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PLOUGHSHARE AND PRUNING-HOOK
Ten Lectures on Social Subjects
by
LAURENCE HOUSMAN
The Swarthmore Press Ltd.
(formerly trading as Headley Bros. Publishers Ltd.)
72 Oxford Street, London, W1
First Printed September, 1919
PREFACE
These papers, originally given as lectures, make no pretence to the
solution of the social or political problems with which they are
concerned. They indicate rather a certain standpoint or attitude of
mind from which these and like questions may be viewed, one which may
find acceptance with only a few of my readers. Even those who are
friendly may consider it too idealistic; those who are adverse will
employ other and harder terms.
With regard to that standpoint, while not wishing to avert criticism,
I would like to secure understanding; and if a few words of general
application can make that more possible it may be well to offer them
here.
Whether these lectures were primarily intended for the pulpit or
the platform it would be hard to say. Most of them have been given
in both places: and their drawback to some who heard them in the
former was (I have been told) their occasional tendency to make the
congregation laugh. That in itself is no special recommendation; it
takes so much less to make a congregation laugh than an audience.
Between the pulpit and the platform there is bound to be a difference;
even the fact that the preacher is normally immune from interjection
or debate tends to give to his statements a complacency which is not
always intellectually justified. And I remember well that two of these
lectures, after having been accepted in a church with only momentary
breaches of decorum, aroused elsewhere a storm of criticism and rebuke
which taught me, if I did not know it before, that a preacher occupies
a very privileged position, and can turn a church, if he chooses, into
a place of licence which elsewhere will not be accorded him.
But there is one point of difference between the pulpit and the
platform, between the exposition of religion and politics, which I
have never been able to understand. After all, in both cases, you
are dealing with and making your appeal to human nature; you may
be inciting it to virtue, you may be exposing its imperfections
and its faults. Why is it, then, that in the religious appeal
“conversion”--change of heart--stands for almost everything, whilst on
the political platform it is hardly reckoned with? It is so much easier
and safer to tell a congregation that they are “miserable sinners,” and
even to get them (perhaps conventionally) to say it of themselves, than
to tell it, or to extract a like confession from a political audience.
In a church we allow ourselves to be taken to task for “hardness of
heart and contempt of God’s word and commandments”; at a political
meeting it is only our opponents whom we so take to task, while of
ourselves and our party we have nothing but praise. It is on these
lines that a general election is run--revivalist meetings are held
throughout the country to denounce, not our own sins, but the sins of
others. Is it any wonder that it does not produce honest results?
Having said this, I have given the main standpoint of the papers
that follow. I do not believe that we can get home to our political
and social problems without self-accusation going quite as deep as
anything we say of ourselves in church or chapel--or without making
the application very direct and personal. There is no institution
in our midst, religious or secular, which does not stand quite as
much in need of conversion, change of heart, as do the individuals
for whose benefit or disciplinary treatment it is run. Our schools,
prisons, law courts, State institutions, ministries, diplomacies--all
those things on which we most pride ourselves--are just as liable,
perhaps more liable, to hardness of heart and contempt of God’s word
and commandments as we ourselves, for they are all part of us. It
is, indeed, one of our social devices to get rid of our consciences
by making them institutional. There is a certain class of mind which
thinks that if it has established legality it has established a right
over conscience--that if it has established order it has established
virtue. It has very often established quite the contrary--not virtue
but a State-regulation of vice; for if we can turn the hardness of our
hearts into a State-regulation, there we have vice enthroned; and
the callousness of the individual is enlarged and becomes a national
callousness, all the more difficult to get rid of, because it has
become identified with law and authority.
A very good (or bad) example of this was provided by the conduct of
the Bishops in the House of Lords a few years ago, when, to provide
the Government with a short cut out of its difficulties in dealing
with political prisoners (mainly caused by its refusal to treat them
as political prisoners) they allowed the rules of the House to be
suspended for the passing through all its stages in twenty-four hours
of the “Cat and Mouse Act.” Before long its operations horrified
them, and they signed (or some of them did) letters and memorials of
protest to the Government, asking for those operations to be stopped.
But not one of them would make a motion in the House of Lords for
the suspension or repeal of that Act for which, in so special a way,
they had made themselves responsible. By allowing it to become law
they had passed on the responsibility to others; and being thus quit
of it, the last thing probably that occurred to any of them was that
they themselves needed “a change of heart” in order to recover moral
integrity, or even political honesty.
