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THE NEW SPIRIT.
⁂ FOR FULL LIST OF THE VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES,
SEE CATALOGUE AT END OF BOOK.
THE NEW SPIRIT.
by
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
“En portant à leur plus haut degré ses sentiments les plus intimes,
on devient le chef de file d’un grand nombre d’autres hommes. Pour
acquérir une valeur typique, il faut être le plus individuel qu’il est
possible.”
Third Edition, with a New Preface.
London: Walter Scott, Ltd.,
24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE vii
INTRODUCTION 1
DIDEROT 34
HEINE 68
WHITMAN 89
IBSEN 133
TOLSTOI 174
CONCLUSION 228
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
No alterations have been made in this edition. It is true that three
of the figures here studied were living when the book was written;
but their genius had matured, their work was for the most part done.
Nothing they could produce would seriously modify one’s conception
of them as aboriginal personal forces, the outcome of the past, the
initiators of the future. Apart from this, it seems to me a mistake to
manipulate or add to one’s own completed work. If I were to re-write
it, I should doubtless write it differently; the Conclusion, for
instance, which is earliest in date, seems to me now rather formal and
metaphysical. But for the most part I have nothing seriously to alter
or to omit.
I have sometimes been asked why, in a discussion of some of the new
influences of the past century, I have left out representative men who
have made so great a stir in the world. Goethe, it may possibly be
true, stalks through every page, but where are Kant, Hegel, Auguste
Comte, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer? I cannot remember ever
proposing to include these names. The reason may be clearer if I
mention other names I once wished to include, although--partly doubting
my competence to discuss them, partly fearing that their introduction
might seem to interfere with the unity of the book--I ultimately
refrained.
One was Burne Jones. I shall never forget how, as a youth in the Public
Library at Sydney, I turned over the leaves of a volume of etchings
and suddenly alighted on “Merlin and Vivien.” Something I knew of
Botticelli, Lippi and the rest, and I had brooded over their antique
mystery and charm; but here were all the mystery and the charm brought
down among us from the world where saints stand stiff and aureoled,
and angels walk tip-toe on lily cups. The fifteenth century artists
of Flanders and Venice and Florence introduced us into a frankly
supernatural world, and they delighted like children to scatter rich
fruits on the golden floors, and to stick peacocks’ feathers into
the bejewelled walls. It is a rarer and subtler art to suggest that
infinitely remote world while accepting the austere conditions of
our own earth. The pale ghosts of Puvis de Chavannes’ frescoes are
a far-off suggestion of this art; and one thinks too of the modern
magician who has brought before us the twinkling of Salome’s feet by
the red blood from the Baptist’s head, curdling amid the flowers; the
rich-robed daughters of Apollo among the olives; the mystic elephant
in solemn festival, gathering the lotus with his trunk as his feet
plash slowly in the clear waters of the sacred lake. But the shadowy
art of Puvis, the wayward and limited art of Gustave Moreau, come
short of the consistent and completely realised art which has been
attained by the painter who stands forth in the eyes of Europe as the
greatest imaginative artist of England. It is a new synthesis of the
world of nature and the world of dreams. The three women who dance in
the foreground of “The Mill” tell us of a country where human joys and
sorrows, hopes and fears, are set to a different measure, and sung in
unknown keys. A strange and troublous art, it seems sometimes,--like
the sinuous melodies of Renan, which seem to belong to some far-haunted
past, and yet contain the intimate secrets of our own hearts,--but it
fascinates and holds us as though music became visible before our eyes.
It opens before us a new and delightful pathway into the land of dreams.
Another was Auguste Rodin. To mould the human figure has been an
amusement for man since ever he carved wood or indented clay. It was
left for the sculptors of Egypt and of Greece and of Italy to form
human figures of stone, not as a mere symbol of the reality, but as
a revelation of their own moods and visions of beauty or passion;
and since then the amusement has fallen back into convention and
symbol, although the plastic representation of the modern human body,
etiolated and hidden, offers fewer difficulties than its representation
in painting which Millet and Degas have in varying ways striven to
achieve. Now even the great sculptors of old only suggest to us beauty
or grace or strength that has become conventional; they reveal nothing.
In this man’s work the form that is closest to us of all forms in the
world, that we cling to from the day of birth, and that remains with
us, half-seen or divined, until the day of death, has been revealed
anew, just as new aspects of light have been revealed by Claude Monet.
