pedlar, this special knowledge is not so damning a thing. No
accountant, be he ever so limited, can be wholly contented with
accountancy as an explanation or sum-total of life; nor can the
broker, however absorbed in his business, admit to his friends that
the manipulating of stocks and shares is the only matter which should
consume the interest of mortals. It is otherwise with the politician,
the priest, the man of letters, the professional philosopher, and even
the lawyer and the soldier. There is nothing human which may not enter
into politics, religion or philosophy, or become the subject of
literature; the human complexion of the State may be transformed by
the professional prejudice of the lawyer or the soldier.
Consider how, for democratic purposes, the Member of Parliament is
made. There is no need to pay undue attention to the amusing
exaggerations and distortions of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Cecil Chesterton.
The Member of Parliament has been supported in his constituency by a
group of local politicals who have a healthy enthusiasm for the party
war-cry. The serious candidate is too experienced, too professional,
to share those enthusiasms in precisely that form which they assume,
at election time, in the minds of his supporters. I do not mean that
he is less enthusiastic than they, a less whole-hearted backer of his
party, but that, from the nature of his political experience, politics
presents itself to him under a perspective which cannot be theirs. He
leaves his constituency a specially ordained champion of political
truth; he arrives at Westminster a unit in the crowd.
If we follow our member to Westminster we shall soon find that he has
fallen into the Parliamentary manner; that his ideas are grouped around
the ideas familiar to the House of Commons; that he has taken its tone,
and that his habits are becoming gradually assimilated to the habits of
those few with whom he especially associates himself. Let us attend a
meeting of some propagandist committee comprising a number of expert
politicians--Members of Parliament, or others. We shall find there the
bond of a common knowledge, a common sympathy, a common approach towards
a given subject, a common jargon. We shall be aware of the fact that we
have come into a particular, highly-specialised atmosphere, where the
familiar language of ordinary life, the familiar ideas, would be
intrusions, meriting nothing but frowns or compassionate smiles.
And the same thing is true of most corporate journalism and most
corporate religion. The atmosphere is highly specialised; it is
binding; and those who live in it believe it to be co-extensive with
the whole of life. Let us bind ourselves by Tolstoy; let us agree to
loosen ourselves by Nietzsche; but, in any case let us agree to love
our neighbour on the principle of a close corporation. The main
influences which shape the modern world operate, for the most part,
through intellectual groups; each group can only be appealed to in a
language familiar to it; it can only act on principles (consciously
accepted or presupposed) which are its very special property; you can
never touch it to the quick, in its corporate and active capacity,
without accepting or appearing to accept its collective prejudices.
Its differentia is that which separates it from the unit of common
humanity.
Thus we come to something more difficult to analyse than
specialisation of work--a specialisation of sentiment, habits and
morals, which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere
which they have appropriated, and so limited as to be blind in the
broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken. And yet it
is through these groups, keen-eyed in one direction, blind in others,
that the intellect, the reforming zeal, the earnestness, the idealism
of the age, have to pass before ideas and vague aspiration can be
transformed into action or effective influence. These groups are the
main-drainage-system of modern life; they are the ordinary channels
through which the business of the world has to pass, and its organised
thought be directed. Take any one of these groups, and consider its
differential character, its mode of apperception, its _êthos_, and you
find it something deformed, twisted, strained in one direction, like a
tree by the sea-shore. But take a few score of them, and imagine their
qualities fused together, and the result would accord with the ideals
of common humanity--ideals vaguely conceived, perhaps, but generous.
It is just because the qualities of these groups, in politics,
religion, social work, and to a lesser extent in literature, are not
and cannot be fused together, but on the contrary, stand apart in
water-tight compartments, so that the whole is like an elaborate
system of checks to make each part inoperative, that, at a time when
the whole community is strangely alive with good will, the actual
social achievement is beyond measure disappointing.
The test of success or failure is the degree of satisfaction afforded
to the common man. By the "common man" I do not mean the inferior man,
but the man who has not specialised himself out of his common
humanity. If there is any interest which an honest lawyer can share
with an honest fisherman, a decent cockney with a decent Bedouin Arab,
he does it in virtue of this nobler "commonness;" it may include the
interests of good fellowship, of delight in song or nature, of a
belief in God, and a host of indescribable interests which do not
belong to the mechanism and compulsory organisation of life; it
includes some "dram of folly," some capacity for "laughable blunder"
in intercourse between men. Culture may break in upon this
"commonness" and destroy it. But it need not be so. Shakespeare has
this commonness in a high degree; so have Johnson, and Goldsmith, and
Lamb; all great artists have had it when their culture has not crazed
them, or when they have not lifted themselves into an almost mystical
absorption in exercising some gift of austere, monumental expression;
in which case, like Milton, they scarcely belong to the category of
humans; their food is ambrosial, and their wine is nectar.
