THE
TYRANNY OF SHAMS
BY
JOSEPH McCABE
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
1916
PREFACE.
THIS book is a frank criticism of most of the dominant ideas and
institutions of our time: a confession of faith in nearly all the more
daring heresies which hold, so to say, the firing line of our
literature: a conception of a new social order and new planetary
arrangement. It is therefore candidly egoistic, and I should like to
explain the circumstances in which it was designed and written.
It was conceived, and much of it was written, during the long voyage
from Australia to England. At that time I had issued, if I may include
the introduction to English readers of foreign writers, some fifty
publications, and in these I had generally described remote periods of
history, or even remoter periods of the earth's story or distant
regions of the universe. Many had asked me to tell them things more
intimate and important than the way in which stars were formed, or the
manners of extinct Dinosaurs and ancient empresses: asked if thirty
years' study of philosophy, science, and history had given me no
interest in, or light upon, the problems of the hour. In Australasia
this request was made more insistently than ever. Our ancient
prejudices have been transplanted into the soil of the new world, and
they have thriven there, like the gorse, the sparrow, the rabbit, and
so many other pests which sentimental colonists have introduced in
order to remind them of "home." But new ideas also have been
imported, and they find a rich soil in the free, unconventional,
enterprising colonial mind. Men and women are asking the same
questions there as in London and New York.
The general drift or implication of these questions obsessed me daily
during the slow traverse of the Southern Ocean. Day after day the
great liner visibly rounded this vast ball of metal which we call our
earth; and to me there is no more impressive symbol than this of the
power and the future of man. Some complain that at sea they feel the
earth and man and man's concerns made trivial by the great fires
which blaze through the darker sky. But largeness is not greatness,
and a vast prairie in some inaccessible region does not make less
precious the little plot of earth at your door that you can make
beautiful. Your predominant feeling, when you round the globe and see
with your own eye its limitations, is one of power. This sphere, you
feel, is the principality of man; and there never was a power so
despotic and far-reaching as the power of a united race would be. You
fed as if the earth could be embraced in the arms of a giant, and
humanity is the giant. If men were agreed in their designs, the earth
would be as clay in the hand of the potter. It would prove as passive
and tractable as the child's ball of plasticine--if all, or the
great part of, men and women were agreed as to the shape it was
desirable to impose on it. In our age differences of ideal restrain
the hand and prevent us from giving a fairer face to the earth. The
power of a united mankind would be something akin to omnipotence.
Every man or woman who has seen the earth with this larger vision must
seethe with impatience to end this conflict of old traditions and new
ideas which paralyses our hands; to do what he or she can to
accelerate that final harmony of conviction which will set free the
fingers of the Great Potter. That is the controlling sentiment of this
little book.
It happens that, before the book reaches the public, one of those
traditions which it assails has spread a ghastly devastation over the
face of the earth. For nearly twenty years I have used my slender
opportunities as speaker and writer to denounce the military machine:
to imagine the mighty resources we waste on militarism and war
transferred to those enterprises which seek to brighten the earth and
make the hearts of men and women lighter. Now the little sermon, which
many feeble voices were preaching, is taken up by an orator whose
voice thunders from pole to pole, whose words are blood-curdling
realities. Ten thousand million sterling, perhaps, poured into the sea
in eighteen months: ten million men, perhaps, prematurely blasted off
the earth or stricken for life: and a trail of blood and tears and
misery that all the mighty fertility of the earth will take a
generation to obliterate! Nor does this outpour of horror merely mean
that _one_ feature of our life needs reconsideration. We could not
have retained this military machine, with its ever-present danger of
an appalling calamity, if our minds were generally sane, alert,
unclogged by shams.
One inquires how it is that a generation which boasts of its wisdom
and humanity can retain this worst survival of barbarism, and one
finds that the evil is connected with a dozen other evils and
protected by a general mental debility. The habit of tracing this
calamity to the peculiar criminality of another nation, and dwelling
only on our own heroism and self-sacrifice in meeting this menace, is
in itself a very grave danger. We may be entirely certain that, as
long as we retain the military machinery for settling quarrels, there
will be wars. How came the machinery to linger amongst us in the
twentieth century? At once we light upon a dozen other disorders of
our life. This remissness in civilising international intercourse
argues a grave indifference to a most important task on the part of
our political servants, and an equally grave absence of pressure and
direction on the part of their supporters. It reveals a dangerously
slovenly condition of our industrial world, a very serious defect in
our educational system, a standing menace in the encouraged
thoughtlessness of the mass of our people, a general flabbiness,
haziness, and anæmia of what may be called the intellectual part of
our public life.