It is the ancient human way-worn and passion-used form, rendered with
pathetic truth, and yet we feel that we have never truly seen the human
body before. We marvel how expression can be carried so far without
passing the bounds of nature and simplicity. It is far from the method
of Michelangelo, Rodin’s immediate predecessor, with whom it has been
the fashion to compare him. Michelangelo’s stupendous fantasy twisted
the human body into the strange or lovely shapes of his own inverted
dreams. In Rodin’s work, it is through a relentless love of nature that
we are led to a new and intimate vision of the body. The quiet artist
in his simple work-room has been building up through long years his
great Gate of Hell; it is the gate of the joy and beauty and terror of
life, expressed otherwise than those sober stories of the old world so
charmingly told on that gate that was thought worthy of Heaven. But
through this gate we are led to a new insight of that figure in the
world which is closest to us and most precious, such an insight, it may
well be, as Pheidias and Donatello brought to the men of their time.
Another personality that I desired to analyse, and perhaps the
greatest, was Richard Wagner. The Leipzig youth, who hated the tawdry
tinsel of the theatre, and was so little of a musical prodigy that he
could never learn to play the piano, impelled by a strange instinct
has yet wrought music and the stage to a poetic height never before
approached. Just as our arts rise out of our industries, so the
manifold art of Wagner--woven of music and poetry and drama--rises to
something that is beyond art. Wagner has made the largest impersonal
synthesis yet attainable of the personal influences that thrill our
lives, and has built it on the broadest physiological basis of our
senses, so that faith has here become sight. Such harmony is what we
are accustomed to call Heaven, and such art--to the mere musician
cacophony and confusion--is truly called religion. It will take some
time yet before we understand its place in life as a new expression of
the human soul. Generations must pass before it will be possible for
a greater artist, by a still wider sensory appeal, to lift us to any
higher Heaven.
It is not the men of one idea--important as these are--who most truly
represent the spirit of an age. Such men most often represent the
spirit of some earlier generation, which in them has become definitely
crystallised. It is the men whose ideas are still free in pungent,
penetrating, often confused solution that we may count nearest to the
natural forces of an age, and it is these that are most interesting
to analyse. In such men the feebler instincts of their fellows are
concentrated, and the flaming energy of their spirits attracts few,
repels most, of their fellows. It is, no doubt, because of this high
degree of emotional exaltation that these men bring us to religion.
It all comes to religion. I would point out to those who think that
this result needs apology, that such men do not bring before us the
pale, animistic children of dreams, who for so many ages have sought
with their shadowy arms to beckon men away from the world to a home
on the other side of the sky, but the robust children of our working
life, the offspring of our living energies and emotions, the harmonised
satisfaction of all that we have lived, of all that we have felt.
So the “new spirit” brings us to one of the most ancient modes of
human emotion. I sought to emphasise this in my Introduction as well
as in the Conclusion, not altogether successfully for some of my
readers, who have been led to credit me with virtues of modernity to
which I can make no claim. So far from being “an apostle of modernity,”
the “new spirit” that I am concerned with is but a quickening in the
pulse of life such as may take place in any age, though my tracings
are only of a recent acceleration. The greatest manifestation of the
new spirit that I know of took place long since in the zoological
history of the race when the immediate ancestor of man began to walk
on his hind legs, so developing the skilful hands and restless brain
that brought sin into the world. That strange and perilous method
of locomotion--which carried other diseases and disabilities in its
train, more concrete than sin--marked a revolutionary outburst of new
life worth contemplating. Yet even among the later and minor movements
of life it is not the most recent that to me personally are the most
attractive. The Eiffel Tower does not thrill me like the gray towers of
Chartres; I find the streets of Zaragoza more interesting than those of
Manchester. And, on the other hand, there are modernities which seem to
me old, very old, older than life itself.
