I came in for; it was conducted loudly and with gestures upon the part
of the Andorran, good-humouredly but equally openly on the part of the
Englishman, who said:
"I grant you that life is very hard for some of our town dwellers in
spite of the high wages they obtain."
To which the Andorran answered: "There is nothing to grant, your Grace,
for I would not believe their life was hard; but I was puzzled by what
you told me, for I could not make out how they earned so much money,
and yet looked so extraordinary." The Andorran showed by this that he
had visited England.
At this the Englishman smiled pleasantly enough and said: "Do you think
me extraordinary?"
The Andorran was a little embarrassed. "No no," he said, "you do not
understand the word I use. I do not mean extraordinary to see, I mean
unhappy and lacking humanity."
The Englishman smiled more genially still in his good wholesome beard,
and said: "Do I look to you like that?"
"No," said the Andorran gravely, "nor does that gentleman whom you
pointed out to me when we left France, your English patron, Mr.
Bernstein I think ... you were both well-fed and well-clothed ... and
what is more, I know nothing of what you earn. But in Andorra we ask
about this man and that man indifferently, and especially about the
poorest, and when I asked you about the poorest in your towns you told
me that there was not one of them who did not earn, when he was fully
working, twenty-five pesetas a week. Now with twenty-five pesetas a
week! Oh ...! Why, I could live on five, and five weeks of twenty saved
is a hundred pesetas; and with a hundred pesetas ...! Oh, one can buy a
great brood sow; or if one is minded for grandeur, the best coat in the
world; or again, a little mule just foaled, which in two years, mind
you, _in two years_" (and here he wagged his finger) "will be a great
fine beast" (and here he extended his arms), "and the _next_ year will
carry a man over the hills and will sell for five hundred pesetas. Yes
it will!"
The Englishman looked puzzled. "Well," said he, leaning forward,
ticking off on his fingers and becoming practical, "there's your pound
a week."
The Andorran nodded. He began ticking it off on his fingers also.
"Now of course the man is not always in work."
"If he is lazy," said the Andorran with angry eyes, "the neighbours
shall see to that!"
"No," said the Englishman, irritated, "you don't understand; he can't
always find some one to _give_ him work."
"But who _gives_ work?" said the Andorran. "Work is not _given_." And
then he laughed. "Our trouble is to get the youngsters to do it!" And
he laughed more loudly.
"You don't understand," repeated the Englishman, pestered, "he can't
work unless some one allows him to work for him."
"Pooh!" said the Andorran, "he could cut down trees or dig, or get up
into the hills."
"Why," said the Englishman with wondering eyes, "the perlice would have
him then."
The Andorran looked mournful: he had heard the name of something
dangerous in this country. He thought it was a ghost that haunted
lonely places and strangled men.
"Well then," went on the Englishman in a practical fashion, again
ticking on his fingers, "let us say he can work three weeks out of the
five."
"Yes?" said the Andorran, bewildered.
"He gets, let us say, three times a week's wage in the five weeks.... I
don't mind, call it an average of twenty pesetas if you like, or even
eighteen."
"What is an 'average'?" said the Andorran, frowning.
"An average," said the Englishman impatiently, "oh, an average is what
he gets all lumped up."
"Do you mean," said the Andorran gravely, "that he gets eighteen
pesetas every Saturday?"
"No, _no_, NO!" struck in the Englishman. "Twenty-five
pesetas, as you call them, when he can get work, and nothing when he
can't."
"Good Lord!" said the Andorran, with wide eyes and crossing himself.
"How does the poor fellow know whether perlice will not be at him
again? It is enough to break a man's heart!"
"Well, don't _argue_!" said the Englishman, keen upon his tale. "He
gets an average, anyhow, of eighteen pesetas, as you call them, a week.
Now you see, however wretched he is, five of those will go in rent, and
if he is a decent man, seven."
The Andorran was utterly at sea. "But if he is wretched, why should he
pay, and if he is decent why should he pay still more?" he asked.
