RESPECTABLE CIVILISATION AND AFTER.
"I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual,
bold."
WALT WHITMAN.
It is the boast of the ordinary patriotic Briton that he lives in a
highly civilised country. During his tutelage, he learns that climate,
or insularity of position on the face of the globe, or the system of
monarchy, or the Bible, has, or have, combined or separately, made
England the foremost nation on earth. In later life he is sometimes
prone to exclaim against our "advanced civilisation," and even to go
to the extreme of asserting that we could well dispense with much of
it. The latter-day Anglo-Saxon, who thinks without thought, has for
himself a very clear and satisfying idea of civilisation. Emerson, on
the other hand, remarks that "nobody has attempted a definition of
civilisation," and that "we usually suggest it by negations;" and he
adduces instances of people lacking an alphabet, iron, and abstract
thought. Thus, when we ask for an explanation of the term Civilisation,
we usually hear an enumeration of the constituents of a state of primal
savagery, and are then possibly referred to the material products,
money, and Gatling guns of a nation for signs of its civilisation.
It is then much simpler for the majority to formulate intrinsic
barbarism than to define refinement, and to delineate a reliable ideal
of Civilisation. They are conscious that much, if not most of that
which they would designate civilised could, upon close examination,
be proved to be barbaric. Their easy exposition will not withstand
keen scientific scrutiny; and a definition which will not stand this
test is merely a stumbling-block in the way of inquiry. A member of a
reputedly cultured community or class naturally resents attack upon
those views and customs which in his estimate denote civilisation, and
are of its very essence. If he is a pious Englishman, he will probably
confess that in the matter of faith the people of Eastern countries
are barbaric, while he fails to discern the trail of barbarity in his
own creed and ritual. In like manner, a Philistine aristocrat will
scarcely accede that there is barely one degree of coarseness betwixt
his pleasures and those of the illiterate proletarian, who, in his
turn, persuades himself that he is more intelligent and decent than his
compeers of another land.
Yet the truth is that a very small number of the inhabitants of these
isles can be justly labelled civilised. We must search, as it were, in
the mode of Diogenes for "the highly organised man, brought to supreme
delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense
of honour and taste," who stands for Emerson's type of civilised
humanity. That such examples are not unknown at this stage is as
certain as the fact that many more are in the process of evolution. And
although savagery in idea and practice confronts us this way and that
in each scale of society, we shall do ill if we approach the study of
modern barbarism in a vein of mocking pessimism. It is also necessary
that a lively faith in the evolutionary principle applied to human
nature should be tempered by a look behind while our hopes are young.
Slowly and painfully are we "working out the beast," slowly and
painfully must we climb the stages till we cease to obey the blind
dictates of instinctive impulse and to base our codes on the reigning
opinions of the irrational mass. It is hardly needful to reiterate even
one of the preliminary conclusions of all philosophers and humanists
to prove that most men have no reasoned views upon the conduct of
life. Seneca says that "the common sort find it easier to believe than
to judge, and content themselves with what is usual, never examining
whether it be good or no. By the common sort is intended the man of
title as well as the clouted shoe." The veracity of Swift's aphorism
that most men have as much turn for flying as for thinking, and of
Carlyle's laconic "mostly fools," is unquestioned.
It is therefore no unsupported postulate that the larger part of
civilised people always tend to lead barbaric lives, and that what
each class is apt to accept as an approximation to a complete
civilisation is a very inchoate form of that truer culture urged upon
society by individualist reformers in each successive age. A very
slight examination of the thought and pursuits of what is called the
highest class in our existing social scale will serve to demonstrate
the prevalence of barbarism. For there, as in the lower circles,
we find the lines of apathy, vulgarity, and animalism graven on
patrician faces, and proclaimed in the talk of the dinner-table, the
smoking-room, and the covert-side. Obviously, all our peers are not
ultra-barbarians; neither are all our bargees and coalheavers savages.
Yet the dominant tone is just as often low and inane in the mansion
as in the tenement, and with much less to offer in its extenuation.
Millions toil and ache, and are vulgarised in order that a coterie of
hereditary lords and titled parvenus shall enjoy the leisure which
they mainly devote to frivolity and the killing of the æons of time.
