We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.
We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man
in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues
that he cannot. And the more we approach the problems of human history
with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we
shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind. The hypocrites shall not
deceive us into thinking them saints; but neither shall they deceive us
into thinking them hypocrites. And an increasing number of cases will
crowd into our field of inquiry, cases in which there is really no
question of hypocrisy at all, cases in which people were so ingenuous
that they seemed absurd, and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous.
There is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy. It is
always urged against the religious in the past, as a point of
inconsistency and duplicity, that they combined a profession of almost
crawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and
considerable triumph in attaining it. It is felt as a piece of humbug,
that a man should be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable
sinner, and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France.
But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between
the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there
is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The
truth is that there are no things for which men will make such
herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.
There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained
every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there
never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to
have it. The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies
in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled. For with the
removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly
released for incredible voyages. If we ask a sane man how much he
merits, his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously. It is
doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth. But if you ask him what
he can conquer—he can conquer the stars. Thus comes the thing called
Romance, a purely Christian product. A man cannot deserve adventures;
he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs. The mediaeval Europe which
asserted humility gained Romance; the civilization which gained Romance
has gained the habitable globe. How different the Pagan and Stoical
feeling was from this has been admirably expressed in a famous
quotation. Addison makes the great Stoic say—
“’Tis not in mortals to command success;
But we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”
But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is in every
lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with European
adventure, is quite opposite. ’Tis not in mortals to deserve success.
But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll obtain it.
And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready
for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that
every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and
mysterious. Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be
a vice. Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. It is
mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a
certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity. Humility will
always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold; pride is that which
refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much. In a
word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is
too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue.
Humility is not merely too good for this world; it is too practical for
this world; I had almost said it is too worldly for this world.
The instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humility of
the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as well as a
modern one. Men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who
is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down
temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old
gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby
and follow his harmless old nose. When a man splits a grain of sand and
the universe is turned upside down in consequence, it is difficult to
realize that to the man who did it, the splitting of the grain is the
great affair, and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one. It is
hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a
new earth in the light of a by-product. But undoubtedly it was to this
almost eerie innocence of the intellect that the great men of the great
scientific period, which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous
power and triumph. If they had brought the heavens down like a house of
cards their plea was not even that they had done it on principle; their
quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident. Whenever
there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done, there
was a good ground for attacking them; but so long as they were wholly
humble, they were wholly victorious. There were possible answers to
Huxley; there was no answer possible to Darwin. He was convincing
because of his unconsciousness; one might almost say because of his
dulness. This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the
world of science. Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as
the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of
their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of
the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk
of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the
discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English, they
are beginning to be soft about their own hardness. They are becoming
conscious of their own strength—that is, they are growing weaker. But
one purely modern man has emerged in the strictly modern decades who
does carry into our world the clear personal simplicity of the old
world of science. One man of genius we have who is an artist, but who
was a man of science, and who seems to be marked above all things with
this great scientific humility. I mean Mr. H. G. Wells. And in his
case, as in the others above spoken of, there must be a great
preliminary difficulty in convincing the ordinary person that such a
virtue is predicable of such a man. Mr. Wells began his literary work
with violent visions—visions of the last pangs of this planet; can it
be that a man who begins with violent visions is humble? He went on to
wilder and wilder stories about carving beasts into men and shooting
angels like birds. Is the man who shoots angels and carves beasts into
men humble? Since then he has done something bolder than either of
these blasphemies; he has prophesied the political future of all men;
prophesied it with aggressive authority and a ringing decision of
detail. Is the prophet of the future of all men humble? It will indeed
be difficult, in the present condition of current thought about such
things as pride and humility, to answer the query of how a man can be
humble who does such big things and such bold things. For the only
answer is the answer which I gave at the beginning of this essay. It
is the humble man who does the big things. It is the humble man who
does the bold things. It is the humble man who has the sensational
sights vouchsafed to him, and this for three obvious reasons: first,
that he strains his eyes more than any other men to see them; second,
that he is more overwhelmed and uplifted with them when they come;
third, that he records them more exactly and sincerely and with less
adulteration from his more commonplace and more conceited everyday
self. Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected—that
is, most romantic. Adventures are to the shy: in this sense
adventures are to the unadventurous.
