Odd ideas are entertained in our time about the real nature of the
doctrine of human fraternity. The real doctrine is something which we
do not, with all our modern humanitarianism, very clearly understand,
much less very closely practise. There is nothing, for instance,
particularly undemocratic about kicking your butler downstairs. It may
be wrong, but it is not unfraternal. In a certain sense, the blow or
kick may be considered as a confession of equality: you are meeting
your butler body to body; you are almost according him the privilege of
the duel. There is nothing, undemocratic, though there may be
something unreasonable, in expecting a great deal from the butler, and
being filled with a kind of frenzy of surprise when he falls short of
the divine stature. The thing which is really undemocratic and
unfraternal is not to expect the butler to be more or less divine. The
thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is to say, as so
many modern humanitarians say, “Of course one must make allowances for
those on a lower plane.” All things considered indeed, it may be said,
without undue exaggeration, that the really undemocratic and
unfraternal thing is the common practice of not kicking the butler
downstairs.
It is only because such a vast section of the modern world is out of
sympathy with the serious democratic sentiment that this statement will
seem to many to be lacking in seriousness. Democracy is not
philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is
not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on
reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. It
does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is
so sublime. It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a
slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of
the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.
Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a
hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely
no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness
for the post. Rational despotism—that is, selective despotism—is
always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man
misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect
for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic, because
it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that
which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man
as despot because he is suitable. For that means that men choose a
representative, not because he represents them, but because he does
not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV. because
they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an
ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man
because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great
men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of
great men until the time when all other men are small.
Hereditary despotism is, then, in essence and sentiment democratic
because it chooses from mankind at random. If it does not declare that
every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing; it
declares that any man may rule. Hereditary aristocracy is a far worse
and more dangerous thing, because the numbers and multiplicity of an
aristocracy make it sometimes possible for it to figure as an
aristocracy of intellect. Some of its members will presumably have
brains, and thus they, at any rate, will be an intellectual aristocracy
within the social one. They will rule the aristocracy by virtue of
their intellect, and they will rule the country by virtue of their
aristocracy. Thus a double falsity will be set up, and millions of the
images of God, who, fortunately for their wives and families, are
neither gentlemen nor clever men, will be represented by a man like Mr.
Balfour or Mr. Wyndham, because he is too gentlemanly to be called
merely clever, and just too clever to be called merely a gentleman. But
even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit, by a sort of accident, from
time to time some of the basically democratic quality which belongs to
a hereditary despotism. It is amusing to think how much conservative
ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House of Lords by men
who were desperately endeavouring to prove that the House of Lords
consisted of clever men. There is one really good defence of the House
of Lords, though admirers of the peerage are strangely coy about using
it; and that is, that the House of Lords, in its full and proper
strength, consists of stupid men. It really would be a plausible
defence of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the
clever men in the Commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in
the last resort to be checked by the average man in the Lords, who owed
their power to accident. Of course, there would be many answers to such
a contention, as, for instance, that the House of Lords is largely no
longer a House of Lords, but a House of tradesmen and financiers, or
that the bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote, and so leave the
chamber to the prigs and the specialists and the mad old gentlemen with
hobbies. But on some occasions the House of Lords, even under all
these disadvantages, is in some sense representative. When all the
peers flocked together to vote against Mr. Gladstone’s second Home Rule
Bill, for instance, those who said that the peers represented the
English people, were perfectly right. All those dear old men who
happened to be born peers were at that moment, and upon that question,
the precise counterpart of all the dear old men who happened to be born
paupers or middle-class gentlemen. That mob of peers did really
represent the English people—that is to say, it was honest, ignorant,
vaguely excited, almost unanimous, and obviously wrong. Of course,
rational democracy is better as an expression of the public will than
the haphazard hereditary method. While we are about having any kind of
democracy, let it be rational democracy. But if we are to have any
kind of oligarchy, let it be irrational oligarchy. Then at least we
shall be ruled by men.
But the thing which is really required for the proper working of
democracy is not merely the democratic system, or even the democratic
philosophy, but the democratic emotion. The democratic emotion, like
most elementary and indispensable things, is a thing difficult to
describe at any time. But it is peculiarly difficult to describe it in
our enlightened age, for the simple reason that it is peculiarly
difficult to find it. It is a certain instinctive attitude which feels
the things in which all men agree to be unspeakably important, and all
the things in which they differ (such as mere brains) to be almost
unspeakably unimportant. The nearest approach to it in our ordinary
life would be the promptitude with which we should consider mere
humanity in any circumstance of shock or death. We should say, after a
somewhat disturbing discovery, “There is a dead man under the sofa.”
