civilisation. It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a man
that it never asks whether it has a likeness of him. Thus declarations,
seemingly most detailed, have flashed along the wires of the world ever
since I was a boy. We were told that in some row Boer policemen had
shot an Englishman, a British subject, an English citizen. A long time
afterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen was
quite black. Well, it makes no difference to the moral question; black
men should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men. But
it makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted so
startling an alteration of the photograph. I am sorry we got hold of a
photographic negative in which a black man came out white. Later we were
told that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag,
which would have been a disgusting thing to do. Later, it was admitted
that he was an Irishman; which is exactly as different as if he had been
a Pole. Common sense, with all the facts before it, does see that black
is not white, and that a nation that has never submitted has a right to
moral independence. But why does it so seldom have all the facts before
it? Why are the big aggressive features, such as blackness or the Celtic
wrath, always left out in such official communications, as they were
left out in the photograph? My friend the poet had hair as black as an
African and eyes as fierce as an Irishman; why does our civilisation
drop all four of the facts? Its error is to omit the arresting
thing--which might really arrest the criminal. It strikes first the
chilling note of science, demanding a man “above the middle height, chin
shaven, with gray moustache,” etc., which might mean Mr. Balfour or Sir
Redvers Buller. It does not seize the first fact of impression, as that
a man is obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or a
nigger or an albino or a prize-fighter or an imbecile or an American.
These are the realities by which the people really recognise each other.
They are almost always left out of the inquiry.
THE SULTAN
There is one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and Imperial
cultures. That is, that in most human things if you spread your butter
far you spread it thin. But there is an odder fact yet: rooted in
something dark and irrational in human nature. That is, that when you
find your butter thin, you begin to spread it. And it is just when you
find your ideas wearing thin in your own mind that you begin to spread
them among your fellow-creatures. It is a paradox; but not my paradox.
There are numerous cases in history; but I think the strongest case is
this. That we have Imperialism in all our clubs at the very time when we
have Orientalism in all our drawing-rooms.
I mean that the colonial ideal of such men as Cecil Rhodes did not arise
out of any fresh creative idea of the Western genius, it was a fad,
and like most fads an imitation. For what was wrong with Rhodes was not
that, like Cromwell or Hildebrand, he made huge mistakes, nor even that
he committed great crimes. It was that he committed these crimes and
errors in order to spread certain ideas. And when one asked for the
ideas they could not be found. Cromwell stood for Calvinism, Hildebrand
for Catholicism: but Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the
world. He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the
principles that he hadn't got. What he called his ideals were the dregs
of a Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous.
That the fittest must survive, and that any one like himself must be the
fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could
not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which
he lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic old
bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverently
quoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of his
time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill
somewhere in South Africa “his church.” It was not his fault, I mean,
that he could not see that a church all to oneself is not a church at
all. It is a madman's cell. It was not his fault that he “figured out
that God meant as much of the planet to be Anglo-Saxon as possible.”
Many evolutionists much wiser had “figured out” things even more
babyish. He was an honest and humble recipient of the plodding popular
science of his time; he spread no ideas that any cockney clerk in
Streatham could not have spread for him. But it was exactly because he
had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and
ruined republics to spread them.
But the case is even stronger and stranger. Fashionable Imperialism not
only has no ideas of its own to extend; but such ideas as it has are
actually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks to
extend them. The Crusading kings and knights might be represented
as seeking to spread Western ideas in the East. But all that our
Imperialist aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in the
East. For that very governing class which urges Occidental Imperialism
has been deeply discoloured with Oriental mysticism and Cosmology.
The same society lady who expects the Hindoos to accept her view of
politics has herself accepted their view of religion. She wants first
to steal their earth, and then to share their heaven. The same Imperial
cynic who wishes the Turks to submit to English science has himself
submitted to Turkish philosophy, to a wholly Turkish view of despotism
and destiny.
There is an obvious and amusing proof of this in a recent life of
Rhodes. The writer admits with proper Imperial gloom the fact that
Africa is still chiefly inhabited by Africans. He suggests Rhodes in
the South confronting savages and Kitchener in the North facing Turks,
Arabs, and Soudanese, and then he quotes this remark of Cecil Rhodes:
“It is inevitable fate that all this should be changed; and I should
like to be the agent of fate.” That was Cecil Rhodes's one small genuine
idea; and it is an Oriental idea.