Upon these, the intimates of monarchs, the protectors of the sacred
pheasant, the distributors of largess, a barbaric populace alternately
lavishes its affection and its abuse. So long as the baron flings his
groats to the churls, all is peace in vassaldom; but when rents are
racked, game laws enforced to their utmost limits, and the dice rattled
in the hall, the voice of the people is upraised in tumult, and the
virtuous artizan, clinking his silver winnings on the way from the
racecourse, thanks heaven he is not as these nobles are, gamblers,
adulterers, and oppressors of the widow and the orphan.
Set a barbarian to lash a barbarian if you wish to see injustice done.
The fact is that, being barbarous, we first allow an accident of birth
to raise a man to a position of power, and then run atilt at our shoddy
dignities because the power tends to impede general well-being. Worth
of mind is the one qualification for esteem, a trite enough dictum in
the mouths of those who persistently ignore its truth. But the time
must come when the aristocracy of character will be the only recognised
aristocracy in civilised nations.
I think that if one should suggest that it is right to hate the members
of our "bloated aristocracy," he is no less absurd than those who
fawn around the lackeys of a court. Our noble lords are not of one
type, as our common people are not of one cast, though in many rude
examples of nobility we can trace the basic elements of ruffianism,
and see the bestial fruits thereof. What most concerns us is the
question whether a society that grants titles to its successful
money-grabbers is clean-purged of its antique barbarism. An academical
diploma conferred upon a teacher of the arts or sciences is possibly
one means by which the respectful heed of the uncultured is secured
for new doctrine. For the one who appends certain characters to his
signature will be held in esteem by the many as a man worth hearing.
Even in the matter of degrees given to scholars of distinction, we too
often discover that such award fosters moral and mental deterioration,
and that it narrows and mars the career of thinkers who are elevated
to a throne of authority. Our laureates must need be eminently wary
in their main theories, though they may pipe an undernote of revolt
in the sequestered grove, to ease their souls of the sting of the
stultifying penalty of vulgar rank. Yes, titles of all kinds seem to
have a tendency to degrade; and the sun of courtly favour often withers
the real and aids the growth of the spurious nobility. "Brave old
Samuel," ever a Respectable in leading sentiments, was more so when he
took a dole from the palace. There is little hope for the amendment
of the semi-barbaric prophet when he is taken from the wilderness
and thrust into a position only tenurable by wily compromise with the
Respectabilities.
Very engrossing is the study of Respectability in high places. "These
be the men we are told to look up to," said a tattered plebeian, whose
eyes had been blasted by the hunting magistrate who was riding on other
men's land. But that we do "look up to" our rich, idle folk with an
avid awe is undoubted. Few persons in a town are especially interested
in hearing that Mr. Herbert Spencer is there on a visit; but we are
most of us anxious to shake hands with a prize-fighter, or the "Jubilee
Plunger," or to take tea with a millionaire's wife. We look up to or
hunt after such because they have vulgar notoriety or money, and we are
not concerned to know how they came by their popularity and their cash,
and whether they deserve either, and make a good use of their power.
Were it not for the few civilised beings who dare to be considered odd,
this odious admiration of trivial character and empty claims would mean
a ripening to the decay of society. Involuntarily, the civilised make
the ways of barbarity easy to thousands, for they absolve the lethargic
from the exertion of severe thinking.
The paradise towards which the _bourgeoisie_ strive is not the
leisure to refine the mind, but the opportunity to vie with the more
commonplace section of the upper class in dissipation. The labourer who
resents the lordling's contumely, and indicts him for living a lazy
life, may only work when he is starving, and perhaps not then. His
ideal may rise no higher than perpetual beer and ninepins, while the
squire craves no higher satisfaction in life than hunting six days a
week, and champagne, billiards, and the sporting papers on Sunday. The
evil is in the setting up of a barbaric aim of life in all classes.
Our greatest ideals are the commercial and the voluptuous. The eternal
pursuit of the frivolous, which makes up the chief part of what is
foolishly termed "high life," and the sordid middle-class struggle to
amass money, are accepted by the shallow as tokens of our progress in
civilisation. We are rich and luxurious; we are therefore far above the
savage. Yet how far? Our leisured and affluent have for the greater
number returned to the employment of a pre-pastoral epoch. Look at
the lives of thousands of English gentlemen. Truer barbarians never
existed of old than many of those whose whole thought, energy, and
wealth are given up to sport. Many of them are restless nomads, ever
hurrying from one quarter of the globe to another in search of fresh
game to kill. I do not underrate the need for the development of the
physical man, nor ignore the value of sports rightly comprehended as a
means to the end of training and recreating the body. But what shall be
said of that multitude of our countrymen who live to amuse themselves
in such primitive fashion? It is these who waste their powers, and
barbarise the vulgar by the force of ill example.
