It is for this reason that the gift of old age is unwished for, and the
prospect of future life without encouragement. It is the modern
conviction that there will be some kind of work in it; and even though
what we shall be set to do may be 'wrought with tumult of acclaim,' we
have had enough of work. What follows, almost as a matter of course, is
that the thought of possible extinction has lost its terrors. Heaven
and its glories may have still their charms for those who are not
wearied out with toil in this life; but the slave draws for himself a
far other picture of home. His is no passionate cry to be admitted into
the eternal city; he murmurs sullenly, 'Let me rest.'
It was a favourite taunt with the sceptics of old—those Early Fathers
of infidelity, who used to occupy themselves so laboriously with
scraping at the rind of the Christian Faith—that until the Cross arose
men were not afraid of Death. But that arrow has lost its barb. The
Fear of Death, even among professing Christians, is now comparatively
rare; I do not mean merely among dying men—in whom those who have had
acquaintance with deathbeds tell us they see it scarcely ever—but with
the quick and hale. Even with very ignorant persons, the idea that
things may be a great deal worse for us hereafter than even at present
is not generally entertained as respects themselves. A clergyman who
was attending a sick man in his parish expressed a hope to the wife
that she took occasion to remind her husband of his spiritual
condition. 'Oh yes, sir,' she replied, 'many and many a time have I
woke him up o' nights, and cried, "John, John, you little know the
torments as is preparing for you."' But the good woman, it seems, was
not disturbed by any such dire imaginings upon her own account.
Higher in the social scale, the apprehension of a Gehenna, or at all
events of such a one as our forefathers almost universally believed in,
is rapidly dying out. The mathematician tells us that even as a
question of numbers, 'about one in ten, my good sir, by the most
favourable computations,' the thing is incredible; the philanthropist
inquires indignantly, 'Is the city Arab then, who grows to be thief and
felon as naturally as a tree puts forth its leaves, to be damned in
both worlds?' and I notice that even the clergy who come my way, and
take their weak glass of negus while the coach changes horses, no
longer insist upon the point, but, at the worst, 'faintly trust the
larger hope.'
Notwithstanding these comparatively cheerful views upon a subject so
important to all passengers on life's highway, the general feeling is,
as I have said, one of profound dissatisfaction; the good old notion
that whatever is is right, is fast disappearing; and in its place there
is a doubt—rarely expressed except among the philosophers, with whom,
as I have said, I have nothing to do—a secret, harassing, and unwelcome
doubt respecting the divine government of the world. It is a question
which the very philosophers are not likely to settle even among
themselves, but it has become very obtrusive and important. Men raise
their eyebrows and shrug their shoulders when it is alluded to,
instead, as of old, of pulverising the audacious questioner on the
spot, or even (as would have happened at a later date) putting him into
Coventry; they have no opinion to offer upon the subject, or at all
events do not wish to talk about it. But it is no longer, be it
observed, 'bad form' in a general way to do so; it is only that the
topic is personally distasteful.
The once famous advocate of analogy threw a bitter seed among mankind
when he suggested, in all innocence, and merely for the sake of his own
argument, that as the innocent suffered for the guilty in this world,
so it might be in the world to come; and it is bearing bitter fruit. To
feel aweary at the Midway Inn is bad enough; but to be journeying to no
home, and perhaps even to some harsher school than we yet wot of, is
indeed a depressing reflection.
Hence it comes, I think, or partly hence, that there is now no fun in
the world. Wit we have, and an abundance of grim humour, which evokes
anything but mirth. Nothing would astonish us in the Midway Inn so much
as a peal of laughter. A great writer (though it must be confessed
scarcely an amusing one), who has recently reached his journey's end,
used to describe his animal spirits depreciatingly, as being at the
best but vegetable spirits. And that is now the way with us all. When
Charles Dickens died, it was confidently stated in a great literary
journal that his loss, so far from affecting 'the gaiety of nations,'
would scarcely be felt at all; the power of rousing tears and laughter
being (I suppose the writer thought) so very common. That prophecy has
been by no means fulfilled. But, what is far worse than there being no
humorous writers amongst us, the faculty of appreciating even the old
ones is dying out. There is no such thing as high spirits anywhere. It
is observable, too, how very much public entertainments have increased
of late—a tacit acknowledgment of dulness at home—while, instead of the
lively, if somewhat boisterous, talk of our fathers, we have
drawing-room dissertations on art, and dandy drivel about blue china.
There is one pleasure only that takes more and more root amongst us,
and never seems to fail, and that is making money. To hear the
passengers at the Midway Inn discourse upon this topic, you would think
they were all commercial travellers. It is most curious how the desire
for pecuniary gain has infected even the idlest, who of course take the
shortest cut to it by way of the race-course. I see young gentlemen,
blond and beardless, telling the darkest secrets to one another,
affecting, one would think, the fate of Europe, but which in reality
relate to the state of the fetlock of the brother to Boanerges. Their
earnestness (which is reserved for this enthralling topic) is quite
appalling. In their elders one has long been accustomed to it, but
these young people should really know better. The interest excited in
society by 'scratchings' has never been equalled since the time of the
Cock Lane ghost. If men would only 'lose their money and look pleasant'
without talking about it, I shouldn't mind; but they _will_ make it a
subject of conversation, as though everyone who liked his glass of wine
should converse upon 'the vintages.' One looks for it in business
people and forgives it; but everyone is now for business.
