HERBERT SPENCER
I remember hearing a Nonconformist divine of the Nineties denounce the
young man who, instead of taking a class, spent his Sunday afternoon
“reading Herbert Spencer.”
It struck me at the time that the reverend gentleman was fighting an
unusually extinct Satan. For even in the Nineties the number of young men
who desecrated the Sabbath in this particular fashion was very small.
Herbert Spencer had reached the stage of being much quoted and little
read. Indeed, the reverence in which he was held had a strong resemblance
to that which men pay to the departing or the departed. Lord Morley has
quoted a competent critic who warned him, a day or two before the last
volume of Spencer’s work was published, that the system expounded by him
was, if not already dead, at least on the eve of death.
But if that were the case in England, it was by no means so in a country
in which Herbert Spencer had shown from time to time considerable
interest. The new agnostic Empire of Japan had taken most kindly to the
Spencerian philosophy, partly because it was exceedingly prosaic and
partly because it put forward a rather arrogant pretension to finality.
The Japanese is intensely matter-of-fact, which is by no means the same
thing as being practical, and is often the reverse of being practical;
thus a Japanese engineer, in giving an estimate for a factory or a
railway, will often state the cost to a fraction of a farthing—and in
the end prove inaccurate by hundreds of thousands of pounds. This trait
is in no way connected with stupidity: it is part of the character of
a people wholly in love with formality, and dominated by a tyrannical
passion for neatness of arrangement. The Japanese loves to pack his
ideas, and dovetail them with one another, with the same precision with
which he makes two dozen lacquer boxes fit into one, or constructs a
house to hold exactly eight hundred and twenty floor-mats, each of just
the same size, without an inch to spare.
What enchanted the Japanese was Herbert Spencer’s solemn way of assuming
that the heavens and the earth, and all that in them is, all space, all
time, all life, and all humanity could be measured and reckoned up to
a millimetre or a half-centime by his particular philosophical abacus.
During the Nineties the Herbert Spencer school was extraordinarily potent
in Japan. At the head of it was that remarkable man, Professor Fukuzawa,
who, more than any other, was responsible for supplying the moral and
philosophical basis of the new Japanese civilisation. Occasionally the
English master favoured his Oriental disciples with an encyclical,
applauding them for their skill in keeping the masterful European at
bay, and giving them hints as to how best they could realise a perfect
morality unalloyed with the smallest taint of the superstition which
still disgraced (and was almost necessary to) the West. At one time
Herbert Spencer had apparently great hopes that Japan might realise his
ideal of the State in which men are guided wholly by reason—a State
untainted with imperialism, militarism, aristocratic prejudice, or
ecclesiastical faddism.
[Illustration: HERBERT SPENCER.]
Japan’s subsequent essays in self-revelation are a sufficient commentary
on these facts. In one sense Japan may still be called a Spencerian
country; unread here, the philosopher is still conned by hundreds of
thousands of eager students in the Eastern Empire; he has been expanded
and adopted by a whole succession of native pedants. Japan still admires
the synthetic philosophy, but remains aristocratic, bureaucratic,
imperialistic, and militarist. Most truly she does not copy the West, but
makes what she borrows her own. Herbert Spencer, who was really not far
from an anarchist, has been converted into one of the chief buttresses of
the State which is the nearest approach extant to the Prussianised German
Empire.
It must have been something of a shock, for those Japanese who had
grown up in the Spencerian dogma, to meet Herbert Spencer in the flesh.
Baron Kikuchi has recorded an impression of Spencer going on a railway
journey in the Nineties. For such an expedition great preparations were
necessary. A hammock was slung diagonally across a saloon carriage; into
this the philosopher was hoisted just before the train started, and from
its depths he was laboriously recovered at the journey’s end. All this
ritual Baron Kikuchi witnessed at Paddington. “What,” he says, “surprised
the onlooker after seeing the hammock slung and the cushions carefully
packed into it was to see a fresh-complexioned gentleman proceed from a
waiting-room where he had been reclining in an invalid chair, walk nimbly
across the platform, and then be hoisted into the hammock.”
