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POST-PRANDIAL
PHILOSOPHY
By GRANT ALLEN
AUTHOR OF
"THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE," ETC.
LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS
1894
PREFACE
These Essays appeared originally in _The Westminster Gazette_, and have
only been so far modified here as is necessary for purposes of volume
publication. They aim at being suggestive rather than exhaustive: I
shall be satisfied if I have provoked thought without following out each
train to a logical conclusion. Most of the Essays are just what they
pretend to be--crystallisations into writing of ideas suggested in
familiar conversation.
G. A.
Hind Head, _March_ 1894.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AMONG LANGUAGES 1
II. IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY 9
III. SCIENCE IN EDUCATION 18
IV. THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS 27
V. AMERICAN DUCHESSES 35
VI. IS ENGLAND PLAYED OUT? 44
VII. THE GAME AND THE RULES 53
VIII. THE RÔLE OF PROPHET 61
IX. THE ROMANCE OF THE CLASH OF RACES 70
X. THE MONOPOLIST INSTINCTS 79
XI. "MERE AMATEURS" 87
XII. A SQUALID VILLAGE 95
XIII. CONCERNING ZEITGEIST 104
XIV. THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE 112
XV. EYE _versus_ EAR 122
XVI. THE POLITICAL PUPA 130
XVII. ON THE CASINO TERRACE 138
XVIII. THE CELTIC FRINGE 147
XIX. IMAGINATION AND RADICALS 156
XX. ABOUT ABROAD 165
XXI. WHY ENGLAND IS BEAUTIFUL 173
XXII. ANENT ART PRODUCTION 182
XXIII. A GLIMPSE INTO UTOPIA 190
XXIV. OF SECOND CHAMBERS 199
XXV. A POINT OF CRITICISM 207
POST-PRANDIAL PHILOSOPHY
I.
_THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AMONG
LANGUAGES._
A distinguished Positivist friend of mine, who is in most matters a
practical man of the world, astonished me greatly the other day at
Venice, by the grave remark that Italian was destined to be the language
of the future. I found on inquiry he had inherited the notion direct
from Auguste Comte, who justified it on the purely sentimental and
unpractical ground that the tongue of Dante had never yet been
associated with any great national defeat or disgrace. The idea
surprised me not a little; because it displays such a profound
misconception of what language is, and why people use it. The speech of
the world will not be decided on mere grounds of sentiment: the tongue
that survives will not survive because it is so admirably adapted for
the manufacture of rhymes or epigrams. Stern need compels. Frenchmen and
Germans, in congress assembled, and looking about them for a means of
intercommunication, might indeed agree to accept Italian then and there
as an international compromise. But congresses don't make or unmake the
habits of everyday life; and the growth or spread of a language is a
thing as much beyond our deliberate human control as the rise or fall of
the barometer.
My friend's remark, however, set me thinking and watching what are
really the languages now gaining and spreading over the civilised world;
it set me speculating what will be the outcome of this gain and spread
in another half century. And the results are these: Vastly the most
growing and absorbing of all languages at the present moment is the
English, which is almost everywhere swallowing up the overflow of
German, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Russian. Next to it, probably, in point
of vitality, comes Spanish, which is swallowing up the overflow of
French, Italian, and the other Latin races. Third, perhaps, ranks
Russian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast tract in
Northern and Central Asia. Among non-European languages, three seem to
be gaining fast: Chinese, Malay, Arabic. Of the doomed tongues, on the
other hand, the most hopeless is French, which is losing all round;
while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill or
slightly retrograding. The world is now round. By the middle of the
twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant
speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate
of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of
mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern
hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay,
Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa
and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and
dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or
Danish in our own day.
And why? Not because Shakespeare wrote in English, but because the
English language has already got a firm hold of all those portions of
the earth's surface which are most absorbing the overflow of European
populations. Germans and Scandinavians and Russians emigrate by the
thousand now to all parts of the United States and the north-west of
Canada. In the first generation they may still retain their ancestral
speech; but their children have all to learn English. In Australia and
New Zealand the same thing is happening. In South Africa Dutch had got a
footing, it is true; but it is fast losing it. The newcomers learn
English, and though the elder Boers stick with Boer conservatism to
their native tongue, young Piet and young Paul find it pays them better
to know and speak the language of commerce--the language of Cape Town,
of Kimberley, of the future. The reason is the same throughout. Whenever
two tongues come to be spoken in the same area one of them is sure to be
more useful in business than the other. Every French-Canadian who wishes
to do things on a large scale is obliged to speak English. So is the
Creole in Louisiana; so earlier were the Knickerbocker Dutch in New
York. Once let English get in, and it beats all competing languages
fairly out of the field in a couple of generations.