This is true of all nations,--it may be the turn of the United States,
or Norway, or Argentina tomorrow,--but it is most seriously true of
England. Do not let us fuddle our minds with the kind of rhetoric one
addresses to schoolboys. We have, in the first year of the war,
betrayed a sluggishness, a lack of foresight and initiative, a
feebleness of organisation, which ought to sober any race, however
wealthy. Our Government knew, or ought to have known, since the spring
of 1912, that just this war was threatening us; and, when it occurred,
they made a virtue of the fact that we were "the least prepared
nation in Europe." They took nine months to begin to organise our
resources, or to perceive that it was necessary to do so. Plainly,
there is something profoundly, comprehensively wrong with our public
life. We shall "muddle through," because we have the resources,
and because the Allies outnumber their opponents by fifty per cent.
But if in a future war we are compelled to face a numerically equal
opponent, England will, if she retains these faults, see her royal
standard in the dust. As it is, the cost of our ineptitude will be
prodigious.
So I am confirmed in my design to declare what seems to me to be wrong
with our life. I choose the form of a direct challenge of old
traditions mainly because they so oppress and benumb the public mind
that new ideals do not get a fair consideration. But it will be found
that behind the series of challenges there is a series of
affirmations, and these make up a constructive ideal of life. Probably
few will accept this ideal in its entirety, though each chapter
advocates a reform which has millions of adherents. It is, however,
not based on any 'ism, least of all on dogmatism. There is a view
of, or attitude toward, life expounded in the first chapter, and
behind each particular claim. But each section deals with a specific
department of life and must find its justification within the limits
of that department. If any regret that the work does not embody a
profound philosophy of life, I must reply that I passed through
philosophy thirty years ago, and came out into science and history in
search of reality: and that philosophers do not seem to me to be
either agreed among themselves or in any close relationship to the
human problems I discuss.
Many will advise me, too, that a man would do well to conceal the more
offensive of his heresies, in order to gain a more patient hearing for
the others. That is the usual and prudent practice, no doubt; but this
book has been written in a mood of fiery impatience with untruth, and
this has forbidden compromise. Night by night, as I sit on the deck of
the ship, I watch the dark purple pall drop swiftly over the last
flush of the tropical sky; and I know that, each night, it shrouds the
faces of thousands of men, women, and children whose chance of
happiness is gone for ever. We are arguing to-day about man's
ailments just as the Greeks were arguing in the Agora at Athens two
thousand years ago, or as men argued in the garden of Plato or of
Epicurus. Meantime almost countless millions have lived in pain and
squalor, and died in delusive hope, under the curse of those ancient
traditions which we will not discard. Therefore I am impatient: I
cannot sit in quiet enjoyment of the sunshine that is granted me. It
will be found that no man appraises more highly than I the advance we
have made in modern times, and that I nowhere exaggerate the darker
features of life. If at times I write fiercely, cynically, even
bitterly, it is not from pessimism, but from fulness and fire of
optimism. My controlling thought is, as I said, a consciousness of our
power.
There are two types of people into whose hands this book may fall. The
first is the man or woman whose nerves must not be disturbed by the
spectacle of the misery of less fortunate beings: who finds life good,
and instinctively resents any proposals to tamper with its
foundations. These people are no more open to blame, as a rule, than
the prophet is entitled to praise for his ardour. We do not choose our
temperament, whatever else we choose. But one does not appeal to these
comfortable people. They would have refined and pleasant things about
them always, and they shrink from the vaults where, they dimly know,
ugly and sordid and writhing things are crowded together: lest their
glance fall on some yellow and distorted face whose hollow cheeks, or
eyes bloodshot with pain or brutality, would disturb the even pleasure
of their lives. So be it. Let it be written in stark letters on their
marble stones, when the last peach has dropped from their relaxing
fingers: My ideal was to enjoy life, and to let the devil take the
hindmost.
