II
But this, after all, is “make-believe”—the play of children; and children grow tired of their toys. Dressed up in gorgeous garments, marching through the world with helmet and tin sword, they may pretend that tremendous events accompany every day. If, to the majority, these tremendous events do not accompany every day, they are destined sooner or later to be found out. Lives insurgent and confined may take delight in the vision of strange countries and far horizons, just as Dick Heldar at his window looking over the lights of the enormous city is roused into a sickness of longing by the song of the “Men of the Sea.” But to the general such emotions must remain a passion vicariously experienced. We must seek elsewhere for a spirit, expressing itself through literature, to which any large proportion of the citizens of the twentieth century can respond. It must be a spirit which will reveal the present as itself satisfying, apart from unknown to-morrows and dead yesterdays. It must stand independent of all attainments of political and social changes, as something by which human life will find itself ennobled, when all the old wrongs are righted and an economic basis of possible existence secured for all. It must be a spirit of joy as well as of reason: yielding exultant satisfaction in a delight which is beyond the mere momentary enjoyment of the senses in the dull instincts of thrift and gain. And it must be independent for the immediate future of supernatural securities and definite theories as to the meaning and purpose of the world. Such theories will continue, indeed, to be maintained with greater or less allegiances by large sections and organisations of the new race. These are not likely at any reckonable time to unite upon any single dominant philosophy of life, or, in union, to impose that dominant philosophy upon the people outside. For a large and probably an increasing proportion, relief from a kind of life-weariness must come from some element in the world as it is given; from renewed expression, either in response to the life of the earth, or in the fulfilment of artistic and creative powers, or in new forms of enthusiasm for their fellow-men, of the possibilities before a people which sees existence less as a pilgrimage than as a present boon.
Indications towards such a new inspiration are not lacking in Europe and America. They are found in the works of such a writer as Whitman, with his ecstasy at the “ever-returning miracle of the sunrise,” the love of ferries and crowds, cities and men, and all the beauty of the world. A more exotic but still hopeful creed is that of Maeterlinck, with his delight in the white road, and the silence of the night, and the splendour of the sunset; his vision of a humanity whose hearts will grow more gentle with the weather, absorbed in persuading the earth to bring forth ever more marvellous treasures of fruit and flowers. And in England also, in such writings as those of William Morris and Richard Jefferies, there would appear a kind of foretaste of a spirit which in its acceptance and its rejoicing, may be found to build up behind the deserts of life-weariness a triumphant affirmation of the greatness of Present Things.
This exultant optimism would often seem to be entirely independent of narrow circumstance or present discouragement. “You never enjoy the world aright,” says Mr. Thomas Treherne, “till you so love the beauty of enjoying it that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it.” Most of those who in latter years of depression and grey skies have revealed themselves as “covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it,” have been great physical sufferers. From a life of physical torment, perhaps intensified and heightened by that torment, they have been engaged in “corroborating for ever the triumph of things.” Stevenson and Henley, Whitman and Jefferies, all those who have “made to-day the first of days and this field Eden,” have learnt the intoxication of present pleasure from association with present pain. “He was a very marked case of hysteria in man,” was one medical verdict upon Jefferies. In the long years of torture which terminated in premature death, “in some way not yet to be explained,” says his latest biographer, “the mortal pining of his body was related to the intense vivacity of his last years.” “Some of my best work,” he wrote, “was done in this intense agony.” In the midst of which agonies he stands as typical of the company of “Life Worshippers” who, awakening while other men were asleep, could behold something of the splendour of the world, the magic of each moment as it passes, vindicating its existence before it dies.
This “Life Worship” becomes revealed as a gluttonous grasping at the present, the sucking of the rind and core of its delights; a response to the consciousness of the crowd; a refusal to accept any standard but the standard of Life, before which many impulses and all inhibitions stand judged and condemned. “I believe in the Body,” is the beginning of the Creed. “I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy; blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship.... The ascetics are the only persons that are impure.” In Jefferies worship of natural things became a kind of physical avidity; intensified by a sense of touch and vision exceedingly delicate and violent. He devoured colour, finding “every spot of it a sort of food.” In the later spring “the ears listen and want more,” he writes: “the eyes are gratified with gazing, and desire yet further; the nostrils are filled with sweet odours of flower and sap. The touch, too, had its pleasures, dallying with leaf and flower.” “Can you not almost grasp the odour-laden air,” he asks, “and hold it in the hollow of the hand?” It is a riot of sense-given impression, accepting, without questioning, very content. These men are of the company who find the world “more to man since he is fallen than it was before,” accepting the challenge of the mystic—“you never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the Heavens and crowned with the Stars.”
It is a pageant, the pageant of the moment which passes and yet abides, ever old and ever young. It delights in “the old road, the same flowers.” It accepts the wind’s whispering that “there never was a yesterday, and never will be a to-morrow.” It finds “always hope in the hills.” “All the grasses of the meadow were my pets,” wrote Jefferies of his childhood’s days. “I loved them all.” Of poppies, “there is genius in them,” he proclaims, “the genius of colour, and they are saved.” With Thoreau he will abandon all for which most men labour to hear one cricket sing. “I found from the dandelion,” he cries, “that there were no books.” “The sunlight puts out the words of the printed books as it puts out the fire; the very grass blades confound the wise.” To that sunlight he brings as a testing instrument all clamorous and appealing things: the hopes and dreams and perplexing ways of men. He is a worshipper of the sun, falling in the afternoon in Trafalgar Square, on the crowded Brighton promenade, in the woods of high June, or under a cold November day. He applauds it stored in the gold of the wheat or woven into the petals of the rose. “More sunshine; more flowers” is a perpetual hope for the future of mankind. For this sunshine is life—riotous, confident, unashamed; life congruous to and illuminating all the physical beauty of the human body, of the world of out of doors; the life which made him almost intoxicated with the marbles in the British Museum, which drew him, resisting, to the unknown city multitudes; which left him in childhood on the downs, “utterly alone with the sun and the earth,” lost in an ecstasy, an inflatus at “the inexpressible beauty of it all.”
