THE END OF THE HOUSEHOLD GODS
The only place where it is possible to find an echo of the mind of the
English masses is either in conversation or in comic songs. The latter
are obviously the more dubious; but they are the only things recorded
and quotable that come anywhere near it. We talk about the popular
Press; but in truth there is no popular Press. It may be a good thing;
but, anyhow, most readers would be mildly surprised if a newspaper
leading article were written in the language of a navvy. Sometimes the
Press is interested in things in which the democracy is also genuinely
interested; such as horse-racing. Sometimes the Press is about as
popular as the Press Gang. We talk of Labour leaders in Parliament;
but they would be highly unparliamentary if they talked like
labourers. The Bolshevists, I believe, profess to promote something
that they call "proletarian art," which only shows that the word
Bolshevism can sometimes be abbreviated into bosh. That sort of
Bolshevist is not a proletarian, but rather the very thing he accuses
everybody else of being. The Bolshevist is above all a bourgeois; a
Jewish intellectual of the town. And the real case against industrial
intellectualism could hardly be put better than in this very
comparison. There has never been such a thing as proletarian art; but
there has emphatically been such a thing as peasant art. And the only
literature which even reminds us of the real tone and talk of the
English working classes is to be found in the comic song of the
English music-hall.
I first heard one of them on my voyage to America, in the midst of the
sea within sight of the New World, with the Statue of Liberty
beginning to loom up on the horizon. From the lips of a young Scotch
engineer, of all people in the world, I heard for the first time these
immortal words from a London music-hall song:--
"Father's got the sack from the water-works
For smoking of his old cherry-briar;
Father's got the sack from the water-works
'Cos he might set the water-works on fire."
As I told my friends in America, I think it no part of a patriot to
boast; and boasting itself is certainly not a thing to boast of. I
doubt the persuasive power of English as exemplified in Kipling, and
one can easily force it on foreigners too much, even as exemplified in
Dickens. I am no Imperialist, and only on rare and proper occasions a
Jingo. But when I hear those words about Father and the water-works,
when I hear under far-off foreign skies anything so gloriously English
as that, then indeed (I said to them), then indeed:--
"I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth have smiled,
And made me, as you see me here,
A little English child."
But that noble stanza about the water-works has other elements of
nobility besides nationality. It provides a compact and almost perfect
summary of the whole social problem in industrial countries like
England and America. If I wished to set forth systematically the
elements of the ethical and economic problem in Pittsburg or
Sheffield, I could not do better than take these few words as a text,
and divide them up like the heads of a sermon. Let me note the points
in some rough fashion here.
1.--_Father._ This word is still in use among the more ignorant and
ill-paid of the industrial community; and is the badge of an old
convention or unit called the family. A man and woman having vowed to
be faithful to each other, the man makes himself responsible for all
the children of the woman, and is thus generically called "Father." It
must not be supposed that the poet or singer is necessarily one of the
children. It may be the wife, called by the same ritual "Mother." Poor
English wives say "Father" as poor Irish wives say "Himself," meaning
the titular head of the house. The point to seize is that among the
ignorant this convention or custom still exists. Father and the family
are the foundations of thought; the natural authority still comes
natural to the poet; but it is overlaid and thwarted with more
artificial authorities; the official, the schoolmaster, the
policeman, the employer, and so on. What these forces fighting the
family are we shall see, my dear brethren, when we pass to our second
heading; which is:--
2.--_Got the Sack._ This idiom marks a later stage of the history of
the language than the comparatively primitive word "Father." It is
needless to discuss whether the term comes from Turkey or some other
servile society. In America they say that Father has been fired. But
it involves the whole of the unique economic system under which Father
has now to live. Though assumed by family tradition to be a master, he
can now, by industrial tradition, only be a particular kind of
servant; a servant who has not the security of a slave. If he owned
his own shop and tools, he could not get the sack. If his master owned
him, he could not get the sack. The slave and the guildsman know where
they will sleep every night; it was only the proletarian of
individualist industrialism who could get the sack, if not in the
style of the Bosphorus, at least in the sense of the Embankment. We
pass to the third heading.
3.--_From the Water-works._ This detail of Father's life is very
important; for this is the reply to most of the Socialists, as the
last section is to so many of the Capitalists. The water-works which
employed Father is a very large, official and impersonal institution.