And so, in these pages, law and authority are just as much questioned
as any other of our social features, on the direct assumption that
like produces like, and that a form of society which establishes,
encourages, or condones as “necessary” such defilements of human
nature as militarism, prostitution, sweated labour, slum-dwellings,
vengeful and unreformative punishment--having its heart so hardened as
to tolerate these--is not likely in its institutions and government
departments to have escaped from a reproduction of that attitude of
mind which makes them possible or regards them as a defensible solution
of the social problem.
The war has revealed much to us. It has shown how much society is
willing to afford for things which it considers worth while; and has
thus shown by implication those things which formerly society did not
think worth while--because its heart was not in them. It has had the
heart to spend colossal sums, to conscript millions of young lives to
death in defence of its organisation upon the lines of power against
a rival organisation willing to pay a similar price. It had not the
heart, in the days of peace and prosperity, to spend one-hundredth part
of that sum in organising even those institutions which it entirely
controlled, on the lines of love.
In our own midst, behind our sea-defences, we were still competitive,
jealous, grudging, parsimonious, wasteful, slow to mercy and of great
anger; and the prevailing characteristic of our civil contentions was
that no side would ever admit itself to be in the wrong, or consent
to think that a change of its own heart was necessary. And as the
very crown and apex to that mountain of self-deception, stood the
ministerial bench in Parliament. When blunders had been perpetrated and
became too obvious for concealment, we might occasionally be told that
to make mistakes was human, and that government did not claim immunity
from the operation of that law; but ministers would dodge, and shuffle,
and lie--suppress, or even falsify information to which only they had
access, rather than admit that they had “done wrong,” or open their
eyes to the fact that what they mainly needed was a change of heart.
And as with ministers as a whole, so as a whole with people. Those
elements of our national and international relations which were leading
steadily on to the great conflagration wherein we were all presently
to be involved, were those in which (our pride being implicated) we
stubbornly denied that any change of heart was necessary. The State
would not admit that its exaltation of the Will to Power over the Will
to Love was morally wrong; it would not admit that the alternative
came within the scope of practical politics; such teaching it left
to the advocacy of the Churches; and how half-hearted that advocacy
had become under pressure of the surrounding atmosphere of national
self-sufficiency was revealed when the war came upon us. Christianity
became almost mute; the one form of prayer, special to the occasion,
which the Church could not or would not use was that which alone is
truly Christian--prayer in identical terms both for ourselves and our
enemies. To pray that spiritual strength and moral virtue might be
given equally to us and them was beyond us--though in the granting of
it war would have ceased. We were not content to pray merely that right
should prevail--right, that most difficult of all outcomes to secure
when once, even for a just cause, nations embark on war--we insisted on
praying that we should prevail: and so (praying for things materially
established) not that we should prevail by a clean adherence to the
principles of democracy, but by the instrumentality of a corrupt and
secret diplomacy. And so before long--knowingly or unknowingly--we were
praying for the success of the secret treaties, for the successful
repudiation of the very principles for which we had set out to
fight, for the suppression of Ireland’s right to self-determination,
for the downfall of the Russian Revolution, which was insisting so
inconveniently on a belated return to first principles, and for other
doubtful advantages not at all synonymous with the coming of Christ’s
Kingdom. And we were praying for these things--just as really, though
we did not mention them by name--because our hearts were not set
on praying for the well-being of all nations and all governments
alike. Had we been capable of so praying, it would have meant that a
real change of heart had come to us, and that we were offering that
changed heart to all the world alike for the establishment of the new
International.
But to such change of heart we could not attain--could not even
consent; for it would have implied that there was something morally
wrong in our national institutions, in our government and our whole
social structure, which we would not admit. We would not admit that the
chemic elements of our own national life had conduced to war in common
with the chemic elements of the nation whose flagrant violation of
treaties had given us the immediate materials for a good conscience. We
fattened our hearts for war on the immediate material thus provided us,
ignoring those other materials which lay behind, and which we and all
other nations shared alike--though not necessarily in equal degrees.
And here we have the essential and fundamental difference between the
genuine profession of Christianity and the profession of Cæsarism.
For the follower of Christ to confess that he has done wrong, that he
needs a change of heart, redounds to his honour--he goes down to his
house justified. But when a nation has given itself to Cæsar, its main
idea of “honour” is to refuse to admit it has done wrong, or to accept
punishment; it may be beaten, crushed, but you cannot extract from it
a confession of moral wrong-doing; a sense of sin is the negation not
only of the German State system, but of all. A “proud nation” will not
own that it has been in the wrong, least of all when it embarks on war;
if it did it would go down to its house in dust.