The task of the inspired politician has become harder in proportion as
the problem of government has become more intricate and more
specialised. He must work through his machinery, which includes not
only the administrative machine, but all those groups, in and out of
Parliament, limited by their ethical and sentimental specialities. He
must be professional enough to appreciate the ground of their
excellences, and "common" enough to discard their limitations. It is
only when there are several such men, powerful enough to leaven
politics and lead politicians, that modern democracy can have any
shadow of reality--men who understand the rank and file of humanity,
conversant also with the complicated machine and the contending groups
of narrowly defined ideals, men fired with that constructive
imagination which crystallises in common sense.
III
SPECIALISM IN RELIGION
It is significant that the name "Religion of Humanity" was given to a
set of tenets which strictly speaking contained no religion at all.
Positivism gained ground in middle-Victorian England not merely
because Science and the theory of Evolution were in the ascendant, but
still more because it was recognised that the orthodox Churches were
out of harmony with modern life; that they were ministering neither to
modern humanitarian feeling nor to humanity. Positivism survives to
this day in the person of Mr. Frederic Harrison and a few others
(including several of the leaders of the Young Turkish party); but it
would by this time have been a powerful creed if it had been really a
creed, if it had anything spiritual and _credible_ to offer to those
who are outraged by the professional neglect, self-absorption, and
intellectual insincerity of the Churches. Everyone is aware of the
failure of the Churches to touch modern life; to escape from their
grooves; to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations of
old-fashioned formulæ instead of finding vital, human, developing
expressions of the spiritual craving of man. Even Mr. George Cadbury
is aware of this failure, as he showed by his zeal for the inquiry
into church attendance some years ago, an inquiry which has been
repeated this year with results unsatisfactory to the Churches. The
question has been debated again and again, and inquirers have been
unable to make up their minds whether it is the Churches that are not
good enough for the people, or the people who are not good enough for
the Churches. It is a question of the priority of the chicken or the
egg. It is not known whether public sentiment is depraved because it
is alienated from the Churches, or whether the Churches are depraved
because they have excluded so many of the most powerful moral forces
of the time. Certain it is that they have offended by their
exclusiveness; by the narrowing down of interest; by the cliquishness
of those who are specialists in piety or ritual. We may observe their
habit of mind in that narrow Victorian sect which converted Mr.
Gosse's strong-willed and in many ways lovable father into an
intolerant tyrant (as set forth in _Father and Son_); that lax and
snobbish branch of the Anglican Church which failed to capture Mr.
Bernard Shaw in his youth, because it stood only for a "class
prejudice;" and those strange types of Christianity which, as Mr.
Lowes Dickinson expresses it, find no disharmony between belief in a
"Power that is supposed to have created the stars and the tiger" and
"the sentimental, almost erotic character of many Christian hymns:
Jesu, lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly."
The evidence of those who have been estranged from the Churches is
worth considering. We see that Mr. Gosse was driven from them in his
youth by their sectarian narrowness and unwillingness to face
intellectual inquiry; Mr. Shaw by the flippancy of the Irish Church,
its class prejudice, its false respectability; Mr. Lowes Dickinson,
among other reasons, because at a time when men are learning to adapt
the processes of Nature to their ends, when it becomes them to "dwell
less and less upon their weaknesses and more and more upon their
strength," the orthodox Christians assert that we are "miserable
sinners," that "there is no health in us," when they "ought to be too
busy demonstrating in fact the contrary." Members of the general
public in one way and another have become accustomed to regard
religion with an uneasy constraint; there are harmless things which
must not be said in the presence of a priest; there is a pastorality
about the minister which implies a flock and a coterie; and Englishmen
seldom mention the name of God without an appearance of apology or
secret shame. Religion has become largely a matter of cliques,
coteries, associations--of specialism in codes and casuistry.
I will not press the question whether the history of the Christian
Church has not been the history of the perversions of Christianity. A
distinguished Chinese author not long ago indicted the alleged
un-Christian methods of our missionaries in China; Dr. Halil Halid, a
Turk, has pointed out that it is in the Christian countries that the
Christian virtues of humility and disdain of wealth are least in
evidence. What concerns us now is the feeling in formally Christian
countries that in spite of Christianity the Christian Churches have
not taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is on earth; they have not
taught toleration and love; they have urged us to ignore the present
world in the interests of the next; and because their own followers
have refused to do anything of the kind they have isolated religion
from practical life. I agree that many Churches, seeking to adapt
themselves to modern needs, have organised social clubs, carried on
political crusades, and rendered useful service in "rescue work;" but
even so they have rather tended to distinguish between themselves in
their spiritual capacity and themselves in their secular capacity. The
majority of people do not seem to find in the religious services of
the Churches a note that touches their practical needs or their
spiritual ideals. The most successful popular appeal has been made by
those organisations which have endeavoured to add to the zest of life
by exciting music, tuneful hymns, and buoyant rhetoric.
