It is often said that the Anglo-Saxon races suffer from a lack of
ideals, that they do not hold enough things sacred. But there is
assuredly one thing which the most elementary and barbarous Anglo-Saxon
holds sacred, beyond creed and Decalogue and fairplay and morality, and
that is property. At inquests, for instance, it may be noted how often
inquiries are solicitously made, not whether the deceased had religious
difficulties or was disappointed in love, but whether he had any
financial worries. We hold our own property to be very sacred indeed,
and our respect for other men's rights in the matter is based on the
fact that we wish our own rights to be respected. If I were asked what
other ideals were held widely sacred in England and America I should
find it very difficult to reply. I think that there is a good deal of
interest taken in America in education and culture; whereas in England I
do not believe that there is very much interest taken in either; almost
the only thing which is valued in England, romantically, and with a kind
of enthusiasm, besides property, is social distinction; the democracy
in England is sometimes said to be indignant at the existence of so
much social privilege; the word "class" is said to be abhorrent to the
democrat; but the only classes that he detests are the classes above him
in the social scale, and the democrat is extremely indignant if he is
assigned to a social station which he considers to be below his own. I
have met democrats who despise and contemn the social tradition of the
so-called upper classes, but I have never met a democrat who is not much
more infuriated if it is supposed that he has not social traditions of
his own vastly superior to the social traditions of the lowest grade of
precarious mendicity. The reason why socialism has never had any great
hold in England is because equality is only a word, and in no sense a
real sentiment in England. The reason why members of the lowest class
in England are not as a rule convinced socialists is because their one
ambition is to become members of the middle-class, and to have property
of their own; and while the sense of personal possession is so strong as
it is, no socialism worthy of the name has a chance. It is possible
for any intelligent, virtuous, and capable member of the lower class to
transfer himself to the middle class; and once there he does not
favour any system of social equality. Socialism can never prevail as a
political system, until we get a majority of disinterested men, who do
not want to purchase freedom from daily work by acquiring property,
and who desire the responsibility rather than the influence of
administrative office. But administrative office is looked upon in
England as an important if indirect factor in acquiring status and
personal property for oneself and one's friends.
I am myself a sincere believer in socialism; that is to say, I do not
question the right of society to deprive me of my private property if
it chooses to do so. It does choose to do so to a certain extent through
the medium of the income-tax. Such property as I possess has, I think
it as well to state, been entirely acquired by my own exertions. I
have never inherited a penny, or received any money except what I have
earned. I am quite willing to admit that my work was more highly paid
than it deserved; but I shall continue to cling tenaciously to that
property until I am convinced that it will be applied for the benefit
of every one; I should not think it just if it was taken from me for the
benefit of the idle and incompetent; and I should be reluctant to part
with it unless I felt sure that it would pass into the hands of those
who are as just-minded and disinterested as myself, and be fairly
administered. I should not think it just if it were taken from me by
people who intended to misuse it, as I have misused it, for their own
personal gratification.
It was made a matter of merriment in the case of William Morris that
he preached the doctrines of socialism while he was a prosperous
manufacturer; but I see that he was perfectly consistent. There is no
justice, for instance, about the principle of disarmament, unless all
nations loyally disarm at the same time. A person cannot be called upon
to strip himself of his personal property for disinterested reasons, if
he feels that he is surrounded by people who would use the spoils
for their own interest. The process must be carried out by a sincere
majority, who may then coerce the selfish minority. I have no conception
what I should do with my money if I determined that I ought not to
possess it. It ought not to be applied to any public purpose, because
under a socialist regime all public institutions would be supported by
the public, and they ought not to depend upon private generosity. Still
less do I think that it ought to be divided among individuals, because,
if they were disinterested persons, they ought to refuse to accept
it. The only good reason I should have for disencumbering myself of my
possessions would be that I might set a good example of the simple life,
by working hard for a livelihood, which is exactly what I do; and my
only misfortune is that my earnings and the interest of my accumulated
earnings produce a sum which is far larger than the average man ought
to possess. Thus the difficulty is a very real one. Moreover the evil of
personal property is that it tends to emphasise class-distinctions and
to give the possessors of it a sense of undue superiority. Now I am
democratic enough to maintain that I have no sense whatever of personal
superiority. I do not allow my possession of property to give me a life
of vacuous amusement, for the simple reason that my work amuses me far
more than any other form of occupation, If it is asked why I tend to
