a martyr in the cause of truth, and not, as is often the case, of some
debasing and degrading superstition. But nobody has a right to demand of
you that you should be a martyr. And some people have often a right to
demand that you should resolutely refuse the martyr's crown on the
ground that you have contracted prior obligations, inconsistent with the
purely personal luxury of martyrdom. 'Tis a luxury for a few. It befits
only the bachelor, the unattached, and the economically spareworthy.
"These be pessimistic pronouncements," you say. Well, no, not exactly.
For, after all, we must never shut our eyes to the actual; and in the
world as it is, meliorism, not optimism, is the true opposite of
pessimism. Optimist and pessimist are both alike in a sense, seeing they
are both conservative; they sit down contented--the first with the smug
contentment that says "All's well; I have enough; why this fuss about
others?" the second with the contentment of blank despair that says,
"All's hopeless; all's wrong; why try uselessly to mend it?" The
meliorist attitude, on the contrary, is rather to say, "Much is wrong;
much painful; what can we do to improve it?" And from this point of view
there is something we can all do to make martyrdom less inevitable in
the end, for the man who has a thought, a discovery, an idea, to tell
us. Such men are rare, and their thought, when they produce it, is sure
to be unpalatable. For, if it were otherwise, it would be thought of our
own type--familiar, banal, commonplace, unoriginal. It would encounter
no resistance, as it thrilled on its way through our brain, from
established errors. What the genius and the prophet are there for is
just that--to make us listen to unwelcome truths, to compel us to hear,
to drive awkward facts straight home with sledge-hammer force to the
unwilling hearts and brains of us. Not what _you_ want to hear, or what
_I_ want to hear, is good and useful for us; but what we _don't_ want to
hear, what we can't bear to think, what we hate to believe, what we
fight tooth and nail against. The man who makes us listen to _that_ is
the seer and the prophet; he comes upon us like Shelley, or Whitman, or
Ibsen, and plumps down horrid truths that half surprise, half disgust
us. He shakes us out of our lethargy. To such give ear, though they say
what shocks you. Weigh well their hateful ideas. Avoid the vulgar vice
of sneering and carping at them. Learn to examine their nude thought
without shrinking, and examine it all the more carefully when it most
repels you. Naked verity is an acquired taste; it is never beautiful at
first sight to the unaccustomed vision. Remember that no question is
finally settled; that no question is wholly above consideration; that
what you cherish as holiest is most probably wrong; and that in social
and moral matters especially (where men have been longest ruled by pure
superstitions) new and startling forms of thought have the highest _a
priori_ probability in their favour. Dismiss your idols. Give every
opinion its fair chance of success--especially when it seems to you both
wicked and ridiculous, recollecting that it is better to let five
hundred crude guesses run loose about the world unclad, than to crush
one fledgling truth in its callow condition. To the Greeks, foolishness:
to the Jews, a stumbling-block. If you can't be one of the prophets
yourself, you can at least abstain from helping to stone them.
Dear me! These reflections to-day are anything but post-prandial. The
_gnocchi_ and the olives must certainly have disagreed with me. But
perhaps it may some of it be "wrote sarcastic." I have heard tell there
is a thing called irony.
IX.
_THE ROMANCE OF THE CLASH OF RACES._
The world has expanded faster in the last thirty years than in any
previous age since "the spacious days of great Elizabeth." And with its
expansion, of course, our ideas have widened. I believe Europe is now in
the midst of just such an outburst of thought and invention as that
which followed the discovery of America, and of the new route to India
by the Cape of Good Hope. But I don't want to insist too strongly upon
that point, because I know a great many of my contemporaries are deeply
hurt by the base and spiteful suggestion that they and their fellows are
really quite as good as any fish that ever came out of the sea before
them. I only desire now to call attention for a moment to one curious
result entailed by this widening of the world upon our literary
productivity--a result which, though obvious enough when one comes to
look at it, seems to me hitherto to have strangely escaped deliberate
notice.