To say this is no doubt to confess that the personal element has a
large place in this study of the “New Spirit.” And it is true that,
however honest a piece of mechanism your sphygmograph may be, if it
is alive there is a very considerable personal equation which you
must make up your mind to reckon with. I believe I am not altogether
incapable of slinging facts at the head of the British Goliath (with
purely benevolent intentions), but on this occasion I wrote for my own
pleasure: let me apologise to Goliath for any annoyance I may so have
caused him. I wished to speak for once, so far as might be, in my own
voice, glad if here and there a reader cared to follow my impatient
track, furnishing from the stores of his own knowledge and intelligence
what was lacking in commentaries and _pièces justificatives_. I wished
at the outset to take a bird’s-eye view of the world as it presented
itself to me personally, only indicating by mere hints those parts
of the field in which I was more specially concerned. And I wished
also to indicate--perhaps once for all--my own faith in those large
facts of nature which are unaffected by personal equation, and which
harmonise all our petty individual activities. Nature is bent on her
own ends, and with infinite ingenuity uses all our energies to carry
out her idea of increasing and multiplying the countless forms of
life. Death itself is but an accidental after-thought, a beneficial
adaptation--as Weismann would have us express it--only affecting the
body, that servant of the immortal germ-cells which has grown so large
and arrogant since the days when we Metazoa were young in the world.
That is the one master-thought of Nature, or--shall we say?--her
systematised delusion, her _délire à forme chronique_. But the malady,
if it is one, is incurable. A friend of mine, under the influence of
nitrous oxide, once found himself face to face with the Almighty. Being
a man of earnest and philosophic temperament, he took advantage of the
opportunity to demand passionately the meaning and aim of this tangled
skein of things in which we find ourselves: “Why have You placed us
here? For what purpose have You submitted us to all this strife and
misery? What is the solution of the riddle of life?” And then, uttered
in a characteristic bass, came in one word the awful reply which my
friend will never forget: “_Procreation_.” I fear that that voice is,
or might well have been, divine.
And yet why should one “fear”? We have our brief triumph. Seeking out
many curious things, we learn to know and to enjoy the earth. Nature’s
naughty children--whether artists or scientists or mystics--we may
stand aside, contemplate her great object, and impudently elevate our
fingers to our nose. It amuses us, and scarcely hurts her. She cannot
refuse us the by-play of her own adaptations. For it all comes of that
primitive manifestation of the new spirit, the “Fall,” which raised us
on to our hind limbs and enabled us to drink of the Cider of Paradise.
H. E.
_7th October, 1892._
PREFACE.
From our earliest days we look out into the world with wide-eyed
amazement, trying to discover for ourselves what it is like.
Instinctively we must spend a great part of our lives in searching
and probing into the nature and drift of the things among which, by a
volition not our own, we were projected. To-day, when we stand, as it
were, at the beginning of a new era, and when we have been celebrating
the centenary of the most significant event in modern history, an
individual who, for his own guidance, has done his part in this
searching and probing, may perhaps be allowed to present some of the
results, not claiming to be an expert, not desiring to impose on others
any private scheme of the universe. The pulse of life runs strong and
fast; I have tried to bring a sensitive lever to that pulse here and
there, to determine and record, as delicately as I could, its rhythms:
the papers I now present might be called a bundle of sphygmographic
tracings.
A large part of one’s investigations into the spirit of one’s time
must be made through the medium of literary personalities. I have
selected five such typical individuals; it is the intimate thought and
secret emotions of such men that become the common property of after
generations.
Whenever a great literary personality comes before us with these
imperative claims, it is our business to discover or divine its
fundamental instincts; we ought to do this with the same austerity
and keen-eyed penetration as, if we were wise, we should exercise in
choosing the comrades of our daily life. He poses well in public; he
has said those brave words on the platform; he has written those rows
of eloquent books--but what (one asks oneself) is all that to me? I
want to get at the motive forces at work in the man; to know what his
intimate companions thought of him; how he acted in the affairs of
every day, and in the great crises of his life; the fashion of his face
and form, the tones of his voice. How he desired to appear is of little
importance; I can perhaps learn all that it imports me to know from a
single involuntary gesture, or one glance into his eyes.
This is the attitude in which I have recorded, as impersonally as may
be, these impressions of the world of to-day, as revealed in certain
significant personalities; by searching and proving all things, to grip
the earth with firmer foothold.
H. E.
THE NEW SPIRIT.
INTRODUCTION.