Like influences favour Spanish in South America and elsewhere. English
has annexed most of North America, Australia, South Africa, the Pacific;
Spanish has annexed South America, Central America, the Philippines,
Cuba, and a few other places. For the most part these areas are less
suited than the English-speaking districts for colonisation by North
Europeans; but they absorb a large number of Italians and other
Mediterranean races, who all learn Spanish in the second generation. As
to the other dominant languages, the points in their favour are
different. Conquest and administrative needs are spreading Russian over
the steppes of Asia; the Arab merchant and the growth of Mahommedanism
are importing Arabic far into the heart of Africa; the Chinaman is
carrying his own monosyllables with him to California, Australia,
Singapore. These tongues in future will divide the world between them.
The German who leaves Germany becomes an Anglo-American. The Italian who
leaves Italy becomes a Spanish-American.
There is another and still more striking way of looking at the rapid
increase of English. No other language will carry you through so many
ports in the world. It suffices for London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast,
Southampton, Cardiff; for New York, Boston, Montreal, Charleston, New
Orleans, San Francisco; for Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Hong Kong,
Yokohama, Honolulu; for Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kurrachi, Singapore,
Colombo, Cape Town, Mauritius. Spanish with Cadiz, Barcelona, Havana,
Callao, Valparaiso, cannot touch that record; nor can French with
Marseilles, Bordeaux, Havre, Algiers, Antwerp, Tahiti. The most
commercially useful language in the world, thus widely diffused in so
many great mercantile and shipping centres, is certain to win in the
struggle for existence among the tongues of the future.
The old Mediterranean civilisation teaches us a useful lesson in this
respect. Two languages dominated the Mediterranean basin. The East spoke
Greek, not because Plato and Æschylus spoke Greek, but because Greek was
the tongue of the great commercial centres--of Athens, Syracuse,
Alexandria, Antioch, Byzantium. The West spoke Latin, not because
Catullus and Virgil spoke Latin, but because Latin was the
administrative tongue, the tongue of Rome, of Italy, and later of Gaul,
of Spain, of the great towns in Dacia, Pannonia, Britain. Whoever wanted
to do anything on the big scale then, had to speak Greek or Latin; so
much so that the native languages of Gaul and Spain died utterly out,
and Latin dialects are now the spoken tongue in all southern Europe. In
our own time, again, educated Hindoos from different parts of India have
to use English as a means of intercommunication; and native merchants
must write their business correspondence with distant houses in English.
To put an extreme contrast: in the last century French was spoken by far
more people than English; at the present day French is only just keeping
up its numbers in France, is losing in Canada and the United States, is
not advancing to any extent in Africa. English is spoken by a hundred
million people in Europe and America; is over-running Africa; has
annexed Australasia and the Pacific Isles; has ousted, or is ousting,
Dutch at the Cape, French in Louisiana, even Spanish itself in Florida,
California, New Mexico. In Egyptian mud villages, the aspiring Copt, who
once learnt French, now learns English. In Scandinavia, our tongue gains
ground daily. Everywhere in the world it takes the lead among the
European languages, and by the middle of the next century will no doubt
be spoken over half the globe by a cosmopolitan mass of five hundred
million people.
And all on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue,
and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is the
easiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbish
of genders; simplified immensely its declensions and conjugations;
thrown overboard most of the nonsensical ballast we know as grammar. It
is only weighted now by its grotesque and ridiculous spelling--one of
the absurdest among all the absurd English attempts at compromise. The
pressure of the newer speakers will compel it to make jetsam of that
lumber also; and then the tongue of Shelley and Newton will march onward
unopposed to the conquest of humanity.
I pen these remarks, I hope, "without prejudice." Patriotism is a vulgar
vice of which I have never been guilty.
II.
_IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY._
Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always
consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to
the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation
and morals than the democracy they live among.
I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of people
at large (and especially of that particular European people which
"dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies and
democracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a common
though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the
aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners,
than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a
boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profound
superiority by birth to the world around him--a superiority as of fine
porcelain to common clay--that the world around him has at last actually
begun to accept him at his own valuation. Most English people in
particular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures and
wines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But history
shows us the exact opposite. It is a plain historical fact, provable by
simple enumeration, that almost all the aristocracies the world has ever
known have taken their rise in the conquest of civilised and cultivated
races by barbaric invaders; and that the barbaric invaders have seldom
or never learned the practical arts and handicrafts which are the
civilising element in the life of the conquered people around them.
To begin with the aristocracies best known to most of us, the noble
families of modern and mediæval Europe sprang, as a whole, from the
Teutonic invasion of the Roman Empire. In Italy, it was the Lombards and
the Goths who formed the bulk of the great ruling families; all the
well-known aristocratic names of mediæval Italy are without exception
Teutonic. In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocratic
element to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised and
cultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere
_roturier_. The great revolution, it has been well said, was, ethnically
speaking, nothing more than the revolt of the Celtic against the
Teutonic fraction; and, one might add also, the revolt of the civilised
Romanised serf against the barbaric _seigneur_. In Spain, the hidalgo is
just the _hi d'al Go_, the son of the Goth, the descendant of those rude
Visigothic conquerors who broke down the old civilisation of Iberian and
Romanised Hispania. And so on throughout. All over Europe, if you care
to look close, you will find the aristocrat was the son of the intrusive
barbarian; the democrat was the son of the old civilised and educated
autochthonous people.