In one word, the point of which I speak is the comparative
cosmopolitanisation of letters, and especially the introduction into
literary art of the phenomena due to the Clash of Races.
This Clash itself is the one picturesque and novel feature of our
otherwise somewhat prosaic and machine-made epoch; and, therefore, it
has been eagerly seized upon, with one accord, by all the chief
purveyors of recent literature, and especially of fiction. They have
espied in it, with technical instinct, the best chance for obtaining
that fresh interest which is essential to the success of a work of art.
We were all getting somewhat tired, it must be confessed, of the old
places and the old themes. The insipid loves of Anthony Trollope's
blameless young people were beginning to pall upon us. The jaded palate
of the Anglo-Celtic race pined for something hot, with a touch of fresh
spice in it. It demanded curried fowl and Jamaica peppers. Hence, on the
one hand, the sudden vogue of the novelists of the younger
countries--Tolstoi and Tourgenieff, Ibsen and Bjornson, Mary Wilkins and
Howells--who transplanted us at once into fresh scenes, new people:
hence, on the other hand, the tendency on the part of our own latest
writers--the Stevensons, the Hall Caines, the Marion Crawfords, the
Rider Haggards--to go far afield among the lower races or the later
civilisations for the themes of their romances.
Alas, alas, I see breakers before me! Must I pause for a moment in the
flowing current of a paragraph to explain, as in an aside, that I
include Marion Crawford of set purpose among "our own" late writers,
while I count Mary Wilkins and Howells as Transatlantic aliens?
Experience teaches me that I must; else shall I have that annoying
animalcule, the microscopic critic, coming down upon me in print with
his petty objection that "Mr. Crawford is an American." Go to, oh, blind
one! And Whistler also, I suppose, and Sargent, and, perhaps, Ashmead
Bartlett! What! have you read "Sarracinesca" and not learnt that its
author is European to the core? 'Twas for such as you that the Irishman
invented his brilliant retort: "And if I was born in a stable would I be
a horse?"
Not merely, however, do our younger writers go into strange and novel
places for the scenes of their stories; the important point to notice in
the present connection is that, consciously or unconsciously to
themselves, they have perceived the mighty influence of this Clash of
Races, and have chosen the relations of the civilised people with their
savage allies, or enemies, or subjects, as the chief theme of their
handicraft. 'Tis a momentous theme, for it encloses in itself half the
problems of the future. The old battles are now well-nigh fought out;
but new ones are looming ahead for us. The cosmopolitanisation of the
world is introducing into our midst strange elements of discord. A
conglomerate of unwelded ethnical elements usurps the stage of history.
America and South Africa have already their negro question; California
and Australia have already their Chinese question; Russia is fast
getting her Asiatic, her Mahommedan question. Even France, the most
narrowly European in interest of European countries, has yet her
Algeria, her Tunis, her Tonquin. Spain has Cuba and the Philippines.
Holland has Java. Germany is burdening herself with the unborn troubles
of a Hinterland. And as for England, she staggers on still under the
increasing load of India, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, the West
Indies, Fiji, New Guinea, North Borneo--all of them rife with endless
race-questions, all pregnant with difficulties.