And as “Life Worship” approves, it also condemns; all energies directed towards blind alleys, burrowings underground; all that is unable to encounter with exultation the test of that strong stimulus and fever. It rebels always against the mechanic pacing to and fro; the set grey life; the apathetic end. Its vision of modern England is of the man with the muckrake, ever being offered the golden crown, ever assiduously and with downcast eyes raking together the sticks and small stones and the dust of the floor. “The pageantry of power,” says Jefferies, “the still more foolish pageantry of wealth; the senseless precedence of place; words fail me to express my utter contempt for such pleasure or such ambitions.” He is dissatisfied that life for the general is “so little and so mean.” “Back to the sun” he is always preaching, from “house life”—“house life” which he denounces as the creed of the half-alive. “Remain; be content; go round and round in one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables, old age, and death.” As a mystic he belongs to the class of those who aspire, rather than of those who acquiesce. These are never in danger of becoming quietists. Rejoicing in the moment, they are never content with the moment, demanding always that which the moment, with all its rich benefits, can never bestow. They ask “for a larger frame, a longer day, more sunshine, a longer sleep.” They rise from the banquet of life never satisfied, encouraging illimitable desires. Longing—an invalid—for “the unwearied strength of Ninus to hunt unceasingly in the fierce sun,” “still I should desire greater strength and a stouter bow,” cries Jefferies; “wilder creatures to combat.” “The intense life of the senses,” he asserts, “there is never enough of them.” “I should like to be loved by every beautiful woman on earth.” Meat and bread he finds pleasant and wine refreshing, but “these are the least of all.” He has never had enough of the vehemence of exertion, the vehemence of sunlight and life, the insatiate desire of love, divine and beautiful, the uncontrollable desire of beauty. “Give me these in greater abundance,” he prays, “than was ever known to man or woman.” It is the prayer of a cripple, in poverty and pain, stricken down ere the journey has well-nigh begun; so soon to pass to where all journeys end.[25]
And what they desire for themselves they come to desire also for all companions, as they march singing down the great roads of the universe. It is a life which will transfer no affections to some problematical future, but here and now will riot and rejoice in the glory of the sum of things. Jefferies was perplexed and saddened by the confusion that man has made of his world. “In twelve thousand written years the world has not yet built itself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised itself for its own comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the wonder with which it fills me.” Yet he believes that there would be enough for all, if only all were willing to share it. He brushes aside the ordinary ambitions which inflame mankind: “money, furniture, affected show, and the pageantry of wealth.” He longs for the coming of a day when the ambition of the multitude will be fixed on the idea of form and beauty. “I would submit to a severe discipline,” he declares, “and to go without many things cheerfully, for the good and happiness of the human race in the future.” “The labour of our predecessors in this country, in all other countries of the earth, is entirely wasted. We live—that is, we snatch an existence—and our works become nothing. The piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of immense commerce, end in a cipher. These objects are so outside my idea that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle in amazement. Not even the pressure of poverty can force upon me an understanding of, and sympathy with, these things.” But he does not despair of the future. “Earth,” he asserts in The Pageant of Summer, “holds secrets enough to give them the life of the favoured immortals.” His heart was fixed firm and stable in the belief that “ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man’s existence.” “There is so much for us yet to come,” he believes, “so much to be gathered and enjoyed.”
So these writers can look towards the future with hope. Their visions and Utopias do not end in a sense of dust and ashes—an infinite weariness. The cities ever growing higher of M. Anatole France, in the heart of which men pile up wealth on a diet of sour milk and digestive tablets, the fat, settled comfort of Mr. Bellamy, the roofed-in labyrinthine airless ant-heaps of Mr. Wells’s nightmare all leave an impression of emptiness and fatigue. But here is the sense of an inspiration and splendour which could become part of the common life of humanity. Nor does this splendour require, as in former appeals in literature, assumptions which the modern world is finding impossible. Wordsworth offered an escape from the tyrannies of a mechanical civilisation, in an exaltation of the appeal of Nature and of the life of the poor. But he demanded for his acceptance assumptions concerning both Nature and the Poor which men to-day are by no means prepared to give. He found the one charged with a spiritual presence, the other transformed by unusual tranquillity and piety. Not through such assumptions will society, in the immediate years to come, find the satisfaction which is the goal of all its wandering. There is more hope in the way of the Life Worshippers like Jefferies than of the Nature Worshippers like Wordsworth. Wordsworth assumes a Nature benignant and responsive, a spirit whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and in the mind of man. The result is a kind of refined and sometimes too rarefied Pantheism, which is compelled often to shut its eyes to the Nature which is “red in tooth and claw,” and equally bestows increase and destruction. Jefferies wove from his dawns and sunsets no roseate scheme of natural religion. He acknowledged the “blunt cruelty” of natural things. He always confessed no intelligence in human affairs: outside, a Nature not so much hostile as utterly indifferent to all the ardours of mankind. “The sea, the earth, the sun, the trees, the hills, care nothing for human life.” He had no specific “humanitarian” teaching, and in early days delighted in the work of devastation and of slaughter. He was bored by the claims of science, and thought nothing of the jargon of “Evolution.” The strength of his position rests in his association of these realities with the overmastering “passion of life.” To him it was an adventure always, into a region of fairyland, occupied as to another modern mystic with “dust like the wreck of temples and thistle-down like the ruin of stars.” His strength was in himself. It was from that hidden, mysterious source of vitality that the colours appeared which he sought in field and flower, that rain of fairy gold which flung itself over the common things until every bush was burning with fire. He did not find a Presence which disturbed with the joy of elevating thoughts. He found a Glamour—inimitable, inexplicable—which excited to passionate emotion. Others have demanded Order, Understanding, evidence of Purpose or Compassion. He asked only for Beauty. And that Beauty is not denied to the supplicant. The Seasons pass in their procession; Birth and Death weave their webs of being; men are seeking, and in vain, for sympathy and pity behind the veil of visible things. Enough for him that here the sunlight flickering on the stems of old trees, the sap creeping up through a million tiny stems, the changes of expanding petals and of withered autumn leaves, can reveal a magic and a mystery which time shall never dim nor age destroy.
This unquestioning love of the Earth and the children of it is perhaps the most hopeful element for future progress. In a century of doubts and scepticisms it may serve to bridge the gulf between the old and the new. Whilst men are still confused concerning the purposes of Nature, and still doubtful concerning any definite or intelligent progress towards a final end, it is much that inspiration and contentment can be found in its present beauty and appeal. The “glory of the sum of things” may thus come to be interpreted in some particular sense-given experience, untroubled—in that present—by inquiry concerning a past that is dead or a future that is not yet born. Forgetful of the cold of a vanished winter, and of the inevitable fading of the flowers, man can accept the summer day, from dawn to sunset, as an “Eternal moment,” something that is good in itself apart from remembrance of what has been or anticipation of what shall be. And if this acquiescence and enjoyment be supplemented by the recreation of a creative energy, in that special happiness which comes from the fashioning by human handiwork of things of delight, the possibilities of an inspiration can be discerned which even for a time, putting aside occupation in ultimate mysteries, may “bring satisfaction to the ways of men.”