There was at every stage of Spencer’s life this singular contrast between
the self-sufficiency of his speculative habit and his mournful physical
dependence. He lived till his eighty-third year; he was not cursed with
a specially feeble constitution; but he coddled himself into a state
of body which is, to a very considerable extent, an explanation of his
state of mind. The sedentary thinker is prone to two opposite errors.
Like Carlyle, Froude, or Treitschke, he may become an extravagant
admirer of mere strength. Or, perhaps like Mr. Wells, and certainly
like Mr. Galsworthy to-day, he may quite unduly depreciate the value of
the qualities of ordinary mankind. Herbert Spencer’s whole thought was
vitiated by the valetudinarian’s contempt for things in which he could
have little part. He not merely undervalued physical courage; he even
saw in it something ridiculous or indelicate. On the other hand, he
altogether over-appraised the kind of moral courage which reveals itself
in disputatiousness. It was his lot to live in a period when heterodoxy
involved no serious danger or inconvenience, and at the same time earned
for its professor the reputation of intellectual daring and distinction.
Thus he enjoyed most of the luxuries with few of the pangs of martyrdom;
he felt all the thrills of conflict without running any of the risks;
in his kind of warfare the worst that could happen was a hurt to his
feelings, and against that he was protected by a vanity of triple proof.
But thought that involves the thinker in no kind of responsibility tends
to be irresponsible; and though Spencer boasted that he “developed his
ideas rationally”—so that he did not get wrinkled like inferior men “who
think from the outside”—few men were in truth more under the dominion
of prejudice; nearly everything he wrote on matters of human concern
was influenced by the fact that he was excessively vain, timid, and
self-indulgent.
“It was one of my misfortunes,” he wrote in his autobiography, “to have
no brothers, and a still greater misfortune to have no sisters.” Brothers
and sisters are blessings—or otherwise—that the gods give or deny us.
But most men can get a wife if they really want one. Spencer’s lack of
a wife was probably a greater handicap than the absence of brothers and
sisters. For whatever arguments there may be in favour of a celibate
priesthood, the celibate social philosopher most obviously suffers from
a grave disadvantage; he lacks both the knowledge and the discipline
that prevent men of thought becoming mere pedants and theorists. No doubt
a wife would not have helped Spencer to write more profoundly about the
limits of the unknowable. But she and hers would have given him a far
juster impression of a large slice of the knowable. Perpetually lecturing
married, child-rearing, householding, and taxpaying men, Spencer passed
his own life as a fussy bachelor in a succession of boarding-houses, and
can hardly have paid income-tax during a great part of it. We find him as
early as the middle of the century in a “fairly lively boarding-house”
in St. John’s Wood, Huxley having warned him that he must not live a
solitary life. At the beginning of the Nineties he made almost a home in
a quiet street in the neighbourhood of Regent’s Park; but towards the end
of the period (and of his life) he found that gardens and trees were poor
company, and, longing for the breadth and openness of the sea, removed
to Brighton. Wherever he lived, he was something of a tyrant, and very
much of a crank. In his fits of depression he insisted on being carried
upstairs and down in an invalid chair, and seemed never to realise that
his very considerable weight was an unfair burden to a man-servant and
a maid. When he was (or thought himself) ill, his bell was perpetually
ringing. “Few men,” writes (very acutely) one of the ladies who kept
house for him in his seventies, “are so thoughtful and considerate as he
was, or so oblivious to the trouble and inconvenience they cause.”
If there was “never yet philosopher who could endure the toothache
patiently,” there have been many in all times above the smaller miseries
which involve no actual torture. Herbert Spencer was none of these. It
is at once painful and amusing to contrast the tone of his philosophical
dissertations with that of his lamentations over some discomfort
which a normal man would dismiss with an energetic monosyllable. The
mind revealed in the printed page as disdainfully careless of any
consideration but truth, which could face without a shudder the dread
emptiness of eternity as Spencer imagined it, was in private occupied
with all kinds of old-maidish whims. His bed “had to be made with a
hard bolster beneath the mattress, raising a hump for the small of
his back, while the clothes had a pleat down the centre, so that they
never strained but fell in folds around him.” He devoted an enormous
amount of thought to his ear-stoppers; at that time he could not live
out of London, and yet he could not bear the noise of London; so that
he “corked” himself, after the manner of Miss Betsy Trotwood, whether
at the club or at his lodgings. He liked whiting for breakfast, and
disliked haddock, and if haddock were served he was full of complaints
about the “gross defects of integration, co-ordination, or whatever
else the attendant molecular shortcoming might be.” “Moral training,”
he once said, “should come into every branch of education, even that of
cookery.” On a steamer he once created quite a scene because Stilton was
served when he had ordered Cheddar. “Oh, the hardness of heart of these
inveterate men! Oh, the accursed cruelty of their inhuman persecutions!”
