THE VENGEANCE OF THE FLESH
By a quaint paradox, we generally miss the meaning of simple stories
because we are not subtle enough to understand their simplicity. As
long as men were in sympathy with some particular religion or other
romance of things in general, they saw the thing solid and swallowed
it whole, knowing that it could not disagree with them. But the moment
men have lost the instinct of being simple in order to understand it,
they have to be very subtle in order to understand it. We can find,
for instance, a very good working case in those old puritanical
nursery tales about the terrible punishment of trivial sins; about how
Tommy was drowned for fishing on the Sabbath, or Sammy struck by
lightning for going out after dark. Now these moral stories are
immoral, because Calvinism is immoral. They are wrong, because
Puritanism is wrong. But they are not quite so wrong, they are not a
quarter so wrong, as many superficial sages have supposed.
The truth is that everything that ever came out of a human mouth had a
human meaning; and not one of the fixed fools of history was such a
fool as he looks. And when our great-uncles or great-grandmothers
told a child he might be drowned by breaking the Sabbath, their souls
(though undoubtedly, as Touchstone said, in a parlous state) were not
in quite so simple a state as is suggested by supposing that their god
was a devil who dropped babies into the Thames for a trifle. This form
of religious literature is a morbid form if taken by itself; but it
did correspond to a certain reality in psychology which most people of
any religion, or even of none, have felt a touch of at some time or
other. Leaving out theological terms as far as possible, it is the
subconscious feeling that one can be wrong with Nature as well as
right with Nature; that the point of wrongness may be a detail (in the
superstitions of heathens this is often quite a triviality); but that
if one is really wrong with Nature, there is no particular reason why
all her rivers should not drown or all her storm-bolts strike one who
is, by this vague yet vivid hypothesis, her enemy. This may be a
mental sickness, but it is too human or too mortal a sickness to be
called solely a superstition. It is not solely a superstition; it is
not simply superimposed upon human nature by something that has got on
top of it. It flourishes without check among non-Christian systems,
and it flourishes especially in Calvinism, because Calvinism is the
most non-Christian of Christian systems. But like everything else that
inheres in the natural senses and spirit of man, it has something in
it; it is not stark unreason. If it is an ill (and it generally is),
it is one of the ills that flesh is heir to, but he is the lawful
heir. And like many other dubious or dangerous human instincts or
appetites, it is sometimes useful as a warning against worse things.
Now the trouble of the nineteenth century very largely came from the
loss of this; the loss of what we may call the natural and heathen
mysticism. When modern critics say that Julius Caesar did not believe
in Jupiter, or that Pope Leo did not believe in Catholicism, they
overlook an essential difference between those ages and ours. Perhaps
Julius did not believe in Jupiter; but he did not disbelieve in
Jupiter. There was nothing in his philosophy, or the philosophy of
that age, that could forbid him to think that there was a spirit
personal and predominant in the world. But the modern materialists are
not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe. Hence, while
the heathen might avail himself of accidental omens, queer
coincidences or casual dreams, without knowing for certain whether
they were really hints from heaven or premonitory movements in his own
brain, the modern Christian turned heathen must not entertain such
notions at all, but must reject the oracle as the altar. The modern
sceptic was drugged against all that was natural in the supernatural.
And this was why the modern tyrant marched upon his doom, as a tyrant
literally pagan might possibly not have done.
There is one idea of this kind that runs through most popular tales
(those, for instance, on which Shakespeare is so often based)--an idea
that is profoundly moral even if the tales are immoral. It is what
may be called the flaw in the deed: the idea that, if I take my
advantage to the full, I shall hear of something to my disadvantage.
Thus Midas fell into a fallacy about the currency; and soon had reason
to become something more than a Bimetallist. Thus Macbeth had a
fallacy about forestry; he could not see the trees for the wood. He
forgot that, though a place cannot be moved, the trees that grow on it
can. Thus Shylock had a fallacy of physiology; he forgot that, if you
break into the house of life, you find it a bloody house in the most
emphatic sense. But the modern capitalist did not read fairy-tales,
and never looked for the little omens at the turnings of the road. He
(or the most intelligent section of him) had by now realised his
position, and knew in his heart it was a false position. He thought a
margin of men out of work was good for his business; he could no
longer really think it was good for his country. He could no longer be
the old "hard-headed" man who simply did not understand things; he
could only be the hard-hearted man who faced them. But he still
marched on; he was sure he had made no mistake.
However, he had made a mistake--as definite as a mistake in
multiplication. It may be summarised thus: that the same inequality
and insecurity that makes cheap labour may make bad labour, and at
last no labour at all. It was as if a man who wanted something from an
enemy, should at last reduce the enemy to come knocking at his door in
the despair of winter, should keep him waiting in the snow to sharpen
the bargain; and then come out to find the man dead upon the doorstep.
He had discovered the divine boomerang; his sin had found him out. The
experiment of Individualism--the keeping of the worker half in and
half out of work--was far too ingenious not to contain a flaw. It was
too delicate a balance to work entirely with the strength of the
starved and the vigilance of the benighted. It was too desperate a
course to rely wholly on desperation. And as time went on the terrible
truth slowly declared itself; the degraded class was really
degenerating. It was right and proper enough to use a man as a tool;
but the tool, ceaselessly used, was being used up. It was quite
reasonable and respectable, of course, to fling a man away like a
tool; but when it was flung away in the rain the tool rusted. But the
comparison to a tool was insufficient for an awful reason that had
already begun to dawn upon the master's mind. If you pick up a hammer,
you do not find a whole family of nails clinging to it. If you fling
away a chisel by the roadside, it does not litter and leave a lot of
little chisels. But the meanest of the tools, Man, had still this
strange privilege which God had given him, doubtless by mistake.