The demand for more and fuller life, which attempts in empty effort, in acceleration, in sense-given pleasure, in the mere blind and laborious effort at the attainment of wealth, may be here pictured as realising itself in no material or brutal fashion, through an experience which itself is its own justification. In such a life as that of William Morris there is the suggestion of a possibility of progress, more satisfying and at the same time more hopeful than Mill’s refuge in transcendental poetry. It is an advance on Jefferies because more determined and alive: more positive in its proclamation of life’s good things. It is the artist as craftsman on the one hand, as lover of the earth on the other, who appears typical of the best that can be expected in a world which has abandoned adventure beyond the sense-given universe. His Socialism indeed led him amongst strange companions and into mean unlovely regions of the Newer England. But this Socialism was just the emotional revolt against all the multitudinous ugliness and captivity and starved limited life of those whose life could have been a thing so different. The very thing that seemed to be intolerable, in a society which called itself a civilisation, was that the variable, fascinating aspects of a changing year should proclaim its appeal on wall and garden, and mankind pass by, with blind uncomprehending gaze, in a pursuit after irrelevant things; and that in the industry of a whole race of men engaged in extravagant toil, there should be absent from that toil the delight in inventiveness and original handwork which alone can convert labour into a joy. His first allies had been absorbed in the effort at escape: through Rossetti’s exotic twilight, or Burne Jones’s radiant visions of a world beyond the world. He also had sought the consolation which comes from far-off places, in a medieval England seen under a light which never was on sea or land. He drew from this passion of the past the best that the past could give; a sharp sense of the good things which are still offered to a world of children living always in fairyland: untroubled by present doubts and future fears. “With him,” says his biographer, “the love of things had all the romance and passion that is generally associated with the love of persons only.” “It has come to be to me,” he wrote in 1882, of the Manor House at Kelmscott, “the type of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the homes of harmless, simple people, not overburdened with the intricacies of life. And as others love the race of men through their lovers, so I love the earth through that small space of it.”
“Children we twain are,” he could write of himself and his book, “late made wise in love, but in all else most childish still.” Loving the earth and the joy of it, seeking still the pleasure of the eyes, exulting in its visible beauty, the waters gliding through the Hollow Land where the hills are blue, a walled garden in the happy poplar land, with old grey stones over which red apples shone “at the right time of the year” he could always cherish the hope that “our small corner of the world may once again become beautiful and dramatic withal”: because the red apples and grey stones and blue hills were possessions which required for their acceptance no impossible extension of present human achievement. In his vision of satisfaction “now it is a picture of some great room full of merriment,” says a critic, “now of the winepress, now of the golden threshing-floor, now of an old mill among apple trees, now of cool water after heat of the sun, now of some well-sheltered, well-tilled place among woods or mountains, where men and women live happily, knowing of nothing that is too far off or too great for the affections.” The one cloud in the landscape comes from the knowledge that it will change and vanish: that, behind, are always the hurrying of the inexorable hours and the beating of the great wings of Death. But if the transitoriness of love and beauty causes some pang of sadness, the intensity of it is deepened by this conviction of its passing. The shadow creeping slowly over the dial, the vision of bare November with its ruined choirs in the splendour of the August afternoon, can excite a longing wild with all regret. But they can excite also an ever-deepening exultation in Beauty all the more desirable because it is “Beauty that must die”; and a passion for the love and labour of the day because so soon “the night cometh,” when all love and labour are done.
Such are indications of a possible escape from a literature that appears in the bulk in active warfare against “progress,” as the word is understood in twentieth-century England. The critics and the novelists, no less than the poets, would seem to have deserved Plato’s rigorous sentence of expulsion from a civilisation against which they are openly at war. They cry pitifully or passionately over the huge ant-heap of modern industry, “What shall it profit?” Those who listen to their crying will probably drop under in the struggle, from mere inability—when the choice is offered—to fashion any intelligible goal of attainment. They exhibit progress making inevitable more men, but by no means better men. They demonstrate, as with the physical accuracy of the dissector’s scalpel, the same selfishnesses and superstitions and weaknesses and impulses of lust and cowardice and greed, multiplying to-day as yesterday. They reveal in the few, as conspicuously as in the many, life directed by prejudice rather than by reason, arrogance and avarice and blindness exercising their ancient empire. They ask sometimes with impatience, sometimes with deliberation, if this be the final word in the matter: if the desirable things which are possible to human experience are always to be sacrificed to Accumulation or Acceleration, or a joyless extravagance, or (at the bottom) a mere animal struggle for food and shelter. And Civilisation, in reply to these “Anarchists,” speaks with voice less certain than in former days; being itself perplexed why, after the long journey has been attempted and all the miracle achieved, it cannot at last see clearly on the horizon the walls and towers of the Golden City of men’s dreams.
CHAPTER IX
RELIGION AND PROGRESS
LITERATURE—at its highest estimate—is, however, only the luxury of the few. It influences a strictly limited class. It is produced by a still more limited class. It is so little operative upon the general life of the nation that its very claim to be considered in a survey of the “Condition of England” is doubtful. The published writings which in the least degree influence the life and opinion of the majority are the published writings not of the present but of the past. In so far as such existence occupies itself with anything beyond the newspapers or the sensational and generally excellent cheap fiction of the day, it is with the “World’s Classics,” or the reprints of established authors, which now are so plentifully provided in portable form by the various contemporary publishers. Whatever evidence of weariness or revolt may be exhibited by the tiny group of practising authors makes no impression upon the contented, boisterous spirit of Middle Class England; which is inclined to attribute all such criticism to a temper soured by disappointment or a disordered digestion. And below such classes lie the huge and inarticulate multitudes of the city people, who find what spiritual and emotional satisfactions “literature” can bring in the journals and popular writings which they consume with ever-increasing avidity. They seek romance—and find it—in a complex murder case, in stories of crime which seem to the fastidious sordid and disgusting, in stories dependent in their appeal upon sudden vicissitudes of fortune, in which chance or resolution are always breaking down the insupportable sequences of cause and effect. That a man shall reap as he has sown, that to-morrow shall be as yesterday, that inevitable law shall bind and control the revolt of human passion against circumstance—these are the affirmations of moralist and philosopher against which the popular spirit is in continual rebellion. Rebellion will endure so long as the human will affirms itself free, and passion can draw its inspiration from some fire beyond the boundaries of the world. That fire descends in the Divine fury of all revolutions; which burn up and suddenly consume the civilisation which has become orderly and comfortable and weary of it all. It descends also when to some remote obscure human being, set in the enormous city, life suddenly acquires significance and high meaning, in utter devotion to a person or a cause.
To such the optimism and rejoicing of Jefferies or Morris is as much an enigma as the questionings and denials of Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. Bernard Shaw. They experience no exultation in Nature because they are cut off from the experience of Nature. They are untroubled by the question of the goal of the industrial process because their own particular part in it—the daily labour, the maintenance of the home, the occasional recreation of Saturday Sport or Sunday Excursion—absorbs all their available energies. “In June 1902,” says Mr. Ensor, “the writer piloted four crippled workmen from a working-class district in Manchester about some grounds on the edge of the suburbs, and put to them a practical flower catechism. Three of them, be it noted, had, before the events which left them cripples, enjoyed high wages and relative prosperity. None of them knew or could name forget-me-nots, daisies, dandelions, clover, pansies, or lilies of the valley, three of them were baffled by a poppy, the fourth felt confident that it was ‘a rose.’”[26] Of what avail, to such a company, to proclaim the exultation of the pageant of Summer, or the joy in old walled gardens under the apple trees “at the right time of the year.” And the crowd which grows delirious over the spectacle of the football contests, and frankly sets itself to enjoyment, in its own jolly fashion, in the Election scrimmage or on an August Bank Holiday, is not likely to find either inspiration or sadness in the problem of what is to be the fate of the human race when economic stability is finally secured.
