VULGARITY

If the present age were less of a hypocrite than it is, probably its

conscience would compel it to acknowledge that vulgarity is excessively

common in it; more common than in any preceding time, despite its very

bountiful assumptions of good taste and generalised education.

Vulgarity is almost a modern vice; it is doubtful whether classic ages

knew it at all, except in that sense in which it must be said that even

Socrates was vulgar, _i.e._, inquisitiveness, and in that other sense of

love of display to which the tailless dog of Alkibiades was a mournful

victim. We are aware that Alkibiades said he cut off his dog’s tail and

ears to give the Athenians something to talk of, that they might not

gossip about what else he was doing. But though gossip was no doubt rife

in Athens, still, vulgarity in its worst sense, that is, in the struggle

to seem what the struggler is not, could have had no existence in times

when every man’s place was marked out for him, and the lines of

demarcation could not be overstepped. Vulgarity began when the freedman

began to give himself airs, and strut and talk as though he had been a

porphyrogenitus; and this pretension was only possible in a decadence.

There may be a vast vulgarity of soul with an admirable polish of

manners, and there may be a vast vulgarity of manner with a generous

delicacy of soul. But, in this life, we are usually compelled to go by

appearances, and we can seldom see beyond them, except in the cases of

those few dear to, and intimate with us. We must be pardoned if we judge

by the externals which are palpable to us and do not divine the virtues

hidden beneath them.

An essayist has recently defined good manners as courtesy and

truthfulness. Now this is simply nonsense. A person may be full of

kindly courtesies, and never utter the shadow of an untruth, and yet he

may have red-hot hands, a strident voice, an insupportable manner,

dropped aspirates, and a horribly gross joviality, which make him the

vulgarest of the vulgar. It is often said that a perfect Christian is a

perfect gentleman, but this also is a very doubtful postulate. The good

Christian may ‘love his neighbour as himself,’ and yet he may offend his

ear with a cockney accent and sit down to his table with unwashed hands.

‘Manners make the man,’ is an old copy-book adage, and is not quiet true

either: but it is certain that, without good manners, the virtues of a

saint may be more offensive, by far, to society than the vices of a

sinner. It is a mistake to confuse moral qualities with the social

qualities which come from culture and from breeding.

I have said that Socrates must have been in a certain degree vulgar,

because he was so abominably inquisitive. For surely all interrogation

is vulgar? When strangers visit us, we can at once tell whether they are

ill-bred or high-bred persons by the mere fact of whether they do, or do

not, ask us questions. Even in intimacy, much interrogation is a

vulgarity; it may be taken for granted that your friend will tell you

what he wishes you to know. Here and there when a question seems

necessary, if silence would imply coldness and indifference, then must

it be put with the utmost delicacy and without any kind of semblance of

its being considered a demand which must be answered. All interrogation

for purposes of curiosity is vulgar, curiosity itself being so vulgar;

and even the plea of friendship or of love cannot be pleaded in

extenuation of it. But if love and friendship be pardoned their

inquisitiveness, the anxiety of the general public to have their

curiosity satisfied as to the habits, ways and scandals of those who are

conspicuous in any way, is mere vulgar intrusiveness, which the ‘society

newspapers,’ as they are called, do, in all countries, feed to a most

pernicious degree. Private life has no longer any door that it can shut

and bolt against the intrusion of the crowd. Whether a royal prince has

quarrelled with his wife, or a country mayoress has quarelled with a

house-maid, the press, large or small, metropolitan or provincial,

serves up the story to the rapacious curiosity of the world-wide, or the

merely local public. This intrusion on personal and wholly private

matters is an evil which increases every day; it is a twofold evil, for

it is alike a curse to those whose privacy it poisons, and a curse to

those whose debased appetites it feeds. It would be wholly impossible,

in an age which was not vulgar, for those journals which live on

personalities to find a public. They are created by the greed of the

multitude which calls for them. It is useless to blame the proprietors

and editors who live on them; the true culprits are the readers—the

legions of readers—who relish and patronise them, and without whose

support such carrion flies could not live out a summer.

‘It is so easy to talk about people’ is the excuse constantly made by

those who are reproved for gossiping about others who are not even,

perhaps, their personal acquaintances. Yes, it is very easy; the most

mindless creature can do it; the asp, be he ever so small, can sting the

hero, and perchance can slay him; but gossip of a malicious kind is

intensely vulgar, and to none but the vulgar should it be welcome, even

if their vulgarity be such as is hidden under a cloak of good manners.

It is true that there is a sort of spurious wit which springs out of

calumny, and which is _malgré nous_ too often diverting to the best of

us, and this sort of personality has a kind of contagious attraction

which is apt to grow even on those who loathe it, much as absinthe does.

But it is none the less vulgar, and vulgarises the mind which admits its

charm, as absinthe slowly eats up the vitality and the digestive powers

of those who yield to its attraction. Were there no vulgarity, it may be

said that there would be no scandal; for scandal is born of that marked

desire to think ill of others, and that restless inquisitiveness into

affairs that do not concern us, which is pre-eminently vulgar. When we

talk of the follies of our friends, or the backslidings of our

acquaintances, in a duchess’s boudoir, we are every whit as vulgar as

the fishwives or the village dames jabbering of the sins of Jack and

Jill in any ale-house. The roots of the vulgarity are the

same—inquisitiveness and idleness. All personalities are vulgar; and

whether personalities are used as the base weapons to turn an argument,

or as the equally base bait wherewith to make the fortunes of a

newspaper, they are alike offensive and unpardonable. The best

characteristic of the best society would be that they should be

absolutely forbidden in it.

Another reason why the present age is more vulgar than any preceding it,

may also be found in the fact that, in it pretension is infinitely more

abundant, because infinitely more successful than it ever was before. An

autocratic aristocracy, or a perfect equality, would equally make

pretension impossible. But, at the present time, aristocracy is without

power, and equality has no existence outside the dreams of Utopians. The

result is, that the whole vast mass of humanity, uncontrolled, can

struggle, and push, and strive, and sweat, and exhaust itself, to appear

something that it is not, and all repose and calm and dignity, which are

the foes of vulgarity, are destroyed.

Essayists have often attempted to define high breeding; but it remains

indefinable. Its incomparable charm, its perfect ease, its dignity which

is never asserted, yet which the most obtuse can always feel is in

reserve, its very manner of performing all the trifling acts of social

usage and obligation, are beyond definition. They are too delicate and

too subtle for the harshness of classification. The courtier of the old

story who, when told by Louis Quatorze to go first, went first without

protest, was a high-bred gentleman. Charles the First, when he kept his

patience and his peace under the insults of his trial at Westminster,

was one also. Mme. du Barry screams and sobs at the foot of the

guillotine; Marie Antoinette is calm.

True, I once knew a perfectly well-bred person who yet could neither

read nor write. I can see her now in her little cottage in the

Derbyshire woods, on the brown, flashing water of the Derwent River

(Darron, as the people of Derbyshire call it), a fair, neat, stout, old

woman with a round face and a clean mob cap. She had been a factory girl

in her youth (indeed, all her womanhood had worked at the cotton mill on

the river), and now was too old to do anything except to keep her

one-roomed cottage, with its tall lancet windows, its peaked red roof,

and its sweet-smelling garden, with its high elder hedge, as neat and

fresh and clean as human hands could make them. Dear old Mary! with her

racy, Chaucerian English, and her happy, cheerful temper, and her silver

spectacles, which some of the ‘gentry’ had given her, and her big Bible

on the little round table, and the black kettle boiling in the wide

fireplace, and her casements wide open to the nodding moss-roses and the

sweet-brier boughs! Dear old Mary! she was a bit of Shakespeare’s

England, of Milton’s England, of Spenser’s England, and the memory of

her, and of her cottage by the brown, bright river often comes back to

me across the width of years. She was a perfectly well-bred person; she

made one welcome to her little home with simple, perfect courtesy,

without flutter, or fuss, or any effort of any sort; she had neither

envy nor servility; grateful for all kindness, she never either abused

the ‘gentry’ or flattered them; and her admirable manner never varied to

the peddler at her door or to the squire of her village; would never

have varied, I am sure, if the queen of her country had crossed her

door-step. For she had the repose of contentment, of simplicity, and of

that self-respect which can never exist where envy and effort are. She

could neither read nor write; she scrubbed and washed and worked for

herself; she had never left that one little green nook of Derbyshire, or

seen other roads than the steep shady highway which went up to the pine

woods behind her house; but she was a perfectly well-bred woman, born of

a time calmer, broader, wiser, more generous than ours.