Do not let me be misunderstood. The enjoyment of life is the supreme
ideal advocated in this book. I loathe asceticism, either Christian or
Stoic. But I write for the second type of man or woman: the people who
are strong and healthy enough to enjoy every pleasure that life
affords, yet keep some thought for the unhappiness of others: who
think it a normal part even of a pleasant and refined life, especially
a leisured life, to spare some hours for seeking how the world may be
improved for less fortunate folk: who, precisely because they love the
sunlight, ask if it cannot be devised that all men and women and
children shall have a larger share of it. Their chief difficulty is
that, unhappily, the new prophets are as discordant as the old. A few
centuries ago, when you crossed London Bridge, or the Pont Neuf at
Paris, or the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, a score of rival quacks or
charlatans (in the literal sense) cried in your ears the virtues of
their conflicting remedies. To-day just so many conflicting social
physicians cry their wares in the streets. They oppose each other
almost as bitterly as they oppose the older traditions. How shall a
busy man or woman decide among them? What fixed and unalterable
principle, in this world of dissolving creeds, can you adopt for the
testing of their truth or untruth?
A very grave and sincere difficulty. Therefore, again, I have chosen
to attack what seem to me to be shams: which I would define as
untruths that the millions venerate as truths. The work of reform will
proceed very slowly and very precariously until these are resolutely
discredited and dethroned. In each case, it is true, it will be found
that the dethronement of an error enthrones a truth; but I insist that
we will pay no grave and practical attention to constructive schemes
until we fully realise the blunders and brutalities of our present
civilisation. The discord of our social prophets does not excuse us
from perceiving these.
As to fixed and unalterable principles, it seems to me that two, at
least, are not disturbed by the ground-quakes of our time. Perhaps
they stand with more conspicuous firmness when so many other
"eternal verities" have fallen. The first is the principle of
truthfulness or sincerity. Of this it need be said only that, if there
are any parts of our human tradition which the larger mind of our age
discovers to be untrue, they ought to be rejected at once; and the
more closely they are woven into our social fabric, the more speedily
and more apprehensively they ought to be torn out. The second and
greater principle is the aim of arresting suffering and diffusing
happiness as far as possible. I will consider this presently, and
merely state here that these chapters have been written solely in the
name and under the inspiration of that ideal. And if my words are at
times violent, the violence is due solely to a great eagerness for the
speedier coming of a brighter and more intelligent age and to a
sincere abhorrence of cant and shams and all that lengthens this grey
twilight of civilisation.
J. M.
CONTENTS.
I. The Philosophy of Revolt
II. The Military Sham
III. The Follies of Sham Patriotism
IV. Political Shams
V. The Distribution of Wealth
VI. Idols of the Home
VII. The Future of Woman
VIII. Shams of the School
IX. The Education of the Adult
X. The Clerical Sham
THE TYRANNY OF SHAMS
CHAPTER I.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLT
[This chapter is, with a few alterations, reproduced from _The
English Review_, October 1914.]
ALTHOUGH this work does not embody any system of speculation about
the universe, any creed or 'ism or large and abstruse set of
principles, it must begin with a careful study of the phenomenon of
revolt. Never before was there such an age of general and feverish
restlessness; never was there such quaking of the deepest foundations
of old institutions, such tottering of thrones and altars. From every
intellectual centre the disturbing waves radiate. Round London,
Berlin, and New York the rumbling is habitual. Already they perceive
it in Tokyo and Peking and Constantinople. Tomorrow it will break on
the ear in Teheran and Lhasa. The same questions are asked all over
the earth. I have discussed them with millionaires at the Ritz and
with great ladies at Claridge's: with students in their universities
and miners in their cottages: with learned professors in Rome or New
York, and with notorious anarchists in obscure corners of Paris: with
working girls in Melbourne, with Maoris in Wellington, with Chinese
and Hindus and alert, full-blooded Africans. I have been invited to
discuss them with a Polynesian princess and to lecture on them in
Fiji, and I have had letters on them from Japanese settlers in British
Columbia and negro tailors in British Guiana. The same questions
everywhere: religious doctrines and political forms, education and
industry, marriage and woman--almost every ideal and institution we
have inherited. And the persistent note that resounds from continent
to continent is the note of rebellion.
Very different feelings are inspired by this characteristic fact of
modern life. To some it seems that this melting of the rigid framework
of traditions is a welcome sign of spring and growth: that a long
winter, which had slowed the blood of the earth and retarded the
development of civilisation, is over at last, and little, shapeless,
promising shoots of new ideals are rising from the loosened soil. To
others it seems as if the binding fabric of our civilisation were
weakened and we were in danger of returning to barbarism. Surely those
old traditions did hold together the structure of our civilisation?