Among all of these—and they comprise in all classes the overwhelming majority—the place of a Philosophy or a Literature must be taken by a Religion. And the question of the survival of a Religion—in the most liberal interpretation of the term—is the question of the survival of any extra-material ideal in the civilisation of the twentieth century. In this, the last of our researches into “the Condition of England,” generalisation is more than ever difficult. Religions which appear dead are so often discovered to be only sleeping, variations in faiths and devotions are so frequent between youth and age, a dark fortune and a bright, that it is quite impossible to accept any mere superficial demonstration of development or decay. Statistics of church-going, varying from generation to generation, such as those of a recent census in London, may indicate a fluctuation in faith, or an alteration in social custom. Impressions of individual observers, such as the researches of Mr. Charles Booth and his assistants into the religious life of the Capital, may at the best be the impressions gathered from various separated workers set in the midst of silent untestifying millions. In every age the sterner moralist has proclaimed a national apostasy, and witnessed with astonishment a world repudiating its ancient pieties. In every age the prophecy of immediate collapse has been falsified by the events of history. More than a hundred and fifty years ago the least sensational of all great Christian apologists declared that in England “it is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much a subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.” “And accordingly,” he continues in famous words, “they treat it as if, in the present age, this was an agreed point amongst all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule as it were, by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.” Yet the “pleasures of the world” find themselves still interrupted by a faith which, with its grave dug and its epitaph set up, unexpectedly refuses to expire. Any variation or section of it, whose end has been confidently predicted, will suddenly flare up again into violent life and upset all the calculations of its undertakers. In 1830 “the acutest characters of the time,” says Mr. Wilfred Ward, “considered that the Church of England was on its death-bed.” “It was folding its robes,” was Mozley’s verdict, “to die with what decency it could.” “The Church as it now stands,” wrote Arnold, “no human power could save.” But to-day on any impartial judgment the “Established Church” whatever gains or losses it may have received in the long struggle with indifference and unbelief, would never be threatened with any such suggestions of immediate destruction. Sidney Smith in 1827 could plead for toleration to Roman Catholics not because they were strong but because they were weak. The power of the Papacy was obviously a dead thing, in the future so conspicuously to become impotent, that he could exhort his fellow-countrymen to some charity towards a forlorn and piteous supplicant. “There is no Court of Rome,” he could assert, “and no Pope. There is a waxwork Pope and a waxwork Court of Rome. Popes of flesh and blood have long since disappeared. The follies of one century,” he proclaimed, “are scarcely credible to that which succeeds it; what will be said of all the intolerable trash which is issued forth at public meetings of ‘No Popery’? If the world lasts till 1927, this childish nonsense will have got out of the drawing-room and passed through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen.” “If the world lasts till 1927,” there will probably be still orators of “No Popery,” and scornful critics of the same. But he would be a rash prophet to-day who would endorse Sidney Smith’s argument for toleration of a Pope and Court of Rome as being “waxworks,” when these “waxworks” have revealed themselves, in the interval, so amazingly alive.
Yet I think there can be no doubt that apart from any questions of future revival, present belief in religion, as a conception of life dependent upon supernatural sanctions or as a revelation of a purpose and meaning beyond the actual business of the day, is slowly but steadily fading from the modern city race. Tolerance, kindliness, sympathy, civilisation continually improve. Affirmation of any responsibility, beyond that to self and to humanity, continually declines. Life therefore gradually ceases to be influenced or coloured by any atmosphere of “other worldliness.” Present disabilities find no compensation in the hope of a future redress, which makes the present endurable. The general standard of humanitarian sentiment is probably higher in the cities than ever before, certainly exhibiting immense advance from that in the rude squalid barbarism of the submerged eighteenth-century life, or the vast penury and discontent of the early nineteenth. But a “background” was implied or assumed practically by the whole population, in these troublous days. Men lived as the beasts, and as the beasts perished. Yet few of them would have definitely denied that there existed a Creator and there awaited for them a judgment. The “Atheist” was as unpopular a figure as the Republican; and the sacking of the house of a “Unitarian” as congenial an occupation as a “No Popery” riot. To-day that “background” has vanished. The Churches are extraordinarily active, endeavouring in this way and in that to influence the lives of the people. Their humanitarian and social efforts are widely appreciated. Their definite dogmatic teachings seem to count for little at all. They labour on steadily amid a huge indifference. The very material of their appeal is vanishing. Fear which is the beginning of wisdom no longer terrifies a society which sees orderly arrangements everywhere accepting the secure as the normal. It cannot believe that, even if any future world exists at all—of which existence it is becoming increasingly doubtful—that future world will not in essence re-establish the decencies and commonplaces of the modern city state. There is less material therefore to-day for the appeal—to the general—of the revivalist preacher, with which Wesley and Whitefield changed the face of eighteenth-century England. The fleeing from the city of Destruction, the crying out against the “burden” of sin, the vision of the flames of hell flaring close to the Celestial City, represent an apparatus of experience that is alien to the present. “Religion,” was Dolling’s testimony from Poplar, “has, so to speak, gone to pieces. There is no opposition. We do not care enough to oppose. God is not in any of our thoughts: we do not even fear Him. We face death with perfect composure, for we have nothing to give up and nothing to look forward to. Heaven has no attraction, because we should be out of place there. And Hell has no terrors.”
And although this fading of the background is perhaps less manifest in country than in town, and less in the industrial provinces than in the capital, its effect can be apprehended amongst all classes of the community and throughout the whole of the modern world. The meaning is gone from phrases which are still repeated, whose significance is becoming historical merely. The tide is ebbing within and without the Churches. The drift is towards a non-dogmatic affirmation of general kindliness and good fellowship, with an emphasis rather on the service of men than the fulfilment of the will of God. Most modern activities of the great religious bodies are coming more and more to enlarge themselves into efforts towards social or humanitarian reforms. Even the noisy warfare between the various denominations may be interpreted less as a sign of secure vitality than as evidence of uncertain position; a struggle excited less by confidence than by foreboding. Whirlpools of brave and often feverish energy are maintained amid the prevailing indifference. The children are everywhere persuaded to attend the centres of religious teaching; everywhere, as they struggle to manhood and womanhood in a world of such doubtful certainties, they exhibit a large falling away. The sternness and severity and compelling claims of the ancient injunctions to repentance and an ordered life become replaced by a general sense of vague and misty optimism, in which the former beliefs are less definitely denied than put aside as negligible and irrelevant to the business of the day. “The great bulk,” is one general verdict of Mr. Booth’s investigation, “seem to be incapable of attaining to that pressing sense of sin which is the common basis not only of these but of most other forms of Christian teaching.” “Those who have any definite convictions,” testifies a hospital chaplain, “are few and far between: they have for the most part put religion deliberately out of their lives, and dislike to be reminded of it.” Another observer finds “a very great variety of aim, but an almost universal sense of disappointment.” “All have empty churches,” is the sweeping verdict over one large industrial borough, “and the general attitude of the people is that of complete indifference.” “Those of the poor who attend religious services,” is another general verdict, “are mostly bought.” “They take their religion lightly,” is perhaps the final word upon twentieth-century England, “and are much inclined to believe that it will all come right in the end.”[27]
These changes amongst the wealthy and prosperous are perhaps negligible; because—with of course many exceptions—in no society have “they that have riches” ever entered but hardly into the kingdom of any God. But among the Middle Classes—the centre and historical support of England’s Protestant creed—the drift away is acknowledged by all to be conspicuous—by friend as well as by enemy. The country is here following the town; and amongst the industrial people the prophecy of Taine thirty years ago would appear to be fulfilling itself to-day: “By an insensible and slow backward movement, the great rural mass, like the great urban mass, is gradually going back to Paganism.”