It is just the same elsewhere, wherever we turn. Take Greece, for
example. Its most aristocratic state was undoubtedly Sparta, where a
handful of essentially barbaric Dorians held in check a much larger and
Helotised population of higher original civilisation. Take the East: the
Persian was a wild mountain adventurer who imposed himself as an
aristocrat upon the far more cultivated Babylonian, Assyrian, and
Egyptian. The same sort of thing had happened earlier in time in
Babylonia and Assyria themselves, where barbaric conquerors had
similarly imposed themselves upon the first known historical
civilisations. Take India under the Moguls, once more; the aristocracy
of the time consisted of the rude Mahommedan Tartar, who lorded it over
the ancient enchorial culture of Rajpoot and Brahmin. Take China: the
same thing over again--a Tartar horde imposing its savage rule over the
most ancient civilised people of Asia. Take England: its aristocracy at
different times has consisted of the various barbaric invaders, first
the Anglo-Saxon (if I must use that hateful and misleading word)--a
pirate from Sleswick; then the Dane, another pirate from Denmark direct;
then the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer of
early French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himself
after just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where you
will, it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to the
Turk at Constantinople or the Arab in North Africa, the aristocrat
belongs invariably to a lower race than the civilised people whom he has
conquered and subjugated.
"That may be true, perhaps," you object, "as to the remote historical
origin of aristocracies; but surely the aristocrat of later generations
has acquired all the science, all the art, all the polish of the people
he lives amongst. He is the flower of their civilisation." Don't you
believe it! There isn't a word of truth in it. From first to last the
aristocrat remains, what Matthew Arnold so justly called him, a
barbarian. I often wonder, indeed, whether Arnold himself really
recognised the literal and actual truth of his own brilliant
generalisation. For the aristocratic ideas and the aristocratic pursuits
remain to the very end essentially barbaric. The "gentleman" never soils
his high-born hands with dirty work; in other words, he holds himself
severely aloof from the trades and handicrafts which constitute
civilisation. The arts that train and educate hand, eye, and brain he
ignorantly despises. In the early middle ages he did not even condescend
to read and write, those inferior accomplishments being badges of
serfdom. If you look close at the "occupations of a gentleman" in the
present day, you will find they are all of purely barbaric character.
They descend to us direct from the semi-savage invaders who overthrew
the structure of the Roman empire, and replaced its civilised
organisation by the military and barbaric system of feudalism. The
"gentleman" is above all things a fighter, a hunter, a fisher--he
preserves the three simplest and commonest barbaric functions. He is
_not_ a practiser of any civilised or civilising art--a craftsman, a
maker, a worker in metal, in stone, in textile fabrics, in pottery.
These are the things that constitute civilisation; but the aristocrat
does none of them; in the famous words of one who now loves to mix with
English gentlemen, "he toils not, neither does he spin." The things he
_may_ do are, to fight by sea and land, like his ancestor the Goth and
his ancestor the Viking; to slay pheasant and partridge, like his
predatory forefathers; to fish for salmon in the Highlands; to hunt the
fox, to sail the yacht, to scour the earth in search of great
game--lions, elephants, buffalo. His one task is to kill--either his
kind or his quarry.
Observe, too, the essentially barbaric nature of the gentleman's
home--his trappings, his distinctive marks, his surroundings, his
titles. He lives by choice in the wildest country, like his skin-clad
ancestors, demanding only that there be game and foxes and fish for his
delectation. He loves the moors, the wolds, the fens, the braes, the
Highlands, not as the painter, the naturalist, or the searcher after
beauty of scenery loves them--for the sake of their wild life, their
heather and bracken, their fresh keen air, their boundless horizon--but
for the sake of the thoroughly barbarous existence he and his dogs and
his gillies can lead in them. The fact is, neither he nor his ancestors
have ever been really civilised. Barbarians in the midst of an
industrial community, they have lived their own life of slaying and
playing, untouched by the culture of the world below them. Knights in
the middle ages, squires in the eighteenth century, they have never
received a tincture of the civilising arts and crafts and industries;
they have fought and fished and hunted in uninterrupted succession since
the days when wild in woods the noble savage ran, to the days when they
pay extravagant rents for Scottish grouse moors. Their very titles are
barbaric and military--knight and earl and marquis and duke, early
crystallised names for leaders in war or protectors of the frontier.