The reverence that used to belong to Death is now only paid to it in
the case of immensely rich persons, whose wealth is spoken of with
bated breath. 'He died, sir, worth two millions; a very warm man.' If
you happen to say, though with all reasonable probability and even with
Holy Writ to back you, 'He is probably warmer by this time,' you are
looked upon as a Communist. What the man was is nothing, what he made
is everything. It is the gold alone that we now value: the temple that
might have sanctified the gold is of no account. This worship of mere
wealth has, it is true, this advantage over the old adoration of birth,
that something may possibly be got out of it; to cringe and fawn upon
the people that have blue blood is manifestly futile, since the
peculiarity is not communicable, but it is hoped that, by being shaken
up in the same social bag with millionaires, something may be attained
by what is technically called the 'sweating' process. So far as I have
observed, however, the results are small, while the operation is to the
last degree disagreeable.
What is very significant of this new sort of golden age is that a
literature of its own has arisen, though of an anomalous kind. It is
presided over by a sort of male Miss Kilmansegge, who is also a model
of propriety. It is as though the dragon that guarded the apples of
Hesperides should be a dragon of virtue. Under the pretence of
extolling prudence and perseverance, he paints money-making as the
highest good, and calls it thrift; and the popularity of this class of
book is enormous. The heroes are all 'self-made' men who come to town
with that proverbial half-crown which has the faculty of accumulation
that used to be confined to snowballs. Like the daughters of the
horse-leech, their cry is 'Give, give,' only instead of blood they want
money; and I need hardly say they get it from other people's pockets.
Love and friendship are names that have lost their meaning, if they
ever had any, with these gentry. They remind one of the miser of old
who could not hear a large sum of money mentioned without an
acceleration of the action of the heart; and perhaps that is the use of
their hearts, which, otherwise, like that of the spleen in other
people, must be only a subject of vague conjecture. They live abhorred
and die respected; leaving all their heaped-up wealth to some
charitable institution, the secretary of which levants with it
eventually to the United States.
This last catastrophe, however, is not mentioned in these biographies,
the subjects of which are held up as patterns of wisdom and prudence
for the rising generation. I shall have left the Midway Inn, thank
Heaven, for a residence of smaller dimensions, before it has grown up.
Conceive an England inhabited by self-made men!
Has it ever struck you how gloomy is the poetry of the present day?
This is not perhaps of very much consequence, since everybody has a
great deal too much to do to permit them to read it; but how full of
sighs, and groans, and passionate bewailings it is! And also how deuced
difficult! It is almost as inarticulate as an Æolian harp, and quite as
melancholy. There are one or two exceptions, of course, as in the case
of Mr. Calverley and Mr. Locker; but even the latter is careful to
insist upon the fact that, like those who have gone before us, we must
all quit Piccadilly. 'At present,' as dear Charles Lamb writes, 'we
have the advantage of them;' but there is no one to remind us of that
now, nor is it, as I have said, the general opinion that it _is_ an
advantage.
It is this prevailing gloom, I think, which accounts for the enormous
and increasing popularity of fiction. Observe how story-telling creeps
into the very newspapers (along with their professional fibbing); and,
even in the magazines, how it lies down side by side with 'burning
questions,' like the weaned child putting its hand into the
cockatrice's den. For your sake, my good fellow, who write stories
[here my friend glowered at me compassionately], I am glad of it; but
the fact is of melancholy significance. It means that people are glad
to find themselves 'anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,' and (I must
be allowed to add) they are generally gratified, for anything less like
real life than what some novelists portray it is difficult to imagine.
[Here he stared at me so exceedingly hard, that anyone with a less
heavenly temper, or who had no material reasons for putting up with it,
would have taken his remark as personal, and gone away.
Another cause of the absence of good fellowship amongst us (he went on)
is the growth of education. It sticks like a fungus to everybody, and
though, it is fair to say, mostly outside, does a great deal of
mischief. The scholastic interest has become so powerful that nobody
dares speak a word against it; but the fact is, men are educated far
beyond their wits. You can't fill any cup beyond what it will hold, and
the little cups are exceedingly numerous. Boys are now crammed (with
information) like turkeys (but unfortunately not killed at Christmas),
and when they grow up there is absolutely no room in them for a joke.
The prigs that frequent my Midway Inn are as the sands in its
hour-glass, only with no chance, alas! of their running out. The wisdom
of our ancestors limited education, and very wisely, to the three R's;
that is all that is necessary for the great mass of mankind: whereas
the pick of them, with those clamping irons well stuck to their heels,
will win their way to the topmost peaks of knowledge.
At the very best—that is to say when it produces _anything_—what does
the most costly education in this country produce in ordinary minds but
the deplorable habit of classical quotation? If it could teach them to
_think_—but that is a subject, my dear friend, into which you will
scarcly follow me.
[I could have knocked his head off if he had not been so exceptionally
stout and strong, and as it was, I took up my hat to go, when a thought
struck me.]
'Among your valuable remarks upon the ideas entertained by society at
present, you have said nothing, my dear sir, about the ladies.'
'I never speak of anything,' he replied with dignity, 'which I do not
thoroughly understand. Man I do know—down to his boots; but woman'—here
he sighed and hesitated—'no; I don't know nearly so much of her.'