A few miles off in the valley, where she never by any chance went, the

excursion trains used to vomit forth, at Easter and in Whitsun week,

throngs of the mill hands of the period, cads and their flames, tawdry,

blowzy, noisy, drunken; the women with dress that aped ‘the fashion,’

and pyramids of artificial flowers on their heads; the men as grotesque

and hideous in their own way; tearing through woods and fields like

swarms of devastating locusts, and dragging the fern and hawthorn boughs

they had torn down in the dust, ending the lovely spring day in

pot-houses, drinking gin and bitters, or heavy ales by the quart, and

tumbling pell-mell into the night train, roaring music-hall choruses;

sodden, tipsy, yelling, loathsome creatures, such as make the monkey

look a king, and the newt seem an angel beside humanity—exact semblance

and emblem of the vulgarity of the age.

Far away from those green hills and vales of Derbyshire I pass to-day in

Tuscany a little wine-house built this year; it has been run up in a few

months by a speculative builder; it has its name and purpose gaudily

sprawling in letters two feet long across its front; it has bright

pistachio shutters and a slate roof with no eaves; it has a dusty

gravelled space in front of it; it looks tawdry, stingy, pretentious,

meagre, squalid, fine, all in one. A little way off it is another

wine-house, built somewhere about the sixteenth century; it is made of

solid grey stone; it has a roof of brown tiles, with overhanging eaves

like a broad-leafed hat drawn down to shade a modest countenance; it has

deep arched windows, with some carved stone around and above them; it

has an outside stairway in stone and some ivy creeping about it; it has

grass before it and some cherry and peach trees; the only sign of its

calling is the bough hung above the doorway. The two wine-houses are,

methinks, most apt examples of the sobriety and beauty which our

forefathers put into the humblest things of life and the flimsy

tawdriness and unendurable hideousness which the present age displays in

all it produces. I have not a doubt that the one under the cherry tree,

with its bough for a sign, and its deep casements, and its clean, aged

look, will be soon deserted by the majority of the carters and fruit

growers and river fishermen who pass this way, in favour of its vulgar

rival, where I am quite sure the wines will be watered tenfold and the

artichokes fried in rancid oil; its patrons will eat and drink ill, but

they will go to the new one, I doubt not, all of them, except a few old

men, who will cling to the habit of their youth. Very possibly those who

own the old one will feel compelled to adapt themselves to the progress

of the age; will cut the eaves off their roof, hew down their fruit

trees, whitewash their grey stone, and turn their fine old windows into

glass doors with pistachio blinds—and still it will not equal its rival

in the eyes of the carters and fishers and gardeners, since it was not

made yesterday! Neither its owners nor its customers can scarcely be

expected to be wiser than are all the municipal counsellors of Europe.

Perfect simplicity is the antithesis of vulgarity, and simplicity is the

quality which modern life is most calculated to destroy. The whole

tendency of modern education is to create an intense self-consciousness;

and whoever is self-conscious has lost the charm of simplicity, and has

already become vulgar in a manner. The most high-bred persons are those

in whom we find a perfect naturalness, an entire absence of

self-consciousness. The whole influence of modern education is to

concentrate the mind of the child on itself; as it grows up this egoism

becomes confirmed; you have at once an individual both self-absorbed and

affected, both hard towards others and vain of itself.

When pretension was less possible, vulgarity was less visible, because

its chief root did not exist. When the French nobility, in the time of

Louis Quatorze, began to _engraisser leurs terres_ with the ill-acquired

fortunes of farmer-generals’ daughters, their manners began to

deteriorate and their courtesy began to be no more than an empty shell

filled with rottenness. They were not yet vulgar in their manners, but

vulgarity had begun to taint their minds and their race, and their

_mésalliances_ did not have the power to save them from the scaffold.

Cowardice is always vulgar, and the present age is pre-eminently

cowardly; full of egotistic nervousness and unconcealed fear of all

those physical dangers to which science has told all men they are

liable. Pasteur is its god, and the microbe its Mephistopheles. A French

writer defined it, the other day, as the age of the ‘infinitely little.’

It might be also defined as the age of absorbing self-consciousness. It

is eternally placing itself in innumerable attitudes to pose before the

camera of a photographer; the old, the ugly, the obscure, the deformed,

delight in multiplying their likenesses on cardboard, even more than do

the young, the beautiful, the famous, and the well-made. All the

resources of invention are taxed to reproduce effigies of persons who

have not a good feature in their faces or a correct line in their limbs,

and all the resources of science are solicited to keep breath in the

bodies of people who had better never have lived at all. Cymon grins

before a camera as self-satisfied as though he were Adonis, and Demos is

told that he is the one sacred offspring of the gods to which all

creation is freely sacrificed. Out of this self-worship springs a

hideous, a blatant vulgarity, which is more likely to increase than to

diminish. Exaggeration of our own value is one of the most offensive of

all the forms of vulgarity, and science has much to answer for in its

present pompous and sycophantic attitude before the importance and the

excellence of humanity. Humanity gets drunk on such intoxicating

flattery of itself.

Remark how even what is called the ‘best’ society sins as these do who

forsake the grey stone house for the slate-roofed and stuccoed one.

There has been an endless outcry about good taste in the last score of

years. But where is it to be really found? Not in the crowds who rush

all over the world by steam, nor in those who dwell in modern cities.

Good taste cannot be gregarious. Good taste cannot endure a square box

to live in, however the square box may be coloured. That the modern poet

can reside in Westbourne Grove, and the modern painter in Cromwell Road,

is enough to set the hair of all the Muses on end. If Carlyle had lived

at Concord, like Emerson, how much calmer and wiser thought, how much

less jaundiced raving, would the world have had from him! That is to

say, if he would have had the soul to feel the green and fragrant

tranquillity of Concord, which is doubtful. Cities may do good to the

minds of men by the friction of opinions found in them, but life spent

only in cities under their present conditions is debasing and

pernicious, for those conditions are essentially and hopelessly vulgar.

If the soul of Shelley in the body of Sardanapalus, with the riches of

Crœsus, could now dwell in Paris, London, or New York, it is doubtful

whether he would be able to resist the pressure of the social forces

round him and strike out any new forms of pleasure or festivity. All

that he would be able to do would, perhaps, be to give better dinners

than other people. The forms of entertainment in them are monotonous,

and trivial where they are not coarse. When a man colossally rich, and

therefore boundlessly powerful, appears, what new thing does he

originate? What fresh grace does he add to society; what imagination

does he bring into his efforts to amuse the world? None; absolutely

none. He may have more gold plate than other people; he may have more

powdered footmen about his hall; he may have rosewood mangers for his

stables; but he has no invention, no brilliancy, no independence of

tradition; he will follow all the old worn ways of what is called

pleasure, and he will ask crowds to push and perspire on his staircases,

and will conceive that he has amused the world.

When one reflects on the immense possibilities of an enormously rich

man, or a very great prince, and sees all the _banalité_, the

repetition, and the utter lack of any imagination, in all that these

rich men and these great princes do, one is forced to conclude that the

vulgarity of the world at large has been too much for them, and that

they can no more struggle against it than a rhinoceros against a

quagmire; his very weight serves to make the poor giant sink deeper and

quicker into the slime.

From his birth to his death it is hard indeed for any man, even the

greatest, to escape the vulgarity of the world around him. Scarcely is

he born than the world seizes him, to make him absurd with the fussy

conventionalities of the baptismal ceremony, and, after clogging his

steps, and clinging to him throughout his whole existence, vulgarity

will seize on his dead body and make even that grotesque with the low

comedy of its funeral rites. Had Victor Hugo not possessed very real

qualities of greatness in him he would have been made ridiculous forever

by the farce of the burial which Paris intended as an honour to him.

All ceremonies of life which ought to be characterised by simplicity and

dignity, vulgarity has marked and seized for its own. What can be more

vulgar than the marriage ceremony in what are called civilised

countries? What can more completely take away all delicacy, sanctity,

privacy and poetry from love than these crowds, this parade, these

coarse exhibitions, this public advertisement of what should be hidden

away in silence and in sacred solitude? To see a marriage at the

Madeleine or St Philippe du Roule, or St George’s, Hanover Square, or

any other great church in any great city of the world, is to see the

vulgarity of modern life at its height. The rape of the Sabines, or the

rough bridal still in favour with the Turcomans and Tartars, is modesty

and beauty beside the fashionable wedding of the nineteenth century, or

the grotesque commonplace of civil marriage. Catullus would not have

written ‘O Hymen Hymenæ!’ if he had been taken to contemplate the

thousand and one rare petticoats of a modern trousseau, or the

tricolored scarf of a continental mayor, or the chairs and tables of a

registry office in England or America.

Modern habit has contrived to dwarf and to vulgarise everything, from

the highest passions to the simplest actions; and its chains are so

strong that the king in his palace and the philosopher in his study

cannot keep altogether free of them.