exclaimed Mr. Stiggins when informed that he could not have the “wanity”
called pineapple rum with three lumps of sugar to the tumbler. The
great Victorian philosopher was scarcely less eloquent over minute
inconveniences and deprivations.
The Athenæum Club had a large part in his life at this time. Elected at
the age of forty-seven, he served for about seven years on the committee,
but a self-admitted “lack of tact” interfered with his usefulness.
Numberless stories are told of his pettishness when other members
unconsciously offended. He used to drive almost daily from his lodgings
to the Club, but would often stop the cab in the middle of Regent Street
or some equally busy thoroughfare in order to feel his pulse. If it
was regular he went on; if not he gave the order to return home. These
habits of invalidism dated very far back. From the age of thirty, when
he had some sort of nervous breakdown, he was continually engaged in
self-analysis. There appeared to be really nothing very much the matter
with him. “Appetite and digestion,” he himself says, “were both good, and
my bodily strength seemingly not less than it had been.” But he slept
badly: “Ordinarily my nights had from a dozen to a score wakings. For
twenty-five years I never experienced drowsiness.” Possibly if he had
acted a little more on instinct, and a little less on reason, things
would have settled themselves; other people have managed better with
worse handicaps. But he so carefully avoided one thing because he thought
it did him harm, and so sedulously cultivated another because he thought
it did him good, that for him the mere act of living was a business in
itself. Thus he found racquets “conducive to mental calm,” and so played
a game between the intervals of dictation; he dictated because he found
his head would better bear that strain than writing. Sometimes he sculled
in the Serpentine in order to soothe himself into tranquillity; for some
time he took up vegetarianism, thinking it would be beneficial, but found
that he had to rewrite what he had written during the time he was a
vegetarian, because it was so “wanting in vigour.” With the same aim in
view he took up billiards, fished, played cards, and sometimes occupied
himself with a little shopping. We have a glimpse of him seeking a bronze
for his sitting-room, but unsuccessfully, since the last available models
were all French, and “French art, when not frivolous, is obscene.”
His æsthetic instincts were indeed singular; his favourite colour was
“impure purple,” and it is believed that when the blue flowers in his
dining-room carpet faded, he employed a charwoman to stain them with red
ink!
Something of his hypochondriac and introspective disposition was no
doubt hereditary. Spencer describes his forebears as late to contract
marriage, and much given to forecasting—everywhere their record shows “a
contemplation of remote results rather than immediate results, joined
with an insistence of the first as compared with that of the last.”
Thinking, possibly, that this very Spencerian jargon needed translation
into the vernacular, he summarises the whole family character as prone
to “dwell too much upon possible forthcoming events.” Spencer’s father
and grandfather were both schoolmasters, who had never done any kind
of manual work, and he derived from them a hand “smaller than the
average woman’s.” The father, a Wesleyan, who afterwards joined the
Quakers, bequeathed to him a “repugnance to priestly rule and priestly
ceremonies,” and probably something of his disposition to question all
authority. The elder Spencer was, indeed, a curious combination of the
ascetic and the latitudinarian; himself piously self-disciplined, he
disliked applying any sort of coercion to others. Thus novel-reading was
not “positively forbidden” to Herbert, but “there were impediments,”
and he knew nothing in childhood of the stories with which children
commonly become familiar. How much he would have gained or lost by an
occasional thrashing balanced by _Gulliver_ and the _Arabian Nights_ is a
question for curious speculation. In the absence of the thrashing young
Spencer—it is himself who speaks—was guilty of “chronic disobedience,”
and developed his “most marked moral trait—a disregard of authority.” His
uncle, a clergyman, to whom he was sent at the age of thirteen, describes
him as having “no fear of the Lord nor fear of any law or authority.”
