SALISBURY,
_January_.
1
[Sidenote: _CONTRASTS_]
Chilliness--a social and emotional chilliness that can with difficulty
be defined or nailed down to any cause--is, above and below all, what
one feels on returning from a poor man's house into middle-class
surroundings. It is not unlike that chill with which certain forms of
metropolitan hospitality strike a countryman. He meets a London friend,
a former fellow-townsman, perhaps, who has migrated to London and whom
he has not seen for a year or two. "Glad to see you," says the
Londoner. "You must call on my wife before you go back. Her day is
Wednesday." Or, "You must come to dinner one evening. When are you
free? Next Tuesday? or Friday?" If the hospitality had begun forthwith,
and the countryman had been haled off, country fashion, to the very
next pot-luck meal, he would have had a pleasant adventure. It would
have been like old times. The former glow of friendship would have more
than revived. But the calculated invitation for a future date, the idea
that the countryman will like to call for a twenty minutes' chat on
generalities and a couple of cups of bad afternoon tea.... Though he
may understand that a multiplicity of engagements in London renders
this sort of thing convenient, he none the less feels a chill when it
is applied to himself, and usually cares little whether he go or not.
He becomes conscious of the desire to save trouble, which is at the
bottom of such calculations. Had the Londoner revisited the country, he
would have found old friends ready to upset all their arrangements for
the sake of entertaining him. The London hospitality is the 'better
done,' but country hospitality is warmer. Middle-class life runs
smoother than the poor man's, it is more arranged and in many ways
'better done,' and it is chillier precisely because, for smooth
running, the warmer human impulses, both good and bad, must be
repressed. 'Something with a little love and a little murder' in it,
was what the illiterate old woman wanted to learn to read. It is what
we all want in our hearts, much more than smooth running and
impenetrable uniform politeness.
Down at Seacombe we warm our hands, so to speak, at the fire of life;
hunger lurks outside, and the fire is dusty and needs looking after;
but it glows, and we sit together round it. Here at Salisbury,
throughout the social house, we have an installation of hot-water
pipes; they may be hygienic (which is doubtful), and they are little
trouble to keep going; but they don't glow. Give me the warmth that
glows, and let me get near the heart of it.
Voices are often raised in Under Town and quarrels are not infrequent,
but the underlying affections are seldom doubted, and when they do rise
to the surface, there they are, visible, unashamed. 'Each for himself,
and devil take the hindmost,' is more admired in theory than followed
in practice. 'Each for himself and the Almighty for us all,' is Tony's
way of putting it. The difference lies there.
My acquaintances here are well off for the necessities of life. No one
is likely to starve next week. Nevertheless, they are full of worry,
and by restraining their expressions of worry so as not to become
intolerable to the other worriers, they make themselves the more lonely
and increase their panic of mind. They are afraid of life.
At Seacombe, though there were not a fortnight's money in the house, we
lived merrily on what we had. In Tony's "Summut 'll sure to turn up if
yu be ready an' tries to oblige" there is more than philosophy; there
is race tradition, the experience of generations. The Fates are
treacherous; therefore, of course, they like to be trusted, and the
gifts they reserve for those that trust them are retrospective.
[Sidenote: _INSTANCES_]
All of us at Tony's wanted many things--a pension, enough to live on,
work, a piano, or only 'jam zide plaate'--God knows what we didn't
want! But the things that men haven't, and want, unite them more than
those they have. _I want_ is life's steam-gauge; the measure of its
energy. It is the ground-bass of love, however transcendentalised, and
whether it give birth to children or ideas. _I have_ is stagnant. And
_I am afraid_ is the beginning of decay.
It is still _I want_, rather than _I am afraid_, that spurs the poor
man on.
2
For his first marriage and towards setting up house, Tony succeeded in
saving twenty shillings. He gave it to his mother in gold to keep
safely for him, and the day before the wedding, he asked for it. "Yu
knows we an't got no bloody sovereigns," said his father. It had all
been spent in food and clothes for the younger children. So Tony went
to sea that night and earned five shillings. A shilling of that too he
gave to his mother; then started off on foot for the village where his
girl was living and awaiting him. She had a little saved up: he knew
that, though he feared it might have gone like his. They were married,
however; they fed, rejoiced, and joked; and 'for to du the thing proper
like,' they hired a trap to drive them home. With what money was left
they embarked on married life, and their children made no unreasonable
delay about coming. "Aye!" says Tony, "I'd du the same again--though
'twas hard times often."
Before I left Seacombe I asked a fisherman's wife, who was expecting
her sixth or seventh child, whether she had enough money in hand to go
through with it all; for I knew that her husband was unlikely to earn
anything just then. "I have," she said, "an' p'raps I an't. It all
depends. If everything goes all right, I've got enough to last out, but
if I be so ill as I was wi' the last one, what us lost, then I an't.