And surely it is impossible to replace in a few generations the links
of a planet-wide human society? The shades of dead Memphis and Babylon
and Nineveh, of Athens and Rome and Bagdad, of Venice and Genoa and
Florence, pass before their anxious eyes. In each case, they remind
us, this same moral, social, and intellectual restlessness preceded
death.
The inevitable specialism of our age adds to the confusion. Life is a
connected whole, yet neither research nor reform can now be other than
sectional. We devote ourselves to a candid study of some particular
reform, and we find it a thoroughly reasonable proposal, a deduction
from principles that we are bound to admit. But we have not had
leisure to discover the indisputable principles of other reforms; and,
when we hear the demand of change and progress rising on one side
after another--in the Church, the State, the Home, the School, and so
on--we remark sententiously that rebellion is becoming a fashion, that
our generation is getting feverish or neurotic, that we must insist on
authority somewhere. We repeat plausible phrases about the decay of
respect and the wisdom of the race. We fasten on symptoms of
disorder--without inquiring very closely whether the disorder is new
or has been recently aggravated--and we conclude that conservatism is
a social duty: that, at all events, we will admit reform only by the
inch. We fancy ourselves the guardians of the _palladium_.
Quite apart from purely selfish motives, some of the closest observers
of our age do differ radically in diagnosis and prescription. The same
movements are symptoms of health to one man, symptoms of disease to
another. Take the enlargement of divorce, the decay of clerical
authority, the industrial revolt, or the rebellion of women. There
seems to be no common ground left on which the observers may meet with
any hope of agreement. The old religious and political standards will
now hopelessly divide any roomful of educated men and women. You
propose, perhaps, to fall back on moral standards--the ground on which
"all reasonable people" unite--and someone quotes against you half
a dozen of the most brilliant writers of Europe and America. Hopes and
lamentations, inspired by precisely the same facts of life, mingle
confusedly in our literature, and men and women of large heart and
little leisure seem to be condemned to a sterile perplexity or a
selfish absorption in business and pleasure. What, at all events, is
the meaning or purpose of life? And how is this spreading rebellion
related to it?
First let us examine the grounds of the very distressing forecasts of
the Conservative. In the vast majority of cases that are worth
examining one will find that the pessimism has not very firm
foundations. Your dismal prophet is usually a man with an ancient
gospel which we are discarding, or a new gospel which does not attract
us. The appeal to the modern world, he realises, must be utilitarian:
he must show us that, without him, we perish. So he recklessly heaps
up before our eyes statistics of crime and consumption and lunacy and
alcohol: he makes weird and totally inaccurate statements about France
or the United States or some other country: he marshals the shades of
dead empires--which seem to have died of a wonderful complication of
modern maladies--before us with appropriate rhetoric.
Now to this kind of conservatism, which says that we are decaying, I
reply that, on every positive test of national health, we are more
flourishing than we ever were before. Dark as the earth is, it was
never brighter than it is to-day, or more full of promise for the
morrow. The war is not inconsistent with this general statement, as I
will show later. A failure to advance in one direction does not alter
the fact that we have advanced in a hundred others; and the gross
behaviour of one nation does not destroy the gain that half a dozen
other nations were ready to behave with a new decency in warfare. As
to that "lesson of history" which is stridently read to us by men
and women whose command of history is not otherwise conspicuous, I
would remind them that the civilisation of dead empires always reached
its height just before, or at the time when, they began to decay. Does
anyone suggest that we ought not further to develop our civilisation
lest we also decay? However, I have sufficiently discussed elsewhere
this nonsense about "laws of history"; and I will show later that
these older empires decayed, not because of their high development of
intellect and fine sentiment, which leads to revolt, but from the
natural defect of those very institutions which our conservatives
defend.
We are not decaying. England is, for every class of its citizens, an
immeasurably finer place to live in than it was a hundred years ago. I
speak on the strength of a rigorous comparison of the moral and social
life of England a century ago with that of modern England, but I
cannot give the facts here. Let it suffice to make plain that I have
no sympathy with pessimists and preachers of penance and austerity, of
any school. The world improves, and improves more rapidly than it ever
did before. What stirs one's impatience is the consciousness that we
could, and do not, move with infinitely greater speed: that we
tolerate abuses and shams which insult our intelligence and mock our
professions of humanity.
What, then, are the grounds of the optimistic view of this widespread
revolt? Let us admit that conservatism, in the sense of an attitude of
caution, is a virtue. We would not try unknown drugs on the life of an
individual, and we ought not to apply untried recipes to the life of
forty million people. Yet it is precisely from this medical world that
we gather valuable hints of progress. By two centuries of sober and
heroic labour the physician has brought the greater part of our
maladies under control. He would tell you, in private, that he has a
hope of eventually being able to check all disease and prolong life.
