Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or
four things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at
least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let
me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner,
or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one
speciality; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral
things is a universal thing; made to supply many different needs; and
while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some
old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins.
The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut
throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick
is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to
point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing
pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a
club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an
extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which
the strangest modern views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be
current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to
light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins,
to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their
children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their
hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man’s house and that
hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.
Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always
proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always
answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man
will wave a cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil with
a little screwing pencil-sharpener instead of a knife; and he will even
boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have
my doubts about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils; and about
hot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those other
requirements that these institutions answered, there opens before us the
whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision a
world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener; where
a man must learn single-stick with a cigarette; where a man must try to
toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the
surface of hot water pipes.
The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a comparison
between the ancient and universal things and the modern and specialist
things. The object of a theodolite is to lie level; the object of a
stick is to swing loose at any angle; to whirl like the very wheel of
liberty. The object of a lancet is to lance; when used for slashing,
gashing, ripping, lopping off heads and limbs, it is a disappointing
instrument. The object of an electric light is merely to light (a
despicable modesty); and the object of an asbestos stove... I wonder
what is the object of an asbestos stove? If a man found a coil of rope
in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be done
with a coil of rope; and some of them might even be practical. He could
tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat’s-cradle, or pick oakum.
He could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her
boxes for a travelling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he
could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveller
who should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with a
telephone; you cannot do anything else with it. And though this is
one of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one degree from its full
delirium when there is nobody to answer you. The contention is, in
brief, that you must pull up a hundred roots, and not one, before you
uproot any of these hoary and simple expedients. It is only with great
difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see that
any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method has
four or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions are
quadrupeds; and some of them are centipedes.
Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation of
a general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six
purposes; everywhere now there are six small things; or, rather (and
there is the trouble), there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, we
will not say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless or
inexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone; I may any
day thank God for the lancet; and there is none of these brilliant and
narrow inventions (except, of course, the asbestos stove) which might
not be at some moment necessary and lovely. But I do not think the most
austere upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old,
many-sided institutions an element of unity and universality which
may well be preserved in its due proportion and place. Spiritually,
at least, it will be admitted that some all-round balance is needed to
equalize the extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to carry
the parable of the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, the
immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant
of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an
unalterable cosmos and also with the practical rules of the rapid and
thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and told
fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the
nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streets
were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing
ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The large uses of religion have
been broken up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearth
have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The romance
of ritual and colored emblem has been taken over by that narrowest of
all trades, modern art (the sort called art for art’s sake), and men are
in modern practice informed that they may use all symbols so long as
they mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience has been dried
up into the science of ethics; which may well be called decency for
decency’s sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic
flower. The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology,
has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been sundered from
everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of
specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the ground
that they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who openly
advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all one
wild divorce court; nevertheless, there are many who still hear in
their souls the thunder of authority of human habit; those whom Man hath
joined let no man sunder.
This book must avoid religion, but there must (I say) be many, religious
and irreligious, who will concede that this power of answering many
purposes was a sort of strength which should not wholly die out of our
lives. As a part of personal character, even the moderns will agree that
many-sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked.
This balance and universality has been the vision of many groups of
men in many ages. It was the Liberal Education of Aristotle; the
jack-of-all-trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends; the
august amateurishness of the Cavalier Person of Quality like Sir William
Temple or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared in literature in our
time in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible
music by Walter Pater and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt Whitman.
But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve this
literal universality, because of the nature of their work in the world.
Not, let it be noted, because of the existence of their work. Leonardo
da Vinci must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand, many a
government office clerk, village constable or elusive plumber may do
(to all human appearance) no work at all, and yet show no signs of the
Aristotelian universalism. What makes it difficult for the average man
to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he
has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold
him in a more or less ruthless society. This is generally true of males
from the first hunter to the last electrical engineer; each has not
merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter
before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters.
The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is
outstripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of the
human mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the
main, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs
the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed
can be so limiting as that awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go
beyond his last. So the largest and wildest shots of our world are but
in one direction and with a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot go
beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short; the astronomer
cannot go beyond his telescope and his telescope goes such a little way.
All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain and
seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down different
paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is right;
there must be people traveling to different towns; there must be
specialists; but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankind
be specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be
monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be
monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman
and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things,
that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-all-trades. It has
decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalism
shall be divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men and
wisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few
sad and certain things.
But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense)
must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the
frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality. A man must be
partly a one-idead man, because he is a one-weaponed man--and he is
flung naked into the fight. The world’s demand comes to him direct; to
his wife indirectly. In short, he must (as the books on Success say)
give “his best”; and what a small part of a man “his best” is! His
second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin
he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth
bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand
at whist, a gun, and an image of God.
*****