Howsbe-ever, I don't want nort now. Us'll see how it turns out." She
went on setting her house in order, preparing baby linen and making
ready to 'go up over,' with perfect courage and tranquillity. When one
thinks of the average educated woman's fear of childbed, although she
can have doctors, nurses, anaesthetics and every other alleviation, the
contrast is very great, more especially as the fisherman's wife had
good reason to anticipate much pain and danger, in addition to the
possibility of her money giving out.
Those are not extraordinary instances, chosen to show how courageous
people can be sometimes; on the contrary, they are quite ordinary
illustrations of a general attitude among the poor towards life. To
express it in terms of a theory which in one form or another is
accepted by nearly all thinkers--the poor have not only the _Will to
Live_, they have the _Courage to Live_.
[Sidenote: _THE COURAGE TO LIVE_]
On the whole, they possess the _Courage to Live_ much more than any
other class. And they need it much more. The industrious middle-class
man, the commercial or professional man, works with a reasonable
expectation of ending his days in comfort. He would hardly work
without. But the poor man's reasonable expectation is the workhouse, or
some almost equally galling kind of dependency. The former may count
himself very unlucky if after a life of work he comes to destitution;
the latter is lucky if he escapes it. Yet the poor man works on, and is
of at least as good cheer as the other one. If he can rub along, he is
even happy. He is, I think, the happier of the two.
The more intimately one lives among the poor, the more one admires
their amazing talent for happiness in spite of privation, and their
magnificent courage in the face of uncertainty; and the more also one
sees that these qualities have been called into being, or kept alive,
by uncertainty and thriftlessness. Thrift, indeed, may easily be an
evil rather than good. From a middle-class standpoint, it is an
admirable virtue to recommend to the poor. It helps to keep them off
the rates. But for its proper exercise, thrift requires a special
training and tradition. And from the standpoint of the essential, as
opposed to the material, welfare of the poor, it can easily be
over-valued. Extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often a
singularly dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries,
just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men
flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the
spiritual squalor of the lower middle-class. It is all right as a means
of living, but lamentable as an end of life. If a penny saved is a
penny earned, then a penny earned by work is worth twopence.
_The Courage to Live_ is the blossom of the _Will to Live_--a flower
far less readily grown than withered. It might be argued that since
apprehensiveness implies foresight, the poor man's _Courage to Live_
is simply his lack of forethought. In part, no doubt, it is that. But
he does think, slowly and tenaciously, as a cuttlefish grips. He
foresees pretty plainly the workhouse; and he has the courage to face
its probability, and to go ahead nevertheless. His reading of life is
in some ways very broad, his foothold very firm; for it is founded
closely on actual experience of the primary realities. He looks
backwards as well as forwards; his fondness and memory for anecdote is
evidence of how he dwells on the past; instead of comparing an
occurrence with something in a book, he recalls a similar thing that
happened to So-and-so, so many years ago, you mind.... He knows vaguely
(and it is our vaguer knowledge which shapes our lives) that only by a
succession of miracles a long series of hair's-breadth escapes and
lucky chances, does he stand at any moment where he is; and he doesn't
see why miracles should suddenly come to an end. Hence his active
fatalism, as opposed to the passive Eastern variety. In Tony's opinion,
"'Tis better to be lucky than rich." I have never heard him say that
fortune favours the brave. He assumes it.
3
[Sidenote: _INTELLECTUAL TYRANNIES_]
As one grows more democratic in feeling, as one's faith in the people
receives shock after shock, yet on the whole brightens--so does one's
mistrust of the so-called democratic programmes increase. One becomes
at once more dissatisfied and less, more reckless and much more
cautious. One sees so plainly that the three or four political parties
by no means exhaust the political possibilities. The poor, though
indeed they have the franchise, remain little more than pawns in the
political game. They have to vote for somebody, and nobody is prepared
to allow them much without a full return in money or domination. They
pay in practice for what theoretically is only their due. Justice for
them is mainly bills of costs. The political fight lies still between
their masters and would-be masters; not so much now, perhaps, between
different factions of property-owners as between the property-owners
and the intellectuals. Out of the frying-pan into the fire seems the
likely course; for the intellectuals, if they have the chance, enslave
the whole man; they are logical and ruthless. The worst tyrannies have
been priestly tyrannies, whether of Christians, Brahmins or negro
witch-doctors; and those priests were the intellectuals of their time.
I wonder when we shall have a party of intellectuals content to find
out the people's ideals and to serve them faithfully, instead of trying
to foist their own ideals upon the people.
