the whole industrial experiment; and there are already signs of it
coming to a bad end. It may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to end
in the Servile State. Indeed, the two things are not so different as
some suppose, and they grow less different every day. The Bolshevists
have already called in Capitalists to help them to crush the free
peasants. The Capitalists are quite likely to call in Labour Leaders to
whitewash their compromise as social reform or even Socialism. The
cosmopolitan Jews who are the Communists in the East will not find it so
very hard to make a bargain with the cosmopolitan Jews who are
Capitalists in the West. The Western Jews would be willing to admit a
nominal Socialism. The Eastern Jews have already admitted that their
Socialism is nominal. It was the Bolshevist leader himself who said,
'Russia is again a Capitalist country.' But whoever makes the bargain,
and whatever is its precise character, the substance of it will be
servile. It will be servile in the only rational and reliable sense;
that is, an arrangement by which a mass of men are ensured shelter and
livelihood, in return for being subjected to a law which obliges them to
continue to labour. Of course it will not be called the Servile State;
it is very probable that it will be called the Socialist State. But
nobody seems to realise how very near all the industrial countries are
to it. At any moment it may appear in the simple form of compulsory
arbitration; for compulsory arbitration dealing with private employers
is by definition slavery. When workmen receive unemployment pay, and at
the same time arouse more and more irritation by going on strike, it may
seem very natural to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbid
them the strike for good; and the combination of those two things is by
definition slavery. And Trotsky can beat any Trust magnate as a
strike-breaker; for he does not even pretend that his compulsory labour
is a free bargain. If Trotsky and the Trust magnate come to a working
compromise, that compromise will be a Servile State. But it will also be
the supreme and by far the most constructive and conclusive result of
the industrial movement in history; of the power of machinery or money;
of the huge populations of the modern cities; of scientific inventions
and resources; of all the things before which the agricultural society
of the Southern Confederacy went down. But even those who cannot see
that commercialism may end in the triumph of slavery can see that the
Northern victory has to a great extent ended in the triumph of
commercialism. And the point at the moment is that this did definitely
mean, even at the time, the triumph of one American type over another
American type; just as much as any European war might mean the triumph
of one European type over another. A victory of England over France
would be a victory of merchants over peasants; and the victory of
Northerners over Southerners was a victory of merchants over squires. So
that that very unity, which Mr. Wells contrasts so favourably with war,
was not only itself due to a war, but to a war which had one of the most
questionable and even perilous of the results of war. That result was a
change in the balance of power, the predominance of a particular
partner, the exaltation of a particular example, the eclipse of
excellent traditions when the defeated lost their international
influence. In short, it made exactly the same sort of difference of
which we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to Europe, or that
it was necessary to fight Prussia lest she should Prussianise the whole
world. America would have been very different if the leadership had
remained with Virginia. The world would have been very different if
America had been very different. It is quite reasonable to rejoice that
the issue went as it did; indeed, as I have explained elsewhere, for
other reasons I do on the whole rejoice in it. But it is certainly not
self-evident that it is a matter for rejoicing. One type of American
state conquered and subjugated another type of American state; and the
virtues and value of the latter were very largely lost to the world. So
if Mr. Wells insists on the parallel of a United States of Europe, he
must accept the parallel of a Civil War of Europe. He must suppose that
the peasant countries crush the industrial countries or vice versa; and
that one or other of them becomes the European tradition to the neglect
of the other. The situation which seems to satisfy him so completely in
America is, after all, the situation which would result in Europe if the
Germanic Empires, let us say, had entirely arrested the special
development of the Slavs; or if the influence of France had really
broken off short under a blow from Britain. The Old South had qualities
of humane civilisation which have not sufficiently survived; or at any
rate have not sufficiently spread. It is true that the decline of the
agricultural South has been considerably balanced by the growth of the
agricultural West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasise in
another place, that the West does give the New America something that is
nearly a normal peasantry, as a pendant to the industrial towns. But
this is not an answer; it is rather an augmentation of the argument. In
so far as America is saved it is saved by being patchy; and would be
ruined if the Western patch had the same fate as the Southern patch.
