civilization, besides the power of social life and manners. There is the
power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of
beauty. The power of conduct is the greatest of all. And without in the
least wishing to preach, I must observe, as a mere matter of natural
fact and experience, that for the power of conduct France has never had
anything like the same sense which she has had for the power of social
life and manners. Michelet,[468] himself a Frenchman, gives us the
reason why the Reformation did not succeed in France. It did not
succeed, he says, because _la France ne voulait pas de réforme morale_--
moral reform France would not have; and the Reformation was above all a
moral movement. The sense in France for the power of conduct has not
greatly deepened, I think, since. The sense for the power of intellect
and knowledge has not been adequate either. The sense for beauty has not
been adequate. Intelligence and beauty have been, in general, but so far
reached, as they can be and are reached by men who, of the elements of
perfect humanization, lay thorough hold upon one only,--the power of
social intercourse and manners. I speak of France in general; she has
had, and she has, individuals who stand out and who form exceptions.
Well, then, if a nation laying no sufficient hold upon the powers of
beauty and knowledge, and a most failing and feeble hold upon the power
of conduct, comes to demoralization and intellectual stoppage and
fearful troubles, we need not be inordinately surprised. What we should
rather marvel at is the healing and bountiful operation of Nature,
whereby the laying firm hold on one real element in our humanization has
had for France results so beneficent.
And thus, when Sir Erskine May gets bewildered between France's equality
and fearful troubles on the one hand, and the civilization of France on
the other, let us suggest to him that perhaps he is bewildered by his
data because he combines them ill. France has not exemplary disaster and
ruin as the fruits of equality, and at the same time, and independently
of this, an exemplary civilization. She has a large measure of happiness
and success as the fruits of equality, and she has a very large measure
of dangers and troubles as the fruits of something else.
We have more to do, however, than to help Sir Erskine May out of his
scrape about France. We have to see whether the considerations which we
have been employing may not be of use to us about England.
We shall not have much difficulty in admitting whatever good is to be
said of ourselves, and we will try not to be unfair by excluding all
that is not so favorable. Indeed, our less favorable side is the one
which we should be the most anxious to note, in order that we may mend
it. But we will begin with the good. Our people has energy and honesty
as its good characteristics. We have a strong sense for the chief power
in the life and progress of man,--the power of conduct. So far we speak
of the English people as a whole. Then we have a rich, refined, and
splendid aristocracy. And we have, according to Mr. Charles Sumner's
acute and true remark, a class of gentlemen, not of the nobility, but
well-bred, cultivated, and refined, larger than is to be found in any
other country. For these last we have Mr. Sumner's testimony. As to the
splendor of our aristocracy, all the world is agreed. Then we have a
middle class and a lower class; and they, after all, are the immense
bulk of the nation.
Let us see how the civilization of these classes appears to a Frenchman,
who has witnessed, in his own country, the considerable humanization of
these classes by equality. To such an observer our middle class divides
itself into a serious portion and a gay or rowdy portion; both are a
marvel to him. With the gay or rowdy portion we need not much concern
ourselves; we shall figure it to our minds sufficiently if we conceive
it as the source of that war-song produced in these recent days of
excitement:--
"We don't want to fight, but by jingo, if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men, and we're got the money
too."[469]
We may also partly judge its standard of life, and the needs of its
nature, by the modern English theatre, perhaps the most contemptible in
Europe. But the real strength of the English middle class is in its
serious portion. And of this a Frenchman, who was here some little time
ago as the correspondent, I think, of the _Siècle_ newspaper, and whose
letters were afterwards published in a volume, writes as follows. He had
been attending some of the Moody and Sankey[470] meetings, and he says:
"To understand the success of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, one must be
familiar with English manners, one must know the mind-deadening
influence of a narrow Biblism, one must have experienced the sense of
acute ennui, which the aspect and the frequentation of this great
division of English society produce in others, the want of elasticity
and the chronic ennui which characterize this class itself, petrified in
a narrow Protestantism and in a perpetual reading of the Bible."
