atmosphere, which differs in “chemical content” and in extension with
each individual. Some of these idola have so uniformly taken possession
of men’s minds in a particular age that they are as much a part of the
environment a baby is born into as the furniture of his house. The
sociologists who follow Émile Durkheim have called a certain part of
these idola collective representations but they are wrong, I believe,
when they limit these “representations” to savage or ignorant groups
for they are an important part of every civilized person’s luggage.
Parallel with The Story of Mankind and with The Story of Utopias, which
I have just told, it would be amusing to write The Story of Mankind’s
Myths. This work, however, would require the scholarship and industry
of another Leibniz, and all that I wish to do here is to put together
the chief social myths that have played a part in Western Europe and
America during the modern period, to contrast these idola with the
utopias of the past and the partial remedies for the present, and to
suggest the bearing of all this upon any new departures we may be ready
to make.
In selecting these idola--The Country House, Coketown, the
Megalopolis--I have been forced to gauge their strength and test their
quality very largely by their actual results in the workaday world, and
it is a little hard to purify them from the various institutions, old
and new, in which they are mixt. Yet with all this taint of actuality,
these idola are scarcely as credible as the Republic and it will help
matters a little to realize that we are still within the province of
utopia, and may exercise all the utopian privileges.
2
To understand the utopia of the Country House we must jump back a few
centuries in history.
Anyone who has ranged through the European castles that were built
before the fourteenth century will realize that they were no more
built for comfort than is a modern battleship. They were essentially
garrisons of armed men whose main occupation was theft, violence,
and murder; and every feature of their environment reflected the
necessities of their life. These castles would be found beetling a
cliff or a steep hill; their walls and their buttresses would be made
of huge, rough hewn stones; their living arrangements would resemble
those of a barracks with an almost complete lack of what we now regard
as the normal decencies and privacies, except possibly for the lord and
his lady; and the life of these feudal bands was necessarily a crude
and limited one.
Up to the fourteenth century in Western Europe the little fortified
town, or the unfortified town that lay beneath the protection of a
garrison on a hill, was the only other social unit that competed with
the even more limited horizons of the peasant’s village, or with the
spacious claims for the Here and the Hereafter which were put forward
by the Roman Church. To dream of huge metropolises and farflung armies
and food brought from the ends of the earth would have been wilder in
those days than anything More pictured in his Utopia.
During the fifteenth century in England, and in other parts of Europe
the same thing seems to have happened sooner or later, this life of
agriculture and warfare and petty trade was upset: the feudal power
of the reigning nobles was concentrated in the hands of a supreme
lord, the King; and the King and his archives and his court settled in
the National Capital, instead of moving about from place to place in
the troubled realm. The territories of the feudal lords ceased to be
dispersed; their possessions were confined more and more within what
were called national boundaries; and instead of remaining in their
castles the great lords gave up their crude, barbaric ways, and went up
to the capital to be civilized. In the course of time money took the
place of direct tribute; instead of receiving wheat and eggs and labor,
the lord came into possession of a rent which could be figured in pence
and pounds; a rent which could be transferred to the new trading cities
for the goods which the rest of the world had for sale. There is a
fascinating picture of this change in W. J. Ashley’s Economic History;
and the old life itself is outlined, with a wealth of significant
detail, in J. S. Fletcher’s Memorials of a Yorkshire Parish.
At the same time that this change was taking place in the physical
life of Western Europe, a corresponding change was taking place in the
domain of culture. Digging about the ruins of Rome and other cities,
the men of the late Middle Age discovered the remains of a great and
opulent civilization; and exploring the manuscripts and printed books
which were getting into general circulation, they found themselves face
to face with strange conceptions of life, with habits of refinement,
ease, and sensuous luxury which the hard life of the camp and the
castle had never really permitted. There followed a reaction against
their old life which was little less than a revulsion; and in that
reaction two great institutions fell out of fashion. Men ceased to
build castles to protect themselves against physical dangers; and they
left off entering monasteries in order to fortify their souls for the
Hereafter. Both the spiritual and the temporal life began to shift to
a new institution, the Country House. The idolum of the Country House
drew together and coalesced; and as a familiar symbol of this change
the colleges at Oxford which date from the Renascence can scarcely
be distinguished in architectural detail from the palaces which the
aristocracy were building in the same period; while our banks and our
political edifices to this day bear almost universally the stamp of
that Roman and Grecian litter which men discovered on the outskirts of
the mediæval city.