Now that being, as I see it, the moral product of Cæsarism, in all its
degrees and kinds--whether autocratic or democratic Cæsarism--of the
setting up of the Will to Power over the Will to Love--it follows that
the change of heart which I predicate in these pages for the solution
of our social and international problems, is almost a Tolstoian
negation of the principle upon which the modern state system stands. As
such, it will be very unwelcome to many of my readers; but I hope that,
as here set down, I have made my standpoint plain. The ploughshare and
the pruning-hook are not mine to wield; I only point in the direction
where I think they are to be found.
L. H.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Great Possessions 1
Crime and Punishment 26
Christianity a Danger to the State 48
The Salt of the Earth 63
The Rights of Majorities 85
Discreditable Conduct 109
What is Womanly? 135
Use and Ornament 157
Art and Citizenship 189
Conscious and Unconscious Immortality 218
GREAT POSSESSIONS
(1913)
“You never know yourself,” says Thomas Traherne, “till you know more
than your own body. The Image of God was not seated in the features of
your face but in the lineaments of your soul. In the knowledge of your
powers, inclinations, and principles, the knowledge of yourself chiefly
consisteth.... The world is but a little centre in comparison of you
... like a gentleman’s house to one that is travelling, it is a long
time before you come unto it--you pass it in an instant--and you leave
it for ever. The omnipresence and eternity of God are your fellows and
companions. Your understanding comprehends the world like the dust of a
balance, measures Heaven with a span, and esteems a thousand years but
as one day.”
To this statement of man’s comprehensive powers, a further one might
legitimately be added: You shall never know delight, till you delight
in more than your own body.
Man’s body being the crucible wherein such vast things come to be
tested, “Eternal Delights are,” says Traherne, in a further passage,
“its only fit enjoyment.”
His doctrine is remarkable in this, that while he tends to see in
everything a spiritual significance, and almost refuses to find beauty
in externals alone, he insists, nevertheless, that man was sent into
the world to enjoy himself, to stretch out for new acquisitions with
all his faculties, and take to himself great possessions. He regards
even the base and material form of conquest, expressed in endless
covetousness and fierce desire for possession, rather as a lower
type of what man should do and be, than of what he should not. Man’s
faculties were given him so that he might be divinely unsatisfied, ever
seeking more, ever assimilating more--regarding this earth not as a
vale of misery or a source of temptation, but as a very Paradise and
the true gate by which Heaven is to be attained and entered. “It is,
indeed,” he writes, “the beautiful frontispiece of Eternity, the Temple
of God, and the Palace of His Children.”
In this respect Traherne’s teaching is remarkably like the teaching of
William Blake, who regarded the mere outwardness of things as nothing
in comparison with their real inwardness, and yet was insistent that
here and now the spirit of delight and energy and enjoyment was the
true and undefiled way of life.
But this revolt against the monastic asceticism of the middle ages
stands far removed from any implication of sensual indulgence.
“My mind to me a kingdom is,” wrote one of our poets. “The kingdom of
Heaven is within you” gives in more scriptural phrase precisely the
same truth; and for its application to the conduct of life we have
this further scripture: “Lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth
where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and
steal, but lay up for yourselves treasure in Heaven where neither moth
nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal.”
And if it be a true boast that man’s mind is his real and legitimate
kingdom, then he must make that kingdom his Heaven, and within that
kingdom his treasure must be stored. It is there, by the power of
his mind more than by the power of his hands, that he must gather
and hold together his great possessions. We are accustomed to speak
in one single connection (with book-knowledge, namely, and with the
use of words)--of “learning things by heart.” It is only “by heart”
that we can ever really learn anything; only when our heart is in it
do we know and value a thing so as to understand it. The man whose
heart is not in his work is not a complete craftsman; he has not yet
learned the “mystery” of his trade. When men’s hearts were in their
work they called their trades “mysteries,” and did, as a consequence,
more excellently than we do now, when we make rather for the price of a
thing than for the joy of it.
Until we have joy in our labour, all labour is a form of waste--for it
wastes the bodies and souls which are put to it, and is destructive
of the most wonderful and valuable commodity which this planet has yet
produced--human nature. Labour without joy causes it to deteriorate;
and if a man is put to work wherein it is impossible to find joy, then
it were better for the wealth of the nation, as well as for the wealth
of his own individual soul, that he should be free from it.
And if that is impossible then let us not boast ourselves about our
“national wealth” or our great possessions. Nations whose wealth
and industries are built up out of the hard and grinding mechanical
labour of millions are not capable in any true sense of holding
great possessions, for at their very root is an enormous mass of
poverty--impoverished blood, impoverished brain, and impoverished
spirit.