We should not be likely to say, “There is a dead man of considerable
personal refinement under the sofa.” We should say, “A woman has fallen
into the water.” We should not say, “A highly educated woman has
fallen into the water.” Nobody would say, “There are the remains of a
clear thinker in your back garden.” Nobody would say, “Unless you hurry
up and stop him, a man with a very fine ear for music will have jumped
off that cliff.” But this emotion, which all of us have in connection
with such things as birth and death, is to some people native and
constant at all ordinary times and in all ordinary places. It was
native to St. Francis of Assisi. It was native to Walt Whitman. In
this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected, perhaps, to
pervade a whole commonwealth or a whole civilization; but one
commonwealth may have it much more than another commonwealth, one
civilization much more than another civilization. No community,
perhaps, ever had it so much as the early Franciscans. No community,
perhaps, ever had it so little as ours.
Everything in our age has, when carefully examined, this fundamentally
undemocratic quality. In religion and morals we should admit, in the
abstract, that the sins of the educated classes were as great as, or
perhaps greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant. But in
practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is
that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the
ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the
educated are sins at all. We are always talking about the sin of
intemperate drinking, because it is quite obvious that the poor have it
more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such
thing as the sin of pride, because it would be quite obvious that the
rich have it more than the poor. We are always ready to make a saint or
prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little
kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or
prophet was something quite different. The mediaeval saint or prophet
was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little
kindly advice to the educated. The old tyrants had enough insolence to
despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them.
It was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that
admonished the gentleman. And just as we are undemocratic in faith and
morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude in such matters,
undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics. It is a sufficient
proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are
always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats,
we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the
governing class is always saying to itself, “What laws shall we make?”
In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, “What laws can
we obey?” A purely democratic state perhaps there has never been. But
even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every
feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all
probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for
breaking a sumptuary law. His head might be cut off for high treason.
But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed
class, but not the governing. We have public-house licensing laws, but
not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity
and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and
hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy—that is,
against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a
rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge. But we have no laws
against heresy—that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the
whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be
likely to be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not that it
necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of
sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the
hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never
suffer. Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad,
they become equally frivolous. The case against the governing class of
modern England is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like, you
may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. The case
against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they
always omit themselves.
We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts
to “raise” the poor. We are undemocratic in our government, as is
proved by our innocent attempt to govern them well. But above all we
are undemocratic in our literature, as is proved by the torrent of
novels about the poor and serious studies of the poor which pour from
our publishers every month. And the more “modern” the book is the more
certain it is to be devoid of democratic sentiment.
A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple
and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern
fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists
and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an
alligator. There is no more need to study the psychology of poverty
than to study the psychology of bad temper, or the psychology of
vanity, or the psychology of animal spirits. A man ought to know
something of the emotions of an insulted man, not by being insulted,
but simply by being a man. And he ought to know something of the
emotions of a poor man, not by being poor, but simply by being a man.
Therefore, in any writer who is describing poverty, my first objection
to him will be that he has studied his subject. A democrat would have
imagined it.
A great many hard things have been said about religious slumming and
political or social slumming, but surely the most despicable of all is
artistic slumming. The religious teacher is at least supposed to be
interested in the costermonger because he is a man; the politician is
in some dim and perverted sense interested in the costermonger because
he is a citizen; it is only the wretched writer who is interested in
the costermonger merely because he is a costermonger. Nevertheless, so
long as he is merely seeking impressions, or in other words copy, his
trade, though dull, is honest. But when he endeavours to represent that
he is describing the spiritual core of a costermonger, his dim vices
and his delicate virtues, then we must object that his claim is
preposterous; we must remind him that he is a journalist and nothing
else. He has far less psychological authority even than the foolish
missionary. For he is in the literal and derivative sense a journalist,
while the missionary is an eternalist. The missionary at least
pretends to have a version of the man’s lot for all time; the
journalist only pretends to have a version of it from day to day. The
missionary comes to tell the poor man that he is in the same condition
with all men. The journalist comes to tell other people how different
the poor man is from everybody else.
