how long this excellent experiment will stand, or whether it will take
firm root, and make Italy all that it desires to be, and all that
Italy should be—seeing the strength of the blood, the industry, the
intelligence, and the warmth of all that people. But, at any rate, it
is good to visit a society still under such an impulse, and to feel
that, in one section of Europe at least, things are going well.
I made a sort of pilgrimage to see Mussolini, the head of the movement,
and I wrote about him for the Americans. I had the honour of a long
conversation with him alone, discovering and receiving his judgments.
What a contrast with the sly and shifty talk of your parliamentarian!
What a sense of decision, of sincerity, of serving the nation, and
of serving it towards a known end with a definite will! Meeting this
man after talking to the parliamentarians in other countries was like
meeting with some athletic friend of one’s boyhood after an afternoon
with racing touts; or it was like coming upon good wine in a Pyrenean
village after compulsory draughts of marsh water in the mosses of the
moors above, during some long day’s travel over the range.
One thing, however, struck me in his comments which was, as I thought,
extreme and ill-founded; and that was his complete contempt for all
majorities. Mussolini laid it down to me that the conception of
majority government is as ridiculous as it is immoral, and should be
fiercely combated as a lie and an evil _in itself_. I do not agree; it
seems to me that the rational basis of majority government stands firm
upon certain conditions.
The right of a majority to rule is, indeed, an absurd doctrine as
we hear it commonly stated. I do not mean the doctrine of majority
government under what is called ‘the representative system,’ for that
is not majority government at all: it is mere oligarchy in the hands
of an intriguing caucus, and perhaps as base a form of oligarchy as
mankind has ever tolerated. I mean real majority government; the
reference of a question to the body of the governed, and the taking
of a decision according to the superior number of votes recorded on
the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ side. Such a test used as a universal decider is
ridiculous. What would a majority vote do with bimetallism, or the
appointment of admirals? But there are conditions in which a decision
by majority is just, and they are surely these:
(1) When the question arises from a homogeneous community; (2) when
there is an active popular demand for its settlement; (3) when the
matter under discussion is reasonably familiar to all; (4) when it
concerns all, or nearly all, directly, and in much the same degree; (5)
when the majority is substantial.
You must be dealing with a homogeneous community—for in one made up of
various races, or fundamentally different religions, a majority means
nothing towards a decision. It is a mere affirmation of discord. You
must have a real and popular demand for a decision, and it must proceed
from the people themselves: not from a body claiming the right to frame
the question: a vote on matters of no popular interest—as a vote on
Welsh disestablishment in North London, or on mining regulations in
Brighton—is a manifest abuse. Even on a burning matter, discussed
by, known to, and affecting all, no small majority can possibly be
decisive, or make an accord—for a half is not the general will. But
when a community of one stuff votes by a large majority in favour of
something they both understand and desire, and that something close to
their own lives, then that majority is of true effect.
Under those conditions the moral argument for majority government
seems to me unanswerable, for under those conditions you have the will
of the community really expressed by the majority. Now the community
is ultimately sovereign; for if the community be not sovereign, what
else can claim sovereignty? It is the old dilemma of Suarez, the great
Jesuit doctrine, as absolutely secure as a mathematical conclusion;
ultimately, the community is sovereign. But unless these conditions are
present, and unless all of them are present, the majority is _not_ the
community, and to call it so is either a delusion or a trick. It is
always immoral, usually fatuous, and occasionally disastrous.
By what right shall fifty-one men out of a hundred, who have no
particular taste for the drinking of tea, who, upon the whole, dislike
it, but not earnestly, forbid the other forty-nine to drink tea, when
those forty-nine feel tea-drinking to be a very necessity of their
lives? For what reason shall fifty-one men—of whom perhaps only one
knows anything upon the subject—outvote forty-nine—of whom perhaps
five know something of the subject? decide (for instance) upon the
annexation of an Asian islet? How can you trust fifty-one white men
to legislate for forty-nine black men, or, to put it more strongly,
fifty-one black men to legislate for forty-nine white? Who does not
know that in such a case only organised force could decide?