Their crests and coats of arms are but the totems of their savage
predecessors, afterwards utilised by mediæval blacksmiths as
distinguishing marks for the summit of a helmet. They decorate their
halls with savage trophies of the chase, like the Zulu or the Red
Indian; they hang up captured arms and looted Chinese jars from the
Summer Palace in their semi-civilised drawing-rooms. They love to be
surrounded by grooms and gamekeepers and other barbaric retainers; they
pass their lives in the midst of serfs; their views about the position
and rights of women--especially the women of the "lower orders"--are
frankly African. They share the sentiments of Achilles as to the
individuality of Chryseis and Briseis.
Such is the actual aristocrat, as we now behold him. Thus, living his
own barbarous life in the midst of a civilised community of workers and
artists and thinkers and craftsmen, with whom he seldom mingles, and
with whom he has nothing in common, this chartered relic of worse days
preserves from first to last many painful traits of the low moral and
social ideas of his ancestors, from which he has never varied. He
represents most of all, in the modern world, the surviving savage. His
love of gewgaws, of titles, of uniform, of dress, of feathers, of
decorations, of Highland kilts, and stars and garters, is but one
external symbol of his lower grade of mental and moral status. All over
Europe, the truly civilised classes have gone on progressing by the
practice of peaceful arts from generation to generation; but the
aristocrat has stood still at the same half-savage level, a hunter and
fighter, an orgiastic roysterer, a killer of wild boars and wearer of
absurd mediæval costumes, too childish for the civilised and cultivated
commoner.
Government by aristocrats is thus government by the mentally and morally
inferior. And yet--a Bill for giving at last some scant measure of
self-government to persecuted Ireland has to run the gauntlet, in our
nineteenth-century England, of an irresponsible House of hereditary
barbarians!
III.
_SCIENCE IN EDUCATION._
I mean what I say: science in education, not education in science.
It is the last of these that all the scientific men of England have so
long been fighting for. And a very good thing it is in its way, and I
hope they may get as much as they want of it. But compared to the
importance of science in education, education in science is a matter of
very small national moment.
The difference between the two is by no means a case of tweedledum and
tweedledee. Education in science means the systematic teaching of
science so as to train up boys to be scientific men. Now scientific men
are exceedingly useful members of a community; and so are engineers, and
bakers, and blacksmiths, and artists, and chimney-sweeps. But we can't
all be bakers, and we can't all be painters in water-colours. There is a
dim West Country legend to the effect that the inhabitants of the Scilly
Isles eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in one another's
washing. As a matter of practical political economy, such a source of
income is worse than precarious--it's frankly impossible. "It takes all
sorts to make a world." A community entirely composed of scientific men
would fail to feed itself, clothe itself, house itself, and keep itself
supplied with amusing light literature. In one word, education in
science produces specialists; and specialists, though most useful and
valuable persons in their proper place, are no more the staple of a
civilised community than engine-drivers or ballet-dancers.
What the world at large really needs, and will one day get, is not this,
but due recognition of the true value of science in education. We don't
all want to be made into first-class anatomists like Owen, still less
into first-class practical surgeons, like Sir Henry Thompson. But what
we do all want is a competent general knowledge (amongst other things)
of anatomy at large, and especially of human anatomy; of physiology at
large, and especially of human physiology. We don't all want to be
analytical chemists: but what we do all want is to know as much about
oxygen and carbon as will enable us to understand the commonest
phenomena of combustion, of chemical combination, of animal or vegetable
life. We don't all want to be zoologists, and botanists of the type who
put their names after "critical species:" but what we do all want to
know is as much about plants and animals as will enable us to walk
through life intelligently, and to understand the meaning of the things
that surround us. We want, in one word, a general acquaintance with the
_results_ rather than with the _methods_ of science.
"In short," says the specialist, with his familiar sneer, "you want a
smattering."
Well, yes, dear Sir Smelfungus, if it gives you pleasure to put it
so--just that; a smattering, an all-round smattering. But remember that
in this matter the man of science is always influenced by ideas derived
from his own pursuits as specialist. He is for ever thinking what sort
of education will produce more specialists in future; and as a rule he
is thinking what sort of education will produce men capable in future of
advancing science. Now to advance science, to discover new snails, or
invent new ethyl compounds, is not and cannot be the main object of the
mass of humanity. What the mass wants is just unspecialised
knowledge--the kind of knowledge that enables men to get comfortably and
creditably and profitably through life, to meet emergencies as they
rise, to know their way through the world, to use their faculties in all
circumstances to the best advantage. And for this purpose what is wanted
is, not the methods, but the results of science.
One science, and one only, is rationally taught in our schools at
present. I mean geography. And the example of geography is so eminently
useful for illustrating the difference I am trying to point out, that I
will venture to dwell upon it for a moment in passing. It is good for us
all to know that the world is round, without its being necessary for
every one of us to follow in detail the intricate reasoning by which
that result has been arrived at. It is good for us all to know the
position of New York and Rio and Calcutta on the map, without its being
necessary for us to understand, far less to work out for ourselves, the
observations and calculations which fixed their latitude and longitude.