Why has it done so? Presumably because this vulgarity is acceptable and

agreeable to the majority. In modern life the majority, however blatant,

ignorant or incapable, gives the law, and the _âmes d’elite_ have, being

few in number, no power to oppose to the flood of coarse commonplace,

with which they are surrounded and overwhelmed. Plutocracy is everywhere

replacing aristocracy, and has its arrogance without its elegance. The

tendency of the age is not towards the equalising of fortunes, despite

the boasts of modern liberalism; it is rather towards the creation of

enormous individual fortunes, rapidly acquired and lying in an

indigested mass on the stomach of Humanity. It is not the possessors of

these riches who will purify the world from vulgarity. Vulgarity is, on

the contrary, likely to live, and multiply, and increase in power and in

extent. Haste is one of its parents, and pretension the other. Hurry can

never be either gracious or graceful, and the effort to appear what we

are not is the deadliest foe to peace and to personal dignity.

‘Dans les anciennes sociétés l’aristocracie de l’argent était

contrepesée par l’aristocracie de la naissance, l’aristocracie de

l’esprit, et l’aristocracie du cœur. Mais nous, en abandonnant

jusqu’au souvenir même de ces distinctions, nous n’avons laissé

subsister que celles que la fortune peut mettre entre les hommes....

Dans les anciennes sociétés la fortune comme la noblesse représentait

quelque chose d’autre, si je puis ainsi dire, et de plus qu’elle-même.

Elle était vraiment une force sociale parcequ’elle était une force

morale. On s’enrichssiait honêtement: de telle sorte que la richesse

représentait non-seulement, comme je crois que disent les économistes,

le travail accumulé de trois ou quatre générations, mais encore toutes

les vertus modestes qui perpétuent l’amour du travail dans une même

famille, et querque chose enfin de plus haut, de plus noble, de plus

rare que lout cela: le sacrifice de l’égoïsme à l’intérèt, la

considération, la dignité du nom. Il n’y a plus d’effort, il n’y a

même pas de travail, à l’origine d’un grand nombre de ces nouvelles

fortunes, et l’on peut se demander s’il y a, seulement de

l’intelligence. Mais, en revanche, il y a de l’audace, et surtout

cette conviction que la richesse n’a pas de juges mais seulement des

envieux et des adorateurs. C’est ce qui fait aujourd’hui l’immoralité

toute particulière et toute nouvelle de cette adoration que nous

professons publiquement pour lui. Le temps approche où il ne sera pas

fâcheux, mais honteux, d’être pauvre.’

These words of the celebrated French critic, Brunetière, written

_apropos_ of _La France Juive_, are essentially true, even if truth is

in them somewhat exaggerated, for in the middle ages riches were often

acquired by violence, or pandering to vice in high places. The modern

worship of riches _per se_ is a vulgarity, and as he has said, it even

amounts to a crime.

Such opinions as his are opposed to the temper of the age; are called

reactionary, old-fashioned and exclusive; but there is a great truth in

them. If the edge were not rubbed off of personal dignity, if the bloom

were not brushed off of good taste, and the appreciation of privacy and

_recueillement_ greatly weakened, all the personalities of the press and

of society would never have been endured or permitted to attain the

growth which they have attained. The faults of an age are begotten and

borne out of itself; it suffers from what it creates. One looks in vain,

in this age, for any indication of any new revolt against the bond of

vulgarity, or return to more delicate, more dignified, more reserved

manners of life. If socialism should have its way with the world (which

is probable), it will not only be vulgar, it will be sordid; all

loveliness will perish; and, with all ambition forbidden, heroism and

greatness will be things unknown, and genius a crime against the

divinity of the Eternal Mediocre. The socialism of Bakounine, of Marx,

of Krapotkine, of Tolstoï, is the dreariest and dullest of all earthly

things—an Utopia without an idea, a level as blank and hopeless as the

dust plains of a Russian summer. It may be a vision, dreary as it is,

which will one day be realised. There is hourly growing in the world a

dull and sullen antagonism against all superiority, all pre-eminent

excellence, whether of intellect, birth or manner; and this jealousy has

the germs in it of that universal war on superiority which will be

necessary to bring about the triumph of socialism. At present, society

is stronger than the socialists; is stronger in Germany, in America, in

Italy, in Russia, even in France; but how much longer it will have this

superior strength who can say? Socialism being founded, not on love, as

it pretends, but on hatred—hatred of superiority—appeals to a malignant

instinct in human nature, in the mediocrity of human nature, which is

likely to increase as the vast and terrible increase of population makes

the struggle of existence more close and more desperate. Socialism will

very possibly ravage and lay waste the earth like a hydra-headed Attila;

but there will be nothing to be hoped for from it in aid of the graces,

the charms, or the dignity of life. Were riches more careful of these,

they would hold their own better in the contest with socialism. Were

society more elegant, more self-respecting, more intelligent, more

distinguished, it would give its defenders much more reason and strength

to plead in favour of its preservation.

But society is on the whole both stupid and vulgar. It scarcely knows

the good from the bad in anything. If a fashion is set, it follows the

fashion sheepishly, without knowing why it does so. It has neither

genuine conscience, nor genuine taste. It will stone A. for what it

admires in B., and will crucify Y. for what it smilingly condones in Z.

It has no true standard for anything. It is at once hypercritical and

over-indulgent. What it calls its taste is but a purblind servility. It

will take the deformed basset-hound as a pet, and neglect all the

beautiful canine races; it will broil in throngs on a bare strip of

sand, and avoid all the lovely places by wood and sea; it will worship a

black rose, and never glance at all the roses which nature has made. If

only Fashion decree, the basset-hound, the bare sand, and the black rose

are to it the idols of the hour. It has no consistency; it will change

the Japanese for the Rococo, the Renaissance for the Queen Anne, the

Watteau for the Oriental, or mix them all together, at the mere

weathercock dictate of fashion or caprice. It has no more consistency in

its code of morals; it will ask Messalina anywhere as long as a prince

speaks to her and she is the fashion; if the prince ceases to speak and

she ceases to be the fashion, it puts up its fan at her vices, and

scores her name out of its visiting list. There is no reality in either

its pretensions to morality or good taste.

When we think of the immense potentialities and capabilities of society,

of all that it might become, of all that it might accomplish, and behold

the monotony of insipid folly, of ape-like imitation, of consummate

hypocrisy, in which it is content to roll on through the course of the

years, one cannot but feel that, if its ultimate doom be to be swallowed

up and vomited forth again, lifeless and shapeless, by the dragon of

socialism, it will have no more than its due; that it will fall through

its own sloth and vileness as the empire of Rome fell under the hordes

of the barbarians.

That charming writer Gustave Droz has said that railways are at once the

symbol and the outcome of the vulgarity of the age; and that whoever

lets himself be shot through space like a parcel through a tube, and

condescends to eat in a crowd at a station buffet, cannot by any

possibility retain dignity of appearance or elegance of manners. The

inelegant scrambling and pushing, and elbowing and vociferating of a

modern railway station form an exact and painful image of this restless,

rude and gregarious century.

Compare the stately progress of a Queen Elizabeth, or a Louis Quatorze

through the provinces, calm, leisurely, dignified, magnificent, with the

modern monarch or prince always in movement as if he were a

_commis-voyageur_, interviewed ridiculously on a square of red carpet on

a station platform, and breathlessly listening to a breathless mayor’s

silly and verbose address of welcome; then rushing off, as if he were

paid so much an hour, to be jostled at a dog show, hustled at an

agricultural exhibition, and forced to shake hands with the very

politicians who have just brought before the House the abolition of the

royal prerogative. It is not the question here of whether royalty is, or

is not, better upheld or abolished; but so long as royalty exists, and

so long as its existence is dear to many millions, and esteemed of

benefit by them, it is infinitely to be regretted that it should have

lost, as it has lost, all the divinity which should hedge a king.

Recent publications of royal feelings and royal doings may be of use to

the enemies of royalty by showing what twaddling nothings fill up its

day; but to royalty itself they can only be belittleing and injurious in

a great degree, whilst the want of delicacy which could give to the

public eye such intimate revelations of personal emotions and struggles

with poverty, as the publication of the _Letters of the Princess Alice

of England_ made public property, is so staring and so strange that it

seems like the public desecration of a grave.

Books, in which the most trivial and personal details are published in

print by those who should veil their faces like the Latin in sorrow and

veil them in their purples, could only be possible in an age in which

vulgarity has even reached up and sapped the very foundations of all

thrones. One cannot but feel pity for the poor dead princess, who would

surely have writhed under such indignity, when one sees in the crudeness

and cruelty of print her homely descriptions of suckling her children

and struggling with a narrow purse, descriptions so plainly intended for

no eyes but those of the person to whom they were addressed. Better—how

much better!—have buried with her those humble letters in which the soul

is seen naked as in its prayer-closet, and which are no more fit to be

dragged out into the garish day of publicity than the bodily nakedness

of a chaste woman is fit to be pilloried in a market-place. I repeat,

only an age intensely and despairingly vulgar could have rendered the

publication of such letters as those royal letters to royal persons

possible. Letters of intimacy are the most sacred things of life; they

are the proofs of the most intimate trust and confidence which can be

placed in us; and to make them public is to violate all the sweetest

sanctities of life and of death.