live by preference among what may be called my social equals, I reply
that the only people one is at ease with are the people whose social
traditions are the same as one's own, for the simple reason that one
does not then have to think about social traditions at all. I do not
think my social traditions are better than the social traditions of any
other stratum of society, whether it be described as above or below
my own; all I would say is that they are different from the social
traditions of other strata, and I much prefer to live without having to
consider such matters at all. The manners of the upper middle-class to
which scientifically I belong, are different from the manners of the
upper, lower-middle, and lower class, and I feel out of my element in
the upper class, just as I feel out of my element in the lower class. Of
course if I were perfectly simple-minded and sincere, this would not
be so; but, as it is, I am at ease with professional persons of my
own standing; I understand their point-of-view without any need of
explanation; in any class but my own, I am aware of the constant strain
of trying to grasp another point-of-view; and to speak frankly, it is
not worth the trouble. I do not at all desire to migrate out of my own
class, and I have never been able to sympathise with people who did. The
motive for doing so is not generally a good one, though it is of course
possible to conceive a high-minded aristocrat who from motives based
upon our common humanity might desire to apprehend the point-of-view of
an artisan, or a high-minded artisan who for the same motive desired to
apprehend the point-of-view of an earl. But one requires to feel sure
that this is based upon a strong sense of charity and responsibility,
and I can only say that I have not found that the desire to migrate into
a different class is generally based upon these qualities.
The question is, what ought a man who believes sincerely in the
principle of equality to do in the matter, if he is situated as I am
situated? What I admire and desire in life is friendly contact with my
fellows, interesting work, leisure for following the pursuits I enjoy,
such as art and literature. I honestly confess that I am not interested
in what are called Social Problems, or rather I am not at all interested
in the sort of people who study them. Such problems have hardly reached
the vital stage; they are in the highly technical stage, and are mixed
up with such things as political economy, politics, organisation, and
so forth, which, to be perfectly frank, are to me blighting and dreary
objects of study. I honour profoundly the people who engage in such
pursuits; but life is not long enough to take up work, however valuable,
from a sense of duty, if one realises one's own unfitness for such
labours. I wish with all my heart that all classes cared equally for
the things which I love. I should like to be able to talk frankly and
unaffectedly about books, and interesting people, and the beauties of
nature, and abstract topics of a mild kind, with any one I happened to
meet. But, as a rule, to speak frankly, I find that people of what I
must call the lower class are not interested in these things; people in
what I will call the upper class are faintly interested, in a horrible
and condescending way, in them--which is worse than no interest at all.
A good many people in my own class are impatient of them, and think
of them as harmless recreations; I fall back upon a few like-minded
friends, with whom I can talk easily and unreservedly of such
things, without being thought priggish or donnish or dilettanteish or
unintelligible. The subjects in which I find the majority of people
interested are personal gossip, money, success, business, politics.
I love personal gossip, but that can only be enjoyed in a circle well
acquainted with each other's faults and foibles; and I do not sincerely
care for talking about the other matters I have mentioned. Hitherto I
have always had a certain amount of educational responsibility, and that
has furnished an abundance of material for pleasant talk and interesting
thoughts; but then I have always suffered from the Anglo-Saxon failing
of disliking responsibility except in the case of those for whom one's
efforts are definitely pledged on strict business principles. I cannot
deliberately assume a sense of responsibility towards people in general;
to do that implies a sense of the value of one's own influence and
example, which I have never possessed; and, indeed, I have always
heartily disliked the manifestation of it in others. Indeed, I firmly
believe that the best and most fruitful part of a man's influence, is
the influence of which he is wholly unconscious; and I am quite sure
that no one who has a strong sense of responsibility to the world in
general can advance the cause of equality, because such a sense implies
at all events a consciousness of moral superiority. Moreover, my
educational experience leads me to believe that one cannot do much
to form character. The most one can do is to guard the young against
pernicious influences, and do one's best to recommend one's own
disinterested enthusiasms. One cannot turn a violet into a rose by any
horticultural effort; one can only see that the violet or the rose has
the best chance of what is horribly called self-effectuation.
My own belief is that these great ideas like Equality and Justice are
things which, like poetry, are born and cannot be made. That a number of
earnest people should be thinking about them shows that they are in
the air; but the interest felt in them is the sign and not the cause
of their increase. I believe that one must go forwards, trying to avoid
anything that is consciously harsh or pompous or selfish or base, and
the great ideas will take care of themselves.