Now, this arresting, mental humility in Mr. H. G. Wells may be, like a
great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult to
illustrate by examples, but if I were asked for an example of it, I
should have no difficulty about which example to begin with. The most
interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he is the only one of
his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can
lie awake at night and hear him grow. Of this growth the most evident
manifestation is indeed a gradual change of opinions; but it is no mere
change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to
another like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous
advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But
the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the
fact that it has been upon the whole an advance from more startling
opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an
advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This
fact fixes Mr. Wells’s honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr.
Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be
so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the
other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments
for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except for
something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted it in favour of
the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated
or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class, a class of
engineers. He has abandoned the sensational theory with the same
honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he
thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the
most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion
that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and
wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand
people and tell them that twice two is four.
Mr. H. G. Wells exists at present in a gay and exhilarating progress of
conservativism. He is finding out more and more that conventions,
though silent, are alive. As good an example as any of this humility
and sanity of his may be found in his change of view on the subject of
science and marriage. He once held, I believe, the opinion which some
singular sociologists still hold, that human creatures could
successfully be paired and bred after the manner of dogs or horses. He
no longer holds that view. Not only does he no longer hold that view,
but he has written about it in “Mankind in the Making” with such
smashing sense and humour, that I find it difficult to believe that
anybody else can hold it either. It is true that his chief objection to
the proposal is that it is physically impossible, which seems to me a
very slight objection, and almost negligible compared with the others.
The one objection to scientific marriage which is worthy of final
attention is simply that such a thing could only be imposed on
unthinkable slaves and cowards. I do not know whether the scientific
marriage-mongers are right (as they say) or wrong (as Mr. Wells says)
in saying that medical supervision would produce strong and healthy
men. I am only certain that if it did, the first act of the strong and
healthy men would be to smash the medical supervision.
The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it
connects the idea of health with the idea of care. What has health to
do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In special and
abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. When we are peculiarly
unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But
even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless. If
we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men, and they
ought to be told to be careful. But when we are sociologists we are
addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity. And humanity
ought to be told to be recklessness itself. For all the fundamental
functions of a healthy man ought emphatically to be performed with
pleasure and for pleasure; they emphatically ought not to be performed
with precaution or for precaution. A man ought to eat because he has a
good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a body to
sustain. A man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but
because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for
their own sake. And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love,
and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated. The
food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking
about his tissues. The exercise will really get him into training so
long as he is thinking about something else. And the marriage will
really stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if
it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement. It is the
first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as
necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be
careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness,
or anything that can be managed with care. But in the name of all
sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as
marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail.
Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower
scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually
ought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected with the
great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not with the
human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some
such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in
his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow
for the stuff or material of men. In his new Utopia he says, for
instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in
original sin. If he had begun with the human soul—that is, if he had
begun on himself—he would have found original sin almost the first
thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter
shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the
mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or
ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take
the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then
give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They
first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are
very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by
motor-car or balloon. And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells’s
indifference to the human psychology can be found in his
cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic
boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a
world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to
occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we
should still make war on it to the end of the world. For if we admit
that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in
thinking there will not be varieties in government? The fact is very
simple. Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being
good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible
to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is
impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were
no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a
strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tend to union
only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. You can often
get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from
fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest
thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism
of the great European civilization. It is also, incidentally, the
meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.
But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells’s philosophy is a somewhat
deeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining manner in the
introductory part of the new Utopia. His philosophy in some sense
amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself. At least,
he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we
can rest with a final mental satisfaction. It will be both clearer,
however, and more amusing to quote Mr. Wells himself.