The _laissez-faire_ attitude is unknown in medical science. It is
unknown in our technical and commercial worlds. We have made
stupendous progress, not by conserving, but by innovating: not asking
if a machine or a system worked well, but if we could devise a better.
In science--in all on which we pride ourselves in modern
civilisation--we have followed the progressive principle: we have
cultivated revolt. Since we began to do so, we have raised the level
of our civilisation in each generation.
It is therefore not surprising that many are asking whether we ought
not to extend the progressive principle to our religions, moralities,
politics, economic systems, schools, domestic and civic and social
traditions. It is, in other words, quite natural that there should be
a demand for, not one reform only, but a hundred reforms, in modern
life. We are justly, wisely proud of what is distinctive and superior
in our civilisation: advance, better organisation, economy of waste,
greater efficiency. The mystery is that so many would restrict this
improvement to what they call the "lower" material departments of
life, and keep a strict guard against the reformer at the frontiers of
their spiritual or political world. The modern rebellion is a very
logical effort to apply these very successful principles to as much of
life as is susceptible of improvement.
This effort, further, coincides with the quite dominant and
characteristic note of modern culture: evolution. We forget sometimes
that until half a century ago Europe was oppressed by an entirely
wrong view of the earth's resources. Plato put a philosophic
anathema on the earth. This material mass, he said, was a barren
thing. Order, truth, beauty, love had to come to it, in fitful gleams,
from a world beyond, over which man had no control. We know now that
Plato was wrong. Order, truth, beauty, and love have developed on the
earth--they are "sublunary" things--and man can control their
sources and enlarge their proportions. They do not properly make men
great: men make them great. They are as surely under our direction as
are applied science and commerce and the franchise. We can cultivate
them as we now cultivate pansies or sheep. It depends on _us_ if lies
and disorder and dishonour are to linger among us, or if truth and
justice and beauty are to prevail.
Again therefore it is quite natural that we should hear a demand for a
more extensive use of these powers of ours. The ships and ploughs and
illuminants of a hundred years ago were made by the same men, or the
same generations of men, as the religions and polities and moralities
of the time. Why assume that the wisdom of the race was almost
infallible in its spiritual and more difficult creations, but capable
of enormous improvement on the material side? Conservatism, as
anything more than an attitude of caution and prudence, has not a
plausible air.
It is well also to regard the essential or characteristic line of
human evolution. Apart from a few who are caught by a transient
attempt to glorify instinct, we agree that the development of
intelligence is one of the main sources of progress. Now this great
and general awakening of intelligence in recent decades was bound to
lead to a good deal of challenging of old traditions. That was
precisely why the grandfathers of our bishops and peers opposed it.
This higher intelligence of the race is now assisted in its decisions
by a vastly greater and more accurate knowledge of man and the
universe than our grandparents had; and the cheapening of literature
dimly conveys this knowledge to millions who were left out of account
when the traditional maps of life were drafted. The artisan discusses
economics and theology. The Tonga Islander works out mathematical
problems. I met a pure-blooded negro, with a European degree in
philosophy, who told me that he had been forced to resign his chair in
an African Mohammedan college because of his advanced ideas! Once I
discussed with a group of miners industrial questions and religion
from twelve to three in the morning, over pots of beer, in a little
inn on the west coast of New Zealand, a hundred miles from anything
like a town.
It is quite impossible for this spreading and better informed
intelligence to bow humbly to the ideas of an earlier generation. It
is going to think for itself, at all events. The old traditions must
be revised throughout. Revision is not particularly dangerous except
to errors. And already we have discovered that our political and
religious and social oracles have been teaching a good deal of error.
We begin to suspect that many things the divine right of kings and the
eternal torment of the wicked may not be strictly accurate. We had
better reconsider all our ways of living.