3
We do not know the Country House until we realize, to begin with,
what its physical characteristics are like. There are a great many
descriptions which the reader may consult if he does not happen to live
in the neighborhood of a great Country House: but perhaps instead of
examining the contemporary Country House it will be well to go back
to its beginnings, and see how it was pictured in all its encrusted
splendor at the first movement of the Renascence--in the setting which
François Rabelais, in one of the few downright serious passages in his
great work, Gargantua, sought to provide for the good life.
Gargantua purposes to build a new Abbey which he calls the Abbey of
Theleme. This Abbey is to be in every respect what the mediæval Abbey
was not. Hence to begin with, the Abbey, unlike the castle, is to
lie in the midst of the open country; and unlike the monastery, it
is to have no walls. Every member is to be furnished with a generous
apartment, consisting of a principal room, a withdrawing room, a
handsome closet, a wardrobe, and an oratory; and the house itself
is to contain not merely libraries in every language, but fair and
spacious galleries of paintings. Besides these lodgings there is to
be a tilt-yard, a riding court, a theatre, or public playhouse, and
a natatory or place to swim. By the river, for the Abbey is to be
situated on the Loire, there is to be a Garden of Pleasure, and between
two of the six towers of the hexagon, in which form the building is
arranged, there are courts for tennis and other games. Add to this
orchards full of fruit trees, parks abounding with venison, and an
archery range, fill all the halls and chambers with rich tapestries,
cover all the pavements and floors with green cloth--and the furnishing
of the Abbey of Theleme is complete.
The costumes of the inmates are equally splendid and elaborate. In
order to have the accoutrements of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s toilets
more convenient, there was to be “about the wood of Theleme a row of
houses to the extent of half a league, very neat and cleanly, wherein
dwelt the goldsmiths, lapidaries, jewellers, embroiderers, tailors,
gold drawers, velvet weavers, tapestry makers, and upholsterers....”
They were to be “furnished with matter and stuff from the hands of Lord
Nausiclete, who every year brought them seven ships from the Perlas and
Cannibal Islands, laden with ingots of gold, with raw silk, with pearls
and precious stones.”
The women who are admitted to Theleme must be fair, well-featured, and
of sweet disposition; the men must be comely and well-conditioned.
Everyone is to be admitted freely and allowed to depart freely; and
instead of attempting to practice poverty, chastity, and obedience, the
inmates may be honorably married, may be rich, and may live at liberty.
The liberty of Theleme is indeed complete; it is such a liberty as one
enjoys at a Country House to this day, under the care of a tactful
hostess; for everyone does nothing except follow his own free will and
pleasure, rising out of his bed whenever he thinks good, and eating,
drinking, and laboring when he has a mind to it. In all their rule and
strictest tie of their order, as Rabelais puts it, there is but one
clause to be observed--
“Do what you please.”
4
When we turn our attention from Rabelais’ conceit of an anti-monastic
order, we discover that he has given us an excellent picture of the
Country House, and of what I shall take the liberty of calling Country
House culture. We see pretty much the same outlines in the introduction
to Boccaccio’s Decameron; it is elaborately described in terms of that
most complete of Country Houses, Hampton Court, in Pope’s Rape of the
Lock; it is vividly pictured by Meredith in his portrait of The Egoist;
and it is analyzed in Mr. H. G. Wells’ cruel description of Bladesover
in Tono-Bungay, as well as by Mr. Bernard Shaw in Heartbreak House.
Whether Mr. W. H. Mallock holds the pattern of Country House culture up
to us in The New Republic or Anton Chekhov penetrates its aimlessness
and futility in The Cherry Orchard, The Country House is one of the
recurrent themes of literature.
This renascence idolum of the Country House, then, is powerful and
complete: I know no other pattern which has imposed its standards and
its practices with such complete success upon the greater part of
European civilization. While the Country House was in the beginning an
aristocratic institution, it has penetrated now to every stratum of
society; and although we may not immediately see the connection, it
is responsible, I believe, for the particular go and direction which
the industrial revolution has taken. The Country House standards of
consumption are responsible for our Acquisitive Society.
5
Perhaps the shortest way to suggest the character of Country House
institutions is to say that they are the precise opposite of everything
that Plato looked upon as desirable in a good community.
The Country House is concerned not with the happiness of the whole
community but with the felicity of the governors. The conditions which
underly this limited and partial good life are political power and
economic wealth; and in order for the life to flourish, both of these
must be obtained in almost limitless quantities. The chief principles
that characterize this society are possession and passive enjoyment.