When all is said, therefore, the advantages of American unification are
not so certain that we can apply them to a world unification. The doubt
could be expressed in a great many ways and by a great many examples.
For that matter, it is already being felt that the supremacy of the
Middle West in politics is inflicting upon other localities exactly the
sort of local injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to
be free. It has already inflicted what amounts to religious persecution,
or the imposition of an alien morality, on the wine-growing civilisation
of California. In a word, the American system is a good one as
governments go; but it is too large, and the world will not be improved
by making it larger. And for this reason alone I should reject this
second method of uniting England and America; which is not only
Americanising England, but Americanising everything else.
But the essential reason is that a type of culture came out on top in
America and England in the nineteenth century, which cannot and would
not be tolerated on top of the world. To unite all the systems at the
top, without improving and simplifying their social organisation below,
would be to tie all the tops of the trees together where they rise
above a dense and poisonous jungle, and make the jungle darker than
before. To create such a cosmopolitan political platform would be to
build a roof above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which only
usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk about in the sun. This
is no moment when industrial intellectualism can inflict such an
artificial oppression upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming to
see dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split from end to
end with strikes and struggles for economic life, in which the poor not
only plead that they are starving, but even the rich can only plead that
they are bankrupt. The peasantries are growing not only more prosperous
but more politically effective; the Russian moujik has held up the
Bolshevist Government of Moscow and Petersburg; a huge concession has
been made by England to Ireland; the League of Nations has decided for
Poland against Prussia. It is not certain that industrialism will not
wither even in its own field; it is certain that its intellectual ideas
will not be allowed to cover every field; and this sort of cosmopolitan
culture is one of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish; or on the
other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some searching and
scientific reform that will really guarantee economic security to all.
It may really purge itself of the accidental maladies of anarchy and
famine; and continue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean
and humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer as a man-eating
machine. Capitalism may clear itself of its worst corruptions by such
reform as is open to it; by creating humane and healthy conditions for
labour, and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid and
recognised law. It may make Pittsburg one vast model factory for all who
will model themselves upon factories; and may give to all men and women
in its employment a clear social status in which they can be contented
and secure. And on the day when that social security is established for
the masses, when industrial capitalism has achieved this larger and more
logical organisation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy and
ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely hover over all
those graves in the Wilderness where lay the bones of so many gallant
gentlemen; men who had also from their youth known and upheld such a
social stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and a
slave a slave.
_A New Martin Chuzzlewit_
The aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest this thesis; that the
very worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be an
Anglo-American. There is only one thing lower, of course, which is being
an Anglo-Saxon. It is lower, because at least Englishmen do exist and
Americans do exist; and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine
an American and an Englishman in some way blended together. But if
Angles and Saxons ever did exist, they are all fortunately dead now; and
the wildest imagination cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of
monster would be made by mixing one with the other. But my thesis is
that the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not in mixing two things
together, but rather in cutting them very sharply asunder. That is the
only way in which two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside
each other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as they are
different and yet supposed to be the same, there can be nothing but a
divided mind and a staggering balance. It may be that in the first
twilight of time man and woman walked about as one quadruped. But if
they did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked and kicked
up its heels. Then the flaming sword of some angel divided them, and
they fell in love with each other.
Should the reader require an example a little more within historical
range, or a little more subject to critical tests, than the above
prehistoric anecdote (which I need not say was revealed to me in a
vision) it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypothetical
and a historical form. It is obvious enough in a general way that if we
begin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not
only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous,
superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and
Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain
guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy;
it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of
Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison
between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against
the sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other
way; it will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on the map
has received insufficient study. In both cases there will not only be
rivalry but very unbalanced and unjust rivalry; in both cases,
therefore, there will not only be enmity but very bitter or insolent
enmity. But so long as the two are sharply divided there can be no
enmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can argue about whether
the Swiss climb mountains better than the Dutch build dykes; just as
nobody can argue about whether a triangle is more triangular than a
circle is round.
