that Western Europe has developed up to certain limits ... and at the
last moment has not the spirit either to cross them, or to be satisfied
with what it has gained. The difficulty of the position to-day rests
on the fact that at this moment the active minority does not feel
itself capable, either of creating forms of existence consistent with
modern thought, or renouncing its old ideals, or frankly accepting the
petty-bourgeois state that has been built up incidentally, as a form
of life suitable for the Germanic Latin people just as the Chinese
civilisation is for China.
This agonising state of hesitation and uncertainty makes the life of
Europe unendurable. Whether it will come to rest by casting off the
prejudices of the past and the hopes of the future, or the restless
spirit of the Western European heights and depths will wash away the new
dams, I do not know; but in any case I consider the present condition a
period of agony and exhaustion. Life is impossible between two ideals.
History provides us with one example in full detail.
The long process of the decline of the ancient world and the rise of
the Christian world presents us with every form of historical death,
transmigration of souls and rebirth. Whole States stood still, remained
outside the movement, did not come into the Christian formation, grew
decrepit, and fell into ruins. Savage races, as yet hardly gathered
into orderly herds, developed at their side into new and powerful
State-organisations.... While Rome, pre-eminently the classical city, was
transformed into a city pre-eminently Catholic.
Those who deny the inner inevitability of the death of ancient Rome, and
hold that it was slain by violence, forget one thing, that every death is
violent. Death does not enter into our conception of the living organism;
it is outside it, beyond its limit. Old age and disease protest against
death in their sufferings, and do not invoke it, and, if they could find
strength in themselves, or means outside themselves, they would conquer
death.
The barbarians are all very well, but we must not assume that the whole
sickness of the ancient world was due to their onslaughts. From the days
of Tacitus, its thought had unmistakably become gloomy and despondent.
The depression, the misery, reached the pitch of suicide; such a pitch,
in fact, that all the world almost went out of its mind and really
became unhinged, believing in the most incredible theodicy and the most
unnatural salvation, taking despair for consolation and the religion
of death for a new life. Men who could not go out of their minds
withdrew from the general saturnalia of death, the funerals in wreaths
of roses, with amphoras of wine, the funerals in crowns of thorns, with
lamentations over the sins of this world, and withdrew through the two
narrow gates of stoicism and scepticism.
Beside the men who disdained death, beside the men who disbelieved in
life, beside the fanatics who went forth to destroy the ancient world to
the last stone, and the fanatics who expected the old world to rise up
again with all the virtues of the days before the Punic Wars, there was
a pinchbeck mediocre class, a crowd of those who were neither blind nor
seeing, a crowd of the myopic who saw nothing, neither Catiline nor death
behind the bustle of their daily cares, the news of war, the affairs of
the senate, the gossip of the Court, the puzzles of scholasticism and the
endless problems of household management, who shrugged their shoulders,
listening to the ravings of the Christian Jacobins, despised the
barbarians and laughed at their uncouthness, never guessing that these
forest Hottentots, with their long hair and flaxen eyebrows, were coming
to take their place in history.
The barbarians, too, have played their part, their duty is over; an
immensely rich and ample period was developed by them, but they have
reached the limits of their formation; they must reject their fundamental
principles or come to a standstill in them.
It is very hard for the modern civilised world to come to terms with the
new principles which are harassing it. What could be improved has been
improved, what could be overturned has been overturned; it has next to
preserve what it has gained, or to move out of the _one-sidedness_, the
individual variation which constitutes its personality. The last word
of Catholicism was uttered by the Reformation and the Revolution; they
revealed its mystery; the mystic redemption was solved by the political
emancipation. The Nicene Creed founded on the remission of sin to the
Christian was expressed in the recognition of the rights of every man
in the Creed of the last œcumenical council, that is, the Convention of
1792. The morality of the Judean proletarian, Matthew the Evangelist,
is the same as that professed by the Geneva proletarian and deist, Jean
Jacques Rousseau. It came in as faith, hope, and charity, and goes out as
liberty, fraternity, and equality.