Knowledge of the map is a good thing in itself, though it is a very
different thing indeed from the technical knowledge which enables a man
to make a chart of an unknown region, or to explore and survey it.
Furthermore, it is a form of knowledge far more generally useful. A fair
acquaintance with the results embodied in the atlas, in the gazetteer,
in Baedeker, and in Bradshaw, is much oftener useful to us on our way
through the world than a special acquaintance with the methods of
map-making. It would be absurd to say that because a man is not going to
be a Stanley or a Nansen, therefore it is no good for him to learn
geography. It would be absurd to say that unless he learned geography in
accordance with its methods instead of its results, he could have but a
smattering, and that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A little
knowledge of the position of New York is indeed a dangerous thing, if a
man uses it to navigate a Cunard vessel across the Atlantic. But the
absence of the smattering is a much more dangerous and fatal thing if
the man wishes to do business with the Argentine and the Transvaal, or
to enter into practical relations of any sort with anybody outside his
own parish. The results of geography are useful and valuable in
themselves, quite apart from the methods employed in obtaining them.
It is just the same with all the other sciences. There is nothing occult
or mysterious about them. No just cause or impediment exists why we
should insist on being ignorant of the orbits of the planets because we
cannot ourselves make the calculations for determining them; no reason
why we should insist on being ignorant of the classification of plants
and animals because we don't feel able ourselves to embark on anatomical
researches which would justify us in coming to original conclusions
about them. I know the mass of scientific opinion has always gone the
other way; but then scientific opinion means only the opinion of men of
science, who are themselves specialists, and who think most of the
education needed to make men specialists, not of the education needed to
fit them for the general exigencies and emergencies of life. We don't
want authorities on the Cucurbitaceæ, but well-informed citizens.
Professor Huxley is not our best guide in these matters, but Mr. Herbert
Spencer, who long ago, in his book on Education, sketched out a radical
programme of instruction in that knowledge which is of most worth, such
as no country, no college, no school in Europe has ever yet been bold
enough to put into practice.
What common sense really demands, then, is education in the main results
of all the sciences--a knowledge of what is known, not necessarily a
knowledge of each successive step by which men came to know it. At
present, of course, in all our schools in England there is no systematic
teaching of knowledge at all; what replaces it is a teaching of the
facts of language, and for the most part of useless facts, or even of
exploded fictions. Our public schools, especially (by which phrase we
never mean real public schools like the board schools at all, but merely
schools for the upper and the middle classes) are in their existing
stage primarily great gymnasiums--very good things, too, in their way,
against which I have not a word of blame; and, secondarily, places for
imparting a sham and imperfect knowledge of some few philological facts
about two extinct languages. Pupils get a smattering of Homer and
Cicero. That is literally all the equipment for life that the cleverest
and most industrious boys can ever take away from them. The sillier or
idler don't take away even that. As to the "mental training" argument,
so often trotted out, it is childish enough not to be worth answering.
Which is most practically useful to us in life--knowledge of Latin
grammar or knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in, physical,
social, moral? That is the question.
The truth is, schoolmastering in Britain has become a vast vested
interest in the hands of men who have nothing to teach us. They try to
bolster up their vicious system by such artificial arguments as the
"mental training" fallacy. Forced to admit the utter uselessness of the
pretended knowledge they impart, they fall back upon the plea of its
supposed occult value as intellectual discipline. They say in
effect:--"This sawdust we offer you contains no food, we know: but then
see how it strengthens the jaws to chew it!" Besides, look at our
results! The typical John Bull! pig-headed, ignorant, brutal. Are we
really such immense successes ourselves that we must needs perpetuate
the mould that warped us?
The one fatal charge brought against the public school system is that
"after all, it turns out English gentlemen!"
IV.
_THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS._
"Alas, how easily things go wrong!" says Dr. George MacDonald. And all
the world over, when things do go wrong, the natural and instinctive
desire of the human animal is--to find a scapegoat. When the great
French nation in the lump embarks its capital in a hopeless scheme for
cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and then finds out too
late that Nature has imposed insuperable barriers to its completion on
the projected scale--what does the great French nation do, in its
collective wisdom, but turn round at once to rend the directors? It
cries, "A Mazas!" just as in '71 it cried "Bazaine à la lanterne!" I
don't mean to say the directors don't deserve all they have got or ever
will get, and perhaps more also; I don't mean to deny corruption
extraordinary in many high places; as a rule the worst that anybody
alleges about anything is only a part of what might easily be alleged if
we were all in the secret. Which of us, indeed, would 'scape whipping?
But what I do mean is, that we should never have heard of Reinach or
Herz, of the corruption and peculation, at all if things had gone well.