Mussolini’s reaction (as the Americans would call it) was, I think,
against the ludicrous abuse of the doctrine of majority, which has
brought Europe to its present pass; for there is nothing so wicked or
so senseless or so degrading but a majority (to the honour of our race
it is generally a sham majority) can be quoted in its favour.
There is a very deplorable instance of this to-day in French politics.
A small but active caucus in France hates the Christian religion. Its
members are afraid to make a frontal attack on that religion, because
such action would endanger their skins, but they will take any measures
which will, they think, indirectly weaken its influence. Particularly
do they desire to restrain the activity of the religious orders, and,
so far as they can, to prevent those orders from having any corporate
existence at all. The mass of the people are, in varying degrees,
attached both to their traditional religion and to the more popular and
active forms of the monastic institution: that is, the teaching and
nursing religious orders. The contemplative orders they do not come
in touch with. Most men and women in the nation would leave things
alone, and that with a bias towards religion. Very many are almost
indifferent. More, though preferring to go on as their forefathers
went on, do not put it—religion—in the forefront of their lives.
Many more think it of some importance, but are far more actively
concerned with their material interests. A small body, quite as small,
perhaps, as the anti-Christian caucus on the other side, are active
in defence of religion. After a wearisome, meaningless rite of making
marks on bits of paper, the said rite (confused by a hundred legal and
personal interests, and conducted by the wire-pulling inherent in all
such performances) throws up some five or six hundred members of a
parliament, nearly all of them intriguers moved by a petty appetite for
money or for notoriety, or both. Of these it may be that fifty-five out
of the hundred follow the anti-Christian caucus, and look to it for
salaries and jobs, forty-five are organised on the other side. Or the
numbers may be the other way. When the fifty-five turn up on one side,
the whole vast organisation of the religious orders in France (most of
which are beneficent, the rest certainly doing no harm) is suddenly
imperilled and shaken; its members are exiled, its goods are stolen and
spent riotously by the lowest sort of politicians and their hangers-on,
its accumulation of wealth dissipated and destroyed. Then another
chance majority comes along in four years, and offers a restoration
which can but only be most precarious: a restoration of their natural
rights to these infamously (and ridiculously) harassed men and women,
but a restoration liable to be ruined in another four years.
After the war there happened to be in the French Parliament a vague
uncertain majority more or less pledged to traditional things. The
politicians most prominent in that gang approached the Carthusians
who had been exiled, and had taken up a new home in Tarragona, and
offered them a chance of returning to the Grande Chartreuse. These
exiles very wisely refused, for they said: ‘How do we know that
after all the expenditure of reëstablishing ourselves in our ancient
foundation—venerable for centuries, peaceable, remote—we may not at
your next “elections,” as you call them, find ourselves turned out?’
They were very wise: but what a commentary upon a system of government!
Think of it! Here is a great House with its roots right back in the
beginnings of the Middle Ages, with its oaken traditions, its reserves
of strength available for itself and all men; doing nothing which
could be construed as perilous under any system of common morals,
either to the State or to any individual. Merely because a clique of
anti-Christians hates them, this doctrine of artificial majorities can
turn the whole community out of doors at a moment’s notice, exile its
members, loot its fortune.
Nor let it be said that these things happen only in countries like
France, to which the disease of parliaments is unnatural and of
alien importation; they happen in one form or another wherever the
parliamentary fraud is at work. In countries which have lost dogmatic
religion and have only vague opinion left, the parliamentary evil
takes another form, that of a perpetual restriction against common
liberties; or it takes the form of putting finance secretly within
the power of inferior men, who fill their pockets at the expense
of the commonwealth; or it takes the form of treason in time of
war—attempting to make peace with the enemy behind the back of the
people and their allies. Or it takes the form of saving the enemy after
his defeat. There is no form of parliamentary activity which is not
deplorable, save in aristocracies.