The Germanic Latin world reached its climax in the storms and the
hurricanes that followed the triumphal year 1789. The upheaval of the
French Revolution went on by summits and abysses, the great and the
terrible, victories and the Terror, partial landslides and earthquakes,
till 1848; then came _Amen, Ne plus ultra_. The cataclysm that had begun
with the Renaissance and the Reformation was over.
The work goes on inwardly: the weaving of the microscopic web, the slow
growth of drift from wind and water, the scurrying to and fro of history,
the volcanic labours underground, the impenetrable passing of last year’s
autumn into this year’s spring. Overhead are terrible apparitions, dead
men in old armour and old tiaras, and fantastic figures, incredibly
radiant shapes, agonisings, sufferings, frantic hopes, the bitter
consciousness of weakness and the impotence of reason. Below is the
bottomless pit of elemental passions, of primeval slumber, of childish
dreams, of cyclopean mole-like labour. The voice of man does not reach
to these depths, as the wind does not reach to the bottom of the sea;
only at times the trumpet-blasts and drum-beats of war are heard there,
calling to blood, promising slaughter and dealing destruction.
Between the fantastic dreamers at the top and the savages beneath hovers
the middle class, having neither the strength proudly to utter its: I am
king! nor the self-sacrifice to join the Jesuits or the Socialists.
Hesitating between two moralities, they furnish precisely by this
hesitation the material for developing that corruption of which I am
speaking.
But how is it between two moralities? What does it mean, ‘between two
moralities’? And are there two moralities? Is there not one eternal
morality, _une et indivisible_?
Absolute morality is bound to share the fate of everything absolute;
it has no existence at all outside theory, outside abstract thought.
There are several moralities, and they are all very relative, that is,
historical.
The first Christians stated this very directly, very boldly, without
beating about the bush, and, having announced that the new Adam brought
a new morality, that the heathen virtues were for the Christian but
brilliant vices, they closed Plato, closed Cicero, and proceeded to drag
from their pedestals golden-haired Aphrodite, ox-eyed Hera, and the other
sinful saints of the old morality.
Pliny looked upon them as fools, Trajan despised them, Lucian laughed
at them, but they ushered in a new world and a new morality. Their new
morality has grown old in its turn. And that is just what we are talking
about.
The Revolution secularised what it could out of the catechism, but the
Revolution, like the Reformation, took its stand in the precincts of the
Church. Egmont and Alva, Calvin and Guise, Louis XVI. and Robespierre,
had the same general convictions; they differed, like Dissenters, in
shades only of opinion. Voltaire, who arrived wrapped up in a fur cloak,
in a carriage, to see the sunrise, and who fell on his trembling knees
with a prayer on his lips, Voltaire, who blessed Franklin’s grandson ‘in
the name of God and liberty,’ is as religious as St. Basil the Great and
Gregory of Nazianzus, only of a different sect. The cold moonlight of
Catholicism has passed through all the vicissitudes of revolution, and at
its last gasp has unfurled a new standard inscribed _Deo et Popolo_!
Somewhere on the heights the dawn of a new day is struggling with the
moonlight, revealing the glaring incompatibility of faith and knowledge,
of church and science, of law and conscience; but of that they know
nothing in the plains below—that is for the small band of the elect.
The union of science and religion is impossible, but there _is_ an
irregular union, from which one can draw one’s conclusion as to the
morality which rests on such a union. The fact is that Reason, fearing
a scandal, conceals the truth she knows; Science conceals that she is
with child, not by Jehovah but by Pan, and will bear a new redeemer; and
both are keeping it quiet, whispering, talking in cypher or simply lying,
leaving men in an utter chaos of confused ideas, in which prayers for
rain are mixed up with barometers, chemistry with miracles, telegraphs
with rosaries. And all this is somehow through routine, through habit;
you may believe or not, so long as you maintain certain forms of
propriety. Who is deceived? What is it all for? One obligatory rule has
remained, strong and accepted. Think what you please, but lie like the
rest.
Prophets may guide the people by visions and passionate words, but they
cannot guide them if they conceal the gift of prophecy or bow down to
Baal.
Is it any wonder that life grows emptier with terrible rapidity, driving
men by lack of understanding and by deadly dullness to every kind of
frenzy, from gambling on the Exchange to playing at turning tables?