It is a European movement, conspicuous even to the superficial observer. At intervals there are efforts at diagnosis, even random efforts at cure. Missions and revivals produce transitory tides invigorating the older faiths—like the Catholic reaction in France after the disasters of 1870, or the rise of the Salvation Army a little later in the great towns of England. Despite such rallies, however, the process continues. It continues without violence, continuously, steadily, as a kind of impersonal motion of secular change. It is the passing of a whole civilisation away from the faith in which it was founded and out of which it has been fashioned. Mr. Hueffer, in his Spirit of the People, tells the story of a neighbour who after a late evening service in the village church suddenly discovered that he no longer believed in the immortality of the soul. And that is typical of the change in the world of to-day. It is not becoming atheist. It is ceasing to believe, without being conscious of the process, until it suddenly wakes up to the fact that the process is complete.
Most attempted explanations fall into the quite natural error of ascribing the indifference towards the enterprise of the Churches of the English city populations to those particular elements of their teaching or action which they regard as pernicious. In examination of these mysterious multitudes which have collected in the new towns it is always possible to find anything that one desires—drunkenness and temperance, happiness and misery, aspiration and indifference, cowardice and courage. This is specially true when the observer seeks to penetrate beneath the surface and to examine the actual spiritual beliefs and apprehensions accepted by large masses of men whose thoughts on such subjects are never clearly expressed. A few years ago a number of the religious leaders of this country collected in a symposium their explanation of this change.[28] And the replies are very characteristic in their reference of causes to things which are disliked or denied. Dr. Horton, from his study at Hampstead, opines that drink is the chief cause of the indifference to Christianity of the working classes. He would add also absence of good preaching. He judges from the crowds which come to hear the good preacher, that preachers of similar power would draw similar crowds beneath every pulpit. But it is just as possible, and perhaps more demonstrable by experience, that the good preacher only attracts the preacher-loving class from the bad preachers, without substantially recruiting the class from the indifferent outside. The water is decanted from bottle to bottle without increasing its bulk. And drink certainly does not separate from religion the Scotch or Irish in their own land, or the Irish in the great cities of England and America. Nor is there any particular reason why drunkenness should exercise a more general estrangement than the other, more respectable of the deadly sins. Mr. Silas Hocking, again, dislikes war and sacerdotalism. He therefore announces that the Church’s alliance with war and sacerdotalism are the cause of the modern falling away from religion. But the Church and war have lived in some condition of mutual tolerance for nineteen centuries. And as in his vision Christianity practically ceased to exist, “since in the early centuries it became corrupted by paganism,” we may assume that here also some friendly agreement had been possible beforetime, which might not be impossible to-day.
Many social reformers very frequently ascribe the abandonment of the churches by the working classes to the fact that the Church has been the Church of a class, filled with respectabilities and caste distinctions, and hostile to the newer movements for the collective welfare of labour. Such reformers, that is to say, eagerly desire that the Church should abandon the stiff and formal ways of its class traditions, should become more friendly and universal in its appeal, and should concern itself actively and intelligently with the problems of poverty and social discontent. But it would seem impossible to assume that such a transformation of organised Christianity would bring back the people to the spiritual affirmation of their fathers. Letters frequently appear in the newspapers, alike pathetic and passionate, from those who have been sweated by “Christian” employers, or have been offended by hearing clergymen openly supporting “wars of aggression” or opposing the franchise and free libraries. But there is no evidence—because in the nature of things such evidence cannot be forthcoming—to prove that the correspondents or the crowd represented by them would be accepting the enormous affirmations of Theism or of Christianity if all these things were suddenly changed.
Again, many good men have perhaps too fatuously discovered and proclaimed that there is “no hostility to Christ” amongst the working men. One observer in the symposium above quoted can find satisfaction in the fact that a crowd of men flung up their caps and cheered His name on Tower Hill. “Such straws show which way the wind blows.” Such “straws” show nothing more than any noise and excitement have shown since the day of the riding into Jerusalem, or the scene in the Judgment Hall of Pilate. Why should any one to-day be “hostile to Christ”? And what relationship has such vague toleration or applause to anything in the nature of a vital and compelling faith? All such sentiment belongs to the same class as that of the comfortable householder, leading a life of respectable and benignant self-indulgence, who will inform you in a burst of confidence that his religion is that of the “Sermon on the Mount,” or one “of willingness to do good.” There is no more common illusion than the interpretation of ethical judgment as spiritual affirmation. To all such advocates of an inexacting standard Christianity appears as a rule of common life, which has been somehow evaded or destroyed. But Christianity is something widely different from a rule of common life. It is a creed, not a system of morals. Religion is an attempt at some ultimate assertion concerning the being and purpose of the world. No tolerance of the virtues specifically Christian or admiration of a life lost in the distant centuries can guarantee that creed’s validity, or restore a faith which appears to be slipping over the visible horizon of mankind.
There is morality without faith; kindliness and devotion with no “consciousness of a divine inheritance or of the sin by which it is lost.” Such is the testimony of Canon Barrett, from thirty years’ experience of every class in English society. The people of East London especially are better mannered, better dressed, more respectable, more sober than the people of a previous generation. But they have “less idealism,” “less superstition.” “Joy” is in consequence lacking. Life is more respectable, less vivid. The salt of life is somehow losing its savour. Whatever scale of value is represented by the outlook upon larger spiritual kingdoms is vanishing. And the scale is in consequence contracting, truncated. “The desertion of the churches and the somewhat undignified efforts of the churches to attract congregations are equally the outward signs of spiritual failing.”
Here is the kernel of the whole matter. Ethical advance is accompanied (as it seems) by spiritual decline. It was the process which so perplexed Mr. Gladstone more than half a century ago. Growth of morality is coincident with decline in religion. Violent controversialists still endeavour to demonstrate the opposite, exhibiting murders, thefts, and adulteries accompanying the introduction of secular education or the disestablishment of a Church. On a large survey the facts do not bear such an interpretation. The work of civilisation steadily advances. The vision of a universe beyond or behind the material steadily fades.