Whether it is technically a bureaucratic department or a big business
makes little or no change in the feelings of Father in connection with
it. The water-works might or might not be nationalised; and it would
make no necessary difference to Father being fired, and no difference
at all to his being accused of playing with fire. In fact, if the
Capitalists are more likely to give him the sack, the Socialists are
even more likely to forbid him the smoke. There is no freedom for
Father except in some sort of private ownership of things like water
and fire. If he owned his own well his water could never be cut off,
and while he sits by his own fire his pipe can never be put out. That
is the real meaning of property, and the real argument against
Socialism; probably the only argument against Socialism.
4.--_For Smoking._ Nothing marks this queer intermediate phase of
industrialism more strangely than the fact that, while employers still
claim the right to sack him like a stranger, they are already
beginning to claim the right to supervise him like a son. Economically
he can go and starve on the Embankment; but ethically and hygienically
he must be controlled and coddled in the nursery. Government
repudiates all responsibility for seeing that he gets bread. But it
anxiously accepts all responsibility for seeing that he does not get
beer. It passes an Insurance Act to force him to provide himself with
medicine; but it is avowedly indifferent to whether he is able to
provide himself with meals. Thus while the sack is inconsistent with
the family, the supervision is really inconsistent with the sack. The
whole thing is a tangled chain of contradictions. It is true that in
the special and sacred text of scripture we are here considering, the
smoking is forbidden on a general and public and not on a medicinal
and private ground. But it is none the less relevant to remember that,
as his masters have already proved that alcohol is a poison, they may
soon prove that nicotine is a poison. And it is most significant of
all that this sort of danger is even greater in what is called the new
democracy of America than in what is called the old oligarchy of
England. When I was in America, people were already "defending"
tobacco. People who defend tobacco are on the road to proving that
daylight is defensible, or that it is not really sinful to sneeze. In
other words, they are quietly going mad.
5.--_Of his old Cherry-briar._ Here we have the intermediate and
anomalous position of the institution of Property. The sentiment still
exists, even among the poor, or perhaps especially among the poor. But
it is attached to toys rather than tools; to the minor products rather
than to the means of production. But something of the sanity of
ownership is still to be observed; for instance, the element of custom
and continuity. It was an _old_ cherry-briar; systematically smoked by
Father in spite of all wiles and temptations to Woodbines and gaspers;
an old companion possibly connected with various romantic or diverting
events in Father's life. It is perhaps a relic as well as a trinket.
But because it is not a true tool, because it gives the man no grip on
the creative energies of society, it is, with all the rest of his
self-respect, at the mercy of the thing called the sack. When he gets
the sack from the water-works, it is only too probable that he will
have to pawn his old cherry-briar.
6.--_'Cos he might set the water-works on fire._ And that single line,
like the lovely single lines of the great poets, is so full, so final,
so perfect a picture of all the laws we pass and all the reasons we
give for them, so exact an analysis of the logic of all our
precautions at the present time, that the pen falls even from the
hands of the commentator; and the masterpiece is left to speak for
itself.
Some such analysis as the above gives a better account than most of
the anomalous attitude and situation of the English proletarian
to-day. It is the more appropriate because it is expressed in the
words he actually uses; which certainly do not include the word
"proletarian." It will be noted that everything that goes to make up
that complexity is in an unfinished state. Property has not quite
vanished; slavery has not quite arrived; marriage exists under
difficulties; social regimentation exists under restraints, or rather
under subterfuges. The question which remains is which force is
gaining on the other, and whether the old forces are capable of
resisting the new. I hope they are; but I recognise that they resist
under more than one heavy handicap. The chief of these is that the
family feeling of the workmen is by this time rather an instinct than
an ideal. The obvious thing to protect an ideal is a religion. The
obvious thing to protect the ideal of marriage is the Christian
religion. And for various reasons, which only a history of England
could explain (though it hardly ever does), the working classes of
this country have been very much cut off from Christianity. I do not
dream of denying, indeed I should take every opportunity of affirming,
that monogamy and its domestic responsibilities can be defended on
rational apart from religious grounds. But a religion is the practical
protection of any moral idea which has to be popular and which has to
be pugnacious. And our ideal, if it is to survive, will have to be
both.
Those who make merry over the landlady who has seen better days, of
whom something has been said already, commonly speak, in the same
jovial journalese, about her household goods as her household gods.