This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed artificially simple;
but, having used it for convenience, I could easily give similar
examples not of fancy but of fact. I had occasion recently to attend the
Christmas festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of the
Scandinavian nations. When I entered the room the first thing that
struck my eye, and greatly raised my spirits, was that the room was
dotted with the colours of peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant
craftsmanship. There were, of course, other costumes and other crafts in
evidence; there were men dressed like myself (only better) in the garb
of the modern middle classes; there was furniture like the furniture of
any other room in London. Now, according to the ideal formula of the
ordinary internationalist, these things that we had in common ought to
have moved me to a sense of the kinship of all civilisation. I ought to
have felt that as the Scandinavian gentleman wore a collar and tie, and
I also wore a collar and tie, we were brothers and nothing could come
between us. I ought to have felt that we were standing for the same
principles of truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers;
or rather, to speak with more precision, similar pairs of trousers.
Anyhow, the pair of trousers, that cloven pennon, ought to have floated
in fancy over my head as the banner of Europe or the League of Nations.
I am constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions overcame me;
and the topic of trousers did not float across my mind at all. So far as
those things were concerned, I might have remained in a mood of mortal
enmity, and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best dressed gentleman in the
room. Precisely what did warm my heart with an abrupt affection for that
northern nation was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentably
lacking in my own nation. It was something corresponding to the one
great gap in English history, corresponding to the one great blot on
English civilisation. It was the spiritual presence of a peasantry,
dressed according to its own dignity, and expressing itself by its own
creations.
The sketch of America left by Charles Dickens is generally regarded as
something which is either to be used as a taunt or covered with an
apology. Doubtless it was unduly critical, even of the America of that
day; yet curiously enough it may well be the text for a true
reconciliation at the present day. It is true that in this, as in other
things, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is also
true that, while it is over-emphasised, it is not allowed for. Dickens
tended too much to describe the United States as a vast lunatic asylum;
but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imagination suited
to the description of lunatic asylums. As it was his finest poetic fancy
that created a lunatic over the garden wall, so it was his fancy that
created a lunatic over the western sea. To read some of the complaints,
one would fancy that Dickens had deliberately invented a low and
farcical America to be a contrast to his high and exalted England. It is
suggested that he showed America as full of rowdy bullies like Hannibal
Chollop, or ridiculous wind-bags like Elijah Pogram, while England was
full of refined and sincere spirits like Jonas Chuzzlewit, Chevy Slime,
Montague Tigg, and Mr. Pecksniff. If _Martin Chuzzlewit_ makes America a
lunatic asylum, what in the world does it make England? We can only say
a criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of course, that Dickens so
described them because he had a genius for that sort of description; for
the making of almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quilp or
Fagin. He made these Americans absurd because he was an artist in
absurdity; and no artist can help finding hints everywhere for his own
peculiar art. In a word, he created a laughable Pogram for the same
reason that he created a laughable Pecksniff; and that was only because
no other creature could have created them.