You know the French;--a little more Biblism, one may take leave to say,
would do them no harm. But an audience like this--and here, as I said,
is the advantage of an audience like this--will have no difficulty in
admitting the amount of truth which there is in the Frenchman's picture.
It is the picture of a class which, driven by its sense for the power of
conduct, in the beginning of the seventeenth century entered,--as I have
more than once said, and as I may more than once have occasion in future
to say,--_entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon
its spirit there for two hundred years_.[471] They did not know, good
and earnest people as they were, that to the building up of human life
there belong all those other powers also,--the power of intellect and
knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners.
And something, by what they became, they gained, and the whole nation
with them; they deepened and fixed for this nation the sense of conduct.
But they created a type of life and manners, of which they themselves,
indeed, are slow to recognize the faults, but which is fatally condemned
by its hideousness, its immense ennui, and against which the instinct of
self-preservation in humanity rebels.
Partisans fight against facts in vain. Mr. Goldwin Smith,[472] a writer
of eloquence and power, although too prone to acerbity, is a partisan of
the Puritans, and of the nonconformists who are the special inheritors
of the Puritan tradition. He angrily resents the imputation upon that
Puritan type of life, by which the life of our serious middle class has
been formed, that it was doomed to hideousness, to immense ennui. He
protests that it had beauty, amenity, accomplishment. Let us go to
facts. Charles the First, who, with all his faults, had the just idea
that art and letters are great civilizers, made, as you know, a famous
collection of pictures,--our first National Gallery. It was, I suppose,
the best collection at that time north of the Alps. It contained nine
Raphaels, eleven Correggios, twenty-eight Titians. What became of that
collection? The journals of the House of Commons will tell you. There
you may see the Puritan Parliament disposing of this Whitehall or York
House collection as follows: "Ordered, that all such pictures and
statues there as are without any superstition, shall be forthwith
sold.... Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the
representation of the Second Person in the Trinity upon them, shall be
forthwith burnt. Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the
representation of the Virgin Mary upon them, shall be forthwith burnt."
There we have the weak side of our parliamentary government and our
serious middle class. We are incapable of sending Mr. Gladstone to be
tried at the Old Bailey because he proclaims his antipathy to Lord
Beaconsfield. A majority in our House of Commons is incapable of
hailing, with frantic laughter and applause, a string of indecent jests
against Christianity and its Founder. But we are not, or were not
incapable of producing a Parliament which burns or sells the
masterpieces of Italian art. And one may surely say of such a Puritan
Parliament, and of those who determine its line for it, that they had
not the spirit of beauty.
What shall we say of amenity? Milton was born a humanist, but the
Puritan temper, as we know, mastered him. There is nothing more unlovely
and unamiable than Milton the Puritan disputant. Some one answers his
_Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_. "I mean not," rejoins Milton, "to
dispute philosophy with this pork, who never read any." However, he does
reply to him, and throughout the reply Milton's great joke is, that his
adversary, who was anonymous, is a serving-man. "Finally, he winds up
his text with much doubt and trepidation; for it may be his trenchers
were not scraped, and that which never yet afforded corn of favor to his
noddle--the salt-cellar--was not rubbed; and therefore, in this haste,
easily granting that his answers fall foul upon each other, and praying
you would not think he writes as a prophet, but as a man, he runs to the
black jack, fills his flagon, spreads the table, and serves up
dinner."[473] There you have the same spirit of urbanity and amenity, as
much of it, and as little, as generally informs the religious
controversies of our Puritan middle class to this day.
But Mr. Goldwin Smith[474] insists, and picks out his own exemplar of
the Puritan type of life and manners; and even here let us follow him.
He picks out the most favorable specimen he can find,--Colonel
Hutchinson,[475] whose well-known memoirs, written by his widow, we have
all read with interest. "Lucy Hutchinson," says Mr. Goldwin Smith, "is
painting what she thought a perfect Puritan would be; and her picture
presents to us not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, but a
highly accomplished, refined, gallant, and most amiable, though
religious and seriously minded, gentleman." Let us, I say, in this
example of Mr. Goldwin Smith's own choosing, lay our finger upon the
points where this type deflects from the truly humane ideal.