_La pudeur de l’âme_ is forever destroyed where such exposure of

feelings, the most intimate and the most personal, becomes possible. In

the preface to those letters it is said that the public will in these

days know everything about us, and therefore it is better that they

should know the truth from us. Not so; this attitude is indeed

submission to the mob: it is unveiling the bosom in the market-place.

Any amount of calumny cannot destroy dignity; but dignity is forever

destroyed when it condescends to call in the multitude to count its

tears and see its kisses.

The great man and the great woman should say to the world: ‘Think of me

what you choose. It is indifferent to me. You are not my master; and I

shall never accept you as a judge.’ This should be the attitude of all

royalty, whether that of the king, the hero, or the genius.

THE STATE AS AN IMMORAL

FACTOR

The tendency of the last years of the nineteenth century is toward

increase in the powers of the state and decrease in the powers of the

individual citizen. Whether the government of a country be at this

moment nominally free, or whether it be avowedly despotic, whether it be

an empire, a republic, a constitutional monarchy, or a self-governing

and neutralised principality, the actual government is a substitution of

state machinery for individual choice and individual liberty. In Servia,

in Bulgaria, in France, in Germany, in England, in America, in

Australia, anywhere you will, the outward forms of government differ

widely, but beneath all there is the same interference of the state with

personal volition, the same obligation for the individual to accept the

dictum of the state in lieu of his own judgment. The only difference is

that such a pretension is natural and excusable in an autocracy; in a

constitutional or republican state it is an anomaly, even an absurdity.

But whether it be considered admirable or accursed, the fact is

conspicuous that every year adds to the pretensions and powers of the

state, and every year diminishes the personal freedom of the man.

To whatever the fact be traceable, it is there, and it is probably due

to the increase of a purely _doctrinaire_ education, which with itself

increases the number of persons who look upon humanity as a

drill-sergeant looks upon battalions of conscripts; the battalions must

learn to move mechanically in masses, and no single unit of them must be

allowed to murmur or to fall out of the ranks. That this conscript, or

that, may be in torture all the while matters nothing whatever to the

drill-sergeant. That what would have been an excellent citizen makes a

rebellious or inefficient conscript is not his business either; he only

requires a battalion which moves with mechanical precision. The state is

but a drill-sergeant on a large scale, with a whole nationality marched

out on the parade-ground.

Whatever were in other respects the evils attendant on other ages than

this, those ages were favourable to the development of individuality,

and therefore of genius. The present age is opposed to such development;

and the more the state manipulates the man, the more completely will

individuality and originality be destroyed. The state requires a

tax-paying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which

there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient,

colourless, spiritless, moving unanimously and humbly like a flock of

sheep along a straight, high road between two walls. That is the ideal

of every bureaucracy; and what is the state except a crystallised

bureaucracy? It is the habit of those who uphold the despotism of

government to speak as though it were some impersonal entity, some

unerring guide, some half-divine thing like the pillar of fire which the

Israelites imagined conducted them in their exodus. In actual fact, the

state is only the executive; representing the momentary decisions of a

majority which is not even at all times a genuine majority, but is, in

frequent cases, a fabricated and fictitious preponderance, artificially

and arbitrarily produced. There can be nothing noble, sacred, or

unerring in such a majority; it is fallible and fallacious; it may be in

the right, it may be in the wrong; it may light by accident on wisdom,

or it may plunge by panic into folly. There is nothing in its origin or

its construction which can render it imposing in the sight of an

intelligent and high-spirited man. But the mass of men are not

intelligent and not high-spirited, and so the incubus which lies on them

through it they support, as the camel his burden, sweating beneath it at

every pore. The state is the empty cap of Gessler, to which all but Tell

consent to bow.

It has been made a reproach to the centuries preceding this one that in

them privilege occupied the place of law; but, though privilege was

capricious and often unjust, it was always elastic, sometimes benignant;

law—civil law, such as the state frames and enforces—is never elastic

and is never benignant. It is an engine which rolls on its own iron

lines, and crushes what it finds opposed to it, without any regard to

the excellence of what it may destroy.

The nation, like the child, becomes either brutalised by over-drilling,

or emasculated by having all its actions and opinions continually

prescribed for it. It is to be doubted whether any precautions or any

system could compass what the state in many countries is now

endeavouring to do, by regulation and prohibition, to prevent the spread

of infectious maladies. But it is certain that the nervous terrors

inspired by state laws and by-laws beget a malady of the mind more

injurious than the bodily ills which so absorb the state. Whether

Pasteur’s inoculation for rabies be a curse or a boon to mankind, there

can be no question that the exaggerated ideas which it creates, the

fictitious importance which it lends to what was previously a most rare

malady, the nightmare horrors it invokes, and the lies which its

propagandists, to justify its pretences, find themselves compelled to

invent, produce a dementia and hysteria in the public mind which is a

disease far more widespread and dangerous than mere canine rabies

(unassisted by science and government) could ever have become.

The dissemination of cowardice is a greater evil than would be the

increase of any physical ill whatever. To direct the minds of men in

nervous terror to their own bodies is to make of them a trembling and

shivering pack of prostrate poltroons. The microbe may be the cause of

disease; but the nervous terrors generated in the microbe’s name are

worse evils than any bacillus. It is the physiologist’s trade to

increase these terrors; he lives by them, and by them alone has his

being, but when the state takes his crotchets and quackeries in earnest

and forces them upon the public as law, the effect is physically and

mentally disastrous. The cholera as a disease is bad enough, but worse

than itself by far are the brutal egotism, the palsied terror, the

convulsive agonies, with which it is met, and which the state in all

countries does so much to increase. Fear alone kills five-tenths of its

victims, and during its latest visitation in the streets of Naples

people would spring up from their seats, shriek that they had cholera,

and fall dead in convulsions, caused by sheer panic; whilst in many

country places the villagers fired on railway trains which they imagined

might carry the dreaded malady amongst them. This kind of panic cannot

be entirely controlled by any state, but it might be mitigated by

judicious moderation, instead of being, as it is, intensified and

hounded on by the press, the physiologists, and the governments all over

the known world.

The state has already passed its cold, hard, iron-plated arms between

the parent and the offspring, and is daily dragging and forcing them

asunder. The old moral law may say ‘Honour your father and mother,’

etc., etc., but the state says, on the contrary: ‘Leave your mother ill

and untended whilst you attend to your own education; and summon your

father to be fined and imprisoned if he dare lay a hand on you when you

disgrace and deride him.’ The other day a working man in London was

sentenced to a fortnight’s imprisonment with hard labour, because, being

justly angry with his little girl for disobeying his orders and staying

out night after night in the streets, he struck her twice with a

leathern strap, and she was ‘slightly bruised.’ The man asked

pertinently what was the world coming to if a parent might not correct

his child as he thought fit. What can be the relations of this father

and daughter when he leaves the prison to which she sent him? What

authority can he have in her sight? What obedience will he be able to

exact from her? The bruises from the strap would soon pass away, but the

rupture, by the sentence of the tribunal, of parental and filial ties

can never be healed. The moral injury done to the girl by this

interference of the state is irreparable, ineffaceable. The state has

practically told her that disobedience is no offence, and has allowed

her to be the accuser and jailer of one who, by another canon of law, is

said to be set in authority over her both by God and man.

The moral and the civil law alike decree and enforce the inviolability

of property; anything which is the property of another, be it but of the

value of a copper coin, cannot be taken by you without your becoming

liable to punishment as a thief. This, by the general consent of

mankind, has been esteemed correct, just and necessary. But the state

breaks this law, derides it, rides rough-shod over it, when for its own

purposes it requires the property of a private person; it calls the

process by various names—condemnation, expropriation, annexation, etc.;

but it is a seizure, a violent seizure, and a essentially seizure

against the owner’s will. If a man enter your kitchen-garden and take a

few onions or a few potatoes, you can hold, prosecute and imprison him;

the state takes the whole garden, and turns you out of it, and turns it

into anything else which for the moment seems to the state excellent or

advantageous, and against the impersonal robber you can do naught. The

state considers it compensation enough to pay an arbitrary value; but

not only are there many possessions, notably in land, for the loss of

which no equivalent could reconcile us, but the state herein sets up a

principle which is never accorded in law. If the man who steals the

onions offers to pay their value, he is not allowed to do so, nor is the

owner of the onions allowed to accept such compensation; it is called

‘compounding a felony.’ The state alone may commit this felony with

impunity, and pay what it chooses after committing it.

The state continually tampers with and tramples on private property,

taking for itself what and where and how it pleases; the example given

to the public is profoundly immoral. The plea put forth in excuse for

its action by the state is that of public benefit; the interests of the

public cannot, it avers, be sacrificed to private interest or ownership

or rights of any sort. But herein it sets up a dangerous precedent. The

man who steals the potatoes might argue in his own justification that it

is better in the interest of the public that one person should lose a

few potatoes than that another person should starve for want of them,

and so, either in prison or in poorhouse, become chargeable to the

nation. If private rights and the sacredness of property can be set at

naught by the state for its own purposes, they cannot be logically held

to be sacred in its courts of law for any individual. The state claims

immunity for theft on the score of convenience, so then may the

individual.