Despite all improvements in machinery, the most important part of the
machinery (the fittings technically described in the trade as "hands")
were apparently growing worse. The firm was not only encumbered with
one useless servant, but he immediately turned himself into five
useless servants. "The poor should not be emancipated," the old
reactionaries used to say, "until they are fit for freedom." But if
this downrush went on, it looked as if the poor would not stand high
enough to be fit for slavery.
So at least it seemed, doubtless in a great degree subconsciously, to
the man who had wagered all his wealth on the usefulness of the poor
to the rich and the dependence of the rich on the poor. The time came
at last when the rather reckless breeding in the abyss below ceased to
be a supply, and began to be something like a wastage; ceased to be
something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a
necessity of shooting foxes. The situation was aggravated by the fact
that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor
could obtain, and were, therefore, disproportionately pursued, and by
the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal
nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences
began to appear. To a much less extent than the Eugenists assert, but
still to a notable extent, in a much looser sense than the Eugenists
assume, but still in some sort of sense, the types that were
inadequate or incalculable or uncontrollable began to increase. Under
the hedges of the country, on the seats of the parks, loafing under
the bridges or leaning over the Embankment, began to appear a new race
of men--men who are certainly not mad, whom we shall gain no
scientific light by calling feeble-minded, but who are, in varying
individual degrees, dazed or drink-sodden, or lazy or tricky or tired
in body and spirit. In a far less degree than the teetotallers tell
us, but still in a large degree, the traffic in gin and bad beer
(itself a capitalist enterprise) fostered the evil, though it had not
begun it. Men who had no human bond with the instructed man, men who
seemed to him monsters and creatures without mind, became an eyesore
in the market-place and a terror on the empty roads. The rich were
afraid.
Moreover, as I have hinted before, the act of keeping the destitute
out of public life, and crushing them under confused laws, had an
effect on their intelligences which paralyses them even as a
proletariat. Modern people talk of "Reason versus Authority"; but
authority itself involves reason, or its orders would not even be
understood. If you say to your valet, "Look after the buttons on my
waistcoat," he may do it, even if you throw a boot at his head. But if
you say to him, "Look after the buttons on my top-hat," he will not do
it, though you empty a boot-shop over him. If you say to a schoolboy,
"Write out that Ode of Horace from memory in the original Latin," he
may do it without a flogging. If you say, "Write out that Ode of
Horace in the original German," he will not do it with a thousand
floggings. If you will not learn logic, he certainly will not learn
Latin. And the ludicrous laws to which the needy are subject (such as
that which punishes the homeless for not going home) have really, I
think, a great deal to do with a certain increase in their
sheepishness and short-wittedness, and, therefore, in their industrial
inefficiency. By one of the monstrosities of the feeble-minded theory,
a man actually acquitted by judge and jury could _then_ be examined by
doctors as to the state of his mind--presumably in order to discover
by what diseased eccentricity he had refrained from the crime. In
other words, when the police cannot jail a man who is innocent of
doing something, they jail him for being too innocent to do anything.
I do not suppose the man is an idiot at all, but I can believe he
feels more like one after the legal process than before. Thus all the
factors--the bodily exhaustion, the harassing fear of hunger, the
reckless refuge in sexuality, and the black botheration of bad
laws--combined to make the employee more unemployable.
Now, it is very important to understand here that there were two
courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalist confronted
by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First, he might have
reversed his machine, so to speak, and started unwinding the long rope
of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to
his feet. In other words, he might have seen that the workmen had more
money, more leisure, more luxuries, more status in the community, and
then trusted to the normal instincts of reasonably happy human beings
to produce a generation better born, bred and cared for than these
tortured types that were less and less use to him. It might still not
be too late to rebuild the human house upon such an architectural plan
that poverty might fly out of the window, with the reasonable prospect
of love coming in at the door. In short, he might have let the English
poor, the mass of whom were not weak-minded, though more of them were
growing weaker, a reasonable chance, in the form of more money, of
achieving their eugenical resurrection themselves. It has never been
shown, and it cannot be shown, that the method would have failed. But
it can be shown, and it must be closely and clearly noted, that the
method had very strict limitations from the employers' own point of
view. If they made the worker too comfortable, he would not work to
increase another's comforts; if they made him too independent, he
would not work like a dependent. If, for instance, his wages were so
good that he could save out of them, he might cease to be a
wage-earner. If his house or garden were his own, he might stand an
economic siege in it. The whole capitalist experiment had been built
on his dependence; but now it was getting out of hand, not in the
direction of freedom, but of frank helplessness. One might say that
his dependence had got independent of control.
But there was another way. And towards this the employer's ideas
began, first darkly and unconsciously, but now more and more clearly,
to drift. Giving property, giving leisure, giving status costs money.
But there is one human force that costs nothing. As it does not cost
the beggar a penny to indulge, so it would not cost the employer a
penny to employ. He could not alter or improve the tables or the
chairs on the cheap. But there were two pieces of furniture (labelled
respectively "the husband" and "the wife") whose relations were much
cheaper. He could alter the _marriage_ in the house in such a way as
to promise himself the largest possible number of the kind of children
he did want, with the smallest possible number of the kind he did
not. He could divert the force of sex from producing vagabonds. And he
could harness to his high engines unbought the red unbroken river of
the blood of a man in his youth, as he has already harnessed to them
all the wild waste rivers of the world.