Mrs. Hutchinson relates a story which gives us a good notion of what the
amiable and accomplished social intercourse, even of a picked Puritan
family, was. Her husband was governor of Nottingham. He had occasion,
she said, "to go and break up a private meeting in the cannoneer's
chamber"; and in the cannoneer's chamber "were found some notes
concerning pædobaptism,[476] which, being brought into the governor's
lodgings, his wife having perused them and compared them with the
Scriptures, found not what to say against the truths they asserted
concerning the mis-application of that ordinance to infants." Soon
afterwards she expects her confinement, and communicates the cannoneer's
doubts about pædobaptism to her husband. The fatal cannoneer makes a
breach in him too. "Then he bought and read all the eminent treatises on
both sides, which at that time came thick from the presses, and still
was cleared in the error of the pædobaptists." Finally, Mrs. Hutchinson
is confined. Then the governor "invited all the ministers to dinner, and
propounded his doubt and the ground thereof to them. None of them could
defend their practice with any satisfactory reason, but the tradition of
the Church from the primitive times, and their main buckler of federal
holiness, which Tombs and Denne had excellently overthrown. He and his
wife then, professing themselves unsatisfied, desired their opinions."
With the opinions I will not trouble you, but hasten to the result:
"Whereupon that infant was not baptised."
No doubt to a large division of English society at this very day, that
sort of dinner and discussion, and indeed, the whole manner of life and
conversation here suggested by Mrs. Hutchinson's narrative, will seem
both natural and amiable, and such as to meet the needs of man as a
religious and social creature. You know the conversation which reigns in
thousands of middle-class families at this hour, about nunneries,
teetotalism, the confessional, eternal punishment, ritualism,
disestablishment. It goes wherever the class goes which is moulded on
the Puritan type of life. In the long winter evenings of Toronto Mr.
Goldwin Smith has had, probably, abundant experience of it. What is its
enemy? The instinct of self-preservation in humanity. Men make crude
types and try to impose them, but to no purpose. "_L'homme s'agite, Dieu
le mene_,"[477] says Bossuet. "There are many devices in a man's heart;
nevertheless the counsel of the Eternal, that shall stand."[478] Those
who offer us the Puritan type of life offer us a religion not true, the
claims of intellect and knowledge not satisfied, the claim of beauty not
satisfied, the claim of manners not satisfied. In its strong sense for
conduct that life touches truth; but its other imperfections hinder it
from employing even this sense aright. The type mastered our nation for
a time. Then came the reaction. The nation said: "This type, at any
rate, is amiss; we are not going to be all like _that!_" The type
retired into our middle class, and fortified itself there. It seeks to
endure, to emerge, to deny its own imperfections, to impose itself
again;--impossible! If we continue to live, we must outgrow it. The very
class in which it is rooted, our middle class, will have to acknowledge
the type's inadequacy, will have to acknowledge the hideousness, the
immense ennui of the life which this type has created, will have to
transform itself thoroughly. It will have to admit the large part of
truth which there is in the criticisms of our Frenchman, whom we have
too long forgotten.
After our middle class he turns his attention to our lower class. And of
the lower and larger portion of this, the portion not bordering on the
middle class and sharing its faults, he says: "I consider this multitude
to be absolutely devoid, not only of political principles, but even of
the most simple notions of good and evil. Certainly it does not appeal,
this mob, to the principles of '89, which you English make game of; it
does not insist on the rights of man; what it wants is beer, gin, and
_fun_."[479]
That is a description of what Mr. Bright[480] would call the residuum,
only our author seems to think the residuum a very large body. And its
condition strikes him with amazement and horror. And surely well it may.