He says, “Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the
mind of a pedant).... Being indeed!—there is no being, but a
universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back on
truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals.” Mr. Wells
says, again, “There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from
weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our
hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities
below.” Now, when Mr. Wells says things like this, I speak with all
respect when I say that he does not observe an evident mental
distinction. It cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we
know. For if that were so we should not know it all and should not call
it knowledge. Our mental state may be very different from that of
somebody else some thousands of years back; but it cannot be entirely
different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference. Mr.
Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxes that
sit by the springs of truth. He must surely see that the fact of two
things being different implies that they are similar. The hare and the
tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree in
the quality of motion. The swiftest hare cannot be swifter than an
isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. When we say the hare moves
faster, we say that the tortoise moves. And when we say of a thing that
it moves, we say, without need of other words, that there are things
that do not move. And even in the act of saying that things change, we
say that there is something unchangeable.
But certainly the best example of Mr. Wells’s fallacy can be found in
the example which he himself chooses. It is quite true that we see a
dim light which, compared with a darker thing, is light, but which,
compared with a stronger light, is darkness. But the quality of light
remains the same thing, or else we should not call it a stronger light
or recognize it as such. If the character of light were not fixed in
the mind, we should be quite as likely to call a denser shadow a
stronger light, or vice versa If the character of light became even for
an instant unfixed, if it became even by a hair’s-breadth doubtful, if,
for example, there crept into our idea of light some vague idea of
blueness, then in that flash we have become doubtful whether the new
light has more light or less. In brief, the progress may be as varying
as a cloud, but the direction must be as rigid as a French road. North
and South are relative in the sense that I am North of Bournemouth and
South of Spitzbergen. But if there be any doubt of the position of the
North Pole, there is in equal degree a doubt of whether I am South of
Spitzbergen at all. The absolute idea of light may be practically
unattainable. We may not be able to procure pure light. We may not be
able to get to the North Pole. But because the North Pole is
unattainable, it does not follow that it is indefinable. And it is only
because the North Pole is not indefinable that we can make a
satisfactory map of Brighton and Worthing.
In other words, Plato turned his face to truth but his back on Mr. H.
G. Wells, when he turned to his museum of specified ideals. It is
precisely here that Plato shows his sense. It is not true that
everything changes; the things that change are all the manifest and
material things. There is something that does not change; and that is
precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea. Mr. Wells says
truly enough, that a thing which we have seen in one connection as dark
we may see in another connection as light. But the thing common to both
incidents is the mere idea of light—which we have not seen at all.
Mr. Wells might grow taller and taller for unending aeons till his head
was higher than the loneliest star. I can imagine his writing a good
novel about it. In that case he would see the trees first as tall
things and then as short things; he would see the clouds first as high
and then as low. But there would remain with him through the ages in
that starry loneliness the idea of tallness; he would have in the awful
spaces for companion and comfort the definite conception that he was
growing taller and not (for instance) growing fatter.
And now it comes to my mind that Mr. H. G. Wells actually has written a
very delightful romance about men growing as tall as trees; and that
here, again, he seems to me to have been a victim of this vague
relativism. “The Food of the Gods” is, like Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play,
in essence a study of the Superman idea. And it lies, I think, even
through the veil of a half-pantomimic allegory, open to the same
intellectual attack. We cannot be expected to have any regard for a
great creature if he does not in any manner conform to our standards.
For unless he passes our standard of greatness we cannot even call him
great. Nietszche summed up all that is interesting in the Superman
idea when he said, “Man is a thing which has to be surpassed.” But the
very word “surpass” implies the existence of a standard common to us
and the thing surpassing us. If the Superman is more manly than men
are, of course they will ultimately deify him, even if they happen to
kill him first. But if he is simply more supermanly, they may be quite
indifferent to him as they would be to another seemingly aimless
monstrosity. He must submit to our test even in order to overawe us.
Mere force or size even is a standard; but that alone will never make
men think a man their superior. Giants, as in the wise old
fairy-tales, are vermin. Supermen, if not good men, are vermin.