There is a memorable period in the history of Europe which we call
the Renaissance. We do well to give pre-eminence to that large
efflorescence of latent life, but we forget sometimes that there have
been many such new expansions of the human spirit since that primitive
outburst of Christianity which is the most interesting of all in modern
times. The tree of life is always in bloom somewhere, if we only know
where to look. What a great forgotten renascence that is which in the
middle of the twelfth century centres around the name of Abelard! It
was nothing less than the new birth of the intellect. Abelard had
made anew the discovery that reason, too, is the gift of God, and
faith was no longer blind; from all Europe thousands of students
gathered around the great teacher who dwelt in his rough hermitage on
the desert plains of Troyes. It was in the strength of that feast
that men wove scholastic cobwebs so diligently that the human spirit
itself seemed for awhile suffocated. It was a great renascence of
life, a hundred years later, in the wonderful thirteenth century,
when Francis of Assisi revealed anew in his own person the ideal
charm of Jesus, and a group of fine spirits, his fellows, who bore
the Everlasting Gospel,--Jean de Parme, Pierre d’Olive, Fra Dolcino
and the rest,--sought to rebuild the edifice of Christendom on the
foundation of the Gospels, only in the end to deluge the world with a
plague of grey friars. And then a great wave, with Luther on its crest,
swept across Europe, reached at last the coast of England, and left
on its shores, as a dreary monumental symbol, St. Paul’s Cathedral.
There is another great vital expansion about the time of the French
Revolution. Since then, and chiefly as a result of that final triumph
of the middle-class throughout Europe, of which the French Revolution
was the decisive seal, the energy of Europe, and of England especially,
has found its main outlets in the development of a huge commercial
structure, now, in the opinion of many, slowly and fearfully toppling
down. The nineteenth century has seen the rise and fall of middle-class
supremacy. What has been the result of it?
One naturally turns first to literature to see the reflection of the
life of a period. The man who seems in the eyes of all Englishmen, so
far as one can make out, to have represented during this century the
claims of humanity, of dignity, of what is called the spiritual side
of life, was Carlyle; and Carlyle has been likened again and again to
the Joels and Jeremiahs of that most material Hebrew race. The whole
of his long day was spent in crying out to a faithless and perverse
generation. Therefore Carlyle never attained the serenity and hilarity
of those two great spirits, Goethe and Emerson, between whom he stood
midway. Nor is it surprising that he was often blinded by the smoke
and heat of a land that had become one huge Black Country, and that he
fought against freedom, and sometimes mistook his friends for enemies.
Nor again is it surprising that of the two great poets who occupy the
centre of the century, one found inspiration in the blunders of a
Crimean war and the royal representative of respectable middle-class
chivalry, while the other gave himself up to marvellous feats of
psychological gymnastic. Matthew Arnold, for his part, resolved the
discords of his time in the austere calm of Stoicism; the calm of souls
“who weigh
Life well and find it wanting, nor deplore;
But in disdainful silence turn away,
Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more:”
practically, however, Arnold found it necessary neither to turn
away nor to be silent. There was yet another solution for sensitive
souls: to hide the heart in a nest of roses away from the world,
just as Schopenhauer, who in Germany represented in more philosophic
vesture this same vague unrest, resolved it by the aid of his profound
religious sense in refined and æsthetic joy. That is the solution
sought in what seems to me one of the most exquisite and significant
books of the century, “Marius the Epicurean.” For Marius, life is
made up of a few rare and lovely visions. All the rough sorrow and
gladness of the world, its Dantesque bitterness or its Rabelaisian
joy, only reaches him through a long succession of mirrors, and every
strong human impulse as an attenuated echo. This serious, sweet,
and thoughtful book is the summary of the “sensations and ideas” of
the finest natures of an era; as in certain of the distinguished
opium-eaters of the beginning of the century, Coleridge or De Quincey,
we see a refined development of the passive sensory sides of the human
organism with corresponding atrophy of the motor sides. It is clearly
impossible to go any farther on that road.
There is no renascence of the human spirit unless some mighty leverage
has been at work long previously. Such forces work underground, slowly
and coarsely and patiently, during barren periods, and they meet with
much contempt as destructive of man’s finer and higher nature; but,
in the end, it is by these that the finer and higher is lifted to new
levels. No great spiritual eruption can take place without the aid of
such levers. What forces have been at work during the century that is
now drawing to a close? Three, I think, stand clearly forth.