For, in aristocracies, which are, of their nature, governments by a
clique, a parliament—which is a clique—can be normal and natural. In
communities based on the idea of equality and of action by the public
will they are cancers, under which such nations always sicken and may
die.
I can bear the thought of them no more. I must get back to realities
and to things loved.
I must return to my Nona.
We came to Berry Head and opened Torbay.
It is with Torbay as with the Fowey coast. I have known it only under
such weathers as leave a hint of heaven: never have I opened Torbay in
passing Berry Head but it was morning, with the young sea delighting in
a leading breeze; and once, a draught to last forever, I came up under
such a dawn and with so tender a dying crescent in the sky that I spent
an hour in Paradise.
What are those days of glory? They are not memories: are they
premonitions, or, are they visions?
They are not memories, though perhaps Plato thought them so, and our
modern pantheists, with Wordsworth for their spokesman here, called and
believed them so.
I will hope that they are premonitions, hints granted beforehand of a
state to be attained. At the worst they are visions of such a state
lying all about us, the home of the Blessed, which we are permitted to
glimpse at for a moment, even those of us sad ones who may never reach
that place.
As for those who call such joy illusion, they are of that great _Schola
Stultorum_, that new herd of fools peculiar to our day; they who have
made the discovery that Something comes out of Nothing, who pour quarts
out of pint-pots and give emptiness creative power.
Neglect them, but ask yourself, as I do when such rare moods are
granted, whether they be visions or premonitions, and hope that
premonitions they may be. For certainly they are the supports of this
life, and we creep from one to another like travellers from inn to inn,
and when they fail us, the world will be no more endurable.
Such thoughts I had—and have had repeatedly—in this run of water
under a morning sky. It is inhabited, is all that air and sea, by
something beneficent—at least, I have always found it so.
But there are pictures more definite and of the hard past which come
into my mind every time I round Berry Head and see Torbay before me.
And of all such thoughts that crowd upon me when I pass the point, and
open that deep recess of water, two stand out most vividly. It was here
on the southern shore of the Bay that the Dutch, and other mercenaries
of William of Orange, landed for the destruction of the last poor
remnants of English kingship; it was here that a Catholic priest
discovered the first ancient human relics, and thus started our modern
controversies.
This last is a most interesting story and little known. Here is what
would seem to have happened:
There is a cave near Torquay in which the water, passing, I think,
through limestone, leaves a deposit. Under this deposit a Catholic
priest in the place, a certain Dr. McEnery (I suppose, an Irishman,
but I have not read sufficiently about him) found a number of human
bones; associated with them were barbaric implements and the remains
of animals, some of such tropical kinds as can no longer live in our
climate, others wholly extinct.
He came to the very just conclusion that he had here evidence of an
antiquity for man far removed beyond the bounds which had been set by
the idolators of the written word of Scripture. He started that ball
rolling which has bounded down so devious a course through our time,
until to-day the grossly ignorant talk of an imaginary being, whom
they call a ‘cave man,’ and the half-learned can bamboozle the public
at will with the pretence that they know all about what they call the
‘prehistory’ of our race.
That man, as man—I mean man as we know him (not imperfect man)—has
lived upon this earth for very much more than ten thousand years,
we are now pretty sure; and we owe the first step to this same Dr.
McEnery—whose name no one hears. The later discoveries in the Somme
Valley we also owe to another priest, and that is as it should be.
What a turmoil so simple a discovery aroused in Biblical countries, to
be sure!
But that turmoil was but the forerunner of something prodigious:
nothing less than the shaking, splitting, and at last the collapse
of all the foundations upon which had been erected half the modern
culture of the West.
For one may say that the modern culture of the West lay after 1600 in
two halves, increasingly different one from the other: the Catholic
culture and the Protestant.