Now, in the Country House possession is based upon privilege and not
upon work. The title to land which was historically obtained for the
most part through force and fraud is the economic foundation of the
Country House existence. In order to keep the artisans and laborers
who surround the Country House at their work, it is necessary to keep
them from having access to the land on their own account, provision
always being made that the usufruct of the land shall go to the owner
and not to the worker. This emphasis upon passive ownership points
to the fact that in the Country House there is no active communion
between the people and their environment. Such activities as remain
in the Country House--the pursuit of game, for instance--rest upon
imitating in play activities which once had a vital use or prepared
for some vital function, as a child’s playing with a doll is a
preparation for motherhood. The Country House ideal is that of a
completely functionless existence; or at best, an existence in which
all the functions that properly belong to a civilized man shall be
carried on by functionaries. Since this ideal cannot be realized in the
actual world, for the reason that it is completely at odds with man’s
biological inheritance, it is necessary in the Country House utopia to
fill in by play and sport an otherwise desirable vacuity.
In the Country House literature and the fine arts undoubtedly
flourish: but they flourish as the objects of appreciation rather
than as the active, creative elements in the community’s life; they
flourish particularly in the fashion that Plato looked upon as a
corrupting influence in the community. In the arts, a gourmandizing
habit of mind--the habit of receiving things and being played upon
by them--prevails; so that instead of the ability to share creative
ecstasy, the chief canon of judgment is “taste,” a certain capacity to
discriminate among sensory stimuli, a capacity which is essentially
just as hospitable to a decomposing cheese as to the very staff of
life. The effect of this gourmandism in the arts can be detected
in every element of the Country House from cellar to roof; for the
result has been to emphasize the collection of good things rather than
their creation, and there is an aspect in which the Country House is
little better than a robber’s hoard or a hunter’s cache--a miniature
anticipation of the modern museums of natural history and art.
Observe the architecture of our Country House. If it has been built in
England during the last three hundred years, the style is probably that
bastard Greek or Roman which we call Renascence architecture; if the
Country House was built in America during the last thirty years, it is
as likely as not a Tudor residence with traces of castle fortification
left here and there on the façade. On the walls there will be plenty
of paintings; indeed a whole gallery may be devoted to them. In all
probability, however, the paintings have been created in other times by
men long since dead, and in other countries: there may be a portrait
by Rembrandt, a Persian miniature, a print by Hokusai. Some very fine
element in the structure, a fireplace or a bit of panelling, may have
been removed piece by piece from the original Country House in England,
Italy, or France; even as many features of the original Country House
were quarried, perhaps, from some mediæval abbey. The very china
that we use upon our tables nowadays is a Country House importation
which took the place of pewter and earthenware; and wall paper is
another importation. From feature to feature everything is derivative;
everything, in the last analysis, has either been stolen or purchased
from the original makers; and what has not been stolen or purchased has
been basely copied.
The insatiability of the Country House to possess art is only equalled
by its inability to create it. In the Country House, the arts are not
married to the community, but are kept for its pleasure.
Let there be no confusion as to either the facts or the ideal we are
examining. There is a vast difference between that fine mingling of
traditions which is the very breath of the arts, as the lover of
classic Greek statuary knows, and the rapacious imperialistic habit of
looting the physical objects of art which has been the essence of the
Country House method in modern times, even as it seems to have been
a couple of thousand years ago in the Roman villa. A genuine culture
will borrow steadily from other cultures; but it will go to them as
the bee goes to the flower for pollen, and not as the beekeeper goes
to the hive for honey. There is a creative borrowing and a possessive
borrowing; and the Country House has in the main limited itself to
possessive borrowing. The Country House ideal, in fact, is limitless
possession: so the great Country House masters have five or six houses,
perhaps, in their name, although they need but a single one to cover
their heads.
Now the Country House idolum involves a dissociation between the
Country House and the community in which it is placed. If you will
take the trouble to examine mediæval conditions, you will find that
differences of rank and wealth did not make a very great difference
between the life of the lord in his castle, and his retainers: if the
common man could not claim to be as good as his lord, it is plain that
the lord shared most of the common man’s disabilities, and was, for all
the exaggerations of chivalry, just as ignorant, just as illiterate,
just as coarse. In the cities, too, the lowest workman in the guild
shared the institutions of his masters: the churches, the guild
pageants, and the morality plays were all part and parcel of the same
culture.
The Country House changed this condition. Culture came to mean not a
participation in the creative activities of one’s own community, but
the acquisition of the products of other communities; and it scarcely
matters much whether these acquisitions were within the spiritual or
the material domain. There had of course been the beginnings of such
a split in mediæval literature, with its vulgar Rabelaisian tales and
its refined romances of the court; but with the integration of the
Country House idolum, this divorcement was accentuated in every other
activity of the community. One of the results of this split was that
popular institutions were deprived of their contacts with the general
world of culture, and languished away; or they were transformed, as
the public schools of England were transformed into restricted upper
class institutions. Far more important than this, perhaps, was the fact
that each separate Country House was forced to obtain for its limited
circle all the elements that were necessary to the good life in a whole
community such as Plato described. We shall deal with the effects of
this presently.
