living; but how can they at the same time diminish our distaste for
dying? That might be their effect, no doubt, in cases where we felt
that our death was promoting some great and sacred cause more than our
life could have done; but such cases must always be extremely rare.
Even the soldier on the battlefield will help his country more by
living than by dying, if he can do so without failing in his duty. His
death is not a triumph, but only a lesser evil than cowardice and
disgrace. And what shall we say, for example, of the case of a young
biologist who dies of blood-poisoning on the eve of a great and
beneficent discovery? Is not this a case in which the modern God might
with advantage have swerved from his principles and (for once) played
the part of Providence? It is better, no doubt, to die in a good cause
than to throw away life in the pursuit of folly or vice; but is it
not playing with words to say that even the end of a martyr to science
like Captain Scott, or a martyr to humanity like Edith Cavell, is a
triumph over death and the grave? It is a triumph over cowardice,
baseness, the love of ease and safety, all the paltrier aspects of our
nature; but a triumph over death it is not. If it be true (which I do
not believe) that German soldiers sign a declaration devoting the
glycerine in their dead bodies to their country's service, one may
imagine that some of them feel a species of satisfaction in resolving
upon this final proof of patriotism; but it will be a gloomy
satisfaction at best; there will be a lack of exhilaration about it;
if the Herr Hauptmann who witnesses their signatures congratulates
them on having triumphed over death, they will be apt to think it a
rather empty form of words. If they had had the advantage of reading
Jane Austen, they would probably say with Mr. Bennet, "Let us take a
more cheerful view of the subject, and suppose that I survive."
I fear that not even the companionship offered by the modern God in
the act of dissolution will make death a cheerful experience, or
induce ordinary, unaffected mortals to glory in their mortality. It
is too much the habit of Gods to pretend to die when they don't really
die at all--when, in fact, the whole idea is a mere intellectual
hocus-pocus.
VII
BACK TO THE VEILED BEING
Why has Mr. Wells partly goaded and partly hypnotized himself into the
belief that he is the predestined prolocutor of a new hocus-pocus?
Rightly or wrongly, I diagnose his case thus: What he really cares for
is the future of humanity, or, in more concrete language, social
betterment. He suffers more than most of us from the spectacle of the
world of to-day, because he has the constructive imagination which can
place alongside of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision
of a rational world-order which seems easily attainable if only some
malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man. But he finds
himself impotent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-are.
Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for the
part of a social regenerator. He has the pen of a ready and sometimes
very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he has a
fertile and inventive brain; his works of fiction have won for him a
great public, both in Europe and America; yet he feels that his social
philosophy, his ardent and enlightened meliorism, makes no more
impression than the buzzing of a gnat in the ear of a drowsy mastodon.
At the same time he has persuaded himself, whether on internal or on
external evidence--partly, I daresay, on both--that men cannot thrive,
either as individuals or as world-citizens, without some relation of
reverence and affection to something outside and above themselves. He
foresees that Christianity will come bankrupt out of the War, and yet
that the huge, shattering experience will throw the minds of men open
to spiritual influences. At the same time (of this one could point to
several incidental evidences) he has come a good deal in contact with
Indian religiosity, and learnt to know a type of mind to which God, in
one form or another, is indeed an essential of life, while the
particular form is a matter of comparative indifference. Then the idea
strikes him: "Have we not here a great opportunity for placing the
motive-power of spiritual fervor behind, or within, the sluggish
framework of social idealism? Here it lies, well thought-out,
carefully constructed, but inert, like an aeroplane without an
engine. By giving the glow of supernaturalism, of the worship of a
personal God, to the good old Religion of Humanity, may we not impart
to our schemes for a well-ordered world precisely the uplift they at
present lack? It was all very well for chilly New England
transcendentalism to 'hitch its waggon to a star,' but the result is
that Boston is governed by a Roman Catholic Archbishop. It is really
much easier and more effective to hitch our waggon to God, who, being
a synthesis of our own higher selves, will naturally pull it in
whatever direction we want. Thus the mass of mankind will escape from
that spiritual loneliness which is so discomfortable to them, and will
find, in one and the same personification, a deity to listen to their
prayers, and a 'boss,' in the Tammany sense of the term, to herd them
to the polling-booths. What we want is collectivism touched with
emotion. By proclaiming it to be the will of God, and identifying
sound politics with ecstatic piety, we may shorten by several
centuries the path to a new world-order."