Now, on the Catholic culture, physical discovery of any kind, in
geology, or biology, or chemistry, can have no effect, save that of
some slight expansion, that is, some addition to the general powers of
its members; just as the learning of mathematics at Cambridge will not
transform, but only somewhat extend the general culture of an English
public school boy. The culture of an English public school is founded
upon a system and tradition which mathematics do not affect one way
or another, save somewhat to increase them. The Catholic culture is
founded on a philosophy which physical science does not affect.
In the Catholic culture of Europe, and especially among the French, who
are the leaders of all our discussions, the opposing camps were upon
the one side those possessed of Catholic dogmatic theology, a strong
metaphysical structure, and, on the other, those sceptics who denied
and ridiculed the claims of such a theology, standing upon the platform
of what they called pure reason; and this ideal of pure reason was as
unaffected by material science as that of its opponents. The sceptical
school of the Great Encyclopædists (which is still and will long remain
the one half of the Catholic culture in Europe) was in no way shaken
because certain of its adventitious conceptions, in no way connected
with its general philosophy, were proved false. The profound effect
of Voltaire was not lessened through his ridicule of fossils, and his
conclusion that the imprint of fishbones upon Alpine rocks came from
the dried herrings of mediæval pilgrims. These conceptions were proved
false, but Voltaire’s power did not depend upon their truth. Nor were
the Encyclopædists’ speculations upon some original, simple, incorrupt,
and admirable savage so essential to their doctrine that the full
discovery of the real savage affected their influence.
No more, on the other side, on the side of those practising and
affirming religion of the Catholic culture, did any material
discoveries upset doctrines which were not connected with specific
material instances, but were transcendental. It mattered nothing to the
two great antagonists, Belief and Unbelief, in Catholic Europe whether
man had existed politically on earth for five, ten, twenty, or fifty
thousand years. Their quarrel was on another and infinitely higher
plane. The vast progress of modern physical discovery has somewhat
extended the powers of either camp, but has not changed the main issue,
which was joined far earlier, from before the middle of the eighteenth
century, and which turns on the great question ‘Is Religion from God or
from man?’ No mere physical discovery can affect the Catholic culture
as a whole, whether in its clerical or in its anti-clerical branches.
The ruin of the Darwinian nonsense during the last twenty years has
been largely effected by anti-clerical biologists: the greatest
achievements in research—Pasteur’s among others—have been the work of
practising Catholics.
But with the Protestant culture of the North it was far otherwise.
_That_ had been based upon a book, and the literal interpretation
of that book. It had, of course, its profound spiritual origin, an
excessive and enthusiastic passion for lonely communion with God. But
its rock of authority was the Book.
The fragments of Hebrew folklore which the Catholic Church affirms
to be inspired, had always been used by that Church as examples,
positive and negative, in support of her doctrines; and particularly as
mystical, often allegorical, prophetic figurings of one great event
that was to come: the Incarnation. But, in the Protestant culture,
these Old Testament stories were _lived_. They had become flesh and
bone of their readers. The very characters therein took on a divine
air; the cruelties, the obscenities, the puerilities, equally with
the occasional sublime actions and sayings of those Old Testament
characters, became in men’s minds the attributes of demigods.
This absorption in the ancient relics of Hebrew Scripture produced
a corresponding vivid attachment to the pictures aroused by their
reading. The allegories became for men of the Protestant culture
concrete and undoubted events, taken for granted as historical and,
which is much more, made the basis of all daily life. Adam and Eve, for
instance, were to Milton, and to all who read Milton, for one hundred
and fifty years and more, a particular man and woman, of an aspect
remembered from the frontispiece of the family Bible. They lived in
a particular place not unlike the finer landscapes of England. They
walked with God and with his angels as one walks in a garden; the
humans and their majestic companions sauntered over real lawns, upon
real feet, taking steps some two feet long—real steps. And the couple
ate, not even a vague fruit, but a particular apple to their hurt. So
it was right through. On such pictures, taken to be plain history and
history inspiring all action, was the new culture of the seventeenth
century built in the North.
