CULTURED GENTILITY.
"I hardly know an _intellectual_ man, even, who is so broad and
truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with
whom you endeavour to talk soon come to a stand against some
institution in which they appear to hold stock--that is some
particular, not universal way of viewing things."
THOREAU.
"Do you persuade yourself that I respect you?"
"MEASURE FOR MEASURE."
Cultured gentility is one of the signs of the times. Snobbishness is
a deep-seated vice of human beings, and a trait of the gregarious
mammalia, with which the human snob, when he is more than ordinarily
ignorant, disclaims relationship. When Darwin told people that their
early progenitors were hairy and ape-like, with prehensile feet, great
canine teeth, and tails equipped with the proper muscles, all the
Respectables jeered at him, and said that they were "only a little
lower than the angels," and that monkeys must have been fashioned as
travesties of men. But though we have moved upwards, "working out of
the beast," Man still exhibits race prejudice, patriotic bias, and
the low instinct of class exclusiveness. Perhaps at no period of our
social evolution have we been more cultured, and yet more vulgar, than
at the present time. Such a juxtaposition may appear to indicate that
a little knowledge for the masses is not without its disadvantages as
well as its blessing. The proletarian of the sixteenth century could
not read nor write; but he was probably less vulgar than those among
his descendants whose acquaintance with modern literature is restricted
to the gutter library of cuts and snips and racing tips. Simple, merry
Dick trolled "Old Rose"; flash 'Arry and his blatant mates hiccough the
staccato of "Glorious Beer."
Contemporaneous with a widespread vulgarity of thought and a hideous
banality of living, there is an immense development of culture.
Nowadays it is the fashion to "go in" for "culture," and in society you
must know, or affect to know, something about evolution, the higher
criticism, Ibsen, Whistler's pictures, and Chippendale furniture. You
may learn much about these, and be "smart" at the same time; for
smartness and culture go hand-in-hand to the "crushes" and "at homes,"
and are as brother and sister one to the other. To use a phrase from
the vocabulary of culture-cum-smartness, you are "not in the running"
if you have merely mastered the theory of the universal germ, and
neglected to practise the skirt dance or the plantation song.
Once upon a time, the philosopher and the man of letters came out and
was separate from amongst the crowd. He lived mostly in the seclusion
of his library, which was neither good for his understanding nor
his digestion. But he forewent the pomps of smart society, partly
because smart society did not wish to be bored, and partly owing
to his enlightened instinct of Bohemianism, which found wholesome
gratification in the unostentatious amenities of the literary
symposium, the forgathering with one or two of his craft at the
historic "Cheshire Cheese" or the "Cock Tavern." He dressed himself
with a certain careless distinction; he drank cider with Porson, and
spent ambrosial nights in the fumes from churchwardens with genial
Lamb, Hazlitt, Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and Landor. These were men of
culture who refused to hover on the fringe of a shallow, fashionable
society, not because they were intellectual snobs, but because their
pursuits were on a higher plane than the frivolities of Respectability.
Wordsworth dwelt remote among the hills; De Quincey led laborious days
in the solitude of Mavis Bush; Shelley lived unknown of his neighbours
at Marlow; and Landor, "a noble-looking old man, badly dressed in
shabby snuff-clothes, a dirty old blue necktie and unstarched cotton
shirt," lived chiefly aloof in Florence. None of these qualified
themselves for lionisation in society. The arts of gentility are not
compatible with the study of science and philosophy.
Ampère, the scientific investigator, went one day to dine with Madame
Beauregard. His hands were stained by a drug which leaves its mark on
the skin for several days. Poor Ampère! what did he in a company where
externals count for all a man is worth? His hostess could not dine with
one whose hands were soiled in the interest of posterity: "I promised
not to return there before my hands were white. Of course, I shall
never enter the house again," wrote Ampère to his wife. And have we not
read how Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were mistaken by a finical
lady for a pair of working men when she saw them conversing together?