This is a translation into plain English of the thoughts which would
seem to have possessed Mr. Wells's mind during the past year or so. I
do not for a moment mean that he put them to himself in plain
English. That would be to accuse him of insincerity--a thought which I
most sincerely disclaim. I have not the least doubt that the Invisible
King does actually supply a "felt want" in his spiritual outfit, and
that he is perfectly convinced that most other people are similarly
constituted and will welcome this new object of loyalty and devotion.
Time will show whether his psychology is correct. If it is, then he
has indeed made an important discovery. To use a very homely
illustration: a carrot dangled from the end of a stick before a
donkey's nose makes no mechanical difference in the problem of
traction presented by the costermonger's barrow. If anything, it adds
to the weight to be drawn. But if the sight of it cheers, heartens,
and inspires the donkey, helping him to overcome those fits of
lethargy so characteristic of his race, then the carrot may quite
appreciably accelerate the general rate of progress. It all depends on
the psychology of the donkey.
Moses doubtless did very wisely in going up into Mount Sinai and
abiding there forty days and forty nights. Whatever he may have seen
and heard, the semblance of communion with a Higher Power
unquestionably lent a prestige to his scheme of social reform which
it could never have attained had he offered it on its inherent merits,
as the project of a mere human legislator, or (still worse) of a man
of letters. Moses, in fact, knew his Children of Israel. Does Mr.
Wells know his modern Englishmen or Anglo-Americans?
That is the question.
Mr. Bernard Shaw has made a similar and very ingenious attempt, not
exactly to found a new religion, but to place his ideas in a religious
atmosphere. In the preface to _Androcles and the Lion_ (a disquisition
just about as long as _God the Invisible King_) he propounds the
question, "Why not give Christianity a trial?" and opens the
discussion thus: "The question seems a hopeless one after 2,000 years
of resolute adherence to the old cry of 'Not this man, but Barabbas.'
Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of
his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of
money, and his moralities and churches and political constitutions.
'This man' has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane
enough to try his way." Then he goes on to shew, by a course of very
plausible reasoning, that the teaching of Jesus was, in all
essentials, an exact anticipation of the economic and social
philosophy of G. B. S.; so that, in giving political expression to
that philosophy, we should be, for the first time, establishing the
Kingdom of Christ upon earth. It is true that there are passages in
the Gospels which no more accord with Mr. Shaw's sociology than do
omnipotence and omniscience with the theology of Mr. Wells. But these
passages do not embarrass Mr. Shaw. He simply points out that, at
Matthew xvi, 16, where Peter hailed him as "the Christ, the Son of the
living God," Jesus went mad. Up to that fatal moment "his history is
that of a man sane and interesting apart from his special gifts as
orator, healer and prophet"; but from that point onward he set to work
to live up to "his destiny as a god," part of which was to be killed
and to rise again. Many other prophets have gone mad--for instance,
Ruskin and Nietzsche. Therefore we can have no difficulty in simply
eliminating as a morbid aberration whatever is un-Shavian in the
message of Jesus, and accepting the rest as the sincere milk of the
word. Mr. Shaw's attempt to place his philosophy under divine
patronage is not so serious as Mr. Wells's; for Mr. Shaw can never
take himself quite seriously for five pages together. But the motive,
in each case, in manifestly the same--to obtain for a system of ideas
the prestige, the power of insinuation, penetration, and stimulation,
that attaches to the very name of religion.
