viable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that tav- erns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to oar wires and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. 'And now comes Miss Pankhorst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.
Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us. Males, like females, in the course of that old fight between the public and private house, had indulged in over- statement and extravagance, feeling that they must keep up their end of the see-saw. We told our wives that Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed our minds that our wives would believe ft. We
ids
THE MODERN SURRENDER
said that everyone must have a vote In the country ; similarly our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In both cases the idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Hug- gins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well that noth- ing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women. We knew this ; we thought the women knew it even more clearly ; and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we our- selves hardly believed when we said it. The solemnity of politics ; the necessity of votes ; the necessity of Huggins ; the necessity of Bug- gins ; all these flow in a pellucid stream from the lips of all the suffragette speakers. I sup- pose in every fight, however old, one has a vague aspiration to conquer; but we never wanted to conquer women so completely as this. We only expected that they might leave us a
THE MODERN SURRENDER
little more margin for our nonsense; we never expected that they would accept it seriously as sense. Therefore I am all at sea about the existing situation; I scarcely know whether to be relieved or enraged by this substitution of the feeble platform lecture for the forcible cur- tain-lecture. I am lost without the trenchant and candid Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know what to do with the prostrate and penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern woman has taken us all so much by surprise that it is desirable to pause a moment, and collect our wits about what she is really say- ing.
As I have already remarked, there is one very simple answer to all this ; these are not the modern women, but about one in two thou- sand of the modern women. This fact is im- portant to a democrat ; but it is of very little importance to the typically modern mind. Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or Pro- 195
THE MODERN SURRENDER
gressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. But in this state of things the democratic argument obviously falls out for the moment ; and we are bound to take the prominent minority, merely because it is prominent. Let us eliminate altogether from our minds the thousands of women who detest this cause, and the millions of women who have hardly heard of it. Let us concede that the English people itself is not and will not be for a very long time within the sphere of practical politics. Let us confine ourselves to saying that these particular women want a vote and to asking themselves what a vote is. If we ask these ladies ourselves what a vote is, we shall get a very vague reply. It is the only question, as a rule, for which they are not pre- pared. For the truth is that they go mainly by precedent; by the mere fact that men have yotes already. So far from being a mutinous movement, it is really a very Conservative one ; 196
THE MODERN SURRENDER
it is in the narrowest rut of the British Con- stitution. Let us take a little wider and freer sweep of thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and meaning of this odd busi- ness called voting.
197
VIII
THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS
SEEMINGLY from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and all nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly fallacious than to fancy that in ruder or simpler ages ruling, judging and punishing appeared perfectly innocent and dignified. These things were always regarded as the penalties of the Fall; as part of the humilia- tion of mankind, as bad in themselves. That the king can do no wrong was never anything but a legal fiction ; and it is a legal fiction still. The doctrine of Divine Right was not a piece of idealism, but rather a piece of realism, a practical way of ruling amid the ruin of hu- manity ; a very pragmatist piece of faith. The religious basis of government was not so much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not put their trust in any child of 198
BRAND OP FLEUR-DE-LIS
man. It was so with all the ugly institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary evils. 'A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern business man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's very horri- ble; but how else can society be conducted?" A mediaeval scholastic regarded the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a mod- ern business man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death : " It is a shock- ing torture; but can you organize a painless world?" It is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without the question by hunger as we have done without the ques- tion by fire. It is equally possible, for the mat- ter of that, that a future society may re- establish legal torture with the whole appara- tus of rack and fagot. The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague savor of science, a method which it calls "the third degree." This is simply the 199
BRAND OF FLEUR-DE-LIS
extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which is surely uncommonly close to their extortion (by bodily pain. And this is legal and scien- tific America. Amateur ordinary America, of course, simply burns people alive in broad day- light, as they did in the Reformation Wars. But though some punishments are more in- human than others there is no such thing as humane punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right in any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him even mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole pro- ceeding must be a humiliating one for all con- cerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have always felt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman, the jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even admiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man law- fully was unpardonable. The most bare-faced 200
BRAND OF FLEUR-DE-LIS
duelist might almost brandish his weapon. But the executioner was always masked.
This is the first essential element in gov- ernment ; coercion ; a necessary but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice. A king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal, evil, uses the general strength to crush it out; the strength is his tool, but the belief is his only sanction. You might as well say that glass is the real reason for telescopes. But arising from whatever reason the act of government is coercive and is burdened with all the coarse and painful qualities of coercion. And if anyone asks what is the use of insisting on the ugliness of this task of state violence since all mankind is con- demned to employ it, I have a simple answer to that. It would be useless to insist on it if 201
BRAND OF FLEUR-DE-LIS
all humanity were condemned to it. But it is not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long as half of humanity is kept out of it.
All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government which