My effort here is confined to diagnosis, not prophecy. And prophecy concerning religion is of all forecasts the most impossible. For never is it safe to assume that any piece of solid ground may not suddenly flare and tremble, or any common bush commence to burn with fire. Remembering the historic failures in similar ages of rationalism, the contemptuous dismissal by Tacitus, in a kind of footnote, of the faith which was to transform the world, he would be rash who asserted that even to-day and in this secure civilisation there may not be the seed growing which will survive when this very society shall have vanished from the earth. My own belief is that the so-called intellectual difficulties of belief are to-day less operative amongst the masses of mankind than certain other changes which are powerful in modern life. I should put in the forefront of these the creation of the towns, with their machinery and their confusion; the condition of labour within their boundaries; and the establishment of security and order in the present “Roman Peace” which has come upon the western races of Europe. The result, as Dolling saw it amongst his people in East London, is a life universally dull, decorous, decent. Nor can we estimate what developments may originate from such a condition of uniform comfort and acquiescence. General Booth in his Salvation Army, the most remarkable spiritual product of the present age, has shown how the inspiration may come in a sudden flaming up of the incalculable elements of the soul of man, amongst seemingly drab and unimportant people; with a craving for self-immolation, and the intrusion into commonplace accepted ways of the vision of blood and fire. The fruit and duration of such a state are equally difficult to foresee. Sidgwick concluded at the end of his days that “humanity would never acquiesce in a godless world.” “If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts,” was Carlyle’s fierce comment, “all or most of them, there will be seen for some length of time, perhaps for several centuries, such a world as few are dreaming of.” The first experiment on a large scale of society organised on a positive basis came to a premature end: through the intrusion of Christianity and the advent of the barbarian. The second seems about to be established. It should prove an interesting study to any observer possessing the felicity of seeing alike its commencement and its close. But it is not impossible that the same two disturbing elements—the advent of the barbarian, intrusion of Christianity—may once again prevent the realisation, upon adequate scale and through any substantial period, of life seeking comfort in a rational society.
CHAPTER X
THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY
SUCH—in briefest outline—is the England which confronts the challenge of a new century. It represents a civilisation containing many of the elements of human welfare, and enjoying a widespread happiness and personal comfort. Such comfort appears as somewhat unjustly divided between class and class. A main body of adequately rewarded and generally satisfied workers are set between the unnaturally wealthy on the one side, on the other the unnaturally poor. The superficial appearance is of a “plutocracy” with riches extravagantly accumulated and extravagantly expended; a middle class industrious and a little bewildered; a labouring population industrious, and in times of prosperity contented; below, a life which cries almost unheeded from a condition of perpetual privation. In all cases prosperity has brought some especial dangers: a weakening of the willingness to work, a rejection of earlier simplicities, a too eager absorption in pleasure. Representatives of the rich, from the security and ignorance of the country house and the country-house outlook upon society, bring charges against the working man: of loafing and neglecting his labour; of betting, drinking, and idling; of organising trades unions as a tyranny on the “ca’ canny” principle, designed to restrain the honest toiler from giving a fair day’s labour for a fair wage. Representatives of the working people, on the other hand, inflamed to bitterness by the wretchedness and degradation of those who endure an animal life in the abyss, bring a fierce indictment against the wealthy: of luxurious living, of callous indifference to the wrongs they see around them, of the contented plundering of the poor. The fact is that each class, in its several station, has pretty much the same characteristics, impulses, desires. If the poor were suddenly made rich, in a short space of time the majority would find themselves able to enjoy superfluous dinners, artificially created pleasures, and the satisfaction of an abundant life, without any sharp sense of judgment and condemnation in the knowledge of the huge misery that accompanies all this waste. If the rich were suddenly made poor they would soon be forcing their children to leave school prematurely in order to earn wages at mean occupations, would be organising themselves into “tyrannous” trades unions, would be mitigating the monotony of their lives by the excitement of a shilling on a horse or the encouragement of alcoholic stimulation. Dives and Lazarus may some day experience that kaleidoscopic change which has been dear to the heart of the discontented in all ages: a reversal of the accepted social order in a poor man’s Paradise. A very short time afterwards the child of Lazarus would be found faring sumptuously every day; indifferent to the descendant of Dives, lying at his gate, impotent, full of sores.
The observer will therefore not be greatly affected, in his choice of advocacy and action, by the particular arguments and appeals which may be advanced for the one side or the other. He sees a literature which vindicates an unequal distribution of wealth, in the necessity for leisure and a secured comfort for a certain proportion of the people, if there is to survive an amenity of manners, a cultivation of the arts, the traditions of a governing class. He sees a literature which stretches gaunt fingers over the costly clothes and furniture, and exhibits upon them the stains of blood. No reasoned or intellectual appeal will compel him to accept the one side or the other, to appear as the advocate of order or the advocate of change. Instinct, sentiment, temperament, upbringing in the case of the many; in the case of the few, a deliberate effort of the will, without much intellectual justification, and certainly as no nicely balanced adjustment of alternative, will direct statesmen or publicist to-day to choose the side of the rich or the side of the poor.
Among the many it is of little importance to any one but the individual which side is chosen. What is of importance is that, the choice being made, each man should see things clearly; should “clear himself of cant”; should realise that he is a soldier fighting for a cause, to be deflected from his purpose by no weakness and no vacillation. Whatever the future may bring, to him the matter of vital moment is that he should refuse to betray under any temptation those who have trusted him with their allegiance.
The reformers who have enrolled themselves with the advocates of change must not expect too speedily to realise even an appreciable percentage of their aims. Most men, setting out to move the mountain, will be content at the end if they have made some impression on the molehill. The divergence between the roseate vision of the ideal and the hard effort of practical affairs is a divergence which sometimes excites impatience and sometimes awakens suspicion of lethargy and compromise. Yet in a settled society, such as that of England to-day, where the overwhelming forces of the community are against any too sudden dislocation, we may be very content if some visible improvement can be estimated in a year or a decade. The forlorn and tattered flag “Work or Revolt,” flapping dejectedly over a procession of the ineffectual unemployed, is more scornful and cruel in dissociation of promise and performance than any attack from outside. It exhibits a challenge to the forces of this country by those who would be mown down like sheep or massacred like flies if they gave any real trouble or excited any real anxiety amongst the governing classes of England.
And this “security” is exceedingly strengthened by the inability of the majority of mankind to picture any life but the life that they have always known. The defiance of the future by the present—the insistence of hard, tangible things against a kingdom of dreams and speculations—is a defiance too often forgotten by those who are impatient of the slow processes of change. They see evil to be overcome, visions of clearer horizons and a fairer dawn. They cannot understand why mankind round them—equally intelligent, equally pitiful—do not find their feet marching to the same militant melody. They fail to apprehend rightly the crushing effect of the present, especially as embodied in solid, material realities, upon the minds of the majority. To these, history is but a misty panorama of uncertain meaning, geography a story of things wonderful and strange, but remote and negligible. Here is the real world: the houses of commerce, four-square, of stone, ample Government offices, law courts, police stations, secure private dwellings. “Let him change it who can,” their innermost souls declare, in a declaration which actually signifies, “It never will be changed at all.” By the many, of all classes, the affirmation of the Psalmist would be readily re-echoed,—“He has held the round world so fast, that it cannot be moved at any time.” Inhabitants of the earthquake zones are always convinced that each successive tremor will be the last tremor, that now, at length, the old earth, after a final shaking, has settled down to sleep. And the same is true of the shaking of the children of earth—the call, sounding to the nations in succeeding centuries, which has shattered custom, convention, security, and all the accepted ways. Each revolution is always the last revolution, the final effort of a violence which has expired in this ultimate convulsion. Now, at last, and after all the centuries, mankind is to be allowed to “settle down” in reasonable comfort to accept and to enjoy.