It is the crash that brought them out. The nation wants a scapegoat.
"Ain't nobody to be whopped for this 'ere?" asked Mr. Sam Weller on a
critical occasion. The question embodies the universal impulse of
humanity.
Tracing the feeling back to its origin, it seems due to this: minds of
the lower order can never see anything go wrong without experiencing a
certain sense of resentment; and resentment, by its very nature, desires
to vent itself upon some living and sentient creature, by preference a
fellow human being. When the child, running too fast, falls and hurts
itself, it gets instantly angry. "Naughty ground to hurt baby!" says the
nurse: "Baby hit it and hurt it." And baby promptly hits it back, with
vicious little fist, feeling every desire to revenge itself. By-and-by,
when baby grows older and learns that the ground can't feel to speak of,
he wants to put the blame upon somebody else, in order to have an object
to expend his rage upon. "You pushed me down!" he says to his playmate,
and straightway proceeds to punch his playmate's head for it--not
because he really believes the playmate did it, but because he feels he
_must_ have some outlet for his resentment. When once resentment is
roused, it will expend its force on anything that turns up handy, as the
man who has quarrelled with his wife about a question of a bonnet, will
kick his dog for trying to follow him to the club as he leaves her.
The mob, enraged at the death of Cæsar, meets Cinna the poet in the
streets of Rome. "Your name, sir?" inquires the Third Citizen. "Truly,
my name is Cinna," says the unsuspecting author. "Tear him to pieces!"
cries the mob; "he's a conspirator!" "I am Cinna the poet," pleads the
unhappy man; "I am not Cinna the conspirator!" But the mob does not heed
such delicate distinctions at such a moment. "Tear him for his bad
verses!" it cries impartially. "Tear him for his bad verses!"
Whatever sort of misfortune falls upon persons of the lower order of
intelligence is always met in the same spirit. Especially is this the
case with the deaths of relatives. Fools who have lost a friend
invariably blame somebody for his fatal illness. To hear many people
talk, you would suppose they were unaware of the familiar proposition
that all men are mortal (including women); you might imagine they
thought an ordinary human constitution was calculated to survive nine
hundred and ninety-nine years unless some evil-disposed person or
persons took the trouble beforehand to waylay and destroy it. "My poor
father was eighty-seven when he died; and he would have been alive still
if it weren't for that nasty Mrs. Jones: she put him into a pair of damp
sheets." Or, "My husband would never have caught the cold that killed
him, if that horrid man Brown hadn't kept him waiting so long in the
carriage at the street corner." The doctor has to bear the brunt of most
such complaints; indeed, it is calculated by an eminent statistician
(who desires his name to remain unpublished) that eighty-three per cent.
of the deaths in Great Britain might easily have been averted if the
patient had only been treated in various distinct ways by all the
members of his family, and if that foolish Dr. Squills hadn't so grossly
mistaken and mistreated his malady.
The fact is, the death is regarded as a misfortune, and somebody must be
blamed for it. Heaven has provided scapegoats. The doctor and the
hostile female members of the family are always there--laid on, as it
were, for the express purpose.
With us in modern Europe, resentment in such cases seldom goes further
than vague verbal outbursts of temper. We accuse Mrs. Jones of
misdemeanours with damp sheets; but we don't get so far as to accuse her
of tricks with strychnine. In the Middle Ages, however, the pursuit of
the scapegoat ran a vast deal further. When any great one died--a Black
Prince or a Dauphin--it was always assumed on all hands that he must
have been poisoned. True, poisoning may then have been a trifle more
frequent; certainly the means of detecting it were far less advanced
than in the days of Tidy and Lauder Brunton. Still, people must often
have died natural deaths even in the Middle Ages--though nobody believed
it. All the world began to speculate what Jane Shore could have poisoned
them. A little earlier, again, it was not the poisoner that was looked
for, but his predecessor, the sorcerer. Whoever fell ill, somebody had
bewitched him. Were the cattle diseased? Then search for the evil eye.
Did the cows yield no milk? Some neighbour, doubtless, knew the reason
only too well, and could be forced to confess it by liberal use of the
thumb-screw and the ducking-stool. No misfortune was regarded as due to
natural causes; for in their philosophy there were no such things as
natural causes at all; whatever ill-luck came, somebody had contrived
it; so you had always your scapegoat ready to hand to punish. The
Athenians, indeed, kept a small collection of public scapegoats always
in stock, waiting to be sacrificed at a moment's notice.
More even than that. Go one step further back, and you will find that
man in his early stages has no conception of such a thing as natural
death in any form. He doesn't really know that the human organism is
wound up like a clock to run at best for so many years, or months, or
hours, and that even if nothing unexpected happens to cut short its
course prematurely, it can only run out its allotted period. Within his
own experience, almost all the deaths that occur are violent deaths, and
have been brought about by human agency or by the attacks of wild
beasts. There you have a cause with whose action and operation the
savage is personally familiar; and it is the only one he believes in.