At the end of the sixteenth century, it was above all the sudden
expansion of the world that inspired human effort and aspiration. In
later days science has carried on the same movement by revealing world
within world. A chief element in the spirit of the French Revolution
was, as Taine pointed out, that scientific activity which centred
around Newton. In our own time the impulse has come from scientific
discoveries much more revolutionary, far-reaching and relative to life,
than any of Newton’s. The conception of evolution has penetrated every
department of organic science, especially where it touches man. Darwin
personally, to whom belongs the chief place of honour in the triumph
of a movement which began with Aristotle, has been a transforming
power by virtue of his method and spirit, his immense patience, his
keen observation, his modesty and allegiance to truth; no one has
done so much to make science--that is to say, all inquiry into the
traceable causes or relations of things--so attractive. The great and
growing sciences of to-day are the sciences of man--anthropology,
sociology, whatever we like to call them, including also that special
and older development, now become a new thing, though still retaining
its antiquated name of Political Economy. It is difficult for us to-day
to enter into the state of mind of those who once termed this the
dismal science; if the question of a man’s right to a foothold on the
earth is not interesting, what things are interesting? Our hopes for
the evolution of man, and our most indispensable guide, are bound up
with all that we can learn of man’s past and all that we can measure
of his present. It was by a significant coincidence that that great
modern science which has man himself for its subject was created by
Broca, when he founded the Société d’Anthropologie of Paris in the
same memorable year of 1859 which first saw “The Origin of Species.”
Man has been brought into a line with the rest of life; a mysterious
chasm has been filled up; a few fruitful hints have been received
which help to make the development of all life more intelligible. This
has, on the one hand, given a mighty impulse to the patient study of
nature and to the accumulation of facts now seen to bear such infinite
possibilities of farther advance; just as the discovery of America in
the sixteenth century produced a like spirit of adventure which led
men to all parts of the globe. On the other hand, this devotion to
truth, this instinctive search after the causes of things, has become
what may be called a new faith. The fruits of this scientific spirit
are sincerity, patience, humility, the love of nature and the love of
man. “Wisdom is to speak truth and consciously to act according to
nature.” So spake the old Ephesian, Heraclitus, to whom, rather than
to Socrates, men are now beginning to look back as the exponent of the
true Greek spirit; and so also speaks modern science. It is a faith
that has become a living reality to many; Clifford, for instance, as
revealed in his “Lectures and Essays,” has long been a brilliant and
inspiring member, often called typical, of the company of those who are
filled with the scientific spirit. Huxley, one of the most militant
and indefatigable exponents of the scientific spirit during the past
half century, has lately set forth its aim, which has been that of
his own life:--“To promote the increase of natural knowledge and to
forward the application of scientific methods of investigation to all
the problems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction,
which has grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that
there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity
of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as
it is, when the garment of make-believe, by which pious hands have
hidden its uglier features, is stripped off.” It is important to
note that this spirit is becoming widely diffused; it would be easy
to point to manifestations in various departments of this open-eyed,
sensitive observation, not pretending to know prematurely, ready to
throw away all prepossessions and to follow Nature whithersoever her
caprices lead, without crying “Out upon her!” It is impossible to
forecast the magnitude of the results that will flow from this growing
willingness to search out the facts of things, and to found life upon
them, broadly and simply, rather than to shape it to the form of
unreasoned and traditional ideals. There was long abroad in the world
a curious dread of all attempts to face simply and sincerely the facts
of life. This audacious frankness and scarcely less audacious humility
aroused horror and suspicion; and those who marched at the front heard
with considerable pain many members of the rear black-guard hurling
“Materialist!” and other such terms of scorn at their backs. The sting
has now died out of these terms. We know that wherever science goes the
purifying breath of spring has passed and all things are re-created. We
realize that it is, above all, by following the light that is shed by
the low and neglected things--the “survivals”--of the world, that the
reasonable path of progress becomes clear. We cried for the moon for
so many thousand years before we conquered the world. We know at last
that it must be among our chief ethical rules to see that we build the
lofty structure of human society on the sure and simple foundations of
man’s organism.
These three great movements are clearly allied, and certainly the
practical applications of this scientific spirit, of which there
is more to say immediately, will rest very largely in the hands of
women. The great wave of emancipation which is now sweeping across
the civilized world means nominally nothing more than that women
should have the right to education, freedom to work, and political
enfranchisement--nothing in short but the bare ordinary rights of
an adult human creature in a civilized democratic state. But many
other changes will follow in the train of these very simple and
matter-of-fact changes, and it is no wonder that many worthy people
look with dread upon the slow invasion by women of all the concerns of
life--which are, after all, as much their own concerns as anyone’s--as
nothing less than a new irruption of barbarians. These good people are
unquestionably right. The development of women means a reinvigoration
as complete as any brought by barbarians to an effete and degenerating
civilization. When we turn to those early societies, which are as lamps
to us in our social progress, we find that the arts of life are in the
possession of women. Therefore when the torch of science is placed
in the hands of women we must expect them to use it as a guide with
audacious simplicity and directness, because of those instincts for
practical life which they have inherited.