It is often said that we learn to love the characters in romances as if
they were characters in real life. I wish we could sometimes love the
characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are
a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even
appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a
story. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is itself indeed an unsatisfactory and even
unfortunate example; for it is, among its author's other works, a rather
unusually harsh and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feel
towards an American friend that exact shade or tint of tenderness that
we feel towards Mr. Hannibal Chollop. Our enjoyment of the foreigner
should rather resemble our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment of
Pecksniff. But there is this amount of appropriateness even in the
particular example; that Dickens did show in both countries how men can
be made amusing to each other. So far the point is not that he made fun
of America, but that he got fun out of America. And, as I have already
pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of selection and
exaggeration to England. In the other English stories, written in a more
amiable mood, he applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could apply
it to an American too, when he was writing in that mood and manner. We
can see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the Yankee
traveller in the musty refreshment room of Mugby Junction; a genuine
example of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a genuinely
British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody expects the American traveller
to admire the refreshments at Mugby Junction; but he might admire the
refreshment at one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it contained
Pickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like Pogram; but he might like the
American who made fun of Mugby Junction. But the point is that, while he
supported him in making fun, he would also think him funny. The two
comic characters could admire each other, but they would also be amused
at each other. And the American would think the Englishman funny because
he was English; and a very good reason too. The Englishman would think
the American amusing because he was American; nor can I imagine a better
ground for his amusement.
Now many will debate on the psychological possibility of such a
friendship founded on reciprocal ridicule, or rather on a comedy of
comparisons. But I will say of this harmony of humours what Mr. H. G.
Wells says of his harmony of states in the unity of his World State. If
it be truly impossible to have such a peace, then there is nothing
possible except war. If we cannot have friends in this fashion, then we
shall sooner or later have enemies in some other fashion. There is no
hope in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism.
And this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of Dickens. It was
not in thinking his Americans funny, but in thinking them foolish
because they were funny. In this sense it will be noticed that Dickens's
American sketches are almost avowedly superficial; they are descriptions
of public life and not private life. Mr. Jefferson Brick had no private
life. But Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit undoubtedly had a private life; and even
kept some parts of it exceeding private. Mr. Pecksniff was also a
domestic character; so was Mr. Quilp. Mr. Pecksniff and Mr. Quilp had
slightly different ways of surprising their families; Mr. Pecksniff by
playfully observing 'Boh!' when he came home; Mr. Quilp by coming home
at all. But we can form no picture of how Mr. Hannibal Chollop playfully
surprised his family; possibly by shooting at them; possibly by not
shooting at them. We can only say that he would rather surprise us by
having a family at all. We do not know how the Mother of the Modern
Gracchi managed the Modern Gracchi; for her maternity was rather a
public than a private office. We have no romantic moonlit scenes of the
love-making of Elijah Pogram, to balance against the love story of Seth
Pecksniff. These figures are all in a special sense theatrical; all
facing one way and lit up by a public limelight. Their ridiculous
characters are detachable from their real characters, if they have any
real characters. And the author might perfectly well be right about what
is ridiculous, and wrong about what is real. He might be as right in
smiling at the Pograms and the Bricks as in smiling at the Pickwicks and
the Boffins. And he might still be as wrong in seeing Mr. Pogram as a
hypocrite as the great Buzfuz was wrong in seeing Mr. Pickwick as a
monster of revolting heartlessness and systematic villainy. He might
still be as wrong in thinking Jefferson Brick a charlatan and a cheat as
was that great disciple of Lavater, Mrs. Wilfer, in tracing every
wrinkle of evil cunning in the face of Mrs. Boffin. For Mr. Pickwick's
spectacles and gaiters and Mrs. Boffin's bonnets and boudoir are after
all superficial jokes; and might be equally well seen whatever we saw
beneath them. A man may smile and smile and be a villain; but a man may
also make us smile and not be a villain. He may make us smile and not
even be a fool. He may make us roar with laughter and be an exceedingly
wise man.
Now that is the paradox of America which Dickens never discovered.
Elijah Pogram was far more fantastic than his satirist thought; and the
most grotesque feature of Brick and Chollop was hidden from him. The
really strange thing was that Pogram probably did say, 'Rough he may be.