On the former point the uncle was an excellent professional judge; on
the latter, the fact that Herbert promptly ran away from the Vicarage,
walking home (a distance of 120 miles) in three days, is sufficiently
indicative. Under the tuition of this orthodox disciplinarian Spencer
acquired some knowledge of mathematics, a little Latin, less Greek, and
scarcely anything besides.
His first idea of getting a living was teaching; but his uncle obtained
him an opening in civil engineering, and he started work on the London
and Birmingham railway. But, as ever, he was much more inclined to teach
other people their business than to learn his own; he objected, also, to
over-work; and it “never entered into his thoughts to ingratiate himself
with those above him.” He was, in fact, quite unfit to be “integrated”—to
use his own favourite expression—in any corporate scheme: too
self-centred, too disputatious, too thoughtful of his own small wants and
comforts. In politics it was the same; he first mixed himself up with the
Chartists, but soon found it necessary to unmix, as the Chartists were
“too fanatical to work with,” and finally decided, no doubt wisely, for
the lonely liberty of letters. It was only by following his trade as an
engineer, however, that he could keep going until, in his twenty-eighth
year, a position on the _Economist_, worth a hundred guineas a year,
enabled him to begin serious work on his _Social Statics_. Like all
his books, this involved him in some first loss; and but for two small
legacies and the little property his father left, he would have been
unable to carry on. He could, of course, have earned money in the way so
many men do—by hack work. But he had no idea of “getting on,” not that
he had any contempt for money, or disdain for the things money buys, but
it was “not worth the bother”; work as work he always disliked. He was
always warning his friends against over-work, and his protests against
bearing any part of the curse of Adam were often nothing but unmanly.
“On the whole,” he wrote to a friend at thirty-one, “I am quite decided
not to be a drudge, and as I see no probability of being able to marry
without being a drudge, why, I have pretty well given up the idea.”
One advantage of not being a drudge was that he could choose his company,
and even “glare” at Carlyle in disapproval of the “absurd dogmas” (so
imperfectly “co-ordinated”) of that sage; another that he could find
leisure to sing part-songs with George Eliot; another that he could
coddle himself to his heart’s content. But such very limited independence
is a little irksome, and now and again he got restive over limited means,
and even took abortive steps to get some Government employment which (at
the public expense) would leave him ample time for his private work.
He was fifty before “adverse circumstances” had ceased to worry him,
and by this time he had advanced far in invalidism. In the Nineties his
work was for all practical purposes over. He had achieved a singular
position. A great legend with the public, he was something of a small
jest with the rather narrow circle of his familiar acquaintance. It was
possible for people who knew only his name and his writings to yield for
his work the admiration it really deserved, not so much for the success
of the achievement as for the splendid audacity (and even impudence) of
the design. The young man who really read him on “Sunday afternoons”
might picture the great sceptic as peering with stern and steadfast
eyes into reality, unafraid of all save intellectual dishonesty. The
enthusiast for social justice might rejoice to see him haling to the
bar of eternal reason (not far from the leader page of _The Times_)
this or that temporary political offender against the laws of correct
“integration” and “co-ordination.” The remote revolutionary struggling
more or less rightly to be free might welcome his as the authentic
voice of intellectual England. But those who knew him mingled a smile
with their reverence. They might recognise his single-mindedness and
his uncompromising “honesty in ideas.” They might value him as a “great
thinker,” while possibly deploring that he was also a crank of the most
voluminous and pertinacious kind. But whether they admired wholly or
with reservations, they could hardly avoid feeling a “very tragical
mirth” over the contrast between the philosophy and the philosopher. The
personality of the preacher, of course, does not affect the truth of
the gospel, but it cannot but affect men’s reception of the gospel; and
it was not easy for those who knew Herbert Spencer intimately, and were
aware how a fast-trotting cab-horse would disorder his pulse for a week,
to take quite seriously all his contributions to the intellectual output
of his time.
As to the philosophy itself, three brief sentences from contemporaries
have a certain justice. “To Spencer,” said Huxley, “tragedy is
represented by a deduction spoiled by a fact.” “Spencer,” said Professor
Sidgwick, “suffered from the fault of fatuous self-confidence.” “You have
such a passion for generalising,” said George Eliot, “you even fish with
a generalisation.”