Let us not wonder that, in bygone days, a gaping peasantry, with
quaint uncouth notions of what constituted an efficient mouthpiece
of their wants, yelled at the hustings for the return of those who
rode straight, and could pummel the best man of the mob in a brace of
rounds. Of such order are still the credentials in some of the Pagan
constituencies, where the beer-steeped intelligence pleads the election
of "an old-fashioned sort and a thorough sportsman."
We are still rearing these rude types in our public schools and
universities, and for these we laudably reserve the chief places on
the senate, on justiciary benches, and in local boards. Despite their
educational chances and social opportunities, these are surely among
the retrograde, with their _argot_ culled from the racing journals,
their strange drawling pronunciation of the English tongue, their
points of breeding, their caddish _hauteur_, their rampant John
Bullisms, and their innate aversion to thought and earnestness. "The
fop of Charles's time," says Leslie, in Mr. Mallock's "New Republic,"
"aimed at seeming a wit and a scholar. The fop of ours aims at being a
fool and a dunce."
Quitting this strange horde, let us descend to the mart for an
examination of the Commercial Ideal. No one denies that for a nation
of shopkeepers we have done great things in the world's history. In a
very large measure we are civilised by the shop, and it is only when
the shop absorbs the best of us, mental and physical, that commercial
activity tends to retard progress. Provide that a man's moral sense and
intellect are not warped or unexercised in the making of money, and
there is nothing degrading, but the opposite, in his desire to succeed
commercially. But in the fierceness of competition in an over-populated
country, cruel barbarity and detestable meanness and cunning arise.
And not only these, but the curse of intellectual and æsthetic atrophy
lights upon the host. Out of this undue stress is developed a tendency
to sordid living, a preference for the lower gratifications of life.
Yet need money-getting always degrade the people? Will the prosperous
business career of the future be alone compatible with a low standard
of thought, and a corrupt canon of commercial morals?
"Life without industry is guilt; industry without art is brutality."
Now, in the push and drive of industry at the close of this century
it is as hard for myriads to keep the soul alive, as it is for many
thousands to find food for the body. The trader who makes Mammon his
idol, who thinks money, and spends his wealth irrationally, brutalises
life. But for the others, let us rather pity and try to amend the
condition of those who cannot, in plain terms, "leave the shop." There
are strong-minded and somewhat exceptional tradesmen who can shake
off the dust of the warehouse, and spend the hours of freedom in
the cultivation of the intellect. There are men of business who do
excellent work in art and science, while their jaded associates are
satisfying their purely animal wants. The question is--Can a man live
the higher life, and _succeed_ in the worldly meaning of prosperity?
Men do not grow money by storing the brain with knowledge, and the
merchant who ponders upon a phase of evolution, or murmurs a rhythm
of Tennyson while he is at the ledger, will most probably be an
indifferent money-maker. Lamb's _Good Clerk_, you will remember, "gets
on" because his first aim is to be a good piece of mechanism. It is a
grievous reflection that zeal for the desk should eat up the brain and
better part of a good man, and leave him a machine. The expert clerk is
as valuable as the clever author or the great painter; but the trouble
is that while the trader is making himself efficient as a trader, he
is frequently neglecting his mind, narrowing his social judgments, and
tending backwards.
Is there no escape from a seemingly invincible fate that restricts the
thought and energy of the million to the bare affairs of the shop? It
does almost seem at first that there is none. What we have to determine
is whether we shall aid the production of mediocre shopkeepers, who
will desire to live cultured lives, while they devote a due share of
thought to the shop, or whether we shall continue to rear a class who
place business first and culture last, or practically without their
scheme of life. For every sociologist this is a great problem. Speaking
out of my own prejudice, I would rather live in a country of moderately
prosperous men, who read, and speculated, and had aspirations for
something higher than lucre, than in the land where the mass were rich
and unintellectual.
There is an economic aspect of the alternatives. Art thrives where
there is wealth; but money does not of necessity make good art. At
present two formidable hindrances stand in the way of developing
culture--over-population, and a passion for ostentation. Regulate the
reproductive faculty, and save the potential slave of industrialism
from a struggle that waxes keener yearly. This must be done in the
individual and national interest, to the gradual diminishment of abject
poverty and the lessening of the awful strain in the congested centres.
