"THE IMPERIAL RACE"
"The public are particularly requested not to tease the Cannibals." So
ran one of the many flaming notices outside the show. Other notices
proclaimed the unequalled opportunity of beholding "The Dahomey Warriors
of Savage South Africa; a Rare and Peculiar Race of People; all there is
Left of them"--as, indeed, it might well be. Another called on the
public "not to fail to see the Coloured Beauties of the Voluptuous
Harem," no doubt also the product of Savage South Africa. But of all the
gilded placards the most alluring, to my mind, was the request not to
tease the Cannibals. It suggested so appalling a result.
I do not know who the Cannibals were. Those I saw appeared to be
half-caste Jamaicans, but there may have been something more savage
inside, and certainly a Dahomey warrior from South Africa would have to
be ferocious indeed if his fierceness was to equal his rarity. But the
particular race did not matter. The really interesting thing was that
the English crowd was assumed to be as far superior to the African
savage as to a wild beast in a menagerie. The proportion was the same.
The English crowd was expected to extend to the barbarians the same
inquisitive patronage as to jackals and hyenas in a cage, when in front
of the cages it is written, "Do not irritate these animals. They bite."
The facile assumption of superiority recalled a paradoxical remark that
Huxley made about thirty years ago, when that apostle of evolution
suddenly scandalised progressive Liberalism by asserting that a Zulu, if
not a more advanced type than a British working man, was at all events
happier. "I should rather be a Zulu than a British workman," said Huxley
in his trenchant way, and the believers in industrialism were not
pleased. By the continual practice of war, and by generations of
infanticide, under which only the strongest babies survived, the Zulus
had certainly at that time raised themselves to high physical
excellence, traces of which still remain in spite of the degeneracy that
follows foreign subjection. I have known many African tribes between
Dahomey and Zululand too well to idealise them into "the noble savage."
I know how rapidly they are losing both their bodily health and their
native virtues under the deadly contact of European drink, clothing,
disease, and exploitation. Yet, on looking round upon the London crowds
that were particularly requested not to tease the cannibals, my first
thought was that Huxley's paradox remained true.
The crowds that swarmed the Heath were not lovely things to look at.
Newspapers estimated that nearly half a million human beings were
collected on the patch of sand that Macaulay's imagination transfigured
into "Hampstead's swarthy moor." But even if we followed the safe rule
and divided the estimated number by half, a quarter of a million was
quite enough. "Like bugs--the more, the worse," Emerson said of city
crowds, and certainly the most enthusiastic social legislator could
hardly wish to make two such men or women stand where one stood before.
Scarlet and yellow booths, gilded roundabouts, sword-swallowers in
purple fleshings, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enough.
Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of
colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them. But in
themselves and in mass the crowds were drab, dingy, and black. Even
"ostridges" and "pearlies," that used to break the monotony like the
exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America
may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say
nothing of the East and Africa, could so colourless a crowd be seen--a
mass of people so devoid of character in costume, or of tradition and
pride in ornament.
But it was not merely the absence of colour and beauty in dress, or the
want of national character and distinction--a plainness that would
afflict even a Russian peasant from the Ukraine or a Tartar from the
further Caspian. It was the uncleanliness of the garments themselves
that would most horrify the peoples not reckoned in the foremost ranks
of time. A Hindu thinks it disgusting enough for a Sahib to put on the
same coat and trousers that he wore yesterday without washing them each
morning in the tank, as the Hindu washes his own garment. But that the
enormous majority of the Imperial race should habitually wear second,
third, and fourth-hand clothes that have been sweated through by other
people first, would appear to him incredible. If ever he comes to
England, he finds that he must believe it. It is one of the first shocks
that strike him with horror when he emerges from Charing Cross. "Can
these smudgy, dirty, evil-smelling creatures compose the dominant race?"
is the thought of even the most "loyal" Indian as he moves among the
crowd of English workpeople. And it is only the numbing power of habit
that silences the question in ourselves. Cheap as English clothing is,
second-hand it is cheaper still, and I suppose that out of that
quarter-million people on the Heath every fine Bank Holiday hardly one
per cent. wears clothes that no one has worn before him. Hence the
sickening smell that not only pervades an English crowd but hangs for
two or three days over an open space where the crowd has been. "I can
imagine a man keeping a dirty shirt on," said Nietzsche, "but I cannot
imagine him taking it off and putting it on again." He was speaking in
parables, as a philosopher should; but if he had stood among an English
working crowd, his philosophic imagination would have been terribly
strained by literal fact.