The second permanent strain of human evolution is the development of
fine sentiment. The notion that the world is becoming more
preponderantly intellectual, and that progress along our present lines
means a limitation of sentiment, is inaccurate. We are working toward
a healthy equilibrium. Sentimental people--those in whom a starving of
intellect or disuse of muscle has surcharged the nervous system with
morbid energy--will become more balanced, more intellectual. Ancient
phrases and modern shibboleths will not be able to induce in them an
instinctive warmth or agitation: they will have to pass the bar of
reason before they reach what one might call the executive department
of personality. But sentiment--deep and healthy feeling--has a
precious use in life. The development of fine sentiment is as
necessary as the cultivation of reason to the advance of man and of
civilisation. We find this illustrated in all the older civilisations
when they reach their highest point. We are picking up this strain of
development to-day, and, since civilisation is now too widely diffused
ever to perish again, we may assume that it will continue. Now this
finer sentiment of our time demands the revision of our traditions and
institutions no less imperiously than our higher intelligence does. We
cannot leave behind the callousness and brutality of the Middle Ages
and at the same time retain medieval practices. Intellectually and
emotionally we are improving, and we must expect that, as our finer
powers grow, there will be an increasing demand for revision and
reconstruction. As Mr. Watson finely says:
"Guests of the ages, at tomorrow's door
Why shrink we? The long track behind us lies,
The lamps gleam and the music throbs before,
Bidding us enter; and I count him wise
Who loves so well man's noble memories
He needs must love man's nobler hopes yet more."
This is, I think, a correct analysis of the innovating spirit of
modern times. These general considerations to which it is due are
quite beyond discussion. One feels that one is almost perpetrating
platitudes in describing them. In fact, we would to-day find only a
negligible number of people who oppose progress and innovation
altogether. They usually oppose it in one or two departments of life,
and quite warmly applaud it in others. A Socialist-Ritualist
clergyman, for instance, fiercely demands advance in the economic
field, yet fences his own department of life with the most rigorous
warnings against innovating trespassers. A Rationalist-Individualist
feels that the Church is the most obvious and urgent field for
innovation, and at the same time guards his economic world against it
with a flaming sword. A Suffragist pours fiery scorn on our obstinate
conservatism in regard to the franchise, and then discovers an even
more obstinate and entirely sacred conservatism when other women claim
something more than political emancipation. It is this very general
sectarianism which compels us to review the philosophy of revolt.
These principles apply to the whole of life. All our institutions must
be critically examined. The searchlight will not injure them if they
are sound.
But how comes this sweetly reasonable philosophy to be converted into
that passion for reform, that mordant and exasperating attack on
institutions, which gives a special complexion to the literature of
our time? For precisely the same reason as the invisible electric
current leaps into incandescence when it passes through the sluggish
particles of the filament of carbon or tungsten: resistance. The old
faith is growing dim in our minds, and we have a suspicion that the
thousands of men and women who, each night, terminate a life of pain
or struggle or burden, wilt never see the sun rise again, on this or
any other planet. We know that every decade in which we put off, with
worn and hollow phrases, the abandonment of old errors, sees another
generation pass away with just the same scars and traces of pain as
those which scored the hearts of the dead two, and four, and six
thousand years ago. We are vividly conscious that, quite apart from
the myriads whose lives were embittered by poverty, or war, or a
galling marriage-yoke, or the tyranny of some old tradition, there are
further and vaster myriads who, whatever comfort they knew, might have
been far happier, and now the sun has gone down on them for ever.
There is real and very serious ground for impatience. The acreage of
squalor and misery and grossness is still appalling, and on every land
lies the crushing burden of militarism; and this fearful visitation of
war reminds us of the incalculable periodic cost of our folly. The
soil of the planet is wet with blood and tears, and a great part of
this inhuman rain might be arrested. Much has been done: it is just
that which stings. You cannot look back on the darkness from which the
race has issued without perceiving that man has the power to transform
the face of the earth: without entertaining a reasoned and coldly
intellectual conviction that a day will yet dawn on this planet when
laughter, as of children on May morning, will ring from pole to pole,
and life, for all its work, will be a holiday. And when this reasoned
and just belief encounters the sullen or selfish indifference of men
and women to their creative power, their insensitiveness to the evils
that they or their fellows endure, it glows and spits fire.
It is quite easy to apologise for strong language: much easier than to
justify the general lack of it. And this impatience cannot be rebuked
by reminding us that the remedy of some of our ills is very obscure;
because the majority of people are indifferent to the very idea of
reform. They shoulder burdens which they might at any moment lay aside
for ever. Some of the greatest reforms that are pressed on us are not
obscured by any serious controversy. Yet in every civilised nation the
mass of the people are inert and indifferent. Some even make a
pretence of justifying their inertness. Why, they ask, should we stir
at all? Is there such a thing as a duty to improve the earth? What is
the meaning or purpose of life? Or has it a purpose?