The notion is a very tempting one. What every prophet wants, in the
babel of latter-day thought, is a magic sounding-board which shall
make his voice carry to the ends of the earth and penetrate to the
dullest understanding. The more he believes in his own reason, the
more he yearns for some method of out-shouting the unreason of his
neighbours. German philosophy thought it had discovered the ideal
reverberator in the artillery of Herr Krupp von Bohlen; but the world
is curiously indisposed to conversion by cannon, and has retorted in a
still louder roar of high-explosive arguments. God, as a
politico-philosophical ally, is certainly cheaper than Herr Krupp;
and, divested of his mediaeval sword and tinder-box, he is decidedly
humaner. But is the glamour of his name quite what it once was? Or can
it be restored to its pristine potency?
On a question, such as this, on which the evidence is too vague, too
voluminous and too complex to be interpreted with any certainty, our
wishes are apt to take control of our thoughts. Making all allowance
for this source of error, I nevertheless venture to suggest to Mr.
Wells that we may perhaps be passing out of, not into, an age of
religiosity. May it not be that the time has come to give the name of
God a rest? Is it not possible, and even probable, that, while the
vast apocalypse of the observatory and the laboratory is proceeding
with unexampled speed, thinking people may prefer to await its
developments, rather than pin their faith to an interim, synthetic
God, whom his own still, small voice must, in moments of candor,
confess to be merely make-believe? Is it the fact that men, or even
women, of our race are, as a rule, absolutely dependent for courage,
energy, self-control and self-devotion, upon some "great brother"
outside themselves, "a strongly-marked personality, loving, inspiring
and lovable," whom they conceive to be always within call? In making
this assumption, is not Mr. Wells ignoring the great mass of paganism
in the world around him--not all of it, or even most of it,
self-conscious and self-confessed, but none the less real on that
account? He makes a curious remark as to the personage whom he calls
"the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his nickname for the
man who is not much interested in midway Gods between himself and the
Veiled Being. This hapless fellow-creature, says Mr. Wells, "has not
really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom
he can give himself. _He is still a masterless man_" (p. 83). As Mr.
Wells has evidently read a good deal about Japan, he no doubt takes
this expression from Japanese feudalism, which made a distinct class
of the "ronin" or masterless man, who had, by death or otherwise, lost
his feudal superior. But is it really, to our Western sense, a
misfortune to be a masterless man? Does the healthy human spirit
suffer from having no one to bow down to, no one to relieve it of the
burden of choice, responsibility, self-control? If our feudal
allegiance has terminated through the death of the Gods who asserted a
hereditary claim upon it, must we make haste to build ourselves an
idol, or synthetize a mosaic ikon, to serve as the recipient of our
obeisances, genuflexions, osculations? I cannot believe that this is a
general, and much less a universal, tendency. If any one is irked by
the condition of a "masterless man," the Roman Catholic Church holds
wide its doors for him. It seems very doubtful whether any less
ancient, dogmatic, hieratic, spectacular form of make-believe will
serve his turn.
It has sometimes seemed to me that the one great advantage of Western
Christianity lies in the fact that nobody very seriously believes in
it. "Nobody" is not a mathematically accurate expression, but it is
quite in the line of the truth. You have to go to Asia to find out
what religion means. If you cannot get so far, Russia will serve as a
half-way house; but to study religion on its native heath, so to
speak, you must go to India. Of course there may be some illusion in
the matter, due to one's ignorance of the languages and inability to
estimate the exact spiritual significance of outward manifestations;
but I cannot believe that, anywhere between Suez and Singapore, there
exists that healthy godlessness, that lack of any real effective
dependence on any outward Power "dal tetto in su," which is so common
in and around all Christian churches. In China and Japan it is another
matter. There, I fancy, religious "ronins" are common enough. But in
the lands of the Crescent and the land of "OM," anything like freedom
of the human spirit is probably very rare and very difficult. The
difference does not arise from any lesser stringency in the claims of
Christianity to spiritual dominion, but rather, I imagine, from a
deep-seated divergence in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have
behind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of Greece and Rome. We
are accustomed from childhood to the knowledge that our civilization
was founded by two mighty aristocracies of intellect, to whom the
religions of their day were, as they are to us, nothing but more or
less graceful fairy-tales.[4] We know that many of the greatest men
the world ever saw, while phrasing their relation to the "deus
absconditus" in various ways, were utterly free from that penitential,
supplicatory abjectness which is the mark of Asian salvationism. And
though of course the conscious filiation to Greece and Rome is rare,
the habit of mind which holds up its head in the world and feels no
childish craving to cling to the skirts of a God, is not rare at all.