Apparently everything is going in the usual way; respectable people are
occupied with their daily cares and business, with practical objects,
they hate every sort of Utopia and all far-reaching ideals; but in
reality this is not so, and the most respectable people as well as their
forefathers have won everything good that they have won by constantly
running after the rainbow and accomplishing impossibilities, such as
Catholicism, the Reformation, the Revolution. These rainbow visions are
no more, or, at any rate, the optical illusion deceives no more.
All the old ideals are dead, every one of them, from the Crucifixion to
the Phrygian cap.
Do you remember that awful picture after the style of Jean Paul Richter’s
inspired rhapsody, in which he depicts, apropos of what I forget, all
the penitent nations on the dread Day of Judgment fleeing terrified to
the Cross, praying for salvation and the good offices of the Son of God?
Christ answers briefly: ‘I have no father!’
A similar answer is heard now from all the crosses, to which the
yearning peoples, worn out with struggle, weary and heavy laden, appeal.
From every Golgotha the answer comes more and more loudly: ‘I have no
liberty!’ ‘I have no equality!’ ‘I have no fraternity!’ And one hope
after another grows dim, casting its last dying light on the melancholy
figures of the Don Quixotes, who obstinately refuse to hear the voices
from Golgotha ... they beckon to men to follow them more quickly, and one
after another vanish in the dark night of winter.
And that is not all; with redoubled horror men have begun to discern that
the Revolution not only has no father, but no son.
The terrible fruitless days of June 1848 were the protest of despair;
they did not create, they destroyed ... but what they attacked turned
out to be the strongest. With the taking of the last barricade, with the
deportation of the last batch of untried exiles, came the era of order.
The Utopia of the democratic republic proved to be as evanescent as the
Utopia of the kingdom of heaven on earth. Emancipation has turned out to
be as much a failure as redemption.
But the social ferment has not calmed down sufficiently to allow people
to be occupied with their own affairs; they must occupy their minds,
and without Utopias, without epidemics of enthusiasm for ideals, they
are badly off. It would not be so bad if the masses of the people,
disappointed in their expectations, would simply rot and mildew in the
Irish manner, like stagnant water; but, as it is, they may rise up in
exasperation and test their Samson-like muscles, and see how strong are
the pillars of the social edifice in which they are fettered!
Where are we to find ideals that are free from danger?
No need to look far—in the soul of man are many mansions. The
classification of man by nationalities becomes more and more the wretched
ideal of this world which has buried the revolution.
Political parties have dissolved into national parties: that is not
merely a backsliding from the Revolution, it is a backsliding from
Christianity. The human ideals of Catholicism and the Revolution have
given place to a heathen patriotism; and the honour of the flag is the
one honour of the peoples that has remained inviolate.
When I recall how twelve years ago the rake and buffoon Romieu[38]
used to preach in the Paris salons to all who would listen that the
revolutionary forces that had been roused should be turned from their
path to national, maybe dynastic, questions, I cannot help blushing with
shame at the memory.
There must be fighting whatever it is for, or a Chinese slumber will fall
upon the people in this stagnation, and it will be long before there is
an awakening. But is there any need of an awakening? That is just the
question.
The last of the Mohicans of the eighteenth century, the Don Quixotes of
the Revolution, the Socialists, some of the literary men, the poets, and
the eccentric folk of all sorts, are not sleepy, and, as far as they can,
they prevent the masses from sleeping.
The taciturn bourgeois is ashamed to confess that he is sleepy and,
half-asleep, goes on muttering incoherent phrases about progress and
liberty....
He needs war to awaken him. And is there in all the arsenal of the past
a standard, a banner, a word, an idea for which men would go out to
fight, which they have not seen put to shame and trampled in the mud?...
Universal suffrage, perhaps?...
No; no man of our day will go out to fight for a deposed idol with the
radiant self-sacrifice with which his forefather went to the stake for
the right to sing psalms, with the proud self-confidence with which his
father faced the guillotine for the sake of the one and indivisible
republic. To be sure, he knows that neither psalms sung in German nor the
emancipation of the people _à la française_ will lead to anything.