If the modern novels about the slums, such as novels of Mr. Arthur
Morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maugham, are
intended to be sensational, I can only say that that is a noble and
reasonable object, and that they attain it. A sensation, a shock to
the imagination, like the contact with cold water, is always a good and
exhilarating thing; and, undoubtedly, men will always seek this
sensation (among other forms) in the form of the study of the strange
antics of remote or alien peoples. In the twelfth century men obtained
this sensation by reading about dog-headed men in Africa. In the
twentieth century they obtained it by reading about pig-headed Boers in
Africa. The men of the twentieth century were certainly, it must be
admitted, somewhat the more credulous of the two. For it is not
recorded of the men in the twelfth century that they organized a
sanguinary crusade solely for the purpose of altering the singular
formation of the heads of the Africans. But it may be, and it may even
legitimately be, that since all these monsters have faded from the
popular mythology, it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of
the horrible and hairy East-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful
and childlike wonder at external peculiarities. But the Middle Ages
(with a great deal more common sense than it would now be fashionable
to admit) regarded natural history at bottom rather as a kind of joke;
they regarded the soul as very important. Hence, while they had a
natural history of dog-headed men, they did not profess to have a
psychology of dog-headed men. They did not profess to mirror the mind
of a dog-headed man, to share his tenderest secrets, or mount with his
most celestial musings. They did not write novels about the semi-canine
creature, attributing to him all the oldest morbidities and all the
newest fads. It is permissible to present men as monsters if we wish to
make the reader jump; and to make anybody jump is always a Christian
act. But it is not permissible to present men as regarding themselves
as monsters, or as making themselves jump. To summarize, our slum
fiction is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction; it is not defensible
as spiritual fact.
One enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality. The men who
write it, and the men who read it, are men of the middle classes or the
upper classes; at least, of those who are loosely termed the educated
classes. Hence, the fact that it is the life as the refined man sees
it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man lives it.
Rich men write stories about poor men, and describe them as speaking
with a coarse, or heavy, or husky enunciation. But if poor men wrote
novels about you or me they would describe us as speaking with some
absurd shrill and affected voice, such as we only hear from a duchess
in a three-act farce. The slum novelist gains his whole effect by the
fact that some detail is strange to the reader; but that detail by the
nature of the case cannot be strange in itself. It cannot be strange to
the soul which he is professing to study. The slum novelist gains his
effects by describing the same grey mist as draping the dingy factory
and the dingy tavern. But to the man he is supposed to be studying
there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the
tavern that there is to a middle-class man between a late night at the
office and a supper at Pagani’s. The slum novelist is content with
pointing out that to the eye of his particular class a pickaxe looks
dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. But the man he is supposed to be
studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the
difference between a ledger and an edition de luxe. The chiaroscuro of
the life is inevitably lost; for to us the high lights and the shadows
are a light grey. But the high lights and the shadows are not a light
grey in that life any more than in any other. The kind of man who
could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind
of man who could share them. In short, these books are not a record of
the psychology of poverty. They are a record of the psychology of
wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a
description of the state of the slums. They are only a very dark and
dreadful description of the state of the slummers. One might give
innumerable examples of the essentially unsympathetic and unpopular
quality of these realistic writers. But perhaps the simplest and most
obvious example with which we could conclude is the mere fact that
these writers are realistic. The poor have many other vices, but, at
least, they are never realistic. The poor are melodramatic and romantic
in grain; the poor all believe in high moral platitudes and copy-book
maxims; probably this is the ultimate meaning of the great saying,
“Blessed are the poor.” Blessed are the poor, for they are always
making life, or trying to make life like an Adelphi play. Some
innocent educationalists and philanthropists (for even philanthropists
can be innocent) have expressed a grave astonishment that the masses
prefer shilling shockers to scientific treatises and melodramas to
problem plays. The reason is very simple. The realistic story is
certainly more artistic than the melodramatic story. If what you
desire is deft handling, delicate proportions, a unit of artistic
atmosphere, the realistic story has a full advantage over the
melodrama. In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the
realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. But, at
least, the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic
story. The melodrama is much more like life. It is much more like man,
and especially the poor man. It is very banal and very inartistic when
a poor woman at the Adelphi says, “Do you think I will sell my own
child?” But poor women in the Battersea High Road do say, “Do you think
I will sell my own child?” They say it on every available occasion;
you can hear a sort of murmur or babble of it all the way down the
street. It is very stale and weak dramatic art (if that is all) when
the workman confronts his master and says, “I’m a man.” But a workman
does say “I’m a man” two or three times every day. In fact, it is
tedious, possibly, to hear poor men being melodramatic behind the
footlights; but that is because one can always hear them being
melodramatic in the street outside. In short, melodrama, if it is dull,
is dull because it is too accurate. Somewhat the same problem exists in
the case of stories about schoolboys. Mr. Kipling’s “Stalky and Co.”
is much more amusing (if you are talking about amusement) than the late
Dean Farrar’s “Eric; or, Little by Little.” But “Eric” is immeasurably
more like real school-life. For real school-life, real boyhood, is full
of the things of which Eric is full—priggishness, a crude piety, a
silly sin, a weak but continual attempt at the heroic, in a word,
melodrama. And if we wish to lay a firm basis for any efforts to help
the poor, we must not become realistic and see them from the outside.
We must become melodramatic, and see them from the inside. The novelist
must not take out his notebook and say, “I am an expert.” No; he must
imitate the workman in the Adelphi play. He must slap himself on the
chest and say, “I am a man.”