Law-makers, however, will probably continue to work for the supposed
benefit of the people rather than on the people's behalf; and equally,
the supposed welfare of the people will continue to be the handiest
political weapon; for the property-owning, articulate classes are
better able to prevent themselves being played with. To those two facts
one's political principles must be adjusted. The articulate classes,
moreover, are actually so little acquainted with the inner life of the
poor that there is no groundwork of general knowledge upon which to
base conclusions, and it is impossible to do more than speak from one's
own personal experience. I don't mind confessing that, though I should
prefer justice all round, yet, if injustice is to be done--as done it
must be no doubt--I had rather the poor were not the sufferers. There
is no reason to believe that present conditions cannot be bettered--to
believe, with Dr Pangloss, _que tout est au mieux dans ce meilleur
des mondes possibles_. I have found that to grow acquainted with the
class that is the chief object of social legislation is to see more
plainly the room for improvement, and also to see how much better, how
much sounder, that class is than it appeared to be from the outside:
how much might be gained, of material advantage especially, and at the
same time how much there is to be lost of those qualities of character
which have been acquired through long training and by infinite
sacrifice. To learn to care for the poor, for their own sake, is to
fear for them nothing so much as slap-dash, short-sighted social
legislation.
[Sidenote: _THE WILL TO LIVE_]
The man matters more than his circumstances. The poor man's _Courage to
Live_ is his most valuable distinctive quality. Most of his finest
virtues spring therefrom. Any material progress which tends to diminish
his _Courage to Live_, or to reduce it to mere _Will to Live_, must
prove in the long run to his and to the nation's disadvantage. And the
_Courage to Live_, like other virtues, diminishes with lack of
exercise. Therefore every material advance should provide for the
continued, for an even greater, exercise and need of the _Courage to
Live_. If not, then the material advance is best done without.
That is the main constructive conclusion to be drawn. Somewhat akin to
it is another conclusion of a more critical nature.
In Nietzsche's _Beyond Good and Evil_ there is an apophthegm to the
effect that, "Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups,
parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." And whilst, on the one
hand mental specialists have been extending the boundaries of insanity
to the point of justifying the popular adage that everyone is a bit
mad, they have, on the other hand, tended to narrow down the difference
between sanity and its reverse until it has become almost entirely a
question of mental inhibition, or self-control.
The highest aim of Mental Hygiene should be to increase the power
of mental inhibition amongst all men and women. Control is the
basis of all law and the cement of every social system among men
and women, without which it would go to pieces.... _Sufficient
power of self-control should be the essence and test of
sanity._[20]
[20] "The Hygiene of Mind," by T. S. Clouston, M.D.,
F.R.S.E., (London, 1906). Without an extension which Dr
Clouston provides, though not in so many words, the
definition I have italicized is psychologically a little
superficial. Mental inhibition, generally, needs dividing
into self-control and, say, auto-control. Where one man may
_self-control_ himself by an effort of will, another man,
in the same predicament, might _auto-control_ himself
instinctively, without a conscious effort of will. Which is
the saner, and likelier to remain so, under ordinary
circumstances and under extraordinary circumstances, would be
most difficult to determine. Many people are only sane in
action because they know that they are insane in impulse, and
take measures accordingly. They keep a sane front to the
world by legislating pretty sternly for themselves.
[Sidenote: _SOCIAL HYGIENE_]
It is too gratuitously assumed by law-makers (_i.e._ agitators for
legislation as well as legislators) that the poor man is woefully
deficient in inhibition and must be legislated for at every turn.
Because, for instance, he furnishes the police courts with the
majority of 'drunks and disorderlies,' he is treated as a born
drunkard, to be sedulously protected against himself, regardless of
such facts as (1) there is more of him to get drunk, (2) he prefers
'going on the bust' to the more insidious dram-drinking and drugging,
(3) he has more cause to get drunk, (4) he gets drunk publicly, (5)
tied-house beer and cheap liquors stimulate to disorderliness more
than good liquor. The truth is that the poor have a great deal of
self-restraint, quite as much probably as their law-makers; but it is
exercised in different directions and, possibly, is somewhat frittered
away in small occasions. The poor man has so much more bark than bite.
He fails to restrain his cuss-words for example--but then cuss-words
were invented to impress fools. There is much in his life that would
madden his law-makers, and _vice versa_. If control is the cement of
every social system and if it is the highest aim of mental hygiene, it
follows that control should be the highest aim of legislation and
custom, which together make up social hygiene. And--always remembering
that control is of all virtues the one which strengthens with use and
withers with disuse--every piece of new legislation should be most
carefully examined as to its probable effect on the self-control of
the people. Control, in short should be the paramount criterion of new
legislation. A proximate advantage, unless it be a matter of life and
death, is too dearly purchased by an ultimate diminution of
self-control.