Let us recall Mr. Hamerton's account of the most illiterate class in
France; what an amount of civilization they have notwithstanding! And
this is always to be understood, in hearing or reading a Frenchman's
praise of England. He envies our liberty, our public spirit, our trade,
our stability. But there is always a reserve in his mind. He never means
for a moment that he would like to change with us. Life seems to him so
much better a thing in France for so many more people, that, in spite of
the fearful troubles of France, it is best to be a Frenchman. A
Frenchman might agree with Mr. Cobden,[481] that life is good in England
for those people who have at least £5000 a year. But the civilization of
that immense majority who have not £5000 a year, or, £500, or even
£100,--of our middle and lower class,--seems to him too deplorable.
And now what has this condition of our middle and lower class to tell us
about equality? How is it, must we not ask, how is it that, being
without fearful troubles, having so many achievements to show and so
much success, having as a nation a deep sense for conduct, having signal
energy and honesty, having a splendid aristocracy, having an
exceptionally large class of gentlemen, we are yet so little civilized?
How is it that our middle and lower classes, in spite of the individuals
among them who are raised by happy gifts of nature to a more humane
life, in spite of the seriousness of the middle class, in spite of the
honesty and power of true work, the _virtus verusque labor_, which are
to be found in abundance throughout the lower, do yet present, as a
whole, the characters which we have seen?
And really it seems as if the current of our discourse carried us of
itself to but one conclusion. It seems as if we could not avoid
concluding, that just as France owes her fearful troubles to other
things and her civilizedness to equality, so we owe our immunity from
fearful troubles to other things, and our uncivilizedness to inequality.
"Knowledge is easy," says the wise man, "to him that understandeth";[482]
easy, he means, to him who will use his mind simply and rationally, and
not to make him think he can know what he cannot, or to maintain, _per
fas et nefas_, a false thesis with which he fancies his interests to be
bound up. And to him who will use his mind as the wise man recommends,
surely it is easy to see that our shortcomings in civilization are due
to our inequality; or, in other words, that the great inequality of
classes and property, which came to us from the Middle Age and which we
maintain because we have the religion of inequality, that this
constitution of things, I say, has the natural and necessary effect,
under present circumstances, of materializing our upper class,
vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.[483] And
this is to fail in civilization.
For only just look how the facts combine themselves. I have said little
as yet about our aristocratic class, except that it is splendid. Yet
these, "our often very unhappy brethren," as Burke calls them, are by no
means matter for nothing but ecstasy. Our charity ought certainly, Burke
says, to "extend a due and anxious sensation of pity to the distresses
of the miserable great." Burke's extremely strong language about their
miseries and defects I will not quote. For my part, I am always disposed
to marvel that human beings, in a position so false, should be so good
as these are. Their reason for existing was to serve as a number of
centres in a world disintegrated after the ruin of the Roman Empire, and
slowly re-constituting itself. Numerous centres of material force were
needed, and these a feudal aristocracy supplied. Their large and
hereditary estates served this public end. The owners had a positive
function, for which their estates were essential. In our modern world
the function is gone; and the great estates, with an infinitely
multiplied power of ministering to mere pleasure and indulgence, remain.
The energy and honesty of our race does not leave itself without witness
in this class, and nowhere are there more conspicuous examples of
individuals raised by happy gifts of nature far above their fellows and
their circumstances. For distinction of all kinds this class has an
esteem. Everything which succeeds they tend to welcome, to win over, to
put on their side; genius may generally make, if it will, not bad terms
for itself with them. But the total result of the class, its effect on
society at large and on national progress, are what we must regard. And
on the whole, with no necessary function to fulfil, never conversant
with life as it really is, tempted, flattered, and spoiled from
childhood to old age, our aristocratic class is inevitably materialized,
and the more so the more the development of industry and ingenuity
augments the means of luxury. Every one can see how bad is the action of
such an aristocracy upon the class of newly enriched people, whose great
danger is a materialistic ideal, just because it is the ideal they can
easiest comprehend. Nor is the mischief of this action now compensated
by signal services of a public kind. Turn even to that sphere which
aristocracies think specially their own, and where they have under other
circumstances been really effective,--the sphere of politics. When there
is need, as now, for any large forecast of the course of human affairs,
for an acquaintance with the ideas which in the end sway mankind, and
for an estimate of their power, aristocracies are out of their element,
and materialized aristocracies most of all. In the immense spiritual
movement of our day, the English aristocracy, as I have elsewhere said,
always reminds me of Pilate confronting the phenomenon of Christianity.