Who can be surprised that amid this seething turmoil of colours,
instincts, creeds, and languages, art should have fastened upon the
race-problems as her great theme for the moment? And she has fastened
upon them everywhere. France herself has not been able to avoid the
contagion. Pierre Loti is the most typical French representative of this
vagabond spirit; and the question of the peoples naturally envisages
itself to his mind in true Gallic fashion in the "Mariage de Loti" and
in "Madame Chrysanthème." He sees it through a halo of vague sexual
sentimentalism. In England, it was Rider Haggard from the Cape who first
set the mode visibly; and nothing is more noteworthy in all his work
than the fact that the interest mainly centres in the picturesque
juxtaposition and contrast of civilisation and savagery. Once the cue
was given, what more natural than that young Rudyard Kipling, fresh home
from India, brimming over with genius and with knowledge of two
concurrent streams of life that flow on side by side yet never mingle,
should take up his parable in due course, and storm us all by assault
with his light field artillery? Then Robert Louis Stevenson, born a
wandering Scot, with roving Scandinavian and fiery Celtic blood in his
veins, must needs settle down, like a Viking that he is, in far Samoa,
there to charm and thrill us by turns with the romance of Polynesia. The
example was catching. Almost without knowing it, other writers have
turned for subjects to similar fields. "Dr. Isaacs," "Paul Patoff," "By
Proxy," were upon us. Even Hall Caine himself, in some ways a most
insular type of genius, was forced in "The Scapegoat" to carry us off
from Cumberland and Man to Morocco. Sir Edwin Arnold inflicts upon us
the tragedies of Japan. I have been watching this tendency long myself
with the interested eye of a dealer engaged in the trade, and therefore
anxious to keep pace with every changing breath of popular favour: and I
notice a constant increase from year to year in the number of short
stories in magazines and newspapers dealing with the romance of the
inferior races. I notice, also, that such stories are increasingly
successful with the public. This shows that, whether the public knows it
or not itself, the question of race is interesting it more and more. It
is gradually growing to understand the magnitude of the change that has
come over civilisation by the inclusion of Asia, Africa, and Australasia
within its circle. Even the Queen is learning Hindustani.
There is a famous passage in Green's "Short History of the English
People" which describes in part that strange outburst of national
expansion under Elizabeth, when Raleigh, Drake, and Frobisher scoured
the distant seas, and when at home "England became a nest of singing
birds," with Shakespeare, Spenser, Fletcher, and Marlow. "The old sober
notions of thrift," says the picturesque historian, "melted before the
strange revolutions of fortune wrought by the New World. Gallants
gambled away a fortune at a sitting, and sailed off to make a fresh one
in the Indies." (Read rather to-day at Kimberley, Johannesburg,
Vancouver.) "Visions of galleons loaded to the brim with pearls and
diamonds and ingots of silver, dreams of El Dorados where all was of
gold, threw a haze of prodigality and profusion over the imagination of
the meanest seaman. The wonders, too, of the New World kindled a burst
of extravagant fancy in the Old. The strange medley of past and present
which distinguishes its masques and feastings only reflected the medley
of men's thoughts.... A 'wild man' from the Indies chanted the Queen's
praises at Kenilworth, and Echo answered him. Elizabeth turned from the
greetings of sibyls and giants to deliver the enchanted lady from her
tyrant, 'Sans Pitie.' Shepherdesses welcomed her with carols of the
spring, while Ceres and Bacchus poured their corn and grapes at her
feet." Oh, gilded youth of the Gaiety, _mutato nomine de te Fabula
narratur_. Yours, yours is this glory!
For our own age, too, is a second Elizabethan. It blossoms out daily
into such flowers of fancy as never bloomed before, save then, on
British soil. When men tell you nowadays we have "no great writers
left," believe not the silly parrot cry. Nay, rather, laugh it down for
them. We move in the midst of one of the mightiest epochs earth has ever
seen, an epoch which will live in history hereafter side by side with
the Athens of Pericles, the Rome of Augustus, the Florence of Lorenzo,
the England of Elizabeth. Don't throw away your birthright by ignoring
the fact. Live up to your privileges. Gaze around you and know. Be a
conscious partaker in one of the great ages of humanity.
X.
_THE MONOPOLIST INSTINCTS._
In the first of these after-dinner _causeries_ I ventured humbly to
remark that Patriotism was a vulgar vice of which I had never been
guilty. That innocent indiscretion of mine aroused at the moment some
unfavourable comment. I confess I was sorry for it. But I passed it by
at the time, lest I should speak too hastily and lose my temper. I recur
to the subject now, at the hour of the cigarette, when man can discourse
most genially of his bitterest enemy. And Monopoly is mine. Its very
name is hateful.