But we have fallen upon different days. The philosopher has been lured
from his den; the poets have come down from Parnassus to sport with
the nymphs of Philistia, the intellectual rogue elephant has been
tamed to "caper nimbly in my lady's chamber," and the recusant and
the pariah sat down to table with the imposing dignitaries of the
Church and State. It may be well on the whole, but these gracious
concessions from the Philistine are not without their perils for the
philosopher and the artist. Even the wisest of them cannot always
escape the moral and mental deterioration that comes of being _au fait_
in the whiffles and frothy small talk of drawing-rooms, the parlour
tricks and pretty deportments; and the donning of a chimney-pot hat
and a dress coat is often the first step on the downward career of
the intellectual. Have we not seen it? One season will transform the
modest, single-hearted, plain-living artist or student into a vain,
insufferable, intellectual mountebank. A few months of interviewing,
and "log-rolling," and posturing in Mayfair, and you change your
ideas, stultify your conscience, and degenerate into a Respectable. It
is almost inevitable. We are all sweetly human, and vanity is one of
our prime characteristics. Most of us, also, as some critic of life
observes, would rather be "the chief of a committee of four than the
unknown benefactor of our species." An author of mediocre ability,
possessing that quality of self-assertiveness known commonly as "side,"
can far outpace the shy genius in the race for public esteem. The
brazen bumptiousness and supercilious disdain of the mere talent which
lacks astute worldly wisdom are the components of the snobbishness
that makes for social success. Society closes the door upon the needy
philosopher in his threadbare garb; but it throws its portals wide to
welcome the adept of claptrap, whose higher philosophy is the study of
the main chance.
I do not applaud the intellectual exclusiveness with which some of the
cultured attempt to keep their immaculate souls unspotted from the
world. We want no Respectability of pedants and book-worms. Erudition
is worthy of the highest respect; but the erudite snob is imperfectly
cultivated. He is frequently more ignorant of many important phases
of life than the sheer illiterates whom he pities for a narrowness of
judgment upon men. Who can gainsay Sir Thomas Browne, when he writes:
"It is an unjust way of compute to magnify a weak head for some Latin
abilities; and to under-value a solid judgment because he knows not
the genealogy of Hector"? It is difficult to dissociate arrogance
from ignorance, even when we know that the arrogant man is learned.
Snobbishness is a mark of shallowness.
Undoubtedly, many men and women of genius have evinced the specific
snobbery of culture. Shakspere, Jonson, Victor Hugo, and Turguenieff,
are great figures that suggest exceptions to the rule. Carlyle is a bad
case of playing to the Respectables; for, despite his loudly-proclaimed
reverence for humanity, his vanity, like that of Antisthenes, peered
through the rents in his cloak. In extolling the imposers of brute
force in the community, the sage displayed a tendency to cajole the
oppressing class, for whom he had about as much real sympathy as
the Southerner has for the negro race. He jeered at and snubbed his
contemporary writers; he despised mere literary artists; he told a
now eminent novelist that he was "ganging to the de'il by the very
vulgarest road"; he described Lecky as "a willow-pattern sort o' man,
voluble but harmless, a pure herbivorous, nay, mere graminivorous
creature;" he called Landor a "wild man," and sighed "over the
spectacle of the commonplace torn to rags;" Maurice was "uninteresting
... twisted, screwed, wiredrawn;" and it is said that the most he could
say for George Meredith was that he was "nae fule." To a host of minor
essayists, journalists, and literary hangers-on, Carlyle set that
fashion of priggishness and snobbery that prevails so widely at the
present time.
What a mighty and fearsome foe to knowledge is Academic Respectability.
Beneath its sway the seats of learning become fusty abiding-places of
mouldy pedantry. It posts its wary lackeys at every avenue of research
to warn back adventurous explorers, with their theological or political
red flags and notice boards. Academic Respectability expelled Shelley.
It frowns upon Bain, Francis Newman, and other bold investigators and
scholars of modern times. It killed Socrates, persecuted Spinoza,
insulted David Hume, sneered at Buckle, and derided Darwin. De Quincey
tells us that he scarcely spoke to a soul while he was at Worcester
College, Oxford. Was the pensive opium-eater thoroughly overawed or
depressed by the Respectability of the classic city? Possibly those
were the days of the genesis of the "Oxford manner," that supercilious
drawling affectation of superior sapience which characterises the sons
of _bourgeois_ families at Alma Mater.
Let William Morris speak: "Oxford was beautiful even in the nineteenth
century, when Oxford, and its less interesting sister, Cambridge,
became definitely commercial. They (and especially Oxford) were the
breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves
cultivated people; they were, indeed, cynical enough, as the so-called
educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an
exaggeration of cynicism, in order that they might be thought knowing
and worldly-wise." ("News from Nowhere.") Thomas Hardy, in describing
the manners of Christminster,[6] writes in a similar strain of the
system that has elbowed the proletariat off the pavements, to make room
for the sons of millionaires.
Academic stubborn opposition to new and revolutionary theories of
all kinds is one phase of the mental malady of Respectability. All
hierarchies and autocracies have the sacrosanct seal of Respectability;
they have a conventional reputation to maintain, and it is to their
vital interest to fight innovating opinion. For instance, the French
Academy refuses persistently to elect M. Zola, on the very plea of his
literary unconventionality and virility. He writes for the thoughtful
and wide-visioned, and not for the horde of shallow Respectables. Yet
Zola is beyond doubt the greatest novelist of our age; and perhaps
the only French novelist of his day who can count upon immortality.