So air our bars. Wild he may be. So air our buffalers,' and yet was a
perfectly intelligent and public-spirited citizen while he said it. The
extraordinary thing is that Jefferson Brick may really have said, 'The
libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood,' and yet
Jefferson Brick may have served freedom, resisting unto blood. There
really has been a florid school of rhetoric in the United States which
has made it quite possible for serious and sensible men to say such
things. It is amusing simply as a difference of idiom or costume is
always amusing; just as English idiom and English costume are amusing to
Americans. But about this kind of difference there can be no kind of
doubt. So sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist as Ingersoll could say
of so shoddy not to say shady a financial politician as Blaine, 'Like an
arméd warrior, like a pluméd knight, James G. Blaine strode down the
hall of Congress, and flung his spear full and true at the shield of
every enemy of his country and every traducer of his fair name.'
Compared with that, the passage about bears and buffaloes, which Mr.
Pogram delivered in defence of the defaulting post-master, is really a
very reasonable and appropriate statement. For bears and buffaloes are
wild and rough and in that sense free; while pluméd knights do not throw
their lances about like the assegais of Zulus. And the defaulting
post-master was at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as
James G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But anybody who had treated
Ingersoll or Blaine merely as a fool and a figure of fun would have very
rapidly found out his mistake. But Dickens did not know Brick or Chollop
long enough to find out his mistake. It need not be denied that, even
after a full understanding, he might still have found things to smile at
or to criticise. I do not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chollop
was as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogram was as true a
prophet as Elijah. But I do say very seriously that they had something
about their atmosphere and situation that made possible a sort of
heroism and even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at
that period in that Merry England whose comedy and common sense we sum
up under the name of Dickens. When we joke about the name of Hannibal
Chollop, we might remember of what nation was the general who dismissed
his defeated soldiers at Appomatox with words which the historian has
justly declared to be worthy of Hannibal: 'We have fought through this
war together. I have done my best for you.' It is not fair to forget
Jefferson, or even Jefferson Davis, entirely in favour of Jefferson
Brick.
For all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent, go together to
form something that Dickens missed, merely because the England of his
time most disastrously missed it. In this case, as in every case, the
only way to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to measure
the defect of our own country. For in this matter the human mind is the
victim of a curious little unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all
international dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin and
supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes
that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple
foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realise
that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his
vices as well as his virtues. His own faults are things with which he is
so much at home that he at once forgets and assumes them abroad. He is
so faintly conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious of
the absence of them in other people. He assumes that they are there so
that he does not see that they are not there. The Englishman takes it
for granted that a Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then he
goes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for having dared to
complicate them by the French faults. The notion that the Frenchman has
the French faults and _not_ the English faults is a paradox too wild to
cross his mind.
He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Europeans for wearing
ludicrous top-hats and curling up their pig-tails inside them; because
obviously all men have pig-tails, as all monkeys have tails. Or he is
like an old Chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled shoes
of the West, considering them a needless addition to the sufficiently
tight and secure bandaging of the foot; for, of course, all women bind
up their feet, as all women bind up their hair. What these Celestial
thinkers would not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility that
we do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or that our
ladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet, though they are silly
enough to have high-heeled shoes. Nor should we necessarily have come an
inch nearer to the Chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hat
rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into a
sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the Englishman will not only curse
the French peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar.
That is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of an
independent man, and then accuse him of having the servility of a
dependent one. Just as the hypothetical Chinaman cannot believe that we
have top-hats but not pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe that
peasants are not snobs even when they are savages. Or he sees that a
Paris paper is violent and sensational; and then supposes that some
millionaire owns twenty such papers and runs them as a newspaper trust.
Surely the Yellow Press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow,
as the British Empire to paint it red. It never occurs to such a critic
that the French paper is violent because it is personal, and personal
because it belongs to a real and responsible person, and not to a ring
of nameless millionaires. It is a pamphlet, and not an anonymous
pamphlet. In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated;
the situation in which the black man first assumes that all mankind is
black, and then accuses the rest of the artificial vice of painting
their faces red and yellow, or the hypocrisy of white-washing
themselves after the fashion of whited sepulchres. The particular case
of it now before us is that of the English misunderstanding of America;
and it is based, as in all these cases, on the English misunderstanding
of England.