Even old age is in his eyes no direct cause of death; for when his
relations grow old, he considerately clubs them, to put them out of
their misery. When, therefore, he sees his neighbour struck down before
his face by some invisible power, and writhing with pain as though
unseen snakes and tigers were rending him, what should he naturally
conclude save that demon or witch or wizard is at work? and if he cares
about the matter at all, what should he do save endeavour to find the
culprit out and inflict condign punishment? In savage states, whenever
anything untoward happens to the king or chief, it is the business of
the witch-finder to disclose the wrong-doer; and sooner or later, you
may be sure, "somebody gets whopped for it." Whopping in Dahomey means
wholesale decapitation.
Now, is it not a direct survival from this primitive state of mind that
entails upon us all the desire to find a scapegoat? Our ancestors really
believed there was always somebody to blame--man, witch, or spirit--if
only you could find him; and though we ourselves have mostly got beyond
that stage, yet the habit it engendered in our race remains ingrained in
the nervous system, so that none but a few of the naturally highest and
most civilised dispositions have really outgrown it. Most people still
think there is somebody to blame for every human misfortune. "Who fills
the butcher's shops with large blue flies?" asked the poet of the
Regency. He set it down to "the Corsican ogre." For the Tory Englishmen
of the present day it is Mr. Gladstone who is most often and most
popularly envisaged as the author of all evil. For the Pope, it is the
Freemasons. There are just a few men here and there in the world who can
see that when misfortunes come, circumstances, or nature, or (hardest of
all) we ourselves have brought them. The common human instinct is still
to get into a rage, and look round to discover whether there's any other
fellow standing about unobserved, whose head we can safely undertake to
punch for it.
"It's all the fault of those confounded paid agitators."
V.
_AMERICAN DUCHESSES._
Every American woman is by birth a duchess.
There, you see, I have taken you in. When you saw the heading, "American
Duchesses," you thought I was going to purvey some piquant scandal about
high-placed ladies; and you straightway began to read my essay. That
shows I rightly interpreted your human nature. There's a deal of human
nature flying about unrecognised. Yet when I said duchesses, I actually
meant it. For the American woman is the only real aristocrat now living
in America.
These remarks are forced upon me by a brilliant afternoon on the
Promenade des Anglais. All Nice is there, in its cosmopolitan butterfly
variety, flaunting itself in the sun in the very ugly dresses now in
fashion. I don't know why, but the mode of the moment consists in making
everything as exaggerated as possible, and sedulously hiding the natural
contours of the human figure. But let that pass; the day is too fine for
a man to be critical. The band is playing Mascagni's last in the Jardin
Public; the carriages are drawn up beside the palms and judas-trees that
fringe the Paillon; the _sous-officiers_ are strolling along the wall
with their red caps stuck jauntily just a trifle on one side, as though
to mow down nursemaids were the one legitimate occupation of the _brav'
militaire_. And among them all, proud, tall, disdainful, glide the
American duchesses, cold, critical, high-toned, yet ready to strike up,
should opportunity serve, appropriate acquaintance with their natural
equals, the dukes of Europe.
"And the American dukes?"--There aren't any. "But these ladies' husbands
and fathers and brothers?"--Oh, _they're_ business men, working hard for
the duchesses in Wall Street, or on 'Change in Chicago. And that's why I
say quite seriously the American woman is the only real aristocrat now
living in America. Everybody who has seen much of Americans must have
noticed for himself how really superior American women are, on the
average, to the men of their kind. I don't mean merely that they are
better dressed, and better groomed, and better got up, and better
mannered than their brothers. I mean that they have a real superiority
in the things worth having--the things that are more excellent--in
education, culture, knowledge, taste, good feeling. And the reason is
not far to seek. They represent the only leisured class in America. They
are the one set of people from Maine to California who have time to
read, to think, to travel, to look at good pictures, to hear good music,
to mix with society that can improve and elevate them. They have read
Daudet; they have seen the Vatican. The women thus form a natural
aristocracy--the only aristocracy the country possesses.
I am aware that in saying this I take my life in my hands. I shall be
prepared to defend myself from the infuriated Westerner with the usual
argument, which I shall carry about loaded in all its chambers in my
right-hand pocket. I am also aware that less infuriated Easterners,
choosing their own more familiar weapon, will inundate my leisure with
sardonic inquiries whether I don't consider Oliver Wendell Holmes or
Charles Eliot Norton (thus named in full) the equal in culture of the
average American woman. Well, I frankly admit these cases and thousands
like them; indeed I have had the good fortune to number among my
personal acquaintances many American gentlemen whose chivalrous breeding
would have been conspicuous (if you will believe it) even at Marlborough
House. I will also allow that in New York, in Boston, and less
abundantly in other big towns of America, men of leisure, men of
culture, and men of thought are to be found, as wide-minded and as
gentle-natured as this race of ours makes them. But that doesn't alter
the general fact that, taking them in the lump, American men stand a
step or two lower in the scale of humanity than American women. One need
hardly ask why. It is because the men are almost all immersed and
absorbed in business, while the women are fine ladies who stop at home,
and read, and see, and interest themselves widely in numberless
directions.