In our unprecedented age of incessant change, continuous revolution,
and swift innovation, we have become accustomed to the idea that the
social order can and must be altered, that men must take things into
their own hands. The fatalism of the old orthodoxy is not for a people
who see that things are accomplished by the human will; such people
are naturally impatient with those who entreat the Deity to do for
them what they can very well do for themselves. The last of the great
fatalists in English literature is Mr. Thomas Hardy. He was moved by
the downfall of the old settled civilisation and the purposeless,
vexing changes which swept like a hurricane on a nation now suddenly
made conscious of its evil lot. He was aware of the "modern vice of
unrest" at a time when the human will had not yet set itself to direct
and organise change. Thus it was that he came to pronounce the last
word about Fatalism, and, in so doing, to reduce it to absurdity. "The
First Cause," as Sue Fawley perceived it, "worked automatically like a
somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage;" she blamed "things in
general, because they are so horrid and cruel!"
Whatever one's theological views may be, no one to-day tolerates in
the drama of life any god-of-the-machine. In Greece, art and religion
went hand in hand, and this was possible because gods were like men
and manifested themselves through Nature, not in a sphere outside
Nature. No civilisation prior to our own experienced so rapid an
evolution as Athens in the fifth century B.C.; but when that
century was over, it was still possible for a philosopher to draw
robust symbolical illustrations from the old mythology. The Modernists
to-day are only applying a law of history when they say that religion
must evolve with the evolution of human culture. In the first thirteen
centuries, the Christian Church did in practice change and adapt
itself to civilisation. As long as the world was conservative, a
conservative Church could keep pace with it. The first cataclysm came
at the time when civilisation was again rapidly changing, and
Christianity only emerged torn and divided by the Reformation. But the
world to-day is being altered far more rapidly than at the time of the
Renaissance. It turns from the Churches, not because it is tired of
the spiritual life, or of other-worldliness, but because, just as it
demands of literature and art that they should appeal to the modern
mind and heart, so it can be content with nothing less from religion.
And it is just because the Churches have been too conservative,
because they tend to tradition, formulæ, conventions, and manners
which, retained beyond their time, assume the garb of unreality, that
they are abandoned or slighted by the people--as they must continue to
be slighted--until new prophets arise to present universal truths in a
new and practical form; to endeavour to preach religion as the great
man of letters endeavours to represent beauty and truth.
IV
SPECIALISM IN WAR
England is very near to the Continent of Europe, and we are accustomed
to thinking of Western civilisation as one. Yet every time we cross
the Channel we are reminded in some fresh way of the foreignness of
foreign countries. The dwelling-houses of France, for instance, are
different from the dwelling-houses of England in respect of the
important fact that they are all to some extent fortified houses.
Great and small houses alike are evidently built with a view to
defence from within. If you take a country walk anywhere in Normandy
you find that the gardens of the country houses have massive gates and
high walls, the front door is like a portcullis, and the window
shutters are barricades. The smallest cottages have great doors and
window shutters, and if there is a garden, it is two to one that the
wall is a real wall. And not only in the country districts, but in the
towns, pre-eminently in Paris itself, each house or block of flats is
so constructed as to defy the violent intruder.
It strikes us strangely, as we walk through the cities of France and
reflect upon the reasons for these square doors and these guarded
windows. We have suffered no recent invasion, we have had no bloody
revolution. During the whole of the nineteenth century our island has
known nothing more violent than the Peterloo massacre or the Chartist
riots. We have constantly had wars, but they have been distant wars, a
matter for the hireling soldier, and not often dragging in the
volunteer civilian. If we were disgusted when we heard the true story
of the Crimea, we soon forgot the story. We were shocked again by the
facts of the Boer War; we had not thought that so many men could be so
quickly killed, so many millions of money whittled away. But even the
South African War never remotely seemed to threaten the security of
our own islands. For the most part, the policeman has been enough. A
light bolt and a key guard us against petty burglars; we walk abroad
unarmed--at the worst, we comment on the fact that it is well to carry
a stick if we walk alone in Epping Forest. We have abolished duelling.
We have forbidden prize-fights. Even the horse-whip has ceased to be
the patrician's mode of redressing wrong. For assault, libel, slander,
we have a remedy in the law courts. Even in our punishment of
criminals, if occasionally we have to put a man out of the way by
discreetly hanging him, we never subject him to the degradation of a
whipping. Youthful barbarians at public schools still roll about and
pummel one another, but the organised, stand-up fight, such as was
fought in Tom Brown's schooldays, is discouraged; public opinion is
against it. From infancy we are taught to be peaceful, law-abiding
citizens.