I don't often say what I think. At least, not much of it. I don't often
get the chance. And, besides, being a timid and a modest man, I'm afraid
to. But just this once, I'm going to "try it on." Object to my opinions
as you will. But still, let me express them. Strike--but hear me!
Has it ever occurred to you that one object of reading is to learn
things you never thought of before, and would never think of now, unless
you were told them?
Patriotism is one of the Monopolist Instincts. And the Monopolist
Instincts are the greatest enemies of the social life in humanity. They
are what we have got in the end to outlive. The test of a man's place in
the scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They are surviving
relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape and tiger die. We
must begin to be human.
I will take Patriotism first, because it is the most specious of them
all, and has still a self-satisfied way of masquerading as a virtue. But
after all what is Patriotism? "My country, right or wrong; and just
because it is _my_ country." It is nothing more than a wider form of
selfishness. Often enough, indeed, it is even a narrow one. It means,
"My business interests against the business interests of other people;
and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support them." At other
times it is pure Jingoism. It means, "_My_ country against other
countries! _My_ army and navy against other fighters! _My_ right to
annex unoccupied territory over the equal right of all other people!
_My_ power to oppress all weaker nationalities, all inferior races!" It
_never_ means anything good. For if a cause is just, like Ireland's, or
once Italy's, then 'tis the good man's duty to espouse it with warmth,
be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then 'tis the good
man's duty to oppose it tooth and nail, irrespective of your
"Patriotism." True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that
justice should be done by the particular State of which he happens
himself to be a member than by any other, because he is partly
responsible for the corporate action; but then, people who feel deeply
this joint moral responsibility of all the citizens are not praised as
patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country should
strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, juster
than other countries around it--the only kind of Patriotism worth a
brass farthing in a righteous man's eyes--is accounted by most men both
wicked and foolish.
Patriotism, then, is the collective or national form of the Monopolist
Instincts. And like all those Instincts, it is a relic of savagery,
which the Man of the Future is now engaged in out-living.
Property is the next form. That, on the very face of it, is a viler and
more sordid one. For Patriotism at least can lay claim to some
expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops
dead short at the narrowest limits. It is not "Us against the world!"
but "Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the final result of the
industrial war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair
face of our England with its anti-social notice-boards, "Trespassers
will be prosecuted!" It says, in effect, "This is my land. God made it;
but I have acquired it and tabooed it. The grass on it grows green; but
only for me. The mountains rise beautiful; no foot of man, save mine and
my gamekeepers', shall tread them. The waterfalls gleam fresh and cool
in the glen: avaunt there, you non-possessors; _you_ shall never see
them! All this is my own. And I choose to monopolise it."
Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he says, in
despite of his own scripture; "I will join railway to railway. I will
juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production of
wealth that I can lay hold of; and I will use them for myself against
the producer and the consumer. I will enrich myself by 'corners' on the
necessaries of life; I will make food dear for the poor, that I myself
may roll in needless luxury. I will monopolise whatever I can seize, and
the people may eat straw." That temper, too, humanity must outlive. And
those who can't outlive it of themselves, or be warned in time, must be
taught by stern lessons that their race has outstripped them.
As for slavery, 'tis now gone. That was the vilest of them all. It was
the naked assertion of the Monopolist platform: "You live, not for
yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your life entirely,
and use you as my chattel." It died at last of the moral indignation of
humanity. It died when a Southern court of so-called justice formulated
in plain words the underlying principle of its hateful creed: "A black
man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." That finally
finished it. We no longer allow every man to "wallop his own nigger."
And though the last relics of it die hard in Queensland, South Africa,
Demerara, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that one
Monopolist Instinct out of the group is pretty well bred out of us.