"Why, damn it all!" said the Englishman, exploding, "a man must live!"
"Precisely," said the Andorran rigidly, "that is why I am asking the
question. He pays this tax, you say, five pesetas, if he is wretched
and seven if he is decent. But a man may be decent although he is
wretched, and who is so brutal as to ask a tax of the poor?"
"It isn't a tax," said the Englishman. "He pays it for his house."
"But a man could buy a house," said the Andorran, "with a few payments
like that."
The Englishman sighed. "Do listen to my explanation. He's got to pay it
anyhow."
"Well," said the Andorran, sighing in his turn, "you must have a wicked
King. But, please God, he cannot spend it all on his pleasures."
"It isn't paid to the King, God bless him," said the Englishman. "The
man pays it to his landlord."
"And suppose he doesn't?" said the Andorran defiantly.
"Well, the perlice," began the Englishman, and the Andorran's face
showed that he was afraid of occult powers.
"So there, you see," went on the Englishman, calculating along with
rapid content, "he's only got thirteen."
The Andorran was willing to stretch a point. "Well," said he
doubtfully, "I will grant him thirteen, and with thirteen pesetas a man
can do well enough. His wife milks, and it does not cost much to put a
little cotton on the child, and then, of course, if he is too poor to
buy a bed, why there is his straw."
"Straw's not decent, and we don't allow it," said the Englishman
firmly; "he doesn't buy a bed always; sometimes he rents it."
"I don't understand," said the Andorran, "I don't understand."
There was a little pause during which neither of the two men looked
at the other. The Englishman went on good-naturedly and laboriously
explaining:
"Now let's come to bread."
"Yes," said the Andorran eagerly, "man lives by bread and wine."
"Well," said the Englishman, ignoring this interruption, "you see,
bread for the lot of them would come to half that money."
"Yes," said the Andorran, nodding, "you are quite right. Bread is a
very serious thing." And he sighed.
"Half of it," continued the Englishman, "goes in bread. And then, of
course, he has to get a little meat."
"Certainly," said the Andorran.
"Bacon anyhow," the Englishman went on, "and there's boots."
"Oh, he could do without boots," said the Andorran.
"No he can't," said the Englishman, "they all have to have boots; and
then you see, there's tea."
The Andorran was interested in hearing about tea. "You Englishmen are
so fond of tea," he said, smiling. "I have noticed that you ask for
tea. Juan has tea to sell."
The Englishman nodded genially. "I will buy some of him," he said.
"Well, go on," said the Andorran.
"And there's a little baccy, of course"--and he gave the prices of both
those articles. "They're a leetle more than you might think," continued
the Englishman, a little confused. "They're taxed, you see."
"Taxed again?" said the Andorran.
"Yes," said the Englishman rapidly, "not much; besides which, I haven't
said anything was taxed yet: they pay about double on their tea and
about four times on the value of the tobacco. But they don't feel it.
Oh, if they get regular work they're all right!"
"Then," said the Andorran, summing it all up, "they ought to do very
well."
"Yes, they ought," said the Englishman, "but somehow they're not steady
of themselves: they get _pauperised_."
"What is that?" said the Andorran.
"Why, they get to expect things for nothing."
"They think," said the Andorran cheerfully, "that good things fall from
the sky. I know that sort: we have them." He thought he had begun to
understand, and just after he had said this we came to a village.
I must here tell you what I ought to have put at the beginning of these
few lines, that I heard this conversation in Andorra valley itself,
while four of us, the Andorran guide, the Englishman, myself and an
Ironist were proceeding through the mountains, riding upon mules.
We had come to the village of Encamps, and there we all got down to
enter the inn. We had a meal together and paid, the four of us, exactly
five shillings and threepence all together for wine and bread, cooked
meat, plenty of vegetables, coffee, liqueurs and a cigar.