The rise of women--who form the majority of the race in most civilized
countries--to their fair share of power, is certain. Whether one looks
at it with hope or with despair one has to recognize it. For my own
part I find it an unfailing source of hope. One cannot help feeling
that along the purely masculine line no striking social advance is
likely to be made. Men are idealists, in search of wealth usually,
sometimes of artistic visions; they have little capacity for social
organization. It is sometimes said that the fundamental inferiority
of women is shown by the very few surpassing women of genius in the
world’s history. In their anxiety to combat this argument women have
even enlisted Semiramis and Dido into their ranks. But it is a fact.
For all great solitary and artistic achievements--the writing of
Divine Comedies, the painting of Transfigurations, the construction
of systems of metaphysic, the inauguration of new religions--men are
without rivals; the more abstract and unsocial an art is, the easier
it is for men to attain eminence in it; in music and in the art of
erecting philosophies men have had, least of all, any occasion to fear
the rivalry of women. Such things are precious, although it may be
that what we call “genius” is something abnormal and distorted, like
those centres of irritation which result in the pearls we likewise
count so precious. Women are comparatively free from “genius.” Yet
it might probably be maintained that the average level of women’s
intelligence is fully equal to that of men’s. Compare the men and
women among settlers in the Australian bush, or wherever else men and
women have been set side by side to construct their social life as
best they may, and it will often be to the disadvantage of the men. In
practical and social life--even perhaps, though this is yet doubtful,
in science--women will have nothing to fear. The most important mental
sexual difference lies in the relative and absolute preponderance in
women of the lower, that is, the more important and fundamental nervous
centres.[1] What new forms the influence of women will give to society
we cannot tell. Our most strenuous efforts will be needed to see to it
that women gain the wider experience of life, the larger education in
the full sense of the word, the entire freedom of development, without
which their vast power of interference in social organization might
have disastrous as well as happy results.
[1] The detailed analysis of the elements which women, by the facts of
their constitution, must bring to the organization of life, cannot be
entered into in this volume. I hope to deal with it in part elsewhere.
We most of us began in youth with literature; the seeds of art and
imagination found a kindly soil in childhood and puberty; and we spent
our enthusiasm on Scott or Shelley, on Gautier or Swinburne. As we
grew older we tired of these, developing instincts that craved other
satisfaction, discovering sometimes even that our idols had clay feet.
Then we turned to the things that had seemed to us before so dull and
stupid that we had scarcely looked at them; we began to be fascinated
by economics and the growth of society, the problem of surplus value
turns out to be full of attraction, and the historic development of
the relationship between men and women as charming as any novel. In
the same way the men of 1859, who were nurtured on “The Origin of
Species,” naturally and rightly turned their militant energies against
theology and fought over the book of Genesis. To-day, when social
rather than theological questions seem to be the legitimate outcome
of the scientific spirit, and when all things connected with social
organization have become the matters of most vital interest to those
who are really alive to the time in which they live, even in youth
such questions begin to grow enchanting, and those who are older feel
the same fascination; the man who shared with Darwin the honour of
initiating a new scientific era becomes a land nationaliser, William
Morris a socialist, and the poet laureate who sixty years earlier had
sung fantastic poems of a coming Utopia grasps at length the concrete
problems with which we have to deal. All this is hopeful, for we have
scarcely yet got to the bottom of the questions raised by the growth of
democracy.
The influence of science on life is an accomplished fact, and we can
distinctly trace its gradual development; the influence of women is on
the eve of attaining its outward consummation, and it is not altogether
impossible to forecast some of the changes which it will involve. But
the influence of democracy, more talked of than either of the others,
is much more vague, complex, and uncertain. Once it was thought that we
had but to give a vote to every adult--outside the asylum and perhaps
the prison--and democracy would be achieved. This crude notion has long
since become ridiculous. We see now that the vote and the ballot-box
do not make the voter free from even external pressure; and, which
is of much more consequence, they do not necessarily free him from
his own slavish instincts. We see that enfranchisement does not mean
freedom, since the enfranchised are capable of running in a brainless
and compact mob after any man who is clever enough to gain despotic
influence over them. This is not democracy, though it is doubtless a
step towards it. If we test the intelligence of the enfranchised by
examining the persons whom they elect as their representatives, we
soon realize the trifling character of the step. Even the free and
generously democratic colonies of Australia show few brilliant results
by this test. It is hard to get rid of the old distinction between a
governing class and a governed, and to recognize that every man must be
a member of the government.