If you would examine into the wealth of this or any other nation, look
not first at its temples or its arts, but into the bodies and minds
and characters--and the faculty for joy--of its men and women. And
if these, in the majority of cases, are below par, then the nation’s
wealth is below par also; its great possessions are overshadowed by the
greater dispossession which stands imposed upon the lives of its people.
The word possession itself has, in our use of it, a double
significance. When we speak of a man “having a possession,” we may mean
two things--either that he possesses, or else that he is possessed. A
man with a possession of jealousy, or hatred, lust or covetousness,
has no real possession or control of those things, but is himself
possessed or controlled by them, and so is rendered not stronger but
weaker--subject to a master other than himself.
Yet the man who is thus possessed is not conscious of any diminution
of his individuality, any reduction of personal power or prowess: he
does not discern from it any closing in of that round horizon to which
first his spirit was heir. For that by which he is possessed fills him
with such a pressure of emotion--its dynamic forces within him are so
strong, that he may actually imagine his personality to be thereby not
diminished but enlarged, and may (by reason of the violence with which
this distemper discharges itself on others) be cheated into the belief
that thus he secures for himself a broader base, raising his life to a
higher level of consciousness, instead of what actually is the truth,
turning it to consumption and waste--not opening his senses to new joys
but shutting them in; sharpening them indeed like teeth, but closing
them together with springs made not for expansion but for contraction,
so that they act like a trap destructive of the very life they would
control. And as with individual men, so with nations.
“Would you know a man,” said the Greek oracle, “give him power.” But
that, though sure as a test of others, is no sure means for enabling a
man to know himself. Power all down the ages has been the arch-deceiver
of mankind. Power which has set itself on great possessions has
brought disinheritance to the human race. We do not know what humanity
might be--how fair, how lovely, and of what good report--that great
beatific vision is still hidden from our eyes--mainly because we
have interpreted power in terms of possession; and, forcing others
to go without, in order that we ourselves may possess, we stand
to-day immeasurably poorer and weaker than we should have been had we
interpreted our power and our possessions differently.
For centuries of time (so long, indeed, as history records anything)
the leading nations of the world have gone out to conquer other nations
and to possess them. And how have they done so?--mainly by depriving
them of their liberty, by reducing their power of initiative, by
undermining and warping their racial characteristics. How much has
not that impoverished the history of the world and the real wealth of
nations? For people living in subservience or subjection, accepting and
not rebelling against it, breed less nobly as a consequence--they fail,
then, to produce great minds or to express themselves greatly in the
arts. Their life-potency is diminished; and we, holding them upon those
terms, are owners of a property which we squander by our very mode of
possessing it.
Quite as much of the art, the literature and the philosophy of the
greatest periods of civilisation has been wiped out and destroyed
beyond recovery by these possessive struggles of the past as has
been hazardously preserved and passed down to us through interludes
of peace; nor have we any cause to think that in the future we shall
be any wiser while our views as to possession show so little change.
And that loss in beautiful production is but the symbol, the outward
and visible sign of a loss immensely more great in flesh and blood
and spirit, which has gone on--not only while wars were waged, but
when (war being ended) dominance over the conquered was imposed as a
condition of peace. Every nation that has made itself materially great
on these terms, has done so on a _débris_ of perished loveliness which
does not reach its full amount in the hour of the victors’ triumph; but
goes on accumulating till that also which caused it is brought to the
dust.
It is many years, for instance, since we conquered India; and in so
far as our dominion has saved it from other conquests and wars of
native State against State, and creed against creed, our rule may
have been beneficial--though I do not think that we ought to take our
own word for it, or indeed anyone’s word except that of the native
communities themselves and a native press, free and unfettered for
the giving or the withholding of its testimonial. But one thing we
assuredly have done: we have gone on steadily destroying the native
arts and “mysteries,” and substituting for them our own baser code of
commercialism and capitalised industry. And in so far as we have done
this we have not possessed ourselves, but have dispossessed ourselves
of the real beauties and values of Indian civilization; and, for the
sake of trade-profit to our merchants and manufacturers, we hold in our
hand a poorer India in consequence, and are the poorer possessors of it.
All that poverty--poverty of invention, poverty of craft--is the
product of a false ideal of possession, false to human nature, because
quite obviously a cause of deterioration to those visible proofs of
man’s well-being--the joyous labour of his hand and brain.