The two great obvious difficulties which seem to me to lie at the root
of all schemes for producing a system of social equality are first the
radical inequality of character, temperament, and equipment in human
beings. No system can ever hope to be a practical system unless we can
eliminate the possibility of children being born, some of them perfectly
qualified for life and citizenship, and others hopelessly disqualified.
If such differences were the result of environment it would be a
remediable thing. But one can have a strong, vigorous, naturally
temperate child born and brought up under the meanest and most
sordid conditions, and, on the other hand, a thoroughly worthless and
detestable person may be the child of high-minded, well-educated people,
with every social advantage. My work as a practical educationalist
enforced this upon me. One would find a boy, born under circumstances
as favourable for the production of virtue and energy as any socialistic
system could provide, who was really only fitted for the lowest kind
of mechanical work, and whose instincts were utterly gross. Even if the
State could practise a kind of refined Mendelism, it would be impossible
to guard against the influences of heredity. If one traces back the
hereditary influences of a child for ten generations, it will be found
that he has upwards of two thousand progenitors, any one of whom may
give him a bias.
And secondly, I cannot see that any system of socialism is consistent
with the system of the family. The parents in a socialistic state
can only be looked upon as brood stock, and the nurture of the rising
generation must be committed to some State organisation, if one is to
secure an equality of environing influences. Of course, this is done to
a certain extent by the boarding-schools of the upper classes; and here
again my experience has shown me that the system, though a good one for
the majority, is not the best system invariably for types with marked
originality--the very type that one most desires to propagate.
These are, of course, very crude and elementary objections to the
socialistic scheme; all that I say is that until these difficulties seem
more capable of solution, I cannot throw myself with any interest into
the speculation; I cannot continue in the path of logical deduction,
while the postulates and axioms remain so unsound.
What then can a man who has resources that he cannot wisely dispose of,
and happiness that he cannot impart to others, but yet who would only
too gladly share his gladness with the world, do to advance the cause
of the general weal? Must he plunge into activities for which he has no
aptitude or inclination, and which have as their aim objects for which
he does not think that the world is ripe? Every one will remember the
figure of Mrs. Pardiggle in Bleak House, that raw-boned lady who enjoyed
hard work, and did not know what it was to be tired, who went about
rating inefficient people, and "boned" her children's pocket-money for
charitable objects. It seems to me that many of the people who work at
social reforms do so because, like Mrs. Pardiggle, they enjoy hard work
and love ordering other people about. In a society wisely and rationally
organised, there would be no room for Mrs. Pardiggle at all; the
question is whether things must first pass through the Pardiggle stage.
I do not in my heart believe it. Mrs. Pardiggle seems to me to be not
part of the cure of the disease, but rather one of the ugliest of its
symptoms. I think that she is on the wrong tack altogether, and leading
other people astray. I do know some would-be social reformers, whom I
respect and commiserate with all my heart, who see what is amiss, and
have no idea how to mend it, and who lose themselves, like Hamlet, in a
sort of hopeless melancholy about it all, with a deep-seated desire to
give others a kind of happiness which they ought to desire, but which,
as a matter of fact, they do not desire. Such men are often those upon
whom early youth broke, like a fresh wave, with an incomparable sense of
rapture, in the thought of all the beauty and loveliness of nature and
art; and who lived for a little in a Paradise of delicious experiences
and fine emotions, believing that there must be some strange mistake,
and that every one must in reality desire what seemed so utterly
desirable; and then, as life went on, there fell upon these the shadow
of the harsh facts of life; the knowledge that the majority of the human
race had no part or lot in such visions, but loved rather food and
drink and comfort and money and rude mirth; who did not care a pin what
happened to other people, or how frail and suffering beings spent their
lives, so long as they themselves were healthy and jolly. Then that
shadow deepens and thickens, until the sad dreamers do one of two
things--either immure themselves in a tiny scented garden of their own,
and try to drown the insistent noises without; or, on the other hand, if
they are of the nobler sort, lose heart and hope, and even forfeit their
own delight in things that are sweet and generous and pleasant and pure.
A mournful and inextricable dilemma!
Perhaps one or two of such visionaries, who are made of sterner stuff,
have deliberately embarked, hopefully and courageously, upon the
Pardiggle path; they have tried absurd experiments, like Ruskin, in
road-making and the formation of Guilds; they have taken to journalism
and committees like William Morris. But they have been baffled. I do not
mean to say that such lives of splendid renunciation may not have a deep
moral effect; but, on the other hand, it is little gain to humanity if
a richly-endowed spirit deserts a piece of work that he can do, to toil
unsuccessfully at a piece of work that cannot yet be done at all.