If the civil law be in conflict with and contradiction of religious law,

as has been shown elsewhere,[N] it is none the less in perpetual

opposition to moral law and to all the finer and more generous instincts

of the human soul. It preaches egotism as the first duty of man, and

studiously inculcates cowardice as the highest wisdom. In its strenuous

endeavour to cure physical ills it does not heed what infamies it may

sow broadcast in the spiritual fields of the mind and heart. It treats

altruism as criminal when altruism means indifference to the contagion

of any infectious malady. The precautions enjoined in any such malady,

stripped bare of their pretences, really mean the naked selfishness of

the _sauve qui peut_. The pole-axe used on the herd which has been in

contact with another herd infected by pleuro-pneumonia or anthrax would

be used on the human herd suffering from typhoid, or small-pox, or

yellow fever, or diphtheria, if the state had the courage to follow out

its own teachings to their logical conclusions. Who shall say that it

will not be so used some day in the future, when increase of population

shall have made mere numbers of trifling account, and the terrors

excited by physiologists of ungovernable force?

-----

Footnote N:

See article ‘The Failure of Christianity.’

-----

We have gained little by the emancipation of human society from the

tyranny of the churches if in its stead we substitute the tyranny of the

state. One may as well be burned at the stake as compelled to submit to

the prophylactic of Pasteur or the serum of Roux. When once we admit

that the law should compel vaccination from small-pox, there is no

logical reason for refusing to admit that the law shall enforce any

infusion or inoculation which its chemical and medical advisers may

suggest to it, or even any surgical interference with Nature.

On the first of May, 1890, a French surgeon, M. Lannelongue, had a

little imbecile child in his hospital; he fancied that he should like to

try trepanning on the child as a cure for imbecility. In the words of

the report,—

‘Il taillait la suture sagittale et parallèlement avec elle une longue

et étroite incision cranienne depuis la suture frontale à la suture

occipitale; il en resulta pour la partie osseusse une perte de

substance longue de 9 centimetres et large de 6 millimetres, et il en

resulta pour le cerveau un véritable débridement.’

If this child live, and be no longer imbecile, the parents of all idiots

will presumably be compelled by law to submit their children to this

operation of trepanning and excision. Such a law would be the only

logical issue of existing hygienic laws.

In the battlefield the state requires from its sons the most unflinching

fortitude; but in civil life it allows them, even bids them, to be

unblushing poltroons.

An officer, being sent out by the English War Office this year to fill a

distinguished post in Hong Kong, was ordered to be vaccinated before

going to it; and the vaccination was made a condition of the

appointment. In this instance a man thirty years old was thought worthy

of confidence and employment by the state, but such a fool or babe in

his own affairs that he could not be trusted to look after his own

health. You cannot make a human character fearful and nervous, and then

call upon it for the highest qualities of resolve, of capacity, and of

courage. You cannot coerce and torment a man, and then expect from him

intrepidity, presence of mind and ready invention in perilous moments.

A few years ago nobody thought it a matter of the slightest consequence

to be bitten by a healthy dog; as a veterinary surgeon has justly said,

a scratch from a rusty nail or the jagged tin of a sardine-box is much

more truly dangerous than a dog’s tooth. Yet in the last five years the

physiologists and the state, which in all countries protects them, have

succeeded in so inoculating the public mind with senseless terrors that

even the accidental touch of a puppy’s lips or the kindly lick of his

tongue throws thousands of people into an insanity of fear. Dr Bell has

justly said: ‘Pasteur does not cure rabies; he creates it.’ In like

manner the state does not cure either folly or fear: it creates both.

The state is the enemy of all volition in the individual: hence it is

the enemy of all manliness, of all force, of all independence, and of

all originality. The exigencies of the state, from its monstrous

taxation to its irritating by-laws, are in continual antagonism with all

those who have character uncowed and vision unobscured. Under the

terrorising generic term of the law, the state cunningly, and for its

own purposes, confounds its own petty regulations and fiscal exactions

with the genuine solemnity of moral and criminal laws. The latter any

man who is not a criminal will feel bound to respect; the former no man

who has an opinion and courage of his own will care to observe. Trumpery

police and municipal regulations are merged by the ingenuity of the

state into a nominal identity with genuine law; and for all its

purposes, whether of social tyranny or of fiscal extortion, the union is

to the state as useful as it is fictitious. The state has everywhere

discovered that it is lucrative and imposing to worry and fleece the

honest citizen; and everywhere it shapes its civil code, therefore,

mercilessly and cunningly towards this end.

Under the incessant meddling of government and its offspring,

bureaucracy, the man becomes poor of spirit and helpless. He is like a

child who, never being permitted to have its own way, has no knowledge

of taking care of itself or of avoiding accidents. As, here and there, a

child is of a rare and strong enough stuff to break his leading-strings,

and grows, when recaptured, dogged and sullen, so are there men who

resist the dogma and dictation of the state, and when coerced and

chastised become rebels to its rules. The petty tyrannies of the state

gall and fret them at every step; and the citizen who is law-abiding, so

far as the greater moral code is concerned, is stung and whipped into

continual contumacy by the impertinent interference of the civil code

with his daily life.

Why should a man fill up a census-return, declare his income to a

tax-gatherer, muzzle his dog, send his children to schools he

disapproves, ask permission of the state to marry, or do perpetually

what he dislikes or condemns, because the state wishes him to do these

things? When a man is a criminal, the state has a right to lay hands on

him; but whilst he is innocent of all crime his opinions and his

objections should be respected. There may be many reasons—harmless or

excellent reasons—why publicity about his life is offensive or injurious

to him; what right has the state to pry into his privacy and force him

to write its details in staring letters for all who run to read? The

state only teaches him to lie.

‘You ask me things that I have no right to tell you,’ replied Jeanne

d’Arc to her judges. So may the innocent man, tormented by the state,

reply to the state, which has no business with his private life until he

has made it forfeit by a crime.

The moment that the states leaves the broad lines of public affairs to

meddle with the private interests and actions of its people, it is

compelled to enlist in its service spies and informers. Without these it

cannot make up its long lists of transgressions; it cannot know whom to

summon and what to prosecute.

That duplicity which is in the Italian character so universally

ingrained there that the noblest natures are tainted by it—a duplicity

which makes entire confidence impossible, and secrecy an instinct strong

as life—can be philosophically traced to the influences which the

constant dread of the detectives and spies employed under their various

governments for so many centuries has left upon their national

temperament. Dissimulation, so long made necessary, has become part and

parcel of the essence of their being. Such secretiveness is the

inevitable product of domestic espionage and trivial interference from

the state, as the imposition of a gate-tax makes the peasantry who pass

the gate ingenious in concealment and in subterfuge.

The requisitions and regulations of the state dress themselves vainly in

the pomp of law; they set themselves up side by side with moral law; but

they are not moral law, and cannot possess its impressiveness. Even a

thief will acknowledge that ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is a just and solemn

commandment: but that to carry across a frontier, without declaring it,

a roll of tobacco (which you honestly bought, and which is strictly your

own) is also a heinous crime, both common-sense and conscience refuse to

admit The Irish peasant could never be brought to see why the private

illicit whisky-still was illicit, and as such was condemned and

destroyed, and the convictions which followed its destruction were

amongst the bitterest causes of Irish disaffection. A man caught in the

act of taking his neighbour’s goods knows that his punishment is

deserved; but a man punished for using or enjoying his own is filled

with chafing rage against the injustice of his lot. Between a moral law,

and a fiscal or municipal or communal imposition or decree, there is as

much difference as there is between a living body and a galvanised

corpse. When in a great war a nation is urged by high appeal to

sacrifice its last ounce of gold, its last shred of treasure, to save

the country, the response is willingly made from patriotism; but when

the revenue officer and the tax-gatherer demand, threaten, fine and

seize, the contributor can only feel the irritating impoverishment of

such a process, and yields his purse reluctantly. Electoral rights are

considered to give him a compensating share in the control of public

expenditure; but this is mere fiction: he may disapprove in every item

the expenditure of the state; he cannot alter it.

Tolstoï has constantly affirmed that there is no necessity for any

government anywhere: it is not _a_ government, but _all_ governments, on

which he wages war. He considers that all are alike corrupt, tyrannical

and opposed to a fine and free ideal of life. It is certain that they

are not ‘the control of the fittest’ in any actual sense, for the whole

aspect of public life tends every year more and more to alienate from it

those whose capacity and character are higher than those of their

fellows: it becomes more and more a routine, an _engrenage_, a trade.

From a military, as from a financial, point of view this result is of

advantage to the government, whether it be imperial or republican; but

it is hostile to the character of a nation, morally and æsthetically. In

its best aspect, the state is like a parent who seeks to play Providence

to his offspring, to foresee and ward off all accident and all evil, and

to provide for all possible contingencies, bad and good. As the parent

inevitably fails in doing this, so the state fails, and must fail, in

such a task.