Set against the witness of all that misguidance of the past that
wise and lovely saying of Christ, so unlikely in its first seeming:
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.” At first
it sounds so improbable--so contrary to all we know of man’s long
struggle for existence up to date. And yet, (however much we must
still qualify the possession of the meek upon earth) still more must
we qualify the possession of the overbearing and the proud, when we
realise what true possession should be. A modern writer has described
war as “the great illusion,” and has set himself to show that all
those advantages at which the State aims when it turns to military
operations, become as dust in the balance if compared to the real
cost in treasure which war entails even for those who are nominally
the victors. And war is only one form or aspect of that great strife
for possession which has afflicted every race in its progress from
the cradle to the grave--merely a larger and more apparent version of
the conflict between folly and wisdom which goes on in every human
breast. Possession is the great illusion through which man physically
or intellectually strong seeks to secure power, and succeeds only in
securing weakness--not only for himself but for others.
For you cannot test strength truthfully without relation to its
surroundings. A tower built upon foundations that shift and give way
under its weight is not strong, however formidably it has been reared,
or however closely its windows are grated and barred. Its very bulk
and weight may help to bring about its fall. Similarly any strength of
despotism or government which is reared up and depends for its stay
upon the weakness of others is a mere apparition of power. Here to-day,
it is gone to-morrow when those upon whose subjection it rested have
discovered a strength of their own--or, because of their weakness, have
failed in its support.
True possession can only be had in relation and in proportion to the
self-possession of others; the man who reduces the self-possession of
others never adds to his own; and where self-possession is absent, no
real or strength-giving possession remains possible.
“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his
own soul,” is one of those profound messages of wisdom which have
been obscured by the theological gloss laid upon them. Instead of the
immediate and practical condemnation of here and now, the hypothetical
condemnation to loss in a future life has been substituted, and our
spiritual preceptors have not concentrated upon making clear to us how,
here and now, possession of the whole world (in any material sense)
does actually tend to destroy soul.
The possessive outlook, in its very inception, sets a limit to the
springs of spiritual growth or action, and to that “perfect freedom”
the basis of which is service. But if “service is perfect freedom,”
then “domination is perfect bondage,” as much for those who impose as
for those who suffer it. For the man who domineers over his fellows
receives in his own soul the reflex or complementary part of that evil
effect which he has on others. There is no act done by man to man which
is not sacramental in its operation for good or ill; in all his deeds
to his neighbours he both gives and receives, either for his own help
or hindrance. Whosoever gives a blow receives one; and that blow may
be the heavier that is not returned in kind. He who does unkindness to
others is unkind to his own soul; he who diminishes the self-possession
of others diminishes his own.
Yet possession--in the sense of realising each one for himself the
wealth and enjoyment which life has to offer--is so deep an instinct,
is so knit up with the adventurous and progressive spirit out of which
the higher human consciousness is built--that it is useless to turn
on man and say to him: “Possess nothing--rid yourself of all joys, of
all the delights of the senses and the understanding--so only shall
you attain to the heavenly stature.” That doctrine has been preached
in the past; and the squeals of Manichean hermits in the wilderness,
and of monastic contortionists, denying to their senses the very
ground upon which they stood, has been its echoing chorus all down
the ages. Never were souls more horribly possessed than these fliers
from possession; never were men more defeated in their warfare with
the thing they spurned. Like a tin tied to a dog’s tail the more they
ran from it, the more the flesh afflicted them reminding them of its
neglected claims. The loveliest and wisest of these mediæval sinners
against the life which God had given them was brought by his own
gospel of peace to a death-bed repentance which others did not attain
to. “Brother ass, I have been too hard upon thee,” said St. Francis,
turning with compunction at last to his much-wronged body, the one
thing to which, in mistaken piety, he had denied either consideration
or love. The single greed which ate up and destroyed the life of that
lovely saint was a greed for mortification; and he died very literally
of blood-poisoning, brought about by his own suicidal act, because
he willed too possessively to share the passion and sufferings of
Christ--the death instead of the life.
That blood-poisoning of the mediæval saint’s was a reaction, violent
and unkind, against the wrongful version of possession which, in their
day as in our own, was destroying the peaceful possibilities of human
society.
Yet without a certain quality of possessiveness the human mind cannot
grow. Wordsworth pictures for us very beautifully that natural
possessive element in its age of innocence.
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six year darling of a pigmy size!
See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song.
With these mental possessions he is opening his mind to the coming
conquests of life: as much to be conquered by its beauty as to conquer
it. But what he gains from his appreciation of earth’s loveliness
brings loss to none; in this extension of his mental horizon there is
no shutting of others from a like view; this aspect of the dominion
upon which he is now entering is communal, something illimitable, which
all may share. Of possession acquired upon those terms we need never
be afraid. And it is a very real possession, far more real, as I shall
hope presently to show, than any mere power to thwart, hinder, or
control the freedom of others, which is the form of possession at which
too often man aims.