Allied with this teaching, there should be a wide inculcation of the
value of a refined simplicity of material life, a substitution of
high-thinking for mere barbarous display in living. These were the
leading precepts of John Stuart Mill to an unheedful generation; but I,
for one, take courage in the view that this will become the creed of
many as we advance in the art of living. In _Liberty_, Mill writes:
"The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and
demoralising effects of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial
society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from
cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time
produce their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted
by deeds, for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their
power."
The way of the civiliser is hard. If the men and women of ideals and
broad sympathies go, as Mills enjoins, into Barbaria and Philistia
as apostles, they must be prepared to receive the hurts of primitive
weapons. Missionaries are not welcomed with barbaric shouts of glee
when they land to subvert ancient faiths. Neither are apostles of
righteousness and sweetness and light beloved of our children of
darkness in Belgravia and Bloomsbury. But as Mr. Hamerton asks in his
"Intellectual Life": "Are the Philistines to have all the talk to
themselves for ever; are they to rehearse their stupid old platitudes
without the least fear of contradiction? How long, O Lord, how long?"
Yet, let your apostle be the quintessence of tact and humility, he will
not escape slander, odium, and contempt when he essays to contradict
the ancient platitudes. Broach boldly any subject, from religion to
corset-wearing, in the drawing-room at Bloomsbury, or in the back
parlour at Lambeth, and you will have to contend against stubborn
apathy. To cultivate eccentricity of opinion and conduct for the
purpose of evoking the curiosity of the languid Respectables, is a form
of insanity which no one will suppose I am advocating as an effort
towards civilisation. But social danger is always to be apprehended
from conventionality that is stagnantly content with the existing
order, and has not the desire nor energy to advance. It is, then,
the onerous duty of a thoughtful member of the respectable classes
to awaken his relatives or associates from a blank contentment with
mere animal well-being and trivial aims. He must not shrink from the
burden because it is the habit of unthinking persons to believe that
the conclusions of sounder brains have been gained by the same meagre
thinking as their own flimsy theories, or that his wrought-out views
are only crotchets advanced to flatter his egoism. For by those who
shirk deep thinking, intellectual seriousness in others is merely
regarded as a more or less peculiar temperamental trait. They do
not know that the eternal voluntary martyrdom of thinkers is their
salvation. They are unaware that the good and the earnest toil daily
in order that the evil and the frivolous may be preserved to reap the
reward of toilsome thought, in which the apathetic have had no share,
and for which they have little praise. Reflect upon what Darwin has
done for morality, science, and art, and then mark the mean ingratitude
and ignorant misrepresentation of some of those who are now being made
whole by his sane science. Will the Respectables always crucify their
social redeemers?
Not wholly encouraging is the investigation of barbarism in our
industrial and proletarian classes. Yet perhaps, if there is one
party above another that appears to be progressing rapidly towards a
higher civilisation, it is the operative. When one thinks of what the
working class has done, with its lack of advantage in the past, and
its scant opportunity in the present, the progress is one of the most
wonderful and hopeful omens of modern times. It is inevitable that the
acquisition of a little knowledge should bear some ill fruit among
the sound; but the humanising influences of education far exceed in
their proved result the expectation of the early pioneers of a noble
movement. Much has been done, and much remains to be accomplished,
in the work of constructing the foundations and superstructure of
an ultimate democratic civilisation. Whitman and Ibsen, latter-day
prophets of sound social foresight, predicted at the outset of their
careers that in the fibre and stuff of a cultured democracy lies our
hope.
Undoubtedly, the moral tone of the industrial class is growing higher
yearly. The rough hand of the artisan has fashioned much of our
civilisation, and his hard, calculating intelligence will have a larger
share in the government of the near future. I confess that it thrills
me to hear that a set of miners in the North have begged the custodian
of a public library to provide them with Mr. Meredith's fine but
"difficult" novels. Again, we should rejoice to learn that a factory
worker, who has taught himself to read at the age of forty, is studying
Mr. Spencer's "First Principles."