This was the end of the conversation in Andorra: it was my business
to return to England after the holiday to write an essay on a point
in political economy, to which I did justice; but the conventions
of academic writing prevented me from quoting in that essay this
remarkable experience.
XXX
PARIS AND THE EAST
One of the things that set a modern man wondering is the nature of the
survivor of our time.
It is customary to say that all human things decay and end; and if
you will take a period long enough of course it is true, for at last
the world itself shall dissolve. But when men point to dead Empires,
as Egypt or Assyria are dead, or when they point to a fossilised
civilisation, as it seems, according to travellers, that certain
civilisations of the East are fossilised, or when they point to little
broken cities where once were famous towns, one is tempted to remember
that to all these there is an exceptional glorious sort which is
ourselves. Atlantic Europe, the Europe that was made by the Christian
Faith and in the first four centuries of our era, lives on from
change to change in a most marvellous way, and for now two thousand
years has not seemed capable of decline. You have in the history of
it resurrection after resurrection, and through all those rapid and
fantastic developments, transformations far more rapid and far more
fantastic than any other of which we have record, a sort of inner
fixity of type remains, like the individual soul of the man which makes
him always himself in spite of accident and in spite of the process of
age; only, Europe differs from such metaphor in this, that it is like
some man not subject, it would seem, to mortality.
This thought to which I perpetually return, occurred to me as I handled
a book on Paris, the illustrations of which were impressions gathered
by a Japanese artist. Such a contrast will call up in the minds of
many the contrast between something very old and something very new. A
reader might say as he glanced at this book: "Here is one of the most
ancient things we have, the Oriental mind, and it is looking at one of
the freshest and most modern things we have, modern Paris."
I confess that to me the contrast is of another kind. I should say:
"Here is something which is, so far as its inner force goes, immovable,
the Oriental mind; and this is how it looks at the most mobile thing on
earth, the heart of Gaul--yet the mobile thing has a history almost as
long as, and far more full than, the immobile thing."
Upon a central page of this book I found a really splendid bit of
drawing. It is an impression of the Statue of the Republic under a
cold dawn. Now when one thinks what that statue means, what portion of
the stoical philosophy re-arisen after so many centuries it embodies,
what furious combats have raged round that idea: I mean combats, not
debates: pain, not rhetoric; men dying in great numbers and desiring to
kill others as they died. When one considers that statue but the other
day, with the raging mob of workmen round it, and when one suddenly
remembers that the whole thing is after all only of the last hundred
years--what a multiplicity of life this chief of our European cities
possesses in one's eyes!
The admirable pictures in this book are drawn as nearly in the European
manner as one could expect, but the feeling is an unchanging feeling
which we know in Eastern things. The mind is like deep and level water,
never stirred by wind: a big lake in a crater of the hills. But the
thing drawn is as moving and as living as the air.
I wonder whether this artist, as he stood and drew, felt as a European
feels when he stands and draws in any one of our immemorial sites: by
the Pool of London, or at the top of the rue St. Jacques, or in the
place of the Martyrdom at Toulouse, or looking at the most ancient
yellow dusts of Toledo from over the tumbling strength of the Tagus?
He may have felt it ... perhaps ... for all his work, even the little
introduction that he has written shows that astonishing adaptability
and exceedingly rapid intelligence which are the marks of the Japanese
to-day. But if he felt it he must have felt it by education. For us
it is in our blood. We stand upon those sites and we feel ourself in
and part of a stream of life that seems almost incapable of ending.
And that brings me back to where I began, How much longer will our
civilisation endure?
Will it end? It has many enemies, most of them unconscious, has modern
Europe.
It has men within it who imagine that the correction of some large
abuse and the withdrawal of some considerable part of its fabric
in the correction of that abuse, is a matter concerning only their
one generation. These men visibly put in peril the balance of that
civilisation by their very enthusiasm.