Let us start, in order to realise this, with certain other experiments
of childhood. Which child more truly “possesses” the life of linnet
or hedge-sparrow, making it in some measure his own: the child who
stays quiet and disciplines himself to watch the bird at the building
of its nest, the hatching of its eggs and the feeding of its young;
or the child who puts an end to all that beauty and complexity of
motion by bringing down his bird with a stone? If he comes to tell
others of his experience, what alternatively is there for him to
tell? In the one case only his own act of destruction, a thing done
and brought to a dead end; in the other he has a dozen new things to
tell of--discoveries made in a process of life which he has watched
with delight and knows still to be going on. From which of these
two experiments does he draw the larger consciousness? Which of the
two most peoples his world for him? Step by step as he advances he
will find how much, by interfering with the lives of others, he can
destroy, but how little he can build up; he can take hold of the
daddy-legs leg by leg and find that they all come off, and wonder
perhaps at the zest with which that eager little martyr fulfils the
words of Scripture, “If thy foot offend thee cut it off and cast it
from thee.” But constant repetition of the experiment, though it may
give him an evil sense of power, will give him no variety, no real
advance in knowledge concerning the life, or the use and beauty of
flies’ legs. He will not treasure--to benefit by them--the legs that
he has pulled off, nor will his brain have stored anything but an
added sense of and liking for his own power to destroy. And so will
it be with everything on which he experiments destructively. His
knowledge and understanding of their nature will remain at a minimum.
Progressing on these lines, he will for ever be making things cease to
be themselves without making them really his own. But if he reverse
that process of experiment by encouraging things to be themselves,
how varied and multitudinous will grow his consciousness of life,
his appreciation of its finer shades, its delicacy, its grace, its
adaptability, its vigour and its freedom. If his interest is in birds,
how much more he will know of them, and find in them how much more of
alertness and beauty, if he hang food for them outside his window,
rather than cages for them within; if he will recognise that the beauty
of a bird lies too largely in its wings, for caging to be anything but
a contradiction of its true existence. If his interest is in animals,
how far more he will learn of their resources and character, if he aims
not at cowing them and causing them to flee from him in fear, but at
encouraging them in all genuine and characteristic development. That
does not mean teaching them to “perform” in painful and artificial
ways--exploits which are always built up on processes of cruelty, and
do not in the least reveal animal nature as it really is but only
impose upon it a mask of concealment--anthropomorphic, full of conceit
and self-flattery--the same fond thing which he did when he began
making God also in his own image to worship it.
There, indeed, in man’s shaping of God to be like himself, revengeful,
deceitful, pompous, inconsiderate, unmerciful, one-sided and masculine;
in making Him, too, a performer of tricks, so that in those attributes
he might see himself reflected and stand enlarged in his own
eyes--surely there more than in any other department of life has man by
his foolish possessiveness brought to the human race poverty instead of
wealth, a curse instead of a blessing.
That is but one example of how this narrow possessiveness with which
man set out to conquer heaven and earth wears thin and poor under the
test of time, and leaves him in the end no standing monuments but just
a heap of rubble on which to gaze--only that, or perhaps less--perhaps
only desert sand.
That failure of material ambitions stands immortalised for us in
Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive--stamped on these lifeless things--
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:--
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away!”
That is a moral which we shall do well to remember. All great
possessions materially founded come at last to that, and the heart that
clings to them must go down after them to the grave.
It is the same when we base our delight of human relationship in an
insistence upon possession: it serves only to accentuate the place of
death in the world and to give it size. The man, or woman, whose idea
of love lies in the claim to possess and to control others, dies many
deaths before he reaches his final end, and walks daily with his foot
in the grave. These tragedies of possession, so impoverishing to the
spirit, are all round us; the world is humanly more full of them than
of anything else: Husbands who adore their wives, but cannot let them
call their souls their own; parents, possessive of their children,
imposing upon them their will up to the legal limit and beyond; homes
devouring the independence of womanhood, cramping, constraining,
robbing of initiative and force, and doing all these things under cover
of the claims of love, of natural affection, of piety! What is all this
really but possession masquerading under another name? I remember once
reading a remarkable story by Mr. John Gray, called _Niggard Truth_,
of a woman who took masterful possession of a weak husband and “ran”
him as an expression, not of his own personality, but of hers. And when
at last she had very literally run him to earth, she buried him in a
garment of red flannel so that, as she expressed it, she might “see
him better” in the grave. And there, at the end of a strenuous life,
she sat amid her domestic possessions, her glass shades, her family
plate, and her mahogany, with her mental eye fixed upon a corpse, and
her heart filled with a _Magnificat_ of self-applause. She was the
“Ozymandias” of the domestic hearth; and there are thousands of them in
this country to-day. “Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!”