As I have before tried to show, the neglect of civilising thought and
study is not voluntary in the case of many busy men and women. It is
largely an outcome of complex commercial rivalry and overpressure that
thousands should not share in the higher refinements of civilisation,
and that science should be outside their rule of life instead of at
the bottom of it. Thoreau speaks of the best part of the husbandman
being ploughed into the soil for compost; and the figure represents
the case for legions of toilers. Mr. Ruskin is among the oracles when
he announces that "the final outcome of all wealth is the producing as
many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human
creatures." Perhaps so; but for the nonce, we mostly plod on in that
"dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being," which we are wont to
describe as "getting on in the world."
It is a great thing, this educational advance of the tool-skilled. Yet
there is much to be done. It is needless to rehearse the manifold
savage characteristics, the mob frenzies, and the low pleasures of many
of the working class--imperfections which all of us exhibit either
in like kind or with faint difference. We forget that a mechanic who
indulges in a weekly debauch, and sometimes beats a constable, has
his counterpart in those who call themselves superior. Ruffianism,
brutality, and gross sensuality are not restricted to one class.
English epicurism is mostly of the lower kind in every rank. The
uncivilised of the upper class spend the larger part of their incomes
upon dishes and drinks; the coarse of the labouring class expend nearly
half their wages on beer. Our sensuousness trends in the direction of
sensuality. We pride ourselves that we are able to consume quantities
of flesh, and we apotheosise John Barleycorn with Shakspere.
Very sombre is the spectacle of the life that bruises the million. To
one who walks the streets observantly on public holidays, the white
faces and worn bodies of his toiling brothers tell of dull, grinding
lives. See the poor mercantile clerks and the shopmen, the genteel
drudges, the indispensable factors of wealth which they will never
share. Well does Guy de Maupassant picture the type:
"With sallow faces and twisted bodies, and one of their shoulders
a little forced up by perpetual bending at work over a table
... they all belonged to the army of poor threadbare devils who
vegetate frugally in a mean little plaster-house, with a flower
bed for a garden."
How can we inveigh against these tired workers for the drowsy
occupation of their few leisure hours? What is chiefly at fault is the
crushing system that leaves so little time for expansion of the mind
and the sympathies, the ideal that shapes the many to this level cast.
Mr. Grant White gives a grimly sardonic sketch of a London shopkeeping
pair in his "England Without and Within." He tells of faces that had
probably "once expressed some of the vivacity of youth; but this had
passed away, and nothing, no trace of thought or feeling, had come into
its place--only fat; a greasy witness of content." But there is more
pathos than humour in this study from lower middle-class life. Were
there not originally the germs of ideas, imagination, and emotion, in
these unfortunate contented souls? Are such doomed to take no thought
for higher things than bread-getting and eating, and will their minds
for ever starve on the Bethel hymn and the newspaper?
More pitiful and tragic is the state of the lowest, the lapsed, the
untameable of the slums. "Our society," says M. Taine, "is a fine
edifice, but in the lowest story what a sink of impurity.... It seems
to me that the evil and the good are greater here than in France."
The law cannot cure inherent propensities to evil doing, and pious
philanthropy can merely patch a rotten vestment; but scientific
criminologists will eventually probe to the root. Too long have we
relied upon the gaoler and the priest. We are learning now that
congenital crime is a subject for the physiologist and the mental
pathologist. So, too, with the plague of chronic destitution, the
prime infamy of pseudo-civilisation. Instinctive barbaric pity urges
liberal almsgiving; but the beautiful emotion of sympathy needs as
much control in its gratification as the purely animal appetites. We
shall awake soon to the truth that it is our selfish Respectability
that must be fought with the weapons of a new economic science, based
upon righteousness. We should strive to destroy the sources of hopeless
want, as we endeavour to exterminate disease microbes in the body.
Are these the visions of Utopianism? No; for when we consider what
modern science has done in its infancy, we may surely reckon upon
greater victory in days now dawning. To support this inspiring creed
of science we do not need to fabricate evidences out of improbability,
conjecture, and fallacy; for the proofs are plain and convincing, and
will survive the severest criticism. Truly, if we make moan one day
for the tenacity of unreason in the human brain, we may rejoice on
the morrow in the thought that never in history has the outlook been
brighter.
It is too evident that thousands who can no longer be satisfied with
the guesses of primitive barbarians concerning man's origin and destiny
still cover their inner convictions with the cloak of Respectability,
and endeavour to seem that which they are not. Honesty will thrive with
the wane of Respectability.