Nor can a materialized class have any serious and fruitful sense for the
power of beauty. They may imagine themselves to be in pursuit of beauty;
but how often, alas, does the pursuit come to little more than dabbling
a little in what they are pleased to call art, and making a great deal
of what they are pleased to call love!
Let us return to their merits. For the power of manners an aristocratic
class, whether materialized or not, will always, from its circumstances,
have a strong sense. And although for this power of social life and
manners, so important to civilization, our English race has no special
natural turn, in our aristocracy this power emerges and marks them. When
the day of general humanization comes, they will have fixed the standard
of manners. The English simplicity, too, makes the best of the English
aristocracy more frank and natural than the best of the like class
anywhere else, and even the worst of them it makes free from the
incredible fatuities and absurdities of the worst. Then the sense of
conduct they share with their countrymen at large. In no class has it
such trials to undergo; in none is it more often and more grievously
overborne. But really the right comment on this is the comment of
Pepys[484] upon the evil courses of Charles the Second and the Duke of
York and the court of that day: "At all which I am sorry; but it is the
effect of idleness, and having nothing else to employ their great
spirits upon."
Heaven forbid that I should speak in dispraise of that unique and most
English class which Mr. Charles Sumner extols--the large class of
gentlemen, not of the landed class or of the nobility, but cultivated
and refined. They are a seemly product of the energy and of the power to
rise in our race. Without, in general, rank and splendor and wealth and
luxury to polish them, they have made their own the high standard of
life and manners of an aristocratic and refined class. Not having all
the dissipations and distractions of this class, they are much more
seriously alive to the power of intellect and knowledge, to the power of
beauty. The sense of conduct, too, meets with fewer trials in this
class. To some extent, however, their contiguousness to the aristocratic
class has now the effect of materializing them, as it does the class of
newly enriched people. The most palpable action is on the young amongst
them, and on their standard of life and enjoyment. But in general, for
this whole class, established facts, the materialism which they see
regnant, too much block their mental horizon, and limit the
possibilities of things to them. They are deficient in openness and
flexibility of mind, in free play of ideas, in faith and ardor.
Civilized they are, but they are not much of a civilizing force; they
are somehow bounded and ineffective.
So on the middle class they produce singularly little effect. What the
middle class sees is that splendid piece of materialism, the
aristocratic class, with a wealth and luxury utterly out of their reach,
with a standard of social life and manners, the offspring of that wealth
and luxury, seeming utterly out of their reach also. And thus they are
thrown back upon themselves--upon a defective type of religion, a narrow
range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low
standard of manners. And the lower class see before them the
aristocratic class, and its civilization, such as it is, even infinitely
more out of _their_ reach than out of that of the middle class; while
the life of the middle class, with its unlovely types of religion,
thought, beauty, and manners, has naturally, in general, no great
attractions for them either. And so they, too, are thrown back upon
themselves; upon their beer, their gin, and their _fun_. Now, then, you
will understand what I meant by saying that our inequality materializes
our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower.
And the greater the inequality the more marked is its bad action upon
the middle and lower classes. In Scotland the landed aristocracy fills
the scene, as is well known, still more than in England; the other
classes are more squeezed back and effaced. And the social civilization
of the lower middle class and of the poorest class, in Scotland, is an
example of the consequences. Compared with the same class even in
England, the Scottish lower middle class is most visibly, to vary Mr.
Charles Sumner's phrase, _less_ well-bred, _less_ careful in personal
habits and in social conventions, _less_ refined. Let any one who doubts
it go, after issuing from the aristocratic solitudes which possess Loch
Lomond, let him go and observe the shopkeepers and the middle class in
Dumbarton, and Greenock, and Gourock, and the places along the mouth of
the Clyde. And for the poorest class, who that has seen it can ever
forget the hardly human horror, the abjection and uncivilizedness of
Glasgow?