I have taken for example the domestic relations, because there we get
in small, but simple and concise, that demoralising claim to possession
which goes forth with missionary zeal to devastate the world; and
because here, in the home, the true social service that is owing is, in
theory at least, recognised and admitted.
The duty--surely the obvious duty--of parents to their children
is to assist them, to the full extent of their means, toward
self-development. We have no right to bring children into the world
to warp and stunt their growth, to make them merely reflections of
ourselves, or to keep them back from independence when they come to
man’s or woman’s estate. What the parent needs, perhaps, most to learn
is to relax constantly and in ever-increasing degree that hold which
was necessary during the early years of childhood, but which, even
then, we take too much for granted and employ far too habitually.
Parents often claim too great a possession of their own children;
they make cages for their characters, and mould them away from their
natural bent to what suits their own family pride, their own taste,
or their own sense of importance, sometimes conscientiously believing
this to be the parental prerogative. But if parents are to use safely
their power to impose moral training they must build up first in their
children a sense of self-reliance, of initiative, of freedom, and then
trust to it. They have no right to rely for their reward on caged
characters, or, by any dictation or control, to exact recompense for
the services which (with whatever devotion) they have rendered. The
same holds good through all human relations, parental, marital, social,
racial: it is ignoble to claim loyalty or devotion from those whom you
have not first made free. Gratitude--even filial gratitude--has no
moral value save if it comes from a free agent. If it comes from one
trained to be not free it partakes of servility. And it is better for
parents to forgo gratitude than to exact its imitation or substitute,
by the imposition of any restrictive conditions or claims after the
years of tutelage are over. It may well be that gratitude has far too
small a place in the human heart; but I am quite sure that the claim
for gratitude has too large a one, and that this in excess brings the
very reverse of a remedy when the other is lacking. And what is true
in relation to parents and their children is true also in every other
human relationship where the claim to possess intrudes to the hindrance
of self-realization and self-development. The possessor, in claiming
restrictive possession of others, loses possession of himself.
That is what made slavery as an institution so doubly impoverishing
to the human race. It impoverished the mind of the slave, but it
impoverished quite as much the mind of the slave-owner.
Wherever man has tried to possess others he has lost possession of
himself. That is the price inevitably paid by any class or section
of the community which seeks to dominate the lives and restrict the
liberty of its fellows. Tyranny does not strengthen but weakens the
moral nature of those who exercise it, and he who owns slaves cannot
himself be free. Domination is as destructive to human worth and more
destructive to moral integrity than subjection. If “possession is nine
points of the law” on the material plane, the tenth point--spiritual in
its working--is anarchy to the soul.
From time immemorial man has claimed it as his natural right to possess
woman. And it is in consequence in relation to woman, and in matters
of sex, that he has most obviously lost self-possession. And just as
he has claimed that to possess woman is the natural prerogative of the
male, so you will hear him maintain that lack of self-possession in
regard to woman is natural also--and a certain degree of licence the
male prerogative. The two things go together--claim to possess others
and you lose possession of yourself: Give to all with whom you come in
contact their full right of self-possession and self-development, and
you, from that social discipline and service, will in your own body and
mind become self-possessed. For that is true possession which, while
it brings you a sense of enlargement and joy, takes nothing from the
freedom and the joy of others.
Of that kind of possession you may be prodigal, but of that which
takes anything from others, or demands any condition of service from
others, have a care! And look well what the conditions may be. Ask
yourself constantly what is this or that demand for service or labour
doing to other souls? What conditions does it lay upon them? You may
boast that you have simplified your life--rid yourself, for instance,
of domestic service by getting rid of cook and housemaid. You have
not. The bread, the meat, even the ground flour that comes into your
house is all provided by a domestic service which takes place outside
your door and which you do not see. And you are as morally concerned
for the conditions of that labour as if you yourself supervised it.
You need it and use it as much; it is only done for you at a further
remove--out of sight and out of mind--so that it is much easier (but
not more justifiable), to be callous as to the conditions of those who
render it. And if upon those material lines of comfort and luxury you
extend your demands, you are also extending your claim over the lives
of others--and your responsibility for those lives, if they go lacking
where you go fed.