“The Food of the Gods” is the tale of “Jack the Giant-Killer” told from
the point of view of the giant. This has not, I think, been done
before in literature; but I have little doubt that the psychological
substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubt that the giant
whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely
enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished
to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not
unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would
point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than
one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment,
enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to
correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the
enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head and one
man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the
single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the
giant was a particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was
whether he was a good giant—that is, a giant who was any good to us.
What were the giant’s religious views; what his views on politics and
the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children—or fond of them
only in a dark and sinister sense? To use a fine phrase for emotional
sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him
up with a sword in order to find out. The old and correct story of Jack
the Giant-Killer is simply the whole story of man; if it were
understood we should need no Bibles or histories. But the modern world
in particular does not seem to understand it at all. The modern world,
like Mr. Wells is on the side of the giants; the safest place, and
therefore the meanest and the most prosaic. The modern world, when it
praises its little Caesars, talks of being strong and brave: but it
does not seem to see the eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of
these ideas. The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave;
and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted,
in time of doubt, to be strong. The only way in which a giant could
really keep himself in training against the inevitable Jack would be by
continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself. That is
by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a Jack. Thus that sympathy with
the small or the defeated as such, with which we Liberals and
Nationalists have been often reproached, is not a useless
sentimentalism at all, as Mr. Wells and his friends fancy. It is the
first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in
the strongest school. Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity
more good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like
dragons. If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight
him; but in that case, why not call him the Saint? But if he is merely
stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do not
care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for
all the strength we have. If we are weaker than he, that is no reason
why we should be weaker than ourselves. If we are not tall enough to
touch the giant’s knees, that is no reason why we should become shorter
by falling on our own. But that is at bottom the meaning of all modern
hero-worship and celebration of the Strong Man, the Caesar the
Superman. That he may be something more than man, we must be something
less.
Doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this. But the
old hero was a being who, like Achilles, was more human than humanity
itself. Nietzsche’s Superman is cold and friendless. Achilles is so
foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of
his bereavement. Mr. Shaw’s sad Caesar says in his desolate pride, “He
who has never hoped can never despair.” The Man-God of old answers from
his awful hill, “Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?” A great man is
not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so
strong that he feels more. And when Nietszche says, “A new commandment
I give to you, ‘be hard,’” he is really saying, “A new commandment I
give to you, ‘be dead.’” Sensibility is the definition of life.
I recur for a last word to Jack the Giant-Killer. I have dwelt on this
matter of Mr. Wells and the giants, not because it is specially
prominent in his mind; I know that the Superman does not bulk so large
in his cosmos as in that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have dwelt on it for
the opposite reason; because this heresy of immoral hero-worship has
taken, I think, a slighter hold of him, and may perhaps still be
prevented from perverting one of the best thinkers of the day. In the
course of “The New Utopia” Mr. Wells makes more than one admiring
allusion to Mr. W. E. Henley. That clever and unhappy man lived in
admiration of a vague violence, and was always going back to rude old
tales and rude old ballads, to strong and primitive literatures, to
find the praise of strength and the justification of tyranny. But he
could not find it. It is not there. The primitive literature is shown
in the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is all
in praise of the weak. The rude old tales are as tender to minorities
as any modern political idealist. The rude old ballads are as
sentimentally concerned for the under-dog as the Aborigines Protection
Society. When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks
and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only
two kinds of songs. The first was a rejoicing that the weak had
conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for
once in a way, conquered the weak. For this defiance of the statu quo,
this constant effort to alter the existing balance, this premature
challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature and inmost secret of the
psychological adventure which is called man. It is his strength to
disdain strength. The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the
only real hope of mankind. In the coarsest ballads of the greenwood men
are admired most when they defy, not only the king, but what is more to
the point, the hero. The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of Superman,
that moment the chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor
tinker whom he thought to thrust aside. And the chivalrous chronicler
makes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration. This
magnanimity is not a product of modern humanitarianism; it is not a
product of anything to do with peace. This magnanimity is merely one of
the lost arts of war. The Henleyites call for a sturdy and fighting
England, and they go back to the fierce old stories of the sturdy and
fighting English. And the thing that they find written across that
fierce old literature everywhere, is “the policy of Majuba.”