When all this structure was blown to pieces in the nineteenth century
by those discoveries of which this priest’s at Torquay was the
first, it did not follow that the tradition and momentum of the old
superstition would disappear as easily. Far from that. The main effects
of the old Bibliolatry are with us to-day in London, and in Berlin, in
Scandinavia, in the United States; though divergent and under various
forms, the effects of Bibliolatry have clearly produced a something
in common which still profoundly separates the Protestant from the
Catholic culture.
The upsetting of the Bible authority, then, did not produce in
the nations of Protestant culture a revolt against the Protestant
rule of life. That is not what happened. But what did happen was
a bewilderment, a chaos, a disintegration of all the solid things
which had stood firm in the North from the first generation of the
seventeenth century down to the first generation of the nineteenth.
The Protestant culture did not separate into a clerical and an
anti-clerical, a traditional and practising as against a mocking
temper: it moved in the main as one. But it moved, eddying and changing
continually, like a great cloud of dust following on the crash of a
building. It continued, after the catastrophe, to whirl and change: so
much so, that no one can tell at this moment, or could tell under the
very different spirit of, say twenty years ago, what form the ultimate
settlement may take.
For there is no settlement yet. Even to-day, even in the (for the
moment) popular mythology of cave men and prehistory and the rest of
it, there is nothing fixed. Characteristically enough, the guesswork
is turned into dogma, and faith reposes on concrete images. But the
dogmas change every few years, and the images as well. All within the
murk is still changing, and will continue to change, until the dust of
the explosion has come slowly to earth and has stratified. When that
happens there will be a new heresy. I wonder what it will be like?
Well, the man who first lit the match, the man who was the author of
the explosion, was Dr. McEnery, Catholic priest, of Torquay.
He was not listened to. The truth seemed too fantastic. The great
Cuvier had dealt with so many hoaxes of the kind (men having sent him,
among other things, the bones of fossil elephants by way of pre-Adamite
giants) that even in a rational society there would have been
hesitation. In the provincial society of England, 1829, there was more
than hesitation—there was contempt and silence. Man older than 4004
(or 4005) B.C. was a mad blasphemy. The idea was not to be tolerated.
It took a solid thirty or forty years before even educated people in
this country could be made familiar with so simple an idea. Now—after
less than a hundred years—not only has that idea soaked right through
society to its lowest depths, but a new conservatism has taken root,
and we find the same provincial people clinging tenaciously to-day to
exploded nonsense like Darwin’s Natural Selection, and the imaginary
evidence of embryology.
On the whole it is a good thing, this ultra-conservative instinct. It
has ridiculous sides to it, but it is a great deal better than the
iconoclast spirit. It does harm when it is used to bolster up injustice
or false doctrine, as in the case of men who still go on defending
human cruelty and oppression on some muddle-headed plea called
‘survival of the fittest’—which simply means survival of that which
survives; or when they convince themselves of some impossible blind
process of uncreative change without a Creator, and therefore conceive
that they may at once abandon even such poor wrecks of moral discipline
as have survived in them.
More interesting to me (I am sorry to say—for I have few companions in
this, and it is a lonely interest) than the discovery of evidence to
the great antiquity of man, is the absence of evidence which _ought_
to be there in the nature of things, but which no one has yet come
across. What I ardently desire is discovery showing, or even hinting
at, the way in which man became what we call _civilised_.
As far as you can go back you see civilised man existing, and, side by
side with him, barbaric man: I mean, ‘as far as you can go back’ in any
real record not only of writing, but of monument. Take the whole period
of surviving record, whatever it may be (no one really knows: but it
is certainly more than five thousand years, and may be more than six
thousand). You find at the origin of it men sculpturing, building with
cut stone and bricks, and leaving record of their actions; inhabiting
cities; possessed of laws—and all the rest of it. Then there is a
halt. You come to the end of a blind alley. You come up against a wall
and there is nothing beyond.