It has a lesser number of other enemies within itself; enemies more
dangerous, who do believe that some quite new thing wholly alien to the
soul of Europe can be imposed upon that soul. These men are always for
anarchy; they delight in emphasising all that seems to diminish the
responsibility and the freedom of citizens, and it is their pleasure
to accelerate every tendency which may destroy, from whatever side,
our permanent solution of domestic and of natural things: families,
properties, armies.
The common faith which was, as it were, the cement of our civilisation
has been hit so hard that some do ask themselves openly the question
that was only whispered some little time ago--whether the cement
still holds. It is quite certain that if that last symbol and reality
disintegrates, if the Catholic Church leaves it, Europe has come to an
end.
But these questions are not yet to be met by any reply. And when I ask
myself those questions, and I always do when I see the Seine going
by the walls that were Cæsar's parleying ground with the chiefs,
Dionysius's prison, Julian's office, Dagobert's palace, and which have
been subject to everything from Charlemagne to the Bourbons, and which
have (within the memory of men whom I myself have known) ended the
Monarchy and seen passing by a wholly new society--when I ask myself
those questions, I answer less and less with every year.
Time was, in the University, say twenty years ago, one would have said:
"It is all over. Everything that can destroy us has triumphed." Time
was, say ten years ago, in the heat of a particular struggle which
raged all over the West, one could have said with the enthusiasm of the
fight, that continuity would win. But to-day, whether because one has
accumulated knowledge or because things are really more confused, it is
difficult to reply.
* * * * *
A man with our knowledge and our experience of what Europe has been and
is, standing in the grey and decayed Roman city of the Fifth Century,
and watching the little barbarian troop riding into Lutetia, might have
said that a gradual darkness would swallow us all, especially since he
knew that just beyond the narrow seas in Eastern Britain a dense pall
then covered the corpse of the Roman civilisation.
A man working on the Tour St. Jacques, the last of the Gothic, might
have seen nothing but anarchy and the end of all good work in the
change that was surging round him: the Huguenots, the new Splendour,
the cruelty and the making of lies.
Certainly those who were present in Paris _before_ the 10th of
August,'92, thought an end had come, and believed the Revolution to be
a most unfruitful and tempestuous death; imagining Europe to have no
hope but in the possible extinction of the flame.
All three judgments would have been wrong. And when one takes that
typical Paris again, and handles it and looks at it and thinks of it as
the example and the symbol of all our time; just as one is beginning to
say "The thing is dying," the memory of similar deaths that were not
deaths in the past returns to one and one must be silent.
Never was Europe less conscious of herself, never did she more freely
admit the forces that destroy, than she admits them to-day. Never
was evil more insolently or more glaringly in power; never had it
less fear of chastisement than in the whirlwind of our time. If that
whirlwind is mechanical, and if this vast anarchic commerce, these
blaring papers, these sudden fortunes, these frequent and unparalleled
huge wars, are the breaking up of all that once made Europe, then the
answer to the question is plain: but it may be that these are things
not mechanical but organic: seeds surviving in the ruin which will grow
up into living forms. We shall see.
XXXI
THE HUMAN CHARLATAN
It is curious that the Scientific Spirit has never tabulated any
research, even superficial, upon the human type of charlatan.
It is the essence of a charlatan that he aims at the results of certain
excellences in the full consciousness that he does not possess those
excellences. The material upon which he works is twofold: the ignorance
and the noble appetite for reverence in his fellow men.
Where animals are concerned the Scientific Spirit has tabulated a good
deal of careful research in this department. We know fairly well the
habits of the Cuckoo. What seemingly harmless organisms are poisonous
to us, and why, we have discovered and can catalogue. The successful
deception practised for purposes of secrecy or greed by such and such a
creature, we can discover in our books. But no one has tabulated the
human charlatan.
An admirable example upon which one can test the whole theory of
charlatanism is the ridiculous Lombroso.
To begin with you have the name. He was no more of an Italian than
Disraeli, or than the present Mayor of Rome: but his Italian name
deceives and is intended to deceive, not necessarily that it was
assumed, but that it was paraded as national. Hundreds of honest
men thought themselves praising the Italian character and Italian
civilisation when the newspapers (themselves half duped) had persuaded
them to blow the trumpet of Lombroso.