Therefore I conceive that people who are shaken out of their
conventional, unrealized Christianity by the earthquake of the war
will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into the arms of the
"great brother" constructed for them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to
picture them flocking to the banner of the Fabian Jesus--the Christ
uncrucified, and restored to sanity, of Mr. Bernard Shaw.
[4] Namque deos didici securum agere aevum,
nec, siquid miri faciat natura, deos id
tristes ex alto caeli demittere tecto.
HORACE, _Satires_ I., 5.
* * * * *
Does it really seem to Mr. Wells an arid and damnable "atheism" that
finds in the very mystery of existence a subject of contemplation so
inexhaustibly marvellous as to give life the fascination of a
detective story? When Mr. Wells tells us that "the first purpose of
God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means to
more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to power," he states what
is, to many of us, the first and last article of religion--only that
we prefer to steer clear of hocus-pocus and substitute "Man" for
"God." If we are almost, or even quite, reconciled to the cruelties
and humiliations of life by the thought of its visual glories, its
intellectual triumphs, and the mysteries with which it is surrounded,
is that frame of mind wholly unworthy to be called religious? If it
is, I, for one, shall not complain; for religion, like God, is a word
that has been--
Defamed by every charlatan
And soil'd with all ignoble use.
But it will be difficult to persuade me of the loftier spirituality,
or even the more abiding solace, involved in ecstatic devotion to a
figure of speech.
There are two elements of consolation in life: the things of which we
are sure, and the things of which we are unsure. We are sure that man
has somehow been launched upon the most romantic adventure that mind
can conceive. He has set forth to conquer and subdue the world,
including the stupidities and basenesses of his own nature. At first
his progress was incalculably slow; then he came on with a rush in the
great sub-tropical river basins; and presently, where the brine of the
AEgean got into his blood, he achieved such miracles of thought and art
that his subsequent history, for well-nigh two thousand years, bore
the appearance of retrogression. I have already asked what the
Invisible King was about when he suffered the glory that was Athens to
sink in the fog-bank that was Alexandria. At all events, that
wonderful false-start came to nothing. Rome succeeded to the
world-leadership; and Rome, though energetic and capable, was never
brilliant. With her, European free thought, investigation, science
flickered out, and Asian religion took its place. Truly the slip-back
from antiquity to the dark ages offers a specious argument to the
atheists--the true and irredeemable atheists--who deny the reality of
progress. Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can analyze the
terrestrial conditions which led to that catastrophe, and assure
ourselves that the bugbear of their recurrence is nothing more than a
bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestimable safeguard. If the
Greeks had hit upon the idea of movable types--and it is little to the
credit of the Invisible King that they did not--the onrush of
barbarism and Byzantinism would not have been half so disastrous. And
even through the Dark Ages the bias towards betterment is still
perceptible, though its operation was terribly hampered. Then, at
last, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took up the thread of
progress where antiquity had dropped it. Science revived, and bade
defiance to dogma. The garnering of knowledge began afresh; and true
knowledge has this to distinguish it from pseudo-sciences like
astrology, theology, and philately, that it is instinct with
procreative vigour. Knowledge breeds knowledge with ever-increasing
rapidity; and the result is that the past hundred years have seen
additions to man's control over the powers of nature which outstrip
the wildest imaginings of Eastern romance. When Mr. Gladstone first
went to Rome in 1832, his "transportation" was no swifter and scarcely
more comfortable than that of Caesar in the fifties before Christ.
Today he could fly over the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, and then cover
the distance from Milan onwards at the rate of seventy miles an hour
in a limousine as luxurious as an Empress's boudoir. We are piling up
the knowledge which is power at an enormous rate--indeed rather too
rapidly, since we have not yet the sense to discriminate between power
for good and power for evil. But "burnt bairns dread the fire," and
after the present awful experience, there is fair ground for hope that
measures will be taken to provide strait-waistcoats for the criminal
lunatics whose vanity and greed impel them to let loose the powers of
destruction.