And no one can die for a god of whom he knows nothing, and who keeps
hidden behind a wall. Let him first speak out who he is, let him own
himself for a god, and with the impertinence of St. Augustine declare
in the face of the old world that ‘its virtues are vices, its truths
falsehood and absurdity.’
Well, that will not be to-day nor to-morrow.
The sensible man of our age is like Frederick II., an _esprit fort_
in his study and an _esprit accommodant_ in the market-place. When he
entered his study from which his lackeys were dismissed, the king became
a philosopher; but when he came out of it, the philosopher became a
king....
Here, too, ‘the bulls stand before the mountain.’ And yet it cannot be
denied that the light of reason is more and more widely dissipating the
darkness of prejudice.... What is most annoying is that people have
no time and die early—a man is only beginning to grow sensible when
in a trice he is carried to the cemetery. One cannot help recalling
the celebrated horse whose master trained it to eat nothing, but death
interfered with his plans.
In the Alpine glaciers every summer a crust of ice melts, but its mass
is so great that the autumn always catches the work of the sunbeams
half-way, and the crust begins to freeze again, though sometimes it does
not attain its former thickness. The meteorologists have reckoned many
times how many ages and ages the summer will need to beat the winter at
its work and melt all the ice. Many doubt whether the sun itself will
last long enough to do all the work: possibly a volcanic eruption will
help.
A similar calculation has not yet been worked out in history.
_October 20, 1862._
Letter 7
Six days for labour and the seventh for rest. Moses and Proudhon were
right to defend the Sabbath day. Monotonous work is terribly exhausting.
A man must have periodical pauses, in which, after washing his hands and
putting on clean clothes, he can go out, not to work but for a walk, have
a look at his fellow-creatures and at Nature, possess his soul, breathe
freely, be [39]‘resurrected.’[40]
Here I, too, have made of my periodical chatter about ‘Ends and
Beginnings’ my Sunday rest, and in it I withdraw from the daily discords,
the journalistic rascalities and the workaday wrangles, in which the
hours and days of the month change, but opinions and the expression of
them remain the same.... I withdraw as into some remote cell from the
windows of which many details are unseen, many sounds unheard, though the
silent outlines of mountains, far and near, are clearly visible, and the
murmur of the sea comes in distinctly.
Perhaps you will think that I am not spending my holiday very gaily;
remember that I am in England, where of all the dull days Sunday is the
dullest.
Well, there is no help for it. You must be bored once more, while, for my
part, I will try to tell you as amusingly as I can about the melancholy
matters which we discuss.
But are they really melancholy? And if it really is so, is it not high
time we were resigned to them? We really should not talk for ever about
things which it is not in our power to change. Would it not be better,
like a sensible man, to make up the account-books we have inherited, and,
forgetting our inordinate expenses and irreparable losses, accept the
total in meekness of spirit as a new starting-point. Grieve as you will,
you will not mend things; there are plenty of ways of using inherited
capital; there are plenty of dreams men cherish when they receive it. We
have had such dreams too.... The _symphonia heroica_ is over, practical
life is beginning. The wine has gone flat, let us drink the dry _tisane
de champagne_. It is not so nice, but they say it is more wholesome. Part
of the cultured world pines, with the old maid’s yearning for happiness
which she has not lost but has never had, and, instead of firmly making
up her mind to widowhood without marriage, laments that the _ideal_ of
her youth has not carried her off.... Well, what is to be done? It has
not, and now it is too late.
People are vexed at not having wings, and so will not trouble to be well
shod. The painfulness of European life in its more cultured classes is
directly due to their false position between dreams of what is not and
contempt for what is.
Side by side with the ideals of seraphic wings which are retreating more
and more into the darkness of the past and the ideals of other wings
that are vanishing into the future, there is a whole independent world
at which the dreamers are incensed, because it has achieved what it
could and not what the dreamers expected, that is, not wings. So long as
the authority and power of this world is not recognised, so long will
the feverish ferment, the perpetual falsity in life, the involuntary
faithlessness both to its ideal and to practical life, which is revealed
in the continual contradiction of words and deeds, phrases and conduct,
continue. That world is not nimble in words and not eloquent, although
it has created a great lever, comparable with steam and electricity, the
lever of advertisement, of proclamation, of _réclame_.