Scrubby coat and trousers, dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like
anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy
jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine"
or mangy "boa"--such is accepted as the natural costume for the heirs of
all the ages. Prehistoric man, roaming through desert and forest in his
own shaggy pelt, was infinitely better clad. So is the aboriginal
African with a scrap of leopard skin, or a single bead upon a cord. To
judge by clothing, we may wonder to what purpose evolution ever started
upon its long course of groaning and travailing up to now. And more than
half-concealed by that shabby clothing, what shabby forms and heads we
must divine! How stunted, puny, and ill-developed the bodies are! How
narrow-shouldered the men, how flat-breasted the women! And the faces,
how shapeless and anaemic! How deficient in forehead, nose, and jaw!
Compare them with an Afghan's face; it is like comparing a chicken with
an eagle. Writing in the _Standard_ of April 8, 1912, a well-known
clergyman assured us that "when a woman enters the political arena, the
bloom is brushed from the peach, never to be restored." That may seem a
hard saying to Primrose Dames and Liberal Women, but the thousands of
peaches that entered the arena (as peaches will) on Hampstead Heath, had
no bloom left to brush, and no political arena could brush it more.
Deficient in blood and bone, the products of stuffy air, mean food, and
casual or half-hearted parentage, often tainted with hereditary or
acquired disease, the faces are; but, worse than all, how insignificant
and indistinguishable! It is well known that a Chinaman can hardly
distinguish one Englishman from another, just as we can hardly
distinguish the Chinese. But in an English working crowd, even an
Englishman finds it difficult to distinguish face from face. Yet as a
nation we have always been reckoned conspicuous for strong and even
eccentric individuality. Our well-fed upper and middle classes--the
public school, united services, and university classes--reach a high
physical average. Perhaps, on the whole, they are still the best
specimens of civilised physique. Within thirty years the Germans have
made an astonishing advance. They are purging off their beer, and
working down their fat. But, as a rule, the well-fed and carefully
trained class in England still excels in versatility, decision, and
adventure. Unhappily, it is with few--only with a few millions of
well-to-do people, a fraction of the whole English population--and with
a few country-bred people and open-air workers, that we succeed. The
great masses of the English nation are tending to become the
insignificant, indistinguishable, unwholesome, and shabby crowd that
becomes visible at football matches and on Bank Holidays upon the Heath.
It is true that familiarity breeds respect. It is almost impossible for
the average educated man to know anything whatever about the working
classes. The educated and the workpeople move, as it were, in worlds of
different dimensions, incomprehensible to each other. Very few men and
women from our secondary schools and universities, for instance, can
long enjoy solemnly tickling the faces of passing strangers with a bunch
of feathers, or revolving on a wooden horse to a steam organ, or gazing
at a woman advertised as "a Marvel of Flesh, Fat, and Beauty." The
educated seldom appreciate such joys in themselves. If they like trying
them, it is only "in the second intention." They enjoy out of patronage,
or for literary sensation, rather than in grave reality. They are
excluded from the mind to which such things genuinely appeal. But let
not education mock, nor culture smile disdainfully at the short and
simple pleasures of the poor. If by some miracle of revelation culture
could once become familiar from the inside with one of those scrubby and
rather abhorrent families, the insignificance would be transfigured, the
faces would grow distinguishable, and all manner of admired and even
lovable characteristics would be found. How sober people are most days
of the week; how widely charitable; how self-sacrificing in hopes of
saving the pence for margarine or melted fat upon the children's bread!
They are shabby, but they have paid for every scrap of old clothing with
their toil; they are dirty, but they try to wash, and would be clean if
they could afford the horrible expense of cleanliness; they are
ignorant, but within twenty years how enormously their manners to each
other have improved! And then consider their Christian thoughtlessness
for the morrow, how superb and spiritual it is! How different from the
things after which the Gentiles of the commercial classes seek! On a
Bank Holiday I have known a mother and a daughter, hanging over the very
abyss of penury, to spend two shillings in having their fortunes told.
Could the lilies of the field or Solomon in all his glory have shown a
finer indifference to worldly cares?
Mankind, as we know, in the lump is bad, but that it is not worse
remains the everlasting wonder. It is not the squalor of such a crowd
that should astonish; it is the marvel that they are not more squalid.
For, after all, what is the root cause of all this dirt and ignorance
and shabbiness and disease? It is not drink, nor thriftlessness, nor
immorality, as the philanthropists do vainly talk; still less is it
crime. It is the "inequality" of which Canon Barnett has often
written--the inequality that Matthew Arnold said made a high
civilisation impossible. But such inequality is only another name for
poverty, and from poverty we have yet to discover the saviour who will
redeem us.
X