Here we have evident all the ultimate idiocy of the present Imperial
position. Rhodes and Kitchener are to conquer Moslem bedouins and
barbarians, in order to teach them to believe only in inevitable fate.
We are to wreck provinces and pour blood like Niagara, all in order to
teach a Turk to say “Kismet”; which he has said since his cradle. We
are to deny Christian justice and destroy international equality, all in
order to teach an Arab to believe he is “an agent of fate,” when he has
never believed anything else. If Cecil Rhodes's vision could come true
(which fortunately is increasingly improbable), such countries as Persia
or Arabia would simply be filled with ugly and vulgar fatalists in
billycocks, instead of with graceful and dignified fatalists in turbans.
The best Western idea, the idea of spiritual liberty and danger, of a
doubtful and romantic future in which all things may happen--this
essential Western idea Cecil Rhodes could not spread, because (as he
says himself) he did not believe in it.
It was an Oriental who gave to Queen Victoria the crown of an Empress
in addition to that of a Queen. He did not understand that the title of
King is higher than that of Emperor. For in the East titles are meant
to be vast and wild; to be extravagant poems: the Brother of the Sun and
Moon, the Caliph who lives for ever. But a King of England (at least in
the days of real kings) did not bear a merely poetical title; but rather
a religious one. He belonged to his people and not merely they to him.
He was not merely a conqueror, but a father--yes, even when he was
a bad father. But this sort of solid sanctity always goes with local
affections and limits: and the Cecil Rhodes Imperialism set up not the
King, but the Sultan; with all the typically Eastern ideas of the magic
of money, of luxury without uproar; of prostrate provinces and a chosen
race. Indeed Cecil Rhodes illustrated almost every quality essential to
the Sultan, from the love of diamonds to the scorn of woman.
THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS
The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion
which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic
architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained
in most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic
eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at once
lively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally
rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No
man ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a
cathedral tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India
there is the presence of something stiff and heartless, of something
tortured and silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers
and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of
their colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the
vision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern.
Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens
to dislike it. Or, again, some will say that it is the liberty of the
Middle Ages in the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes the
Gothic more interesting than the Greek. There is more truth in this;
indeed, there is real truth in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals
would have passed the Censor of Plays. We talk of the inimitable
grandeur of the old cathedrals; but indeed it is rather their gaiety
that we do not dare to imitate. We should be rather surprised if a
chorister suddenly began singing “Bill Bailey” in church. Yet that would
be only doing in music what the mediævals did in sculpture. They put
into a Miserere seat the very scenes that we put into a music hall
song: comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and the
hanging out of the washing. But though the gaiety of Gothic is one of
its features, it also is not the secret of its unique effect. We see
a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese sketches. But delightful
as these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper houses, and toddling,
infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of a kind quite
different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some have even been
so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure in medieval
building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is rough,
shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed after the
same fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating bristles,
are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all the
same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and almost
equally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in mediævalism;
and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and simplicity, as
of a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here, again, the uniqueness
is missed. There are Renaissance things (such as the ethereal silvery
drawings of Raphael), there are even pagan things (such as the
Praying Boy) which express as fresh and austere a piety. None of these
explanations explain. And I never saw what was the real point about
Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw it behind a row of
furniture-vans.
I did not know they were furniture-vans; at the first glance and in the
smoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wall
cut off the wheels, and the vans were somewhat of the same colour as the
yellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come across
that interminable Eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all the
more so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in it
like a light-house. I had climbed the sharp, crooked streets up to this
ecclesiastical citadel; just in front of me was a flourishing and richly
coloured kitchen garden; beyond that was the low stone wall; beyond
that the row of vans that looked like houses; and beyond and above that,
straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds, and terrible as
the Tower of Babel, Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight.
As I looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here;
what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not
variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical,
but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man
of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or
an Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had
mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start this
gave to my eye and mind I really fancied that the Cathedral was moving
towards the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding across
the plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered with
the clouds. Then I saw what it was.
The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that
it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting
architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are
stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear
the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty
and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of
imperial elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners
going into battle; the silence was deafening with all the mingled noises
of a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up
its thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from
all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in
the core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his
wings of brass.
And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in
the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight;
the voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of
spears. I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church;
and I knew indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in
either hand the trowel and the sword.
I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had
marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army.
Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of
the desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been
woke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the
tall pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night every
snake or sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner
of the architecture. And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally
in the flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like
torches across dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain of
music and darkness and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln
hill. So for some hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of
the Gothic; then the last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I saw
only a church tower in a quiet English town, round which the English
birds were floating.
THE MAN ON TOP
There is a fact at the root of all realities to-day which cannot be
stated too simply. It is that the powers of this world are now not
trusted simply because they are not trustworthy. This can be quite
clearly seen and said without any reference to our several passions or
partisanships. It does not follow that we think such a distrust a wise
sentiment to express; it does not even follow that we think it a good
sentiment to entertain. But such is the sentiment, simply because such
is the fact. The distinction can be quite easily defined in an example.
I do not think that private workers owe an indefinite loyalty to their
employer. But I do think that patriotic soldiers owe a more or less
indefinite loyalty to their leader in battle. But even if they ought to
trust their captain, the fact remains that they often do not trust him;
and the fact remains that he often is not fit to be trusted.
Most of the employers and many of the Socialists seem to have got a very
muddled ethic about the basis of such loyalty; and perpetually try to
put employers and officers upon the same disciplinary plane. I should
have thought myself that the difference was alphabetical enough. It has
nothing to do with the idealising of war or the materialising of trade;
it is a distinction in the primary purpose. There might be much more
elegance and poetry in a shop under William Morris than in a regiment
under Lord Kitchener. But the difference is not in the persons or the
atmosphere, but in the aim. The British Army does not exist in order
to pay Lord Kitchener. William Morris's shop, however artistic and
philanthropic, did exist to pay William Morris. If it did not pay the
shopkeeper it failed as a shop; but Lord Kitchener does not fail if he
is underpaid, but only if he is defeated. The object of the Army is the
safety of the nation from one particular class of perils; therefore,
since all citizens owe loyalty to the nation, all citizens who are
soldiers owe loyalty to the Army. But nobody has any obligation to make
some particular rich man richer. A man is bound, of course, to consider
the indirect results of his action in a strike; but he is bound to
consider that in a swing, or a giddy-go-round, or a smoking concert;
in his wildest holiday or his most private conversation. But direct
responsibility like that of a soldier he has none. He need not aim
solely and directly at the good of the shop; for the simple reason that
the shop is not aiming solely and directly at the good of the nation.
The shopman is, under decent restraints, let us hope, trying to get what
he can out of the nation; the shop assistant may, under the same decent
restraints, get what he can out of the shopkeeper. All this distinction
is very obvious. At least I should have thought so.
But the primary point which I mean is this. That even if we do take the
military view of mercantile service, even if we do call the rebellious
shop assistant “disloyal”--that leaves exactly where it was the
question of whether he is, in point of fact, in a good or bad shop.
Granted that all Mr. Poole's employees are bound to follow for ever the
cloven pennon of the Perfect Pair of Trousers, it is all the more true
that the pennon may, in point of fact, become imperfect. Granted that
all Barney Barnato's workers ought to have followed him to death or
glory, it is still a Perfectly legitimate question to ask which he was
likely to lead them to. Granted that Dr. Sawyer's boy ought to die for
his master's medicines, we may still hold an inquest to find out if he
died of them. While we forbid the soldier to shoot the general, we may
still wish the general were shot.
The fundamental fact of our time is the failure of the successful man.
Somehow we have so arranged the rules of the game that the winners are
worthless for other purposes; they can secure nothing except the prize.
The very rich are neither aristocrats nor self-made men; they are
accidents--or rather calamities. All revolutionary language is
a generation behind the times in talking of their futility. A
revolutionist would say (with perfect truth) that coal-owners know next
to nothing about coal-mining. But we are past that point. Coal-owners
know next to nothing about coal-owning. They do not develop and defend
the nature of their own monopoly with any consistent and courageous
policy, however wicked, as did the old aristocrats with the monopoly of
land. They have not the virtues nor even the vices of tyrants; they have
only their powers. It is the same with all the powerful of to-day; it is
the same, for instance, with the high-placed and high-paid official. Not
only is the judge not judicial, but the arbiter is not even arbitrary.
The arbiter decides, not by some gust of justice or injustice in his
soul like the old despot dooming men under a tree, but by the permanent
climate of the class to which he happens to belong. The ancient wig of
the judge is often indistinguishable from the old wig of the flunkey.