One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece of
controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness. People tell you
that the conflict of science and religion--it would be better to say,
the conflict of modern culture and ancient traditions--has robbed life
of its plain significance. The men who, like Tolstoi, seriously urge
this point fail to appreciate the modern outlook on life. Certainly
modern culture--science, history, philosophy, and art--finds no
purpose in life: that is to say, no purpose eternally fixed and to be
discovered by man. A great chemist said a few years ago that he could
imagine "a series of lucky accidents"--the chance blowing by the wind
of certain chemicals into pools on the primitive earth--accounting for
the first appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the
influences which have lifted those early germs to the level of
conscious beings as a similar series of lucky accidents.
But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us. If there
is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the
development of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose its
own purpose and set up its own goal; and the most elementary sense of
order will teach us that this choice must be social, not merely
individual. In whatever measure ill-controlled individuals may yield
to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race must be a
collective aim. I do not mean an austere demand of self-sacrifice from
the individual, but an adjustment--as genial and generous as
possible--of individual variations for common good. Otherwise life
becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste react on each
individual. So we raise again, in the twentieth century, the old
question of "the greatest good," which men discussed in the Stoa
Poikile and the suburban groves of Athens, in the cool _atria_ of
patrician mansions on the Palatine and the Pincian, in the Museum at
Alexandria, and the schools which Omar Khayyám frequented, in the
straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages and the opulent chambers of
Cosmo de' Medici.
We answer, as men did in all those earlier debates, according to our
temperament. One says culture, another character, another happiness,
another pleasure, another efficiency. This discussion is often a mere
exercise of wit, and very often we use a quite arbitrary standard in
fixing what is "best," or the greatest good. Probably the modern
mind will put to itself the plain question: "What is the best
purpose for the race, in its own interest, to adopt?" As we are not
now clear that there are any other interests to be consulted, this is
the obvious form of the question. And when we do put it in this form,
the old conflict begins to disappear. We see that a comprehensive
ideal, embracing all the classical answers, commends itself. We want
more--we want as much as possible--culture, character, happiness,
pleasure, and efficiency. We want a quicker and fuller development of
man's highest and richest resources. But, if you look closely into
it, there is one ultimate and commanding element in this broad ideal.
It is happiness. Culture is a necessity of the race and luxury of the
few. Character is supremely important, but you have now to prove to
men that it is important. We do not bow any longer to arbitrary
commands and categorical imperatives and Stoic laws. We have to be
convinced that the cultivation of a high type of character will lessen
suffering and brighten the earth. Pleasure, again, is, as Epicurus
insisted, only a part of a large ideal of happiness. There is, in
fact, no ground on which you can appeal to the mass of men to-day in
favour of cultivation or idealism except this ground that it makes for
greater happiness: and on that ground you may safely appeal to the
whole race.
Sometimes, when you ascend the slopes of a range of hills,--the idea
occurred to me during a walk from Chamonix to Montanvert,--the mists
close round you, and the guiding peaks and contours are lost. Then,
perhaps, some point breaks through the clouds, and you stride on
confidently. This must apply to the most sceptical or nebulous mind of
our generation. The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve
life, to bring happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach,
shines above all the mists of the day. Through the ruins of creeds and
philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our
steps toward that height--just as the Athenians did two thousand years
ago. It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no disputable
tradition--nothing that scepticism can corrode or advancing knowledge
undermine. Its foundations are the fundamental and unchanging impulses
of our nature. Its features are as clear and attractive to the child as
to the philosopher. Philosophers will, of course, declare it
superficial; but we may remind them that all their supposed deeper
probing of reality, from Pythagoras to Bergson, has ended in a
confusion of contradictory guesses. Churchmen will declare with horror
that it is "materialistic"; and we may remind _them_ that for
fifteen centuries they have taught Europe to place its highest good in
happiness. If the happiness they promised is getting doubtful, we make
sure of what we can. In truth, however, no nobler aim ever inspired
action, and none is so fitted to appeal to modern man. It is, in fact,
the mainspring of nearly all the progressive activity of our time. The
more doubtful all else becomes, the more determined men and women are
to be happy in this world. Thrones and creeds and institutions, even
moral codes, are brought to judgment to-day before that ideal. It is
more profitable to judge the living than the dead.