I myself believe that when Society is capable of using property and the
better pleasures, it will arise and take them quietly and firmly: and
as for the fine spirits who would try to organise things before they are
even sorted, well, they have done a noble, ineffectual thing, because
they could not do otherwise; and their desire to mend what is amiss
is at all events a sign that the impulse is there, that the sun has
brightened upon the peaks before it could warm the valleys.
I was reading to-day The Irrational Knot, an early book by Mr.
Bernard Shaw, whom I whole-heartedly admire because of his courage and
good-humour and energy. That book represents a type of the New Man, such
as I suppose Mr. Shaw would have us all to be; the book, in spite of
its radiant wit, is a melancholy one, because the novelist penetrates
so clearly past the disguises of humanity, and takes delight in dragging
the mean, ugly, shuddering, naked creature into the open. The New Man
himself is entirely vigorous, cheerful, affectionate, sensible, and
robust. He is afraid of nothing and shocked by nothing. I think it
would have been better if he had been a little more shocked, not in
a conventional way, but at the hideous lapses and failures of even
generous and frank people. He is too hard and confident to be an
apostle. He does not lead the flock like a shepherd, but helps them
along, like Father-o'-Flynn, with his stick. I would have gone to
Conolly, the hero of the book, to get me out of a difficulty, but I
could not have confided to him what I really held sacred. Moreover the
view of money, as the one essential world-force, so frankly confessed
in the book, puzzled me. I do not think that money is ever more than a
weapon in the hands of a man, or a convenient screening wall, and the
New Man ought to have neither weapons nor walls, except his vigour and
serenity of spirit. Again the New Man is too fond of saying what
he thinks, and doing what he chooses; and, in the new earth, that
independent instinct will surely be tempered by a sense, every bit as
instinctive, of the rights of other people. But I suppose Mr. Shaw's
point is that if you cannot mend the world, you had better make it serve
you, as in its folly and debility it will, if you bully it enough. I
suppose that Mr. Shaw would say that the brutality of his hero is the
shadow thrown on him by the vileness of the world, and that if we were
all alike courageous and industrious and good-humoured, that shadow
would disappear.
And this, I suppose, is after all the secret; that the world is not
going to be mended from without, but is mending itself from within;
and thus that the best kind of socialism is really the highest
individualism, in which a man leaves legislation to follow and express,
as it assuredly does, the growth of emotion, and sets himself, in his
own corner, to be as quiet and disinterested and kindly as he can,
choosing what is honest and pure, and rejecting what is base and vile;
and this is after all the socialism of Christ; only we are all in such
a hurry, and think it more effective to clap a ruffian into gaol than
to suffer his violence--the result of which process is to make men
sympathise with the ruffian--while, if we endure his violence, we touch
a spring in the hearts of ruffian and spectators alike, which is more
fruitful of good than the criminal's infuriated seclusion, and his just
quarrel with the world. Of course the real way is that we should each
of us abandon our own desires for private ease and convenience, in the
light of the hope that those who come after will be easier and happier;
whereas the Pardiggle reformer literally enjoys the presence of the
refuse, because his broom has something to sweep away.
And the strangest thing of all is that we move forward, in a bewildered
company, knowing that our every act and word is the resultant of ancient
forces, not one of which we can change or modify in the least degree,
while we live under the instinctive delusion, which survives the
severest logic, that we can always and at every moment do to a certain
extent what we choose to do. What the truth is that connects and
underlies these two phenomena, we have not the least conception; but
meanwhile each remains perfectly obvious and apparently true. To myself,
the logical belief is infinitely the more hopeful and sustaining of the
two; for if the movement of progress is in the hands of God, we are at
all events taking our mysterious and wonderful part in a great dream
that is being evolved, far more vast and amazing than we can comprehend;
whereas if I felt that it was left to ourselves to choose, and
that, hampered as we feel ourselves to be by innumerable chains of
circumstance, we could yet indeed originate action and impede the
underlying Will, I should relapse into despair before a problem full of
sickening complexities and admitted failures. Meanwhile, I do what I am
given to do; I perceive what I am allowed to perceive; I suffer what is
appointed for me to suffer; but all with a hope that I may yet see the
dawn break upon the sunlit sea, beyond the dark hills of time.