Most of us, then, know very little about physical violence. The
shedding of blood is an unfamiliar spectacle. If a man is knocked
down by a motor-bus, we may or we may not feel human sympathy, but
certainly we are physically shocked by the gruesome sight. We send men
to the gallows, but we no longer watch their agony on Tyburn Hill. We
despatch men to a frontier war, but we know little about their wounds.
And yet, as of old, our martial ardour is aroused and we glow with
patriotic pride when a regiment of soldiers marches past to the sound
of music. As of old, the thought of any great European war excites us,
even fascinates us. We know enough, indeed, to assure ourselves that a
great war would mean economic ruin, that even a distant war between
two foreign countries, such as Turkey and Italy, or Turkey and
Bulgaria, will probably react unfavourably on our own trade. Yet the
thought of a great war still profoundly interests the mass of
Englishmen; they are fascinated; they almost long for news of the
great, decisive, bloody battle which means a sensation, a spectacle,
an acquaintance with something doing, a something strange, gruesome,
violent, and vast.
I am not saying that the people of this country approved of the war
which Italy thought good to wage against Turkey, or were pleased at
the horrible slaughter in the Balkans. It is obvious, on the contrary,
that they strongly disapproved. The "Great Illusion," so effectively
exposed by Norman Angell, is no longer universally entertained.
Capital has learnt the horrors of war, and organised labour has
emphatically declared against it. And yet, though there were few
English people who would not have stopped the Turco-Italian war and
mitigated the horrors of the Balkan war if they could have done so, it
is manifest that there were few who did not revel in the sensation,
just as some years ago even our most philanthropic classes deplored
and revelled in the spectacle of Macedonian atrocities. A fire at a
theatre, an appalling railway accident, and especially murder on a
vast, heroic scale, attracts, in these peaceful days, certainly not
less than in the days when barbarism was customary.
Now, violence and brutality are obviously one thing to a peaceful
people and a very different thing to people accustomed to violence in
their daily lives. Upon a man of sedentary occupation a prize-fight
must have a very different effect from that which it will have upon
men accustomed to the use of their fists. It is worth asking: What is
this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace? What
is this emotion which leads men to be heroic by proxy? Is it surviving
physical excellence which reveals itself in this way, or is it a
cumbrous atavistic relic like the appendix which the doctors remove?
We see, for instance, enormous crowds gathering at the football
matches where professional players show their prowess, and muscles
trained and hardened for the fray. We know that there was a crowd
looking forward to the Wells-Johnson contest. Contrast these events
with a cricket match, where there is practically no violence. Whatever
be the reason, any sportsman will testify to the fact that the crowd
which goes to see cricket is generally a cricketing crowd, but that
the crowd which goes to a cup-tie football match is by no means in
the same way a footballing crowd. In other words, so far as the
onlookers are concerned, the cricket match is more truly a sporting
event than is the professional football match or the Wells-Johnson
contest.
Whatever the answer be, it is certain that when we beat the big drum
of patriotism and set the guns firing, the thrill which it arouses in
the vocal populace is different from the thrill in a people accustomed
to violence and blood. We say the "vocal" populace, remembering that
there is a portion of the population, very important to the community
and growing in power, which is not facile in the art of
self-expression. That portion of the population was in evidence at the
time of the great Coal Strike, when it seemed actually on the verge of
rebellion, when it actually committed violence to the horror and
surprise of our peaceful middle classes. The fact is that the very
poor are never so far from the violent life as are members of other
classes. Violent deaths are not infrequent in factories, in
coal-mines, in great building-works, in dockyards. The life of
deprivation makes the passion of anger frequent; among the poor blows
are often exchanged, and the police are seldom called upon to
interfere. Necessarily, from the nature of the case, the poor are more
familiar with violence than are their richer and more conventional
neighbours; it is a natural thing for the more ignorant of them to
fall back upon physical force, as they did at Liverpool. And so, too,
just as they are more accustomed to petty war, they are less
interested in war between nations. In Italy it was the working-men
who protested against the war with Turkey.
But it seems that the more educated and the more organised we become,
the more we leave our affairs to be managed by professionals. When a
nation declares for war, it declares for a war to be waged by its
professionals, and it turns them on to do a job which, according to
civilised practices, is a dirty job. And when it is fired with
patriotic pride for achievements won in the field it is exercising its
emotions on something it cannot understand or realise, for the simple
reason that the violence of war is strange, distantly horrible,
fascinating, but unfamiliar. It has never directly entered into our
experience.
V
SPECIALISM IN LITERATURE