our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is
possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death.
But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine
myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving
way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I
would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new
light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or
structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw,
there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and
chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply
its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular
movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This
last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an
unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must
drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have
begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters
in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged
to supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too short
a time. What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the less
tremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousness
screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of
a swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will
have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the
time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a
few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become
pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold
around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the
ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been
overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely
more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less
energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle
in the sunlight. Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments
happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined
itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted
existences do before the fittest--_i.e._, the existence composed of the
most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of
incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who--if our
consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling
of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection--who shall say
that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what
we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate
processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals
are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the
earth's crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be
blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate
and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of
what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without
sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute
rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy
the silence."
"Absurd!" grumbled Trost.
"The supposition is logical," said I. "It is well argued from the
premises."
"Whose premises?" cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. "You
don't mean to call them mine, I hope."
"Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the air with other
germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies.
Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as
walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or
walking fast to catch the train."
XVIII.
THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!
To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require
so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general
sameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominent
resemblances of things: the progress is towards finer and finer
discrimination according to minute differences. Yet even at this stage
of European culture one's attention is continually drawn to the
prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the
most ordinary prompting of comparison--the bringing things together
because of their likeness. The same motives, the same ideas, the same
practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced,
according to their association with superficial differences, historical
or actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjects
often show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that
of the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of her
maid.
To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a
form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in
conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglect
of resemblances is a common property of dulness which unites all the
various points of view--the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and
the abysmally ignorant.
That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of
national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving
nationality, that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has
been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that
even such a corporate existence as that of a Roman legion or an English
regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards,--these are the
glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools and
universities, being happily ingrained in Greek and Latin classics. They
have also been impressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances.
That there is a free modern Greece is due--through all infiltration of
other than Greek blood--to the presence of ancient Greece in the
consciousness of European men; and every speaker would feel his point
safe if he were to praise Byron's devotion to a cause made glorious by
ideal identification with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist that
the Greeks were not to be helped further because their history shows
that they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that
many modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while others are
disposed to grasp too large a share of our commerce. The same with
Italy: the pathos of his country's lot pierced the youthful soul of
Mazzini, because, like Dante's, his blood was fraught with the kinship
of Italian greatness, his imagination filled with a majestic past that
wrought itself into a majestic future. Half a century ago, what was
Italy? An idling-place of dilettanteism or of itinerant motiveless
wealth, a territory parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynastic
convenience, and the profit of an alien Government. What were the
Italians? No people, no voice in European counsels, no massive power in
European affairs: a race thought of in English and French society as
chiefly adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve as models for
painters; disposed to smile gratefully at the reception of halfpence;
and by the more historical remembered to be rather polite than truthful,
in all probability a combination of Machiavelli, Rubini, and Masaniello.
Thanks chiefly to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments
with a past, a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate
existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and
innocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed.
Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy in his vigorous
insistance on our true ancestry, on our being the strongly marked
heritors in language and genius of those old English seamen who,
beholding a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came,
doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves on this
or the other side of fertilising streams, gradually conquering more and
more of the pleasant land from the natives who knew nothing of Odin,
and finally making unusually clean work in ridding themselves of those
prior occupants. "Let us," he virtually says, "let us know who were our
forefathers, who it was that won the soil for us, and brought the good
seed of those institutions through which we should not arrogantly but
gratefully feel ourselves distinguished among the nations as possessors
of long-inherited freedom; let us not keep up an ignorant kind of naming
which disguises our true affinities of blood and language, but let us
see thoroughly what sort of notions and traditions our forefathers had,
and what sort of song inspired them. Let the poetic fragments which
breathe forth their fierce bravery in battle and their trust in fierce
gods who helped them, be treasured with affectionate reverence. These
seafaring, invading, self-asserting men were the English of old time,
and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are profiting. They
had virtues which incorporated themselves in wholesome usages to which
we trace our own political blessings. Let us know and acknowledge our
common relationship to them, and be thankful that over and above the
affections and duties which spring from our manhood, we have the closer
and more constantly guiding duties which belong to us as Englishmen."
To this view of our nationality most persons who have feeling and
understanding enough to be conscious of the connection between the
patriotic affection and every other affection which lifts us above
emigrating rats and free-loving baboons, will be disposed to say Amen.