This tyranny of the present upon the imagination, is perhaps the greatest of all obstacles to reform. It is not only that the inhabitants of London cannot picture what London was when the Abbey of Westminster stood up white from green gardens, and over the river where now dwell two millions of persons the roads ran on causeways through sullen marshes lit by will-o’-the-wisps and fever fires. It is that they are unable even to imagine a time when Cadogan Square was a huddle of slum tenements, and Islington an expanse of meadow land, and the places they now occupy, quiet fields. Lacking such imagination, they find it impossible to stand up and face the domination of the present with the naked vision of the future. Mr. Wells, at the end of his voyage into Utopia, has described the traveller returning, standing, after so adventurous a journey, at the familiar spot where the Strand debouches into Trafalgar Square. Everything is the same—the railway stations, the tall buildings with winking sky signs, the column and the lions of the Square, the long, low, brooding ugliness of the National Gallery. Amongst them move the busy people, hurrying, to-day as yesterday, to and from their sedentary occupations and their comfortable suburban homes. It all appears “so fast” that “it cannot be moved at any time.” Utopia, before this intrusive reality—to be seen, touched, handled—rises from the earth and joins all other cloud cities “built in heaven.” An ironical touch may be given by the sight of a squalid, tiny crowd gathered round one of these pillars, with banners demanding the speedy coming of “the Social Revolution”; mocked at alike by the solid architecture, the indulgent policemen, the indifferent multitude that passes by. Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in a dialogue recently published, confronted a banker, of enlightened views, with the protest of an idealist and reformer against present social injustices. The reformer—from a University common room—has much the best of the argument. Looking out from those pleasant paths and gardens, not only over the injustices of the present, but also over all time and all existence, he can reveal to the man of business the impossibility of these injustices continuing, the urgent necessity for change. The banker has but one argument, but with that he can overwhelm his antagonist. That argument is the actual existence of the present, in solid, appreciable reality. He can counter the reformer’s acute and ready phrases with steamships and factories, Lombard Street, Pimlico, Manchester; against which the random Socialist, academic or anarchical, can make no more impression than a rat attempting to gnaw through the granite stones of the Bank of England. Here in part is the insistence of things against ideas, the dominance of the material; “the things” which, according to Emerson, are “in the saddle and ride mankind.” Samuel Butler once pictured the revolt of the machine against its master, a kind of universal Frankenstein monster come to life and striking blindly in the dark, like the furious rebellion of some slave race which in the past has occasionally wiped out a civilisation in hideous ruin. But apart from the possibility of such revolt, no first visitor to the newer industrial centres but is aware of a certain shrivelling up of man’s importance before the aggregate of material construction. The sense of proportion is dwarfed by the mere divergence in size and stability, as the weak, unprotected human body is contrasted with vast levers and furnaces which at any moment could crack him like an eggshell, or shrivel him up like sawdust. Human life and mechanical life come to be pictured in permanence like those gaunt and sullen streets of East London, where tiny cottages crouch beneath tall encompassing walls so high that between them men scarce can see the sun. And behind the weight laid upon the imagination by mass and matter is the perhaps more oppressive weight of custom and convention. “Every body”—so commences Newton’s famous law—“continues in its state of rest or motion in a straight line.” More than of any projectiles careering through space is this true of the mind of man—continuing always, unless forcibly and sometimes brutally wrested away by impacting forces, in its motion in a straight line. Bagehot tells a story of the “very conservative” people of Fiji. “A chief was one day going over a mountain path, followed by a long string of his people, when he happened to stumble and fall; all the rest of the people immediately did the same except one man, who was set upon by the rest to know whether he considered himself better than the chief.” Fiji is too remote a dwelling-place for such a leader. He resides to-day in Dulwich, in Poplar, in Eaton Square.
Not only is the present in its resistance to the future secure in its own armies and entrenchments. It is continually trafficking—and successfully—with the forces of the invader, purchasing them in single spies and in battalions. Every reform, successfully effected, transfers whole divisions and army corps from the attacking to the defending army. The giving of old age pensions, for example, at one stroke swings half a million aged persons passionately on the side of the status quo, passionately against any upheaval which would jeopardise, or might be thought to jeopardise, the regular reckonable dole of two half-crowns per week. And amongst individuals, nine out of ten at least of the men who would be competent to lead a movement towards change are to-day immediately caught up in the huge machine and provided outlet for their ambitions within a tangible and realisable present. How many potential Labour leaders and Socialists, through the operation of the huge sieve-net of the new scholarship system, are being swept into secondary schools from working-class homes? and thence, as clerks in great businesses, through university training, in subsequent Government or private employment, destined to be firmly cemented into the fabric of the present social order? Even the Labour leader, if successful, tends to become conservative, to despise the material he once organised, the masses of unskilled labour, as scattered dust or crumbling snow.
But the great majority of the children of ability in the industrial classes are being intercepted before the opportunity of becoming “Labour leaders” will arise. Their energies are being deflected from politics into commercial or industrial enterprise. Socialism seems destined to be left to the idealist and the economic failure, to the man with ready tongue and little stable capacity for work, like the “Masterman” so cruelly portrayed in Mr. Wells’s “Kipps,” to the reformer who revolts from the harsh operation of present law, but finds no allies except a proletariat from which the intelligence has been steadily drained in early boyhood. We seem destined to pass from the antithesis of the class war—the rich against the poor—to the antithesis which Nietzsche foresaw many years ago—the Many against the Few; the demands of incapacity to share in the benefits created by the competent. It is under such circumstances that the very sombre architecture of the present seem to smile down derisive indulgence at the vapourings and pleadings of those who still hope to change the world a little. The infant, says Mr. Whiteing in The Yellow Van, was blowing lustily upon a tin whistle as the van of the land reformers passed under the walls of Allonby Castle. “Nothing happened to the walls.”
Yet against this tyranny of the present the reformer, after all, has some sources of protection. “He laughs best who laughs the last”: and the longest laugh is always on the side of the forces of change. The hills are nothing, and flow from form to form; the mountains smoke at the touch of His hand: “He washeth away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth and destroyest the hope of man.” Researches in the great canyon of Arizona have revealed not only an eating through miles of solid rock by the flow of a quiet stream of water in a gulf created through almost limitless time, but behind this, in incalculable space of years, a succession of previous operations, formation and upheaval of continents and their overthrow, swinging the plummet of the mind into abysses beyond the powers of that mind ever to comprehend. The sun and rain and delicate air are wasting away, not only the backbone of the mountains, but also the granite stones of the Bank of England. The Future has great allies. Despite the momentary insistence of the material in factory and furnace, the mind can find tranquillity in realisation that this is merely the Idea, clothing itself for a season and in a temporary habitation; the Idea which can make the rocks dance to its music, and the solid ground tremble at its advent. Such has always been the vision of the poet; of all who can see not beyond the present, but through the present, to the future. To all such insight
“Cities and thrones and powers
Stand in Time’s eye
Almost as long as flowers
Which daily die.”