If democracy means a state in which every man shall be a freeman,
neither in economic nor intellectual nor moral subjection, two
processes at least are needed to render democracy possible--on the one
hand a large and many-sided education; on the other the reasonable
organization of life.
The conception of education has within recent times undergone a curious
development. Some of us can still remember the time when the word
“education” meant as a matter of course the rudiments of intellectual
education only, and when such education was regarded as a panacea for
many evils; this kind of education has, in consequence, we may take it,
been virtually secured to every child in all civilized countries. To
this kind of education, however, it is no longer possible to attribute
any satisfying sort of virtue. It may produce a very inferior
order of clerk; but _education_--the reasonable development of the
individual--it cannot deserve to be called; it merely puts a certain
rude intellectual instrument into the hands of a still thoroughly
uneducated person. Education, as we understand it now, must be founded
on the harmonious exercise of body, senses, and emotions, as well
as intellect; the whole environment is the agent of education. That
is why we are now extending the meaning of the word indefinitely.
Fresh air, good food, manual training, the cultivation of the art
instincts, physical exercise and abundant recreation, wholesome home
relationships--these are a few of the things which we now recognize as
essential parts of the rational education of every boy and girl, and
which we are seeking to obtain for all. Nor is education in this sense
incompatible with intellectual development; on the contrary, it is the
only sound foundation for such development. There is here no need for
fear. We seem, indeed, to be rapidly approaching a period in which the
excessive intension of knowledge, its confinement to a few persons,
will give way to a marked extension of knowledge. Such a process is in
the lines of our democratic advance. It is for the advantage of the men
of science who have paid for the seclusion of extreme specialism by
incapacity to understand popular movements and popular needs; it is to
the advantage of all that there should be no impassable gulf between
those who know and those who are ignorant. It is well to sacrifice
much, if we may thereby help to diffuse the best things that are known
and thought in the world, and make the scientific attitude, even more
than scientific results, a common possession.
It is clear that education thus understood leads directly to the other
great factor of democracy. Education is impossible without social
organization: no advanced stage of social organization is possible
without a complex and diffused education; they lead up to each other
and go hand in hand. The average working man, in England at all events,
is not an enthusiast for schemes of technical education; as things
stand, such schemes constitute a method for supplying the capitalist
with cheap instruments, and the working man cannot be expected to view
with enthusiasm his own depreciation in the market. At the same time
his lack of education leads him to overrate the value of a tawdry
intellectual equipment, and he views with little anxiety the growth of
a race of inferior clerks, for whom the world has few uses.
In England the love of independent individual initiative and the
dislike of all harmonious social organization is certainly stronger
than elsewhere; it is intimately associated with the best and worst
qualities of the race, and it has spread over all the countries we
have overrun. For three hundred years this tendency has had a free
field. But during the last fifty years a new instinct of social
organization has been slowly developing and gaining strength. Trades
unions have been one of the most potent influences in this direction.
All our factory legislation has been a sign of its growth, and the same
movement has given enthusiasm to the County Council. There are very
few things in our daily life which this spirit of social organization
is not embracing or promising to embrace. The old bugbear of “State
interference” (a real danger under so many circumstances) vanishes
when a community approaches the point at which the individual himself
becomes the State. It might be added that under no circumstances could
the temper of the English people tolerate any considerable amount of
“State interference.” The communalization of certain social functions
corresponds--without being an exact analogy--to the process by which
physiological actions become automatic. As it becomes a State function
commerce will cease to absorb the best energy and enterprise of the
world, and will become merely mechanical.
It may not be out of place to point out that while this process of
socialization is rapidly developing, individual development so far
from stopping, is progressing no less rapidly. It is too often
forgotten that the former is but the means to secure the latter. While
we are socializing all those things of which all have equal common
need, we are more and more tending to leave to the individual the
control of those things which in our complex civilization constitute
individuality. We socialize what we call our physical life in order
that we may attain greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life.