The consequence is that nowhere, as a rule, does the gulf between the
sexes yawn so wide as in America. One can often observe it in the
brothers and sisters of the same family. And it runs in the opposite
direction from the gulf in Europe. With us, as a rule, the men are
better educated, and more likely to have read and seen and thought
widely, than the women. In America, the men are generally so steeped in
affairs as to be materialised and encysted; they take for the most part
a hard-headed, solid-silver view of everything, and are but little
influenced by abstract conceptions. Their horizon is bounded by the rim
of the dollar. Nay, owing to the eager desire to get a good start by
beginning life early, their education itself is generally cut short at a
younger age than their sisters'; so that, even at the outset, the girls
have often a decided superiority in knowledge and culture. Amanda reads
Paul Bourget and John Oliver Hobbes; she has some slight tincture of
Latin, Greek, and German; while Cyrus knows nothing but English and
arithmetic, the quotations for prime pork and the state of the market
for Futures. Add to this that the women are more sensitive, more
delicate, more naturally refined, as well as unspoilt by the trading
spirit, and you get the real reasons for the marked and, in some ways,
unusual superiority of the American woman.
That, I think, in large part explains the fascination which American
women undoubtedly exercise over a considerable class of European men. In
the European man the American woman often recognises for the first time
the male of her species. Unaccustomed at home to as general a level of
culture and feeling as she finds among the educated gentlemen of Europe,
she likes their society and makes her preference felt by them. Now man
is a vain animal. You are a man yourself, and must recognise at once the
truth of the proposition. As soon as he sees a woman likes him, he
instantly returns the compliment with interest. In point of fact, he
usually falls in love with her. Of course I admit the large number of
concomitant circumstances which disturb the problem; I admit on the one
hand the tempting shekels of the Californian heiress, and on the other
hand the glamour and halo that still surround the British coronet.
Nevertheless, after making all deductions for these disturbing factors,
I submit there remains a residual phenomenon thus best interpreted. If
anybody denies it, I would ask him one question--how does it come that
so many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians marry American women, while
so few Englishwomen, French women, or Italian women marry American men?
Surely the American men have also the shekels; surely it is something
even in Oregon or Montana to have inspired an honourable passion in a
Lady Elizabeth or a dowager countess. I think the true explanation is
that our men are attracted by American women, but our women are not
equally attracted by American men, and that the quality of the articles
has something to do with it.
The American duchess, I take it, comes over to Europe, and desires
incontinently to drag the European duke at the wheels of her chariot.
And the European duke is fascinated in turn, partly by this very fact,
partly by the undeniable freshness, brightness, and delicate culture of
the American woman. For there is no burking the truth that in many
respects the American woman carries about her a peculiar charm ungranted
as yet to her European sisters. It is the charm of freedom, of ease, of
a certain external and skin-deep emancipation--an emancipation which
goes but a little way down, yet adds a quaint and piquant grace of
manner. What she conspicuously lacks, on the other hand, is essential
femininity; by which I don't mean womanliness--of that she has enough
and to spare--but the wholesome physical and instinctive qualities which
go to make up a sound and well-equipped wife and mother. The lack of
these underlying muliebral qualities more than counterbalances to not a
few Europeans the undoubted vivacity, originality, and freshness of the
American woman. She is a dainty bit of porcelain, unsuited for use; a
delicate exotic blossom, for drawing-room decoration, where many would
prefer robust fruit-bearing faculties.
I dropped into the Opera House here at Nice the other night, and found
they were playing "Carmen"--which is always interesting. Well, you may
perhaps remember that when that creature of passion, the gipsy heroine,
wishes to gain or retain a man's affections, she throws a rose at him,
and then he cannot resist her. That is Mérimée's symbolism. Art is full
of these sacrifices of realism to reticence. Outside the opera, it is
not with roses that women enslave us. But the American duchess relies
entirely upon the use of the rose; and that is just where she fails to
interest so many of us in Europe.
And now I think it's almost time for me to go and hunt up the material
arguments for that rusty six-shooter.
VI.
_IS ENGLAND PLAYED OUT?_
Britain is now the centre of civilisation. Will it always be so? Is our
commercial supremacy decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the period
of inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might a
nation go on being great for ever? If so, are _we_ that nation? If not,
have we yet arrived at the moment when retrogression becomes a foregone
conclusion? These are momentous questions. Dare I try, under the mimosas
on the terrace, to resolve them?