4
Since the Industrial Revolution and rise of the press, the middle-class
has become more and more the real law-maker. The poor have voted
legislators into power; the upper class in the main has formally made
the laws; but the engineering of legislation has been, and is, the work
of the middle class. And the amusing and pathetic thing is that the
middle class has used its power to try to make other classes like
itself. That it has succeeded so badly is largely due to the fact that
the poor man is not simply an undeveloped middle-class man. The
children at Seacombe showed true childish penetration in treating a
_gentry-boy_ as an animal of another species: the poor and the middle
class are different in kind as well as in degree. (More different
perhaps than the poor and the aristocrat). Their civilizations are not
two stages of the same civilization, but two civilizations, two
traditions, which have grown up concurrently, though not of course
without considerable intermingling. To turn a typical poor man into a
typical middle-class man is not only to develop him in some respects,
and do the opposite in others; it is radically to alter him. The
civilization of the poor may be more backward materially, but it
contains the nucleus of a finer civilization than that of the middle
class.
[Sidenote: _TWO CIVILIZATIONS_]
The two classes possess widely dissimilar outlooks. Their morale is
different. Their ethics are different.[21] Middle class people
frequently make a huge unnecessary outcry, and demand instant
unnecessary legislation because they find among the poor conditions
which would be intolerable to themselves but are by no means so to the
poor. And again, the benevolent frequently accuse the poor of great
ingratitude because, at some expense probably, they have pressed upon
the poor what they themselves would like, but what the poor neither
want nor are thankful for. The educated can sometimes enter fully, and
even reasonably, into the sorrows of the uneducated, but it is seldom
indeed that they can enter into their joys and consolations.
[21] "The more one sees of the poor in their own homes, the more
one becomes convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole,
can be more justly described as different from those of the upper
classes than as better or worse." ("The Next Street but One." By
M. Loane. London, 1907.)
Broadly speaking, the middle-class is distinguished by the utilitarian
virtues; the virtues, that is, which are means to an end; the
profitable, discreet, expedient virtues: whereas the poor prefer what
Maeterlinck calls 'the great useless virtues'--useless because they
bring no apparent immediate profit, and great because by faith or
deeply-rooted instinct we still believe them of more account than all
the utilitarian virtues put together.[22]
[22] "When one begins to know the poor intimately, visiting the
same houses time after time, and throughout periods of as long as
eight or ten years, one becomes gradually convinced that in the
real essentials of morality, they are, as a whole, far more
advanced than is generally believed, but they range the list of
virtues in a different order from that commonly adopted by the
more educated classes. Generosity ranks far before justice,
sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and
obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the
less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any
virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation." ("From their
Point of View." By M. Loane. London, 1908.)
It is difficult to see on what grounds Miss Loane implies--if she
does mean to imply--that the poor would do well to exchange their
own order of the virtues for the other order. Christianity
certainly affords no such grounds, nor does any other philosophy
or religion, except utilitarianism perhaps.
The poor, one comes to believe firmly, if not interfered with by those
who happen to be in power, are quite capable of fighting out their own
salvation. A clear ring is what they want--the opportunity for their
'something in them tending to good' to develop on its own lines. (When
I say 'a clear ring' I do not mean that one side should have seconds
and towels provided and that the other side should be left with
neither.) That their culture, so developed, will be different from our
present middle-class culture, is certain; that it will be superior is
probable. The middle class is in decay, for its reproductive instincts
are losing their effective intensity, and it is afraid of having
children; its culture, that it grafted on the old aristocratic stem,
must decay with it. When the culture derived from the lower classes is
ready to be grafted in its turn upon the old stem it is possible that
mankind's progress will go backwards a little to find its footing, and
will then take one of its great jumps forward.
5
[Sidenote: _THE SOCIO-POLITICAL PROBLEM_]
The socio-political problem turns out, on ultimate analysis, to be a
wide restatement of the old theological Problem of Pain. Suffering does
not necessarily make a fine character, but the characters that we
recognise as fine could not, apparently, have been so without
suffering. It is possible to say, "I have suffered, and though I am
scarred and seared, yet I know that on the whole I am the better for
that suffering. I do not now wish that I had not had that suffering. I
even desire that those I love shall suffer so much as they can bear,
that their conquest may be the greater, their joys the fuller, and
their life the more intense." Nevertheless, the very next moment, the
same man will try by every means possible to avoid suffering for
himself and for those he loves. That is the dualism which dogs humanity
in the mass no less than in the individual. That lies at the core of
domestic politics. But it may be that the part of our nature which
finds reason to be grateful for past suffering is higher than that part
which seeks to avoid it in the future.
Waste of the benefits of suffering is waste indeed.