With all that, it cannot stand at its full height in all its breadth and
say aloud to the people: ‘I am the alpha and omega of your development;
come to me and I will comfort you, I will give what can be given; but
leave off knocking at all the doors which are not opened to you, some
because there is no one to open them, others because they lead nowhere.
Remember at last that you have no other god but me, and cease to bow down
to all sorts of idols and desire all sorts of wings. Understand that you
cannot preach at the same time Christian poverty and political economy,
socialist theories and the unlimited right of property. So far my power
exists as a fact, but not as the recognised foundation of morality, not
even as a flag, and, what is worse, I am denounced, I am insulted in
churches, in academies, in aristocratic halls and clubs, in speeches and
in sermons, in novels and in newspapers.... I am sick of playing the
part of a provincial relation from whom city fops take money and domestic
supplies, but about whom they keep quiet or speak with a blush. I want
not only to rule, but to wear the purple.’
Yes, my dear friend, it is time to come to recognising with all meekness
and humility that bourgeoisie is the final form of Western European
civilisation, its coming of age—_état adulte_; this closes the long
series of its visions; with this the epic of its growth, the romance
of its youth, everything that has brought so much poetry and calamity
into the life of the nations, ends. After all men’s dreams and efforts
... this offers them modest repose and a less troubled life and a
comfort within their capacity, not beyond the reach of any one, though
insufficient for the majority. By hard work the nations of the West have
won their winter quarters. Let others show their mettle. From time to
time, of course, men of a different leaven, of heroic times, of other
formations—monks, knights, Quakers, Jacobins—will be seen again, but
their transient appearance will not be able to affect the prevailing tone.
The mighty elemental hurricanes, that tossed up the whole surface of the
European sea, have sunk into a quiet sea-breeze, not perilous for ships,
but helping them to sail along the coast. Christianity has grown shallow
and quietened down into the calm stony haven of the Reformation; the
Revolution, too, has grown shallow and sunk into the calm sandy haven
of liberalism. Protestantism, a religion austere in trifles, has found
the secret of reconciling the Church which despises earthly goods, with
the supremacy of commerce and profit. Liberalism, austere in political
trifles, has learned even more artfully to unite a continual protest
against the government with a continual submission to it.
With so indulgent a Church, with so docile a Revolution, Western Europe
has begun to settle down, to find its equilibrium: everything that
hindered it has been drawn gradually into the solidifying waves, like
insects caught in amber. Byron, unable to breathe, let out a scream of
anger and fled, one of the first, anywhere ... to Greece.[41] Stoically
remaining in Frankfort, Schopenhauer slowly expired, noticing, like
Seneca when his veins had been opened, the progress of death and
welcoming it as his deliverer.... This did not in the least hinder the
tendency of all European life towards stillness and crystallisation; on
the contrary, this tendency grew more and more distinct. Individuality
was effaced, the racial type concealed everything strikingly original,
restless, or eccentric. Men, like goods, were turned into something
wholesale, ready-made, cheaper, and commoner, individually, but stronger
and more numerous in the mass. Individual characteristics were lost,
like the drops of a cataract in the general flood, without even the poor
consolation of
‘Gleaming bright in the rainbow’s passing streak.’
Hence their hateful but natural indifference to the life of their
neighbours and the fate of individuals; it is the type, the race, the
work that matters, not the person. To-day one hundred men are buried in a
coal-mine, to-morrow fifty more will be buried; to-day ten men are killed
on one railway, and to-morrow five more will be; and every one looks on
this as individual misfortune. Society suggests insurance.... What more
can it do?... There can be no shortage in the transport of stock because
somebody’s son or father has been killed; there can be no shortage in the
living apparatus for coal-mining either. A horse is needed, a workman
is needed, and whether it is a bay, or whether it is Tom or Harry, is
absolutely no matter. In this _no matter_ lies the whole secret of
persons being replaced by masses, of individuals being swallowed up by
the race.