Strikes, with their concomitant evils, are only another form of tyranny;

but they have this good in them—that they are opposed to the tyranny of

the state, and tend to lessen it by the unpleasant shock which they give

to its self-conceit and self-complacency. Trades-unions turn to their

own purposes the lesson which the state has taught them—_i.e._, a brutal

sacrifice of individual will and welfare to a despotic majority.

There is more or less truth and justification in all revolutions because

they are protests against bureaucracy. When they are successful, they

abjure their own origin and become in their turn the bureaucratic

tyranny, sometimes modified, sometimes exaggerated, but always tending

towards reproduction of that which they destroyed. And the bureaucratic

influence is always immoral and unwholesome, were it only in the

impatience which it excites in all courageous men and the apathy to

which it reduces all those who are without courage. Its manifold and

emasculating commands are to all real strength as the cords in which

Gulliver was bound by the pygmies.

The state only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which

its demands are obeyed and its exchequer is filled. Its highest

attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere

all those finer and more delicate liberties which require liberal

treatment and spacious expansion inevitably dry up and perish. Take a

homely instance. A poor, hard-working family found a little stray dog;

they took it in, sheltered, fed it, and attached themselves to it; it

was in one of the streets of London; the police after a time summoned

them for keeping a dog without a licence; the woman, who was a widow,

pleaded that she had taken it out of pity, that they had tried to lose

it, but that it always came back to them; she was ordered to pay the

amount of the dog-tax and two guineas’ costs; _i.e._, the state said to

her: ‘Charity is the costliest of indulgences; you are poor; you have no

right to be humane.’ The lesson given by the state was the vilest and

meanest which could be given. This woman’s children, growing up, will

remember that she was ruined for being kind; they will harden their

hearts, in accordance with the lesson; if they become brutal to animals

and men, it is the state which will have made them so.

All the state’s edicts in all countries inculcate similar egotism;

generosity is in its sight a lawless and unlawful thing: it is so busied

in urging the use of disinfectants and ordering the destruction of

buildings and of beasts, the exile of families and the closing of

drains, that it never sees the logical issue of its injunctions, which

is to leave the sick man alone and flee from his infected vicinity: it

is so intent on insisting on the value of state education that it never

perceives that it is enjoining on the child to advance itself at any

cost and leave its procreators to starve in their hovel. The virtues of

self-sacrifice, of disinterested affection, of humanity, of

self-effacement, are nothing to it; by its own form of organism it is

debarred from even admiring them; they come in its way; they obstruct

it; it destroys them.

Mr Ruskin, in one of the papers of his _Fors Clavigera_, speaks of an

acacia tree, young and beautiful, green as acacias only are green in

Venice, where no dust ever is; it grew beside the water steps of the

Academy of the Arts and was a morning and evening joy to him. One day he

found a man belonging to the municipality cutting it down root and

branch. ‘Why do you murder that tree?’ he asked. The man replied, ‘_Per

far pulizia_’ (to clean the place). The acacia and the municipality of

Venice are an allegory of the human soul and its controller, the state.

The acacia was a thing of grace and verdure, a sunrise and sunset

pleasure to a great soul; it had fragrance in its white blossoms and

shade in its fair branches; it fitly accompanied the steps which lead to

the feasts of Carpaccio and the pageants of Gian Bellini. But in the

sight of the Venetian municipality it was irregular and unclean. So are

all the graces and greenness of the human soul to the state, which

merely requires a community tax-paying, decree-obeying, uniform,

passionless, enduring as the ass, meek as the lamb, with neither will

nor wishes; a featureless humanity practising the goose-step in eternal

routine and obedience.

When the man has become a passive creature, with no will of his own,

taking the military yoke unquestioningly, assigning his property,

educating his family, holding his tenures, ordering his daily life, in

strict accord with the regulations of the state, he will have his spirit

and his individuality annihilated, and he will, in compensation to

himself, be brutal to all those over whom he has power. The cowed

conscript of Prussia becomes the hectoring bully of Alsace.[O]

-----

Footnote O:

Whoever may care to study the brutal treatment of conscripts and

soldiers in Germany by their officers is referred to the revelations

published this year by Kurt Abel and Captain Miller, both

eye-witnesses of these tortures.

-----

‘_Libera chiesà in libero stato_’ is the favourite stock phrase of

Italian politicians; but it is an untruth—nay, an impossibility—not only

in Italy, but in the whole world. The church cannot be liberal because

liberality stultifies itself; the state cannot be liberal because its

whole existence is bound up with dominion. In all the political schemes

which exist now, working themselves out in actuality, or proposed as a

panacea to the world, there is no true liberality; there is only a

choice between despotism and anarchy. In religious institutions it is

the same; they are all egotisms in disguise. Socialism wants what it

calls equality; but its idea of equality is to cut down all tall trees

that the brushwood may not feel itself overtopped. Plutocracy, like its

almost extinct predecessor, aristocracy, wishes, on the other hand, to

keep all the brushwood low, so that it may grow above it at its own pace

and liking. Which is the better of the two?

Civil liberty is the first quality of a truly free life; and in the

present age the tendency of the state is everywhere to admit this in

theory, but to deny it in practice. To be able to go through the comedy

of the voting-urn is considered privilege enough to atone for the loss

of civil and moral freedom in all other things. If it be true that a

nation has the government which it deserves to have, then the merits of

all the nations are small indeed. With some the state assumes the guise

of a police officer, and in others of a cuirassier, and in others of an

attorney; but in all it is a despot issuing its petty laws with the pomp

of Jove; thrusting its truncheon, or its sword, or its quill into the

heart of domestic life, and breaking the backbone of the man who has

spirit enough to resist it. The views of the state are like those of the

Venetian municipality concerning the acacia. Its one aim is a

methodical, monotonous, mathematically-measured regularity: it admits of

no expansion; it tolerates no exceptions; of beauty it has no

consciousness; of any range beyond that covered by its own vision it is

ignorant. It may work on a large scale—even on an enormous scale—but it

cannot work on a great one. Greatness can be the offspring alone of

volition and of genius: it is everywhere the continual effort of the

state to coerce the one and to suffocate the other.

The fatal general conception of the state as an abstract entity, free

from all mortal blemish, and incapable of error, is the most disastrous

misconception into which the mind of man could possibly have fallen. If

the human race would only understand, and take the trouble to realise,

that government by the state can be nothing better than government by a

multitude of clerks, it would cease to be enamoured of this

misconception. Government, absolute and unelastic, by a million of

Bumbles, the elevation to supreme and most meddlesome power of a

Bureaucracy employing an army of spies and informers in its service;

this is all that the rule of the state can ever be, or can ever mean,

for mankind. It is impossible that it should ever be otherwise.

Were there some neighbouring planet, populated by demi-gods or some

angels, from whom the earth could obtain a superior race to undertake

its rule, the domination of this superior race might be beneficial,

though it is questionable whether it would, even then, be agreeable.

Socialism calls itself liberty, but it is the negation of liberty, since

it would permit the state, _i.e._, the bureaucracy, to enter into and

ordain every item of private or of public life. The only sect which has

any conception of liberty is that which is called Individualism, and it

is singular and lamentable how few followers Individualism obtains. It

is due, perhaps, to the fact that so few human beings possess any

individuality.

The mass of men are willing to be dominated, have no initiative, no

ambition, no moral courage; it is easier to them to join a herd and be

driven on with it; it saves them thought and responsibility. Were

Individualism general, there would be no standing armies, there would be

no affiliation to secret societies, there would be no formation of the

public mind by the pressure of a public press, there would be no

acceptance of the dicta of priests and physicians, there would be no

political councils, there would be no ministers of education. But

Individualism is extremely rare, whether as a quality or a doctrine.

Where it does exist, as in Tolstoï or Auberon Herbert, it is regarded by

the mass of men as abnormal, as something approaching a disease. Yet it

will be the resistance of Individualism which will alone save the world

(if it be saved indeed) from the approaching slavery of that tyranny of

mediocrity which is called the authority of the state. For government by

the state merely means government by multitudes of hired, blatant,

pompous official servants, such as we are now blessed with; but with the

powers of those official servants indefinitely extended until the

tentacles of the state should stretch out like that of the octopus and

draw into its maw all human life.

No one who studies the signs of the times can fail to be struck by the

growing tendency to invoke the aid of what is called the state in all

matters; and those who would be alarmed and disgusted at the despotism

of a single ruler, are disposed meekly to accept the despotism of the

impalpable, impersonal and most dangerous legislator. No one who has

observed the action of a bureaucracy can, without dread, see its

omnipotence desired; for the fact cannot be too often repeated, that the

omnipotence of the state is the omnipotence of its minions in a

multitude of greater or smaller offices throughout the country cursed by

them. Through whom can the espionage which is necessary to secure the

working of permissive bills, of total abstinence laws, of muzzling

regulations, of medical and hygienic interference, be exercised, and the

vast machinery of fines and dues which accompany these be manipulated,

except by hordes of officials gaining their livelihood by torturing the

public?