Except as regards women! There, it lingers still. The Man says even now
to himself:--"This woman is mine. If she ventures to have a heart or a
will of her own, woe betide her! I have tabooed her for life; let any
other man touch her, let her look at any other man--and--knife,
revolver, or law court, they shall both of them answer for it!" There
you have in all its natural ugliness another Monopolist Instinct--the
deepest-seated of all, the vilest, the most barbaric. She is not yours:
she is her own: unhand her! The Turk takes his offending slave, sews her
up in a sack, and flings her into the Bosphorus. The Christian
Englishman drags her shame before an open court, and divorces her with
contumely. Her shame, I say, in the common phrase, because though to me
it is no shame that any human being should follow the dictates of his or
her own heart, it is a shame to the woman in the eyes of the world, and
a life of disgrace she must live thenceforward. All this is Monopoly and
essentially slavery. As man lives down the Ape and Tiger stage, he will
learn to say, rather: "Be mine while you can; but the day you cease to
feel you can be mine willingly, don't disgrace your own body by yielding
it up where your soul feels loathing; don't consent to be the mother of
children by a father you despise or dislike or are tired of. Let us kiss
and part. Go where you will; and my good will go with you!" Till the man
can say that with a sincere heart, why, to borrow a phrase from George
Meredith, he may have passed Seraglio Point, but he hasn't rounded Cape
Turk yet.
You find that a hard saying, do you? You kick against freedom for wife
or daughter? Well, yes, no doubt; you are still a Monopolist. But,
believe me, the earnest and solemn expression of a profound belief never
yet did harm to any one. I look forward to the time when women shall be
as free in every way as men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up;
not, as some would have us think, by enslaving the men, but by
elevating, emancipating, unshackling the women.
There is a charming little ditty in Louis Stevenson's "Child's Garden of
Verse," which always seems to me to sum up admirably the Monopolist
attitude. Here it is. Look well at it:--
"When I am grown to man's estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys,
Not to meddle with _my_ toys."
That is the way of the Monopolist. It catches him in the very act. He
says to all the world: "Hands off! My property! Don't walk on my grass!
Don't trespass in my park! Beware of my gunboats! No trifling with my
women! I am the king of the castle. You meddle with me at your peril."
"Ours!" not "Mine!" is the watchword of the future.
XI.
"_MERE AMATEURS._"
"He was a mere amateur; but still, he did some good work in science."
Increasingly of late years I have heard these condescending words
uttered, in the fatherland of Bacon, of Newton, of Darwin, when some
Bates or Spottiswoode has been gathered to his fathers. It was not so
once. Time was when all English science was the work of amateurs--and
very well indeed the amateurs did it. I don't think anybody who does me
the honour to cognise my humble individuality at all will ever be likely
to mistake me for a _laudator temporis acti_. On the contrary, so far as
I can see, the past seems generally to have been such a distinct failure
all along the line that the one lesson we have to learn from it is, to
go and do otherwise. I am one on that point with Shelley and Rousseau.
But it does not follow, because most old things are bad, that all new
things and rising things are necessarily and indisputably in their own
nature excellent. Novelties, too, may be retrograde. And even our
great-grandfathers occasionally blundered upon something good in which
we should do well to imitate them. The amateurishness of old English
science was one of these good things now in course of abolition by the
fashionable process of Germanisation.
Don't imagine it was only for France that 1870 was fatal. The sad
successes of that deadly year sent a wave of triumphant Teutonism over
the face of Europe.
I suppose it is natural to man to worship success; but ever since 1870
it is certainly the fact that if you wish to gain respect and
consideration for any proposed change of system you must say, "They do
it so in Germany." In education and science this is especially the case.
Pedants always admire pedants. And Germany having shown herself to be
easily first of European States in her pedant-manufacturing machinery,
all the assembled dominies of all the rest of the world exclaimed with
one voice, "Go to! Let us Germanise our educational system!"