This ideal is the chief inspiration of the rebellious temper of our
age. The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our
time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome
of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the
general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor
altruistic. It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an
inspiration in the finer sentiments, of our generation, but the glow
which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a
happier earth. It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and
assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of
social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy
which is linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges all
to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation of
happiness. The advance guard of the race, the men and women in whom
mental alertness is associated with fine feeling, cry that they have
reached Pisgah's slope; and in increasing numbers men and women are
pressing on to see if it be really the Promised Land. That is the
spirit of the reform-movement of our times. Popes anathematise our
age, and the clergy of all sects bemoan its "materialism," yet it
is exulting in a wider and higher idealism than any that ever yet
stirred the heart of man. For we now know from what dark and brutal
origins we came, and we feel that, if we advance only as we are
advancing, we may reach any height that any prophet ever yet saw in
his visions.
It is very difficult to avoid what seem to be rhetorical phrases in
describing this age of ours: the age which some profess to find prosy
and materialistic in comparison with the earlier age when a handful of
plethoric landowners ruled England, and little children worked in
filthy rooms for twelve hours a day, and cut-throats, in most charming
costumes, slew each other in the fields of London. I have not the
least desire to use rhetoric; I do but express my feeling, and what I
take to be the feeling of "advanced" people generally, as it comes
to me. But in this poetry there is the solidity of scientific prose.
Some time ago I sailed slowly toward Teneriffe from the south. Eighty
miles away, on a fine morning, the summit of the Peak showed its
delicate contour in the clouds, hardly distinguishable from them. We
thought it an illusion, a simulating cloud, because far below the
summit the blue sky seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. The
Peak floated in the air. But, as we drew nearer, the blue band below
it grew thinner, and at last it disclosed the massive bulk of the
supporting mountain.
Speaking as a sober student of history and science, I say that this
dream of a brighter and happier earth rests on no less solid a
foundation. We see primitive man, blindly, and with infinite slowness,
move towards civilisation: we see civilisation slowly, with many a
tragic interruption, advance toward the modern age: and now we see the
pace quicken enormously, and we find a new consciousness of power and
a deliberate aim at higher things bear the race onward. The
reformer's belief in the future is a scientific deduction from the
past.
The failure of the mass of people to co-operate in the realisation of
this ideal is due, not to indolence or stupidity, but to the obsessing
influence of the old traditions. They choke the fires of the mind:
they make us insensible to the real enormity of a great deal of our
social arrangements. Hence it is that the reformer's appeal is cast
so frequently in a negative or aggressive form. The most powerful
thing in our world is, not truth, but untruth; and the most important
thing in the world is to assail it. "Great is truth, and it will
prevail," said an ancient writer. But the civilisation which gave
birth to that sentiment died, and all its promising young truths
perished with it, and Europe fell under the rule of lies for more than
a thousand years. Untruth is millennia older than truth. Its roots run
deep into the flesh of the heart, while the rootlets of truth are
struggling for a frail clasp in the intellect. Great is untruth, and
it will prevail--unless it is attacked unceasingly. No untruth ever
died a natural death. Being the sacred truth of yesterday, it is
usually entrenched in powerful corporations, embodied in the law and
life of nations, enshrined in the tenacious affections of the
millions. At one time you incurred sentence of death if you challenged
it: now you incur slander, misrepresentation, and mockery. The race
has been made docile to it by a kind of negative Eugenic--perhaps we
ought to say Cacogenic--selection. Yet nearly everything which the
majority venerate as truth to-day began its career as heresy and will
end it as lie.
So the first task of the well-wisher of mankind is to distinguish
truth from untruth in our traditions. The story of man is a long story
of the tyranny of consecrated shams, with occasional intervals of
rebellion and advance to a higher stage. Rebellion is the salt of the
earth. There comes a time in the history of every civilisation when
the mind of a few rises high enough to survey critically that stream
of traditions in which the majority lazily float. Then comes the
inevitable revolt; hence the close kinship which we feel across the
ages with "the Preacher," with Socrates, with Omar Khayyám, with
Erasmus, with Molière. We are at the same stage of evolution, with
the difference that we moderns have an immense mass of knowledge of
history and prehistory to aid us in testing the value of our
traditions. Already we have discarded scores of old dogmas: in
religion, politics, education, law, and every department of our common
life. It would be folly to attempt to fence off any province of our
life from this critical scrutiny. And since we obstinately retain many
traditions which a very high proportion of properly educated people
regard as unsound and mischievous, since these traditions are the
chief obstacle to the advance of the race, one of the most pressing
needs of our time is, surely, a stern campaign for the abolition of
this tyranny of shams.