True, we are not indebted to those ancestors for our religion: we are
rather proud of having got that illumination from elsewhere. The men who
planted our nation were not Christians, though they began their work
centuries after Christ; and they had a decided objection to Christianity
when it was first proposed to them: they were not monotheists, and their
religion was the reverse of spiritual. But since we have been fortunate
enough to keep the island-home they won for us, and have been on the
whole a prosperous people, rather continuing the plan of invading and
spoiling other lands than being forced to beg for shelter in them,
nobody has reproached us because our fathers thirteen hundred years ago
worshipped Odin, massacred Britons, and were with difficulty persuaded
to accept Christianity, knowing nothing of Hebrew history and the
reasons why Christ should be received as the Saviour of mankind. The Red
Indians, not liking us when we settled among them, might have been
willing to fling such facts in our faces, but they were too ignorant,
and besides, their opinions did not signify, because we were able, if we
liked, to exterminate them. The Hindoos also have doubtless had their
rancours against us and still entertain enough ill-will to make
unfavourable remarks on our character, especially as to our historic
rapacity and arrogant notions of our own superiority; they perhaps do
not admire the usual English profile, and they are not converted to our
way of feeding: but though we are a small number of an alien race
profiting by the territory and produce of these prejudiced people, they
are unable to turn us out; at least, when they tried we showed them
their mistake. We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished
people: we are a colonising people, and it is we who have punished
others.
Still the historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on the
virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of a
common descent as a bond of obligation. The eminence, the nobleness of a
people depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of
striving for what we call spiritual ends--ends which consist not in
immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great
feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. A people
having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when
it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its
national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and
gradual growth through past labours and struggles, such as are still
demanded of it in order that the freedom and wellbeing thus inherited
may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when
an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great
precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its
institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes
a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest with
the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood
to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity,
will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and thinkers
whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual man, to be
harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in
actual existence yet existing in the past, in memory, as a departed,
invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. A
common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various
activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come for
cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to
suffice for social energy. I am not bound to feel for a Chinaman as I
feel for my fellow-countryman: I am bound not to demoralise him with
opium, not to compel him to my will by destroying or plundering the
fruits of his labour on the alleged ground that he is not cosmopolitan
enough, and not to insult him for his want of my tailoring and religion
when he appears as a peaceable visitor on the London pavement. It is
admirable in a Briton with a good purpose to learn Chinese, but it
would not be a proof of fine intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry in
the original more than he tastes the poetry of his own tongue.
Affection, intelligence, duty, radiate from a centre, and nature has
decided that for us English folk that centre can be neither China nor
Peru. Most of us feel this unreflectingly; for the affectation of
undervaluing everything native, and being too fine for one's own
country, belongs only to a few minds of no dangerous leverage. What is
wanting is, that we should recognise a corresponding attachment to
nationality as legitimate in every other people, and understand that its
absence is a privation of the greatest good.
For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the
presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each
individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our
sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with
high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to
self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and
more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease
or prosperity. And a people possessing this good should surely feel not
only a ready sympathy with the effort of those who, having lost the
good, strive to regain it, but a profound pity for any degradation
resulting from its loss; nay, something more than pity when happier
nationalities have made victims of the unfortunate whose memories
nevertheless are the very fountain to which the persecutors trace their
most vaunted blessings.
These notions are familiar: few will deny them in the abstract, and many
are found loudly asserting them in relation to this or the other
particular case. But here as elsewhere, in the ardent application of
ideas, there is a notable lack of simple comparison or sensibility to
resemblance. The European world has long been used to consider the Jews
as altogether exceptional, and it has followed naturally enough that
they have been excepted from the rules of justice and mercy, which are
based on human likeness. But to consider a people whose ideas have
determined the religion of half the world, and that the more cultivated
half, and who made the most eminent struggle against the power of Rome,
as a purely exceptional race, is a demoralising offence against rational
knowledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical interpretation.
Every nation of forcible character--_i.e._, of strongly marked
characteristics, is so far exceptional. The distinctive note of each
bird-species is in this sense exceptional, but the necessary ground of
such distinction is a deeper likeness. The superlative peculiarity in
the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is only the more apparent when
the elements of their peculiarity are discerned.
From whatever point of view the writings of the Old Testament may be
regarded, the picture they present of a national development is of high
interest and speciality, nor can their historic momentousness be much
affected by any varieties of theory as to the relation they bear to the
New Testament or to the rise and constitution of Christianity. Whether
we accept the canonical Hebrew books as a revelation or simply as part
of an ancient literature, makes no difference to the fact that we find
there the strongly characterised portraiture of a people educated from
an earlier or later period to a sense of separateness unique in its
intensity, a people taught by many concurrent influences to identify
faithfulness to its national traditions with the highest social and
religious blessings. Our too scanty sources of Jewish history, from the
return under Ezra to the beginning of the desperate resistance against
Rome, show us the heroic and triumphant struggle of the Maccabees, which
rescued the religion and independence of the nation from the corrupting
sway of the Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum of its memorials,
and stimulating continuous efforts of a more peaceful sort to maintain
and develop that national life which the heroes had fought and died for,
by internal measures of legal administration and public teaching.