The state is always spoken of as if it were an impersonal force,

magnified into semi-divinity of more than mortal power and prescience,

wholly aloof from all human error, and meteing out the most infallible

justice from the purest balance. Instead of that the state is nothing,

can be nothing, more than a host of parasites fastened on the body

politic, more or less fattening thereon, and trained to regard the

public as a mere taxable entity, always in the wrong and always to be

preyed upon at pleasure. It may be unintelligible why mankind ever laid

its head under the heel of a single human tyrant, but it is surely more

perplexing still why it lies down under the feet of a million of

government spies and scriveners. That there is a singular increase in

public pusillanimity everywhere is unquestionable; its outcome is the

tendency, daily increasing, to look to the government in every detail

and every difficulty.

THE PENALTIES OF A WELL-KNOWN

NAME

When in childhood, if we be made of the stuff which dreams ambitious

dreams, we see the allegorical figure of Fame blowing her long trumpet

down the billowy clouds, we think how delightful and glorious it must be

to have a name which echoes from that golden clarion. Nothing seems to

us worth the having, except a share in that echoing windy blast. To be

famous: it is the vision of all poetic youth, of all ambitious energies,

of all struggling and unrecognised talent. To be picked out by the

capricious goddess and lifted up from the crowd to sit beside her on her

throne of cloud, seems to the fancy of youth the loftiest and loveliest

of destinies.

In early youth we know not what we do, we cannot measure all we part

with in seeking the publicity which accompanies success; we do not

realise that the long trumpet of our goddess Fame will mercilessly blow

away our dearest secrets to the ears of all, and so strain and magnify

them that they will be no more recognised by us, though become the toy

of all. We do not appreciate, until we have lost it, the delightful

unregarded peace with which the obscure of this world can love, hate,

caress, curse, move, sit still, be sick, be sorry, be gay or glad, bear

their children, bury their dead, unnoted, untormented unobserved.

It is true that celebrity has its pleasant side. To possess a name which

is an open sesame wherever it is pronounced is not only agreeable, but

is often useful. It opens doors easily, whether they be of palaces or of

railway stations; it saves you from arrest if you be sketching

fortifications; it obtains attention for you from every one, from

ministers to innkeepers; in a word, it marks you as something out of the

common, not lightly to be meddled with, or neglected with impunity. It

has its practical uses and its daily advantages, if it have also this

prosaic drawback, that, like other conspicuous personages, you pay fifty

per cent. dearer than ordinary people for everything which you consume.

Fame, like position, has its ugly side; whatever phase of it be taken,

whatever celebrity, notoriety, distinction, or fashion, it brings its

own penalties with it, and it may be that these penalties underweigh its

pleasures.

The most cruel of its penalties is the loss of privacy which it entails;

the difficulty which it raises to the enjoyment of free and unobserved

movement. Whether the owner of a well-known name desire privacy for the

rest of solitude, for the indulgence of some affection of which it is

desired that the world shall know nothing, for the sake of repose, and

ease, or for the pursuit of some especial study, the _incognito_ sighed

for is almost always impossible to obtain.

Find the most retired and obscure of places, amidst hills where no foot

but the herdsman’s treads, and pastures which feel no step but those of

the cattle, a mountain or forest nook which you fondly believe none but

yourself and one other know of as existing on the face of the globe; yet

brief will be your and your companion’s enjoyment of it if your lives,

or one of your lives, be famous; the press will track you like a

sleuth-hound, and all your precautions will be made as naught, and,

indifferent to the harm they do or the misery they create, the Paul Prys

of broadsheets will let in the glare of day upon your dusky, mossy dell.

The artist has, no doubt, in this much for which to blame himself: why

does the dramatist deign to bow from his box? why does the composer

salute his audience? why does the painter have shows at his studio? why

does the great writer tell his confidences to the newspaper hack?

Because they are afraid of creating the enmity and the unpopularity

which would be engendered by their refusal. Behind this vulgar,

intrusive espionage and examination there lies the whole force of the

malignity of petty natures and inferior minds, _i.e._, two thirds of the

world. The greater is afraid of the lesser; the giant fears the sling or

the stone of the pigmy; he is alone, and the pigmies are multitudinous

as the drops in the sea.

We give away the magic belt which makes us invisible, without knowing in

the least all that we give away with it: all that delightful

independence and repose which are the portion of the _humbles de la

terre_, who, all the same, do not value it, do not appreciate it; do

not, indeed, ever cease from dissatisfaction at it In their ignorance

they think how glorious it must be to stand in the white blaze of the

electric light of celebrity; how enviable and delightful it surely is to

move forever in a buzz of wondering voices and a dust of rolling

chariots, never to stir unchronicled and never to act uncommented.

Hardly can one persuade them of the treasure which they possess in their

own obscurity? If we tell them of it, they think we laugh at them or

lie.

Privacy is the necessity of good and great art, as it is the corollary

of dignity and decorum of life. But it is bought with a price; it is

bought by incurring the dislike and vindictiveness of all who are

checked in their petty malice and prying curiosity and are sent away

from closed doors.

The ideal literary life is that of Michelet; the ideal artistic life is

that of Corot. Imagine the one leaving the song of the birds and the

sound of the seas to squabble at a Copyright Congress, or the other

leaving his green trees and his shining waters to pour out the secrets

with which nature had intrusted him in the ear of a newspaper reporter!

If a correspondent of the press had hidden behind an elder-bush on a

grassy path at Shottery, methinks Shakespeare would have chucked him

into the nearest ditch; and if a stenographer had inquired of Dante what

meats had tasted so bitter to him at Can Grande’s table, beyond a doubt

the meddler would have learned the coldness and the length of a

Florentine rapier. But then no one of these men was occupied with his

own personality, none of them had the restless uneasiness, the morbid

fear, which besets the modern hero, lest, if his contemporaries do not

prate of him, generations to come will know naught of him.

In modern life also, the fox, with his pen and ink hidden under his fur,

creeps in, wearing the harmless skin of a familiar house-dog, and the

unhappy hare or pullet, who has received, caressed, and fed him without

suspicion, sees too late an account of the good nature and of his

habitation travestied and sent flying on a news sheet to the four

quarters of the globe. Against treachery of this kind there is no

protection possible. All that can be done is to be very slow in giving

or allowing introductions; very wary in making new acquaintances, and

wholly indifferent to the odium incurred by being called exclusive.

Interrogation is always ill-bred; and an intrusion that takes the form

of a prolonged interrogation is an intrusion so intolerable that any

rudeness whatever is justifiable in its repression.

The man of genius gives his work, his creation, his _alter ego_, to the

world, whether it be in political policy, in literary composition, in

music, sculpture, painting, or statuary. This the world has full right

to judge, to examine, to applaud, or to condemn; but beyond this, into

the pale of his private life it has no possible title to entry. It is

said in the common jargon of criticism that without knowing the habits,

temperament, physique and position of the artist, it is impossible to

correctly judge his creation. It is, on the contrary, a hindrance to the

unbiassed judgment of any works to be already prejudiced _per_ or

_contra_ by knowledge of the accidents and attributes of those who have

produced them. It is a morbid appetite, as well as a vulgar taste, that

makes the public invade the privacy of those who lead, instruct, or

adorn their century, and these last have themselves to thank, in a great

measure, for the pests which they have let loose.

Every day any one who bears a name in any way celebrated receives

requests or questions from persons who are unknown to him, demanding his

views on everything from Buddhism to blacking, and inquiring into every

detail of his existence, from his personal affections to his favourite

dish at dinner. If he deign to answer them, he is as silly as the

senders.

Sometimes you will hear that a town has been named after you in America,

or Australia, or Africa; it is usually a few planks laid down in a

barren plain, and you are expected to be grateful that your patronymic

will be shouted on a siding as the railway train rushes by it. Sometimes

an enthusiastic and unknown letter writer will implore you to tell him

or her ‘everything’ about yourself, from your birth onwards; and if, as

you will certainly do if you are in your senses, you consign the

impudent appeal to the waste-paper basket, your undesired correspondent

will probably fill up the _lacuna_ from his or her own imagination. Were

all this the offspring of genuine admiration, it might be in a measure

excused, though it would always be ill-bred, noxious and odious. But it

is either an impertinent curiosity or a desire to make money.

The moment that your name is well known, the demands made upon you will

be as numerous as they will be imperative. Though you may never have

given any permission or any data for a biography, the fact will not

prevent hundreds of biographies appearing about you: that they are

fictitious and unauthorised matters nothing either to those who publish

or to those who read. Descriptions, often wholly inaccurate, of your

habits, your tastes, your appearance, your manner of life, will be put

in circulation, no matter how offensive or how injurious to you they may

be. Your opinions will be demanded by strangers whose only object is to

obtain for themselves some information which they can turn to profit.

