Modern reformers, religious and political, have usually retained
the classic theory of orthodoxy, namely, that there is one right or
true system--democracy and free thought, for instance--which it is
the reformer's duty to establish in the place of prevalent abuses.
Certainly Luther and Calvin and the doctrinaires of the French
revolution only meant to substitute one orthodoxy for another, and
what they set forth they regarded as valid for all men and forever.
Nevertheless they had a greater success in discrediting the received
system than in establishing their own, and the general effect of their
reforms was to introduce the modern conception of liberty, the liberty
of liberalism.
This consists in limiting the prescriptions of the law to a few points,
for the most part negative, leaving it to the initiative and conscience
of individuals to order their life and conversation as they like,
provided only they do not interfere with the same freedom in others. In
practice liberal countries have never reached this ideal of peaceful
anarchy, but have continued to enforce state education, monogamy, the
vested rights of property, and sometimes military service. But within
whatever limits, liberty is understood to lie in the individual being
left alone, so that he may express his personal impulses as he pleases
in word and action.
A philosopher can readily see that this liberal ideal implies a certain
view about the relations of man in the universe. It implies that the
ultimate environment, divine or natural, is either chaotic in itself or
undiscoverable by human science, and that human nature, too, is either
radically various or only determinable in a few essentials, round which
individual variations play _ad libitum_. For this reason no normal
religion, science, art, or way of happiness can be prescribed. These
remain always open, even in their foundations, for each man to arrange
for himself. The more things are essentially unsettled and optional,
the more liberty of this sort there may safely be in the world and the
deeper it may run.
Man, however, is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind
than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but hates to
stand alone in his opinions. And he is so imitative that what he thinks
he most wishes to do is whatever he sees other people doing. Hence
if compulsory organization disappears a thousand free and private
organizations at once take its place. Virginal lived in compulsory
unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one
political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism
has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions
without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people retain
their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally
free to abandon it and to sample any and every other form of life.
Liberalism does not go very deep; it is an adventitious principle, a
mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all
who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them
an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that
sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind
which Matthew Arnold called culture.
Primitive, dragooned, unanimous ages cannot possess culture. What
they possess is what the Germans call a _Kultur_, some type or other
of manners, laws, implements, arts, religion. When these national
possessions are perused and relished by some individual who does
not take them for granted and who understands and judges them as if
from outside, his acquaintance with them becomes an element in his
culture; and if he is at home in many such forms of life and thought,
his culture is the more perfect. It should ideally be culled from
everywhere. Culture is a triumph of the individual over society. It is
his way of profiting intellectually by a world he has not helped to
make.
Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires
culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination
the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice.
Out of the public disarray of beliefs and efforts it gathers its
private collection of curiosities, much as amateurs stock their museums
with fragments of ancient works. It possesses a wealth of vicarious
experience and historical insight which comforts it for having nothing
of its own to contribute to history. The man of culture abounds in
discriminating sentiments; he lives under the distant influence
of exalted minds; his familiar thoughts at breakfast are intimate
appreciations of poetry and art, and if his culture is really mellow,
he sometimes smiles a little at his own culture.
Culture came into the modern world with the renaissance, when personal
humours and remote inspiration broke in upon the consecrated mediaeval
mind. Piety and learning had their intrinsic charms, but, after all,
they had been cultivated for the sake of ulterior duties and benefits,
and in order to appropriate and hand down the revealed wisdom which
opened the way to heaven. Culture, on the contrary, had no ulterior
purpose, no forced unity. It was an aroma inhaled by those who walked
in the evening in the garden of life. Far from being a means to
religion, it threw religion also into the context of human experience,
and touched its mysteries and quarrels with judgement and elegance. It
liberated the studious mind from obligatory or national discipline,
and as far as possible from all bonds of time, place, utility, and
co-operation, kindling sympathies by preference with what was most
exotic, and compensating the mind for the ignominious necessity of
having to be, in practical matters, local and partisan. Culture was
courteous, open, unconscious of self; it was the joy of living every
life but one's own. And its moral side--for everything has its moral
side--lay in the just judgements it fostered, the clear sense it
awakened of the different qualities and values of things. The scale of
values established by the man of culture might sometimes be fanciful or
frivolous, but he was always most scrupulous, according to his lights,
in distinguishing the better from the worse. This conscientiousness,
after all, is the only form of morality that a liberal society can
insist upon.
The days of liberalism are numbered. First the horrors of competition
discredited it, and now the trial of war, which it foolishly thought
it could elude. The vogue of culture, too, has declined. We see that
the man whose success is merely personal--the actor, the sophist,
the millionaire, the aesthete--is incurably vulgar. The rightness of
liberalism is exactly proportional to the diversity of human nature,
to its vague hold on its ideals. Where this vagueness and play of
variation stop, and they stop not far below the surface, the sphere of
public organization should begin. It is in the subsoil of uniformity,
of tradition, of dire necessity that human welfare is rooted, together
with wisdom and unaffected art, and the flowers of culture that do not
draw their sap from that soil are only paper flowers.
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