One of the characteristics of the charlatan is that he parades the
object with which he desires to dupe you, and simultaneously hides his
methods in pushing the thing forward. The purveyor of cheap jewellery
in Whitechapel does this. He lets you have the glitter of his article
full and strong. Where he got it, of his own connection with it,
and what it is, you learn last in the business or not at all. The
whole process is one of suggestion, or, as our forefathers called it,
"hoodwinking." Lombroso was true to type in this regard.
The European Press was deluged one day with notices, praise, reviews of
a book which was called _Degeneration_. It was a tenth-rate book, but
we were compelled to hear of it. No words were fine enough to describe
its author. We learnt that his name was Nordau. There was no process
of logic in the book, there was no labour. Where it asserted (it was a
mass of assertions) it usually trespassed on ground which the author
could not pretend to any familiarity with. Those who are already alive
to the international trick were suspicious and upon their guard from
the very moment that they smelt the thing. The infinitely larger number
who do not understand the nature of international forces were taken in.
For one man who read the farrago a hundred were taught to magnify the
name of Nordau. Only when this process of suggestion had well sunk in
did the public casually learn that the said Nordau was a connection of
Lombroso's.
A book of greater value (which is not saying much) proceeded from the
pen of one Ferrero. It proposed an examination of the Roman Empire and
the Roman people. Its thesis was, of course, a degradation of both.
For one man who so much as saw that book, a hundred went away with
the vague impression that a certain great Ferrero dominated European
thought. He gave opinions (among other things) upon the polity of
England so absurd and ignorant that, had the process of suggestion
not run on before, those opinions would only have attained some small
measure of notoriety from their very fatuousness. But the international
trick had reversed the common and healthy process of human thought.
We were not allowed to judge the man by his work; no, we must accept
the work on the authority of the man; only after the trick had been
successfully worked did it come out that Ferrero was a connection of
Lombroso's.
Lombroso's own department of charlatanry was to attack Christian morals
in the shape of denying man's power of choice between good and evil.
In another epoch and with other human material to work upon his
stock-in-trade would have taken some other form, but Lombroso had been
born into that generation immediately preceding our own, whose chief
intellectual vice was materialism. A name could be cheaply made upon
the lines of materialism, and Lombroso took to it as naturally as his
spiritual forerunners took to rationalist Deism and as his spiritual
descendants will take to spurious mysticism. We shall have in the near
future our Lombrosos of the Turning Table, the Rapping Devil, and the
Manifesting Dead Great Aunt--indeed this development coincided with his
own old age--but as things were, the easiest charlantry in his years
of vigour was to be pursued upon Materialist lines, and on Materialist
lines did the worthy Lombroso proceed. His method was childishly
simple, and we ought to blush for our time or rather for that of our
immediate seniors that it should have duped anybody--but it was far
from childishly guileless.
When the laws are chiefly concerned in defending the possessions of
those already wealthy, and when society, in the decline or depression
of religion, takes to the worshipping of wealth, those whom the
laws will punish are generally poor. Such a time was that into
which Lombroso was born. No man was executed for treason, few men
were imprisoned for it. Cheating on a large scale was an avenue to
social advancement in most of the progressive European countries. The
purveying of false news was a way to fortune: the forestaller and the
briber were masters of the Senate. The sword was sheathed. The popular
instinct which would repress and punish cowardice, oppression, the
sexual abominations of the rich, and their cruelties, had no outlet
for its expression. The prisons of Europe were filled in the main with
the least responsible, the weakest willed, and the most unfortunate
of the very poor. We owe to Lombroso the epoch-making discovery that
the weakest willed, the least responsible, and the most unfortunate
of the very poor often suffer from physical degradation. With such an
intellectual equipment Lombroso erected the majestic structure of human
irresponsibility.