To judge about success or failure one must see things very simply; one
must see them in masses, as the artist, half closing his eyes against
details, sees light and shade. That is the only way in which a just
judgment can be formed as to whether any departure or development, such
as Islam or the American Republic, has been a benefit upon the whole.
Seen close, such great erections always abound in ingenious detail and
impressive solidity; it is only by seeing them afar off that one can
tell if the Tower leans.
Now if we thus take in the whole tilt or posture of our modern state,
we shall simply see this fact: that those classes who have on the whole
governed, have on the whole failed. If you go to a factory you will
see some very wonderful wheels going round; you will be told that the
employer often comes there early in the morning; that he has great
organising power; that if he works over the colossal accumulation of
wealth he also works over its wise distribution. All this may be true of
many employers, and it is practically said of all.
But if we shade our eyes from all this dazzle of detail; if we simply
ask what has been the main feature, the upshot, the final fruit of the
capitalist system, there is no doubt about the answer. The special and
solid result of the reign of the employers has been--unemployment.
Unemployment not only increasing, but becoming at last the very pivot
upon which the whole process turns.
Or, again, if you visit the villages that depend on one of the great
squires, you will hear praises, often just, of the landlord's good sense
or good nature; you will hear of whole systems of pensions or of care
for the sick, like those of a small and separate nation; you will see
much cleanliness, order, and business habits in the offices and accounts
of the estate. But if you ask again what has been the upshot, what has
been the actual result of the reign of landlords, again the answer is
plain. At the end of the reign of landlords men will not live on the
land. The practical effect of having landlords is not having tenants.
The practical effect of having employers is that men are not employed.
The unrest of the populace is therefore more than a murmur against
tyranny; it is against a sort of treason. It is the suspicion that
even at the top of the tree, even in the seats of the mighty, our very
success is unsuccessful.
THE OTHER KIND OF MAN
There are some who are conciliated by Conciliation Boards. There are
some who, when they hear of Royal Commissions, breathe again--or
snore again. There are those who look forward to Compulsory Arbitration
Courts as to the islands of the blest. These men do not understand the
day that they look upon or the sights that their eyes have seen.
The almost sacramental idea of representation, by which the few may
incarnate the many, arose in the Middle Ages, and has done great things
for justice and liberty. It has had its real hours of triumph, as when
the States General met to renew France's youth like the eagle's; or
when all the virtues of the Republic fought and ruled in the figure of
Washington. It is not having one of its hours of triumph now. The
real democratic unrest at this moment is not an extension of the
representative process, but rather a revolt against it. It is no good
giving those now in revolt more boards and committees and compulsory
regulations. It is against these very things that they are revolting.
Men are not only rising against their oppressors, but against their
representatives or, as they would say, their misrepresentatives.
The inner and actual spirit of workaday England is coming out not in
applause, but in anger, as a god who should come out of his tabernacle
to rebuke and confound his priests.
There is a certain kind of man whom we see many times in a day, but whom
we do not, in general, bother very much about. He is the kind of man of
whom his wife says that a better husband when he's sober you couldn't
have. She sometimes adds that he never is sober; but this is in anger
and exaggeration. Really he drinks much less and works much more than
the modern legend supposes. But it is quite true that he has not the
horror of bodily outbreak, natural to the classes that contain ladies;
and it is quite true that he never has that alert and inventive sort
of industry natural to the classes from which men can climb into great
wealth. He has grown, partly by necessity, but partly also by temper,
accustomed to have dirty clothes and dirty hands normally and without
discomfort. He regards cleanliness as a kind of separate and special
costume; to be put on for great festivals. He has several really curious
characteristics, which would attract the eyes of sociologists, if they
had any eyes. For instance, his vocabulary is coarse and abusive, in
marked contrast to his actual spirit, which is generally patient and
civil. He has an odd way of using certain words of really horrible
meaning, but using them quite innocently and without the most distant
taint of the evils to which they allude. He is rather sentimental; and,
like most sentimental people, not devoid of snobbishness. At the
same time, he believes the ordinary manly commonplaces of freedom and
fraternity as he believes most of the decent traditions of Christian
men: he finds it very difficult to act according to them, but this
difficulty is not confined to him. He has a strong and individual sense
of humour, and not much power of corporate or militant action. He is not
a Socialist. Finally, he bears no more resemblance to a Labour Member
than he does to a City Alderman or a Die-Hard Duke. This is the Common
Labourer of England; and it is he who is on the march at last.