They would be much startled if they discovered how right they are.
Exactly what is lacking to the modern materialist is something that
can be what the household gods were to the ancient heathen. The
household gods of the heathen were not only wood and stone; at least
there is always more than that in the stone of the hearth-stone and
the wood of the roof-tree. So long as Christianity continued the
tradition of patron saints and portable relics, this idea of a
blessing on the household could continue. If men had not domestic
divinities, at least they had divine domesticities. When Christianity
was chilled with Puritanism and rationalism, this inner warmth or
secret fire in the house faded on the hearth. But some of the embers
still glow or at least glimmer; and there is still a memory among the
poor that their material possessions are something sacred. I know poor
men for whom it is the romance of their lives to refuse big sums of
money for an old copper warming-pan. They do not want it, in any sense
of base utility. They do not use it as a warming-pan; but it warms
them for all that. It is indeed, as Sergeant Buzfuz humorously
observed, a cover for hidden fire. And the fire is that which burned
before the strange and uncouth wooden gods, like giant dolls, in the
huts of ancient Italy. It is a household god. And I can imagine some
such neglected and unlucky English man dying with his eyes on the red
gleam of that piece of copper, as happier men have died with their
eyes on the golden gleam of a chalice or a cross.
It will thus be noted that there has always been some connection
between a mystical belief and the materials of domesticity; that they
generally go together; and that now, in a more mournful sense, they
are gone together. The working classes have no reserves of property
with which to defend their relics of religion. They have no religion
with which to sanctify and dignify their property. Above all, they are
under the enormous disadvantage of being right without knowing it.
They hold their sound principles as if they were sullen prejudices.
They almost secrete their small property as if it were stolen
property. Often a poor woman will tell a magistrate that she sticks to
her husband, with the defiant and desperate air of a wanton resolved
to run away from her husband. Often she will cry as hopelessly, and
as it were helplessly, when deprived of her child as if she were a
child deprived of her doll. Indeed, a child in the street, crying for
her lost doll, would probably receive more sympathy than she does.
Meanwhile the fun goes on; and many such conflicts are recorded, even
in the newspapers, between heart-broken parents and house-breaking
philanthropists; always with one issue, of course. There are any
number of them that never get into the newspapers. And we have to be
flippant about these things as the only alternative to being rather
fierce; and I have no desire to end on a note of universal ferocity. I
know that many who set such machinery in motion do so from motives of
sincere but confused compassion, and many more from a dull but not
dishonourable medical or legal habit. But if I and those who agree
with me tend to some harshness and abruptness of condemnation, these
worthy people need not be altogether impatient with our impatience. It
is surely beneath them, in the scope of their great schemes, to
complain of protests so ineffectual about wrongs so individual. I have
considered in this chapter the chances of general democratic defence
of domestic honour, and have been compelled to the conclusion that
they are not at present hopeful; and it is at least clear that we
cannot be founding on them any personal hopes. If this conclusion
leaves us defeated, we submit that it leaves us disinterested. Ours is
not the sort of protest, at least, that promises anything even to the
demagogue, let alone the sycophant. Those we serve will never rule,
and those we pity will never rise. Parliament will never be surrounded
by a mob of submerged grandmothers brandishing pawn-tickets. There is
no trade union of defective children. It is not very probable that
modern government will be overturned by a few poor dingy devils who
are sent to prison by mistake, or rather by ordinary accident. Surely
it is not for those magnificent Socialists, or those great reformers
and reconstructors of Capitalism, sweeping onward to their scientific
triumphs and caring for none of these things, to murmur at our vain
indignation. At least if it is vain it is the less venal; and in so
far as it is hopeless it is also thankless. They have their great
campaigns and cosmopolitan systems for the regimentation of millions,
and the records of science and progress. They need not be angry with
us, who plead for those who will never read our words or reward our
effort, even with gratitude. They need surely have no worse mood
towards us than mystification, seeing that in recalling these small
things of broken hearts or homes, we are but recording what cannot be
recorded; trivial tragedies that will fade faster and faster in the
flux of time, cries that fail in a furious and infinite wind, wild
words of despair that are written only upon running water; unless,
indeed, as some so stubbornly and strangely say, they are somewhere
cut deep into a rock, in the red granite of the wrath of God.