The growth of social organization is now beginning to open up
possibilities which a few years ago would have seemed Utopian. It
cannot remain limited within merely national bounds. It is concerned
with the things of which all have a common need, and the interests of
nations are here inextricably intertwined. This must sooner or later
result in the formation of international tribunals, and this again will
have decisive results in relation to war--a method of dispute rapidly
becoming antiquated. Twenty-eight millions of men, ready to be put into
the field (is not this a suggestive euphemism?) at a moment’s notice,
in a corner of the world! Take a _plébiscite_ of the adult population
of Europe, of whose life-blood these twenty-eight millions are,
to-morrow--and what would the _régime_ of militarism be worth? We must
certainly expect to see the same process repeated between nations which
has everywhere taken place among individuals. When a strong power to
which appeal can be made is established, individuals cease to fight and
become litigants; this was seen in the Middle Ages, and again, as Maine
pointed out, when a strong British executive was established in India.
As soon as a sufficiently strong tribunal is formed, nations who once
went to war must in the same way become litigants. This again will have
its reaction on democracy and social life.
Along another line we may observe the approaching disappearance of
war. The wars of modern times have, to a large extent, had commercial
causes at their roots. The downfall of unrestricted competition,
and the organization of industrialism, will remove this cause of
war. In the profoundly interesting movement, witnessed to-day in the
direction of trusts and syndicates, we see the natural and inevitable
transition to a new era. Like all transitions, it can only be effected
with much friction. From one point of view it is the last barricade
of capitalism; from a wider stand-point it is the forging of a huge
instrument to be taken up eventually by a vast international community
who will thus control the means of providing for themselves by methods
of simple and uneventful routine.
Before international organization can be realized there seems
little doubt that a period of protective national organization must
intervene. At present there is a floating population of the weakest
and less capable--unable to emigrate to a new country--always flowing
from a poorer country into a less poor country, and bearing with them
the seeds of vagrancy and crime. No progress is possible if every
little redeemed patch is at once flooded from over sea. It must be
remembered also, that the dykes necessary to regulate the floating
population are required even in the interests of the poorer countries.
We are approaching a time when the general spread of information,
especially by means of newspapers, will render it impossible for any
country to tolerate the fact that the general level of its people’s
existence should exceed in wretchedness that of any other nation.
The evolution of a better state can only take place by the pressure
resulting from the presence of these outcast elements of society. To
reject them is but to disguise the condition of a nation and to imperil
its destiny.
The destiny and fate of nations has always fascinated the popular
imagination, and the destinies of nations are now shaping themselves
before our eyes with singular clearness. Within a measurable period
of time France will have become a beautiful dream; all Frenchmen
will be Belgians or Italians, the races which have already in large
measure taken possession of the country; it is a process which
Frenchmen themselves observe and chronicle with painful interest.
But France has already accomplished a great work among the nations.
Of wider significance is the development of Russia. For various
reasons the position of Russia is peculiar. The youngest of European
nations in civilization, with a strong Asiatic element by position
and race, Russia is approaching the task of social organization with
a different endowment from that possessed by any other nation. This
racial endowment, while imparting a curious freshness to its methods
of dealing with European problems, especially fits it for its great
mission of dominating Asia. To the English it has never been easy
to find a _modus vivendi_ with lower races, or races which we are
pleased to consider lower; the very qualities which give us insular
independence and toughness of fibre, unfit us for the other task. But
the Russian temperament, as is now generally recognized, is peculiarly
adapted for mingling harmoniously even with the fiercest yellow races
and bringing them into relation with the best European influences;
all those who care for humanity view with satisfaction the growing
influence of Russia in the East, an influence which, we may reasonably
hope, will overspread the continent. A very large field indeed is
still left for the other great expanding race of the world. The
English-speaking races have in their hands the greater part of North
America, and nearly all Australia, and here their special qualities
find ample scope. This division gives no ground for quarrel; the
Russians have never had much capacity for emigration in the English
sense, and the English are beginning to learn by bitter experience that
they are not suited for the mission of civilizing Asia; the Spanish
races have, as a field for their renascence, now so rapidly taking
place, nearly the whole of the rich continent of South America; while
those slow, yet tenacious and admirable colonists, the Germans, will
be able to gain ground in that African continent to which they are
most attracted, and which was long ago claimed by the Dutch for this
division of the Teutonic race. If we English are certain to make little
progress where, as in Asia, the great task is conciliation, when it is
a question of stamping out a lower race--then is our time! It has to
be done; it is quite clear that the fragile Red men of America and the
strange wild Blacks of Australia must perish at the touch of the White
man. On the whole we stamp them out as mercifully as may be, supplying
our victims liberally with missionaries and blankets.