6
Let us admit what is valid in the utopia of the Country House.
Enjoyment is a necessary element in achievement, and by its regard for
the decent graces of life, for such things as an ease in manners and
a fine flow of conversation and the clash of wits and a sensitiveness
to beautiful things, the Country House was by all odds a humanizing
influence. In so far as the Country House fostered a belief in
contemplation and a desire for the arts apart from any uses that might
be made of them by way of civic advertisement; in so far as it urged
that all our pragmatic activities must be realized in things that are
worth having or doing for themselves, the Country House was right,
eminently right. It was no snobbery on the part of Russian soviet
officialism when it opened up some of its Country Houses as rest
houses for the peasants and workers, and then insisted that some of
the airs of the Country House should be acquired there, to replace the
rough usages of the stable, the dungpile, and the field. Ruskin and
Samuel Butler were possibly right when they insisted that the perfect
gentleman was a finer product than the perfect peasant or artisan:
he is a finer product because he is essentially more alive. Even by
its emphasis upon appreciation the Country House did no mean service;
for it called attention to the fact that there were more permanent
standards--standards which were common to the arts of Greece and
China--than those which were looked upon as sufficient in the local
region. In sum, the Country House emphasized a human best, which was
the sum of a dozen partial perfections; and so all that was crude
and inadequate in the old regional cultures was brought to light and
criticized. All these virtues I admit; and they hold just as good today
as they ever did.
The fatal weakness of Country House culture comes out all the plainer
for this admission. The Country House did not see that enjoyment
rested upon achievement, and was indeed inseparable from achievement.
The Country House strove to put achievement in one compartment and
enjoyment in another; with the result that the craftsman who no longer
had the capacity to enjoy the fine arts no longer had the ability to
create them. The effect of an isolated routine of enjoyment is equally
debilitating; for enjoyment, to the masters of the Country House came
too easily, with a mere snap of the fingers, as it were, and the
tendency of connoisseurship was to set novelty above intrinsic worth.
Hence the succession of styles by which Country House decoration has
become a thing for mockery: Chinese in one age, Indian in another,
Persian in the next, with Egyptian, Middle African, and heaven knows
what else destined to follow in due order. There is nothing to settle
to, because there is no task to be done, and no problem to work out;
and as soon as the first taste for a style gets exhausted it is
speedily supplanted by another.
It would be impossible to calculate the extent to which the Country
House has degraded our taste but I have little doubts as to the source
of the degradation. The stylicism which has perverted the arts and
has kept a congruent modern style from developing has been the work
of Country House culture. I remember well the contempt with which a
furniture manufacturer in the Chiltern Hills told me about the way
in which he produced an original Sheraton: his knowledge of sound
furniture design was subordinated to some other person’s knowledge of
“style” and the miscarriage of the man’s innate craftsmanship made him
so mordant on the subject that it seemed as though he had been reading
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. It is the same through
all the arts. A visit to the industrial sections of the Metropolitan
Museum in New York will show how dismally the taste for novelty, which
led the Sheratons and Chippendales to find “classic motifs” in one age,
causes the designers of the present day to seek the motifs of Sheraton
and Chippendale. So much for what happened to the arts when enjoyment
and achievement are separated.
7
The industrial bearing of the Renascence ideal is of capital importance.
During the Middle Age the emphasis in industry was upon the production
of tangible goods; the craft guilds set high standards in design and
workmanship; and the aim of the worker, in most of the trades, was to
get a living from his work, and not simply to get enough money to free
himself from the necessity of working. This is a broad generalization,
I need scarcely emphasize, and there is plenty of evidence of pecuniary
interests under the best of conditions; but it seems fair to say that
the dominant ideals of the older industrial order were industrial
rather than commercial. In the trading ventures that the Country House
promoted under its Drakes and Raleighs, ventures which were needed to
bring them “Ships from the Perlas and Cannibal Islands,” the emphasis
shifted from workmanship to sale; and the notion of working and
gambling to acquire multifarious goods took the place of that earlier
ideal which Henry Adams so sympathetically described in Mt. St. Michel
and Chartres. Thus the good life, as I have said elsewhere, was the
Goods Life: it could be purchased. If the whole community no longer
offered the conditions for this life, one might filch what one wanted
from the general store, and try to monopolize for self or family all
that was needed for a good life in the community.