Thenceforth the virtuous elements of the Jewish life were engaged, as
they had been with varying aspects during the long and changeful
prophetic period and the restoration under Ezra, on the side of
preserving the specific national character against a demoralising fusion
with that of foreigners whose religion and ritual were idolatrous and
often obscene. There was always a Foreign party reviling the National
party as narrow, and sometimes manifesting their own breadth in
extensive views of advancement or profit to themselves by flattery of a
foreign power. Such internal conflict naturally tightened the bands of
conservatism, which needed to be strong if it were to rescue the sacred
ark, the vital spirit of a small nation--"the smallest of the
nations"--whose territory lay on the highway between three continents;
and when the dread and hatred of foreign sway had condensed itself into
dread and hatred of the Romans, many Conservatives became Zealots, whose
chief mark was that they advocated resistance to the death against the
submergence of their nationality. Much might be said on this point
towards distinguishing the desperate struggle against a conquest which
is regarded as degradation and corruption, from rash, hopeless
insurrection against an established native government; and for my part
(if that were of any consequence) I share the spirit of the Zealots. I
take the spectacle of the Jewish people defying the Roman edict, and
preferring death by starvation or the sword to the introduction of
Caligula's deified statue into the temple, as a sublime type of
steadfastness. But all that need be noticed here is the continuity of
that national education (by outward and inward circumstance) which
created in the Jews a feeling of race, a sense of corporate existence,
unique in its intensity.
But not, before the dispersion, unique in essential qualities. There is
more likeness than contrast between the way we English got our island
and the way the Israelites got Canaan. We have not been noted for
forming a low estimate of ourselves in comparison with foreigners, or
for admitting that our institutions are equalled by those of any other
people under the sun. Many of us have thought that our sea-wall is a
specially divine arrangement to make and keep us a nation of sea-kings
after the manner of our forefathers, secure against invasion and able to
invade other lands when we need them, though they may lie on the other
side of the ocean. Again, it has been held that we have a peculiar
destiny as a Protestant people, not only able to bruise the head of an
idolatrous Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted as possessors of
the most truth and the most tonnage to carry our purer religion over the
world and convert mankind to our way of thinking. The Puritans,
asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found the Hebrew history
closely symbolical of their feelings and purpose; and it can hardly be
correct to cast the blame of their less laudable doings on the writings
they invoked, since their opponents made use of the same writings for
different ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine right of
kings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram,
took on themselves the office of the priesthood which belonged of right
solely to Aaron and his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by the
English bishops. We must rather refer the passionate use of the Hebrew
writings to affinities of disposition between our own race and the
Jewish. Is it true that the arrogance of a Jew was so immeasurably
beyond that of a Calvinist? And the just sympathy and admiration which
we give to the ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts of our native
kings, and by resisting rescued or won for us the best part of our civil
and religious liberties--is it justly to be withheld from those brave
and steadfast men of Jewish race who fought and died, or strove by wise
administration to resist, the oppression and corrupting influences of
foreign tyrants, and by resisting rescued the nationality which was the
very hearth of our own religion? At any rate, seeing that the Jews were
more specifically than any other nation educated into a sense of their
supreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that any other
nation is found to rival them in this form of self-confidence.
More exceptional--less like the course of our own history--has been
their dispersion and their subsistence as a separate people through ages
in which for the most part they were regarded and treated very much as
beasts hunted for the sake of their skins, or of a valuable secretion
peculiar to their species. The Jews showed a talent for accumulating
what was an object of more immediate desire to Christians than animal
oils or well-furred skins, and their cupidity and avarice were found at
once particularly hateful and particularly useful: hateful when seen as
a reason for punishing them by mulcting or robbery, useful when this
retributive process could be successfully carried forward. Kings and
emperors naturally were more alive to the usefulness of subjects who
could gather and yield money; but edicts issued to protect "the King's
Jews" equally with the King's game from being harassed and hunted by the
commonalty were only slight mitigations to the deplorable lot of a race
held to be under the divine curse, and had little force after the
Crusades began. As the slave-holders in the United States counted the
curse on Ham a justification of negro slavery, so the curse on the Jews
was counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agriculture
and handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar
dress; for torturing them to make them part with their gains, or for
more gratuitously spitting at them and pelting them; for taking it as
certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and took
pains to spread the plague; for putting it to them whether they would be
baptised or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them when they
were obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking the baptism
when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of their
insincerity; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousands
from the homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and
inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dispersion. All
this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these
stiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed such
beneficent effects of His teaching.