Surely, for the whole of that part of your life you are under a strict
obligation to render service in return--equal to that which you claim.
And if you, by your service, cannot insure to others an equality of
possession in things material (and make as good and wholesome a use of
them as they could make), those material possessions should be a weight
upon your conscience, till you have got matters more fairly adjusted.
Take it as your standard of life to consume no more than you, by your
own labour, in your own lifetime, could produce. What right has any
man to more than that, except through the bounty and kindness of his
fellows? But if he insists on more, and takes more, does he really
possess it? Only in an ever diminishing degree in proportion to his
excess, because as he exceeds he is ever diminishing his true faculty
for reception.
Here is a simple illustration of that truth, a gross example which I
read in a newspaper the other day: In America a prize is annually given
to the man who can eat the largest number of pies at a sitting--each
of the pies, a compound of jam and pastry, weighing on an average
half a pound. The prize-winner became the external possessor of
twenty-seven. But internally he could hardly be said to possess them at
all--they possessed him, and made him, one would imagine, a thoroughly
ineffective citizen for at least the two or three following days. That
man would have been far more really the possessor of three or four pies
(seeing that he could have properly digested them) than it was possible
for him to be of the twenty-seven. In this excess he merely injured
himself without any gain, except the monetary bribe which induced
him to make a beast of himself. And how many men are there not, who
(receiving the monetary bribe of our present unequal and inequitable
system of reward for industry or for idleness) proceed to make beasts
of themselves--more elaborately, but just as truly and completely as
this pie-eater; and by making beasts of themselves are by so much the
less men of soul and understanding--not more, but less the possessors
of their human birthright.
If we store up treasure materially (treasure of a kind which, if one
has more of it, another must needs have less)--if we gather about us,
in excess, creature comforts for the over-indulgence of our bodily
appetites, we are gathering that which is liable to moth and rust and
theft--liable to be a cause of envy and covetousness in others; and
when we have gathered to ourselves this excess of perishable delight
and have applied it, the result, more likely than not, is a cloying of
those very appetites to which we seek to minister--and, eventually,
deterioration and enfeeblement of the body itself.
And as with individuals so with nations; there is no greatness of
possession in holding that which involves the deprivation of others,
the diminution of their freedom, their happiness, their power of
self-development. That is not true kingdom. It is the manufacture
of slaves. But if we lay up treasure in the kingdom of the mind, in
the development of our sense of beauty, our faculty for joy, we have
something here on earth which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor
thieves steal. Our possessions then are things that can arouse no base
covetousness, we need not hold them under lock and key, or make laws
for their protection, for none can deprive us of them. And while you
so hold them on such free and noble conditions, you do not fail to
dispense something of their beauty and worth to those with whom you
associate.
These possessions, with which you have enriched your lives, make no man
poorer, rob no fellow creature of his right, conflict not with the law
of charity to all.
Seeking possession upon those lines, you shall find that noble
things do tend to make possible a form of possession in which all
alike may share; that architecture, music, literature and painting
do offer themselves to the service of a far nobler and more communal
interpretation of wealth than that which would keep it for separate
and individual enjoyment. A thousand may look upon the beauty of one
picture, and detract nothing, in the enjoyment of each, from the
enjoyment of all; nor has virtue or value gone out of it because so
many have looked on it; and so it is (or so it may be) with all beauty
whether we find it in nature or in art.
If I were asked to name the man who in the last hundred years had
the greatest possessions, I think I would name Wordsworth. Read his
poetry with this thought in your mind, of how day by day he gathered
possessions of an imperishable kind, which needed no guardianship
beyond the purity of his mind, and excited in others no envy. Nay, how
much of those wonderful possessions was he not able to give to others?
Some of his loveliest lines of poetry are a record of possession
rightly attained. I give here only one of his poems--one of his
simplest in inspiration--to show what I mean:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd--
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay.
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
“Only daffodils” you say? But he made them for himself and others an
eternal possession of beauty and delight.
Those who have great possessions on these terms need never turn
sorrowfully away when the command comes: “Sell all thou hast and give
to the poor.” For these are the inexhaustible treasures of the soul,
and are in their nature communal; and happy is the man or nation that
finds them.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
(1918)
The two words Crime and Punishment have come to us in a conjunction
which it is very difficult to separate. Our fathers have told us, and
our teachers and theologians have strenuously insisted that the one
necessarily entails the other.
The whole of our social order is based upon the idea that if a man
commits crime--an offence, that is to say, against the written law of
the community--he must be punished for it. If he were not, social order
would go to pieces.