It is his greatness, his genius, that exclude him from the narrow
coterie. "My position is simple," he writes. "Since there is an Academy
in France, I ought to belong to it. I have stood for election, and
I cannot recognise anything wrong on my part in having done so. So
long as I continue to stand, I am not beaten, therefore I will always
stand." But Zola may rest well content; he has won greater fame and
honour than the Academy could confer upon him.
* * * * *
Instance, again, the Respectable hostility to the evolutionary
theory. Was the opposition entirely motived by a spirit of scientific
scepticism and caution? Certainly not. The main attack was made by the
army of Respectables, who became exceedingly angry with Charles Darwin
because he calmly demolished a number of groundless suppositions as
to the origin of life, the descent of man, and the development of the
sense of morality. Your true conventionalist, confronted with a new and
startling idea, is like the savage who lashes himself into a passion at
the sight of a steamboat or some other mechanical invention. The savage
wants to smash the machine and the man who made it.
* * * * *
Mr. Lawson Tait, the well-known physician, has stated that he suffered
in social and professional life for his acceptance of the Darwinian
hypothesis. Mr. Tait writes: "'The Origin of Species' was published in
1859. I came across it in 1861--as a boy of 17--it captivated me, and
took such a hold of me that I tried the application of its principle
in every direction open to my youthful mind. In 1863, as president of
the Hunterian Medical Society (the Society of University Students),
I applied Darwin's doctrines in directions which brought upon me the
expressed anger of the authorities, and my career as a University
student was in danger of a premature ending. Not only was there not a
single professor of the University of Edinburgh at that time who was
other than actively hostile to Darwin's views, but the acceptance of
them actually drove me from my native city, in 1866."
Such is a typical illustration of the mental corrosion induced by the
insanity of Academic Respectability.
I am not tilting at Universities, but against Respectability in
every guise. With the growth of power in the _bourgeois_ class, the
Universities have, to a large degree, degenerated from halls of
knowledge into mere forcing beds of the disease of Respectability.
The case seems even worse in "free America."
Plutocracy has taken the colleges under its ægis, and knowledge has
been cramped to suit the whims of millionaire patrons. Just as happened
in the case of the academic professors who protested against slavery,
so are they now threatened when they advocate new economic doctrines,
which do not fit in with the ideas of big capitalists. Sensational
light was thrown on this matter by a letter written by one of the
professors of the Leland Stanford University of California, and given
to the public by the chief of the Literary Bureau of the Democratic
Bryan Party, though its language seems to suggest that its writer
did not expect its publication. This professor states that college
professors enjoy no freedom of expression on the money question.
"I know," he says, "there are many who wish to champion national
bi-metallism, but I am very sure if there were such, they would be
compelled to surrender their present livelihoods." He cites by name
several instances of instructors who have been placed under duresse for
teaching views that are considered heterodox by the wealthy men who
rule the Board of some of our principal colleges, and rule them in
orthodox obedience to the gospel of self-interest.[7]
The same writer informs us that for advocating the passage of a Bill
by the Illinois State Legislature to give the City of Chicago the
option of becoming the owner of a municipal gas plant, and for some
other exhibitions of a spirit of economic freedom, Professor Bemis
was dismissed from his position in the University of Chicago, an
institution created and largely maintained by a great millionaire,
part of whose fortune is in gas stock. Wisconsin has a university
supported by the people of that State, and there learning has a chance
to flourish. But wherever the influence of the patron is found, there
progress is blocked by plutocracy.
"A most competent professor of political economy, in one of the
greatest of our universities, allowing himself to become an
advocate of the ownership and operation of our telegraphs by the
Government, was compelled to give up his place by the influence of
one of the trustees, who happened to be a large owner of telegraph
stock.... The victorious trustee carries about with him in his
pocket-book a little printed slip, containing the offensive views
of the discharged professor, and it is his pleasant habit to read
this when occasion offers, to instructors or students who may, he
thinks, need bracing up, and he accompanies the reading with
cheering comments on the fate which befel the heretic who uttered
such doctrines."
An important scientific school in America had been created and endowed
by one of our "poor boys," become plutocrat. He was dissuaded with
difficulty by the President from carrying out the idea which he
proposed, that the teachers should be hired by the month, as were the
clerks in his factories, so that they could be discharged whenever he
wanted to do so! You see, even in democratic nations, the trail of
Respectability is over education.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] "Jude the Obscure."
[7] From article "Freedom in the American Colleges," in "Progressive
Review," January, 1897.