Can any thinking man say that the world is quite the same to him since
the invention of wireless telegraphy? True it is only one among the
multitude of phenomena behind which the Veiled Being dissembles
himself. But is it not a phenomenon of a new and perhaps an
epoch-marking order? It may not make the veil more diaphanous, but it
somehow suggests an alteration--perhaps a progressive alteration--in
its texture.
When we say we are sure of the fact of progress, the atheist comes
down on us with the retort that we thereby confess ourselves naive and
credulous optimists. As well say that when we express our confidence
that the North Western Railway will carry us to Manchester, we thereby
imply the belief that Manchester is the Earthly Paradise. It is quite
possible--any one who is so minded may say it is quite probable--that
progress means advance towards disillusion. What we are sure of is
merely this: that life may be, and ought to be, a very different thing
from what it now is, and that it is in our own power to make it so. We
have not the least doubt that the generations which come after us will
say:--
We will not cease from mortal strife,
Nor shall the sword slip from our hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
But whether, when they have built it, they will think Jerusalem worth
the building is quite a different matter. It may be that Leopardi was
right when he said, "Men are miserable by necessity, but resolute in
believing themselves to be miserable by accident." That is a
proposition which the individual can accept or reject so far as his
own little span is concerned, but on which the race, as such, can pass
no valid judgment. Life has never had a fair chance. It has always
been so beset with accidental and corrigible evils that no man can say
what life, in its ultimate essence, really is. All we know is that
many of its miseries are factitious, inessential, eminently curable;
and till these are eradicated, how are we to determine whether there
are other evils too deep-rooted for our surgery? It may be, for
example, that the elimination of Pain would only leave a vacuum for
Tedium to rush in; but how are we to decide this _a priori_? Let us
learn what are the true potentialities of life before we undertake to
declare whether it is worth living or not.
Perhaps I may be allowed to quote at this point some words of my own
which express the idea I am trying to convey as clearly as I am
capable of putting it. They are part of the last paragraph of an
address entitled _Knowledge and Character: The Straight Road in
Education_:[5]
The great, dominant, all-controlling fact of this life is the
innate bias of the human spirit, not towards evil, as the
theologians tell us, but towards good. But for this bias, man
would never have been man; he would only have been one more
species of wild animal ranging a savage, uncultivated globe,
the reeking battle-ground of sheer instinct and appetite. But
somehow and somewhere there germinated in his mind the idea
that association, co-operation, would serve his ends better
than unbridled egoism in the struggle for existence. Instead
of "each man for himself" his motto became "each man for his
family, or his tribe, or his nation, or--ultimately--for
humankind." And, at a very early stage, what made for
association, co-operation, brotherhood, came to be designated
"good," while that which sinned against these upward
tendencies was stigmatized as "evil." From that moment the
battle was won, and the transfiguration of human life became
only a matter of time. The prejudice in favour of the idea of
good is the fundamental fact of our moral nature. It has an
irresistible, a magical prestige. We have made, and are still
making, a myriad mistakes--tragic and horrible mistakes--in
striving for good things which are evils in disguise. A few
of us (though relatively not very many) try to overcome the
prejudice altogether, and say, "Evil, be thou my good!" But
even these recreants and deserters from the great army of
humanity have to express themselves in terms of good, and to
take their stand on a sheer contradiction. Evil, as such, has
simply not a fighting chance. The prestige of good is
stupendous. We are all hypnotized by it; and the reason we
are slow in realizing the ideal is, not that we are evil, but
that we are stupid.
[5] London: George Allen and Unwin, 1916.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens"--no one had a
better right to say that than a German poet. But though the Invisible
King has made a poor fight against human stupidity, it is not really
unconquerable. If Gods cannot conquer it, men can. Its strongholds
are falling one by one, and, though a long fight is before us, its end
is not in doubt.