From the frequency or rarity of your dreams to the length of your menu

at dinner, nothing will escape the insatiable appetite of an unwholesome

and injurious inquisitiveness. Obscure nonentities from Missouri or

Nevada will imagine that they honour you by writing that they have

baptised their brats in your name, and requesting some present or

acknowledgment in return for their unwelcome effrontery in taking you as

an eponymus.

It is probable, nay, I think, certain, that in no epoch of the world’s

history was prominence in any art or any career ever rendered so

extremely uncomfortable as in ours, never so heavily handicapped with

the observation and penalty-weight of inquisitive misrepresentation. All

the inventions of the age tend to increase a thousandfold all that

minute examination of and impudent interference with others which were

alive in the race in the days of Miltiades and Socrates, but which has

now, in its so-called scientific toys, the means of gratifying this

mischievous propensity in an infinitely greater and more dangerous

degree.

The instant that any man or woman accomplishes anything which is in any

way remarkable, the curiosity of the public is roused and fastens on his

or her private life to the neglect and detriment of his or her

creations. The composer of the ‘Cavalleria Rusticana,’ an opera which,

whatever may or may not be its artistic merit, has had charm and melody

enough to run like a flame of fire across Italy, awakening the applause

of the whole nation, had dwelt in obscurity and poverty up to the moment

when his work aroused a fury of delight in his country people. Lo! the

press immediately seizes on every detail of his hard and laborious life,

and makes a jest of his long hair. What has his life or his hair to do

with the score of the ‘Cavalleria Rusticana?’ What has the fact that he

has written music which, if not original, or spiritual, has the secret

of rousing the enthusiasm of the populace, to do with the private

circumstances, habits, or preferences of his daily existence? It is an

intolerable impudence which can presume to pry into the latter because

the former has revealed in him that magic gift of inspiration which

makes him momentarily master of the souls of others.

The human mind is too quickly coloured, too easily disturbed, for it to

be possible to shake off all alien bias and reflected hues; and it is

more just to the dead than to the living, because it is not by the dead

moved either to that envy or detraction, that favour or adulation, which

it unconsciously imbibes from all it hears and knows of the living.

Whoever else may deem that the phonograph, the telephone, and the

photographic apparatus are beneficial to the world, every man and woman

who has a name of celebrity in that world must curse them with deadliest

hatred. Life is either a miserable and weak submission to their demands,

or a perpetual and exhausting struggle against and conflict with their

pretensions, in the course of which warfare enemies are made inevitably

and continually by the tens of thousands. He who bends beneath the

decrees of the sovereign spy is popular at the price of dignity and

peace. Those who refuse to so stoop are marked out for abuse and calumny

from all those who live by or are diverted by the results of the

espionage. There is no middle way between the two; you must be the

obedient slave or the irreconcilable opponent of all the numerous and

varied forms of public inquiry and personal interference. The walls of

Varzin have never been high enough to keep out the interviewer, and the

trees of Faringford have never been so thickly planted that they availed

to screen the study of the poet. The little, through these means and

methods, have found out that they can annoy, harass, torment, and turn

to profit, the great. Who that knows humanity could hope that the former

would abstain from the exercise of such power?

The worst result of the literary clamour for these arrays of facts, or

presumed facts, is that the ordinary multitude, who have not the talent

of the original seekers, imitate the latter, and deem it of more

importance to know what any famous person eats, drinks, and wears, in

what way he sins, and in what manner he sorrows, than it does to rightly

measure and value his picture, his position, his romance, or his poem.

Journalistic inquisitiveness has begotten an unwholesome appetite, an

impudent curiosity, in the world, which leaves those conspicuous in it

neither peace nor privacy.

The press throughout the whole world feeds this appetite, and the

victims, either from timidity or vanity, do not do what they might do to

condemn and resist it. The interviewer too often finds his impertinent

intrusion unresented for him, or the public which employs him, to reach

any consciousness of his intolerable effrontery. He has behind him those

many-handed powders of anathema, misrepresentation, and depreciation

which are called the fourth estate, and almost all celebrity is afraid

of provoking the reprisals in print which would follow on a proper and

peremptory ejection of the unsought visitor.

Because a man or woman more gifted than the common multitude bestows

upon the world some poem or romance, some picture, statue, or musical

composition, of excellence and beauty, by what possible right can the

world pry into his or her privacy and discuss his or her fortunes and

character? The work belongs to the public, the creator of the work does

not. The invasion of private life and character never was so great or so

general as it is in the last years of this century. It is born of two

despicable parents, curiosity and malignity. Beneath all the flattery,

which too frequently covers with flowers the snake of inquisitiveness,

the snake’s hiss of envy may be plainly heard by those who have ears to

hear. It is the hope to find, sometime, some flaw, some moral or

physical disease, some lesion of brain or decay of fortune, in the

private life of those whom they profess to admire or adore, which brings

the interviewer crawling to the threshold and peering through the

keyhole. What rapture for those who cannot write anything more worthy

than a newspaper paragraph to discover that the author of ‘Salammbo’ was

an epileptic! What consolation for those who cannot string rhymes

together at a child’s party to stand beside the bedside of Heine and

watch ‘the pale Jew writhe and sweat!’

In Dalou’s monument to Eugene Delacroix he represents the great painter

with his chin sunk in the _cache-nez_, which his chilly and fragile

organisation led to his wearing generally, no matter whether the weather

were fine or foul. Dalou has outraged art, but he has delighted his

contemporaries and crystallised their taste; the _cache-nez_ about the

throat of the man of genius enchants the common herd, which catches cold

perpetually, but could not paint an inch of canvas or a foot of fresco,

and feels jealously, restlessly, malignantly, grudgingly, that the

creator of the ‘Entreé des Croises’ and the ‘Barque de Dante,’ who was

so far above them in all else is brought nearer to them by that folded

foulard. The monument in the gardens of the Luxembourg is an epitome of

the sentiment of the age; time, glory and art bend before Delacroix and

offer him the palms of immortality; Apollo throws his lyre away in

sympathy and ecstasy; but what the mortal crowds see and applaud is the

disfiguring neckerchief!

It is the habit of scholars to lament that so little is known of the

private life of Shakespeare. It is, rather, most fortunate that we know

so little, and that little but vaguely. What can we want to know more

than the plays tell us? Why should we desire to have records which,

drawing earthwards the man, might draw us also downwards from that high

empyrean of thought where we can dwell through the magic of the poet’s

incantations?

It may be a natural instinct which leads the crowd to crave and seek

personal details of the lives of those who are greater than their

fellows, but it is an instinct to be discouraged and repressed by all

who care for the dignity of art. The cry of the realists for _documents

humains_ is a phase of it, and results from the poverty of imagination

in those who require such documents as the scaffolding of their

creations. The supreme gift of the true artist is a rapidity of

perception and comprehension which is totally unlike the slow piecemeal

observations of others. As the musician reads the page of a score at a

glance, as the author comprehends the essence of a book by a flash of

intelligence, as the painter sees at a glance the points and lines and

hues of a landscape, whilst the ordinary man plods through the musical

composition note by note, the book page by page, the landscape detail by

detail, so the true artist, whether poet, painter, or dramatist, sees

human nature, penetrating its disguises and embracing all its force and

weakness by that insight which is within him. The catalogues, the

classifications, the microscopic examinations, which are required to

make up these ‘_documents_,’ are required by those who have not that

instantaneous comprehension which is the supreme gift of all supreme

talent. The man who takes his notebook and enumerates in it the

vegetables, the fish, the game, of the markets, missing no bruise on a

peach, no feather in a bird, no stain on the slab where the perch and

trout lie dying, will make a painstaking inventory, but he will not see

the whole scene as Teniers or Callot saw it.

When the true poet or artist takes up in his hand a single garden pear

or russet apple, he will behold, through its suggestions, as in a

sorcerer’s mirror, a whole smiling land of orchard and of meadow; he

will smell the sweet scent of ripe fruit and wet leaves; he will tread a

thousand grassy ways and wade in a thousand rippling streams; he will

hear the matin’s bell and the even song, the lowing kine and the

bleating flocks; he will think in a second of time of the trees which

were in blossom when Drake and Raleigh sailed, and the fields which were

green when the Tudor and Valois met, and the sunsets of long, long ago,

when Picardy was in the flames of war, and all over the Norman lands the

bowmen tramped and the fair knights rode.

The phrasing of modern metaphysics calls this faculty assimilation; in

other days it has been called imagination: be its name what it will, it

is the one essential and especial possession of the poetic mind, which

makes it travel over space, and annihilate time, and behold the endless

life of innumerable forests as suggested to it by a single green leaf.

When the writer, therefore, asks clamorously for folios on folios of

_documents humains_, he proves that he has not this faculty, and that he

is making an inventory of human qualities and vices rather than a

portrait of them.