And as of Nineveh there remains but a heap, and of Tyrus a spit of sandy shore, and of Sagesta but one solemn temple looking down the valley to the sea, so a triumphant imagination can fling off the yoke of the present, to see in solid England dynamic instead of static forces, and all the cities in motion and flow towards some unknown ends. This may not provide any peculiar satisfaction for present endeavour. There is no guarantee, because change is inevitable, that change will come along desirable ways. Nor does any consolation reside in the knowledge that one day, without a shadow of uncertainty, great London itself will become but a vast tomb for all its busy people, and of its splendour and pride not one stone be left upon another. But it does release from the tyranny of a present which sees no change possible. If change must come, then it may be deflected along desirable ways. The direction of forces is so much easier than the initiation of them. E pur si muove is the eternal affirmation, as much over societies which appear stationary as over societies which appear reckless in progress. For over each successive present, with its ample Government offices, its law courts, its police stations, its secure private dwellings, there will be written as epitaph the inexorable law of a universe, not of Being, but of Becoming: “A wind passeth over it. It is gone. The place thereof shall know it no more.”
And of all illusions of the opening twentieth century perhaps the most remarkable is that of security. Already gigantic and novel forces of mechanical invention, upheavals of people, social discontents, are exhibiting a society in the beginnings of change. It would seem likely that the very rapid disintegration, which has taken place in a period of external tranquillity, in beliefs and ideas, may be giving place to a reverse condition: of a time of internal quietude accompanied by large external transformations. With Europe facing an international discontent amongst its industrial peoples, the nations, as an armed camp, heaping up instruments of destruction, the East suddenly awake, the people in England and America writhing in the grasp of a money power more and more concentrated in the hands of enormous Corporations, he would be but a blind prophet who, looking to the future, would assert that all things will continue as until now.
A few years back men loved to anticipate an age of innocence and gold; with humanity at last tranquil and satisfied, in the socialistic millennium or the anarchic heaven of childhood. To-day the critic of a less sanguine outlook openly proclaims that modern civilisation carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Two great imaginative writers, M. Anatole France in Paris, Mr. H. G. Wells in London, have presented their visions of the coming end of an age. The picture of the former is more ironical, more completely the cry of Vanity in a world of disillusionment. The picture of the latter is more scientific. Here is one way at least in which the thing may happen, in which the end may come. And if not in this way, yet in any similar and entirely unexpected fashion, arising out of that present danger: the instability which of necessity must prevail when vast implements of destruction are placed in the hands of a civilisation imperfectly self-controlled, and subject to panic fears and hatreds. It is in the realisation of so remarkable a danger that the story of the outbreak of aerial warfare becomes not so much a nightmare vision of the future as a vigorous criticism of the present. Mr. Wells had formerly demanded supernatural machinery to effect his outpouring of calamity and terror. A comet, bearing a strange gas, will make every one sane. With a sudden gasp of amazement, they will realise the essential insanity of the life which they had hitherto regarded as natural to mankind. Martians, descending from the darkened sky, with irresistible powers of heat ray and poisonous dust, will wipe out humanity as a man will wipe out a wasp’s nest. But here[29] he has returned to the solid ground, and without any assumptions but those of but a slight advance in mechanical invention, exhibits the forces which make towards a cosmic overthrow. The apparatus required is not much more than will undoubtedly be furnished within the next half-century. “Flying” is now assured; has come to stay. It is merely a matter of years or perhaps months before every external apparatus that the author requires for his apocalypse will be at the disposal of mankind. And with that invention there comes a new epoch in the history of humanity. Given effective flying—to be utilised in war not for the transference of men, but for coercing a nation into submission—the march of events appears to follow a possible chain of sequence. Each nation, armed to the teeth in a world which has scarcely apprehended war—a city-bred people—is to-day restrained from fighting by fear of consequences. Each nation—in this grim forecast—thinking itself secure in the possession of a new invincible weapon, plunges into effort for the overlordship of the world. The German air fleet invades New York. The city, “drinking up the wealth of a continent as Rome once drank up the wealth of the Mediterranean, and Babylon the wealth of the East,” after a hopeless resistance, capitulates. The poor, neglected in their quarters of squalor, like the poor in Paris in 1870, raise the cry that they are betrayed. Sporadic violence against the invader breaks the truce. The Germans, enraged, determine to make an example which will crush out the need for further effort in a cruelty which is ultimately to prove a kindness. Fire and brimstone rain down from the airships, like the fire and brimstone which rained down upon the cities of the plain. At the end New York is a smoking mass of ruins: a cemetery of a million dead. The assumption of terrorism would have been justified had war been operating under the old conditions. Rage and a fury of revenge on such occasion will always overcome cowardice; man, in a kind of madness, will be content to be destroyed, if only he can destroy. It is only when the resistance becomes obviously senseless—when he has no means of hurting his enemy—that he finally accepts the inevitable. But in the new conditions of air-fighting such an equilibrium would never be attained. There are no frontiers that can be guarded. Desperate men, equipping these new craft, can always exact terrible reprisals. In return for New York’s destruction, Berlin is smashed to powder by American airships; in return for Berlin, other American cities. Madness and delirium seize the people: the whole world is at war; modern civilisation blows up and vanishes from the world.
With the destructive fury of the war comes the collapse in the whole edifice of credit which maintains the economic efficiency of the industrial system. Men demand gold as in America in the last crisis, hoarding it in their stockings or burying it in their gardens. The stock of gold becomes exhausted, bonds and shares waste paper. Factories close. The city populations find neither work nor bread. In peril of imminent destruction from the enemy above, men claw and mow at one another in blind struggle in the starving cities, reeling back visibly into the beast; as they will do in extremity even when an earthquake has shattered their city and death sits waiting at the door of their houses. After the fighting comes the famine, after the famine the great pestilence. The organisation of society is broken and fissured. The vast multitude perish. The few that remain, like the few that remained of the Roman civilisation after the impact of the barbarian, are found at the end, in village communities or isolated huts, or encamped in the ruins of once populous towns. Amid the nettle and the ivy the survivors of London wander forlorn through the empty labyrinths: as the survivors encamped in the ruins of Rome in the long twilight which preceded the Middle Age. After the three hundred years of diastole there came “the swift and unexpected systole, like the closing of a fist.” “They could not understand it was a systole,” writes Mr. Wells. “They could not think of it as anything but a jolt, a hitch, a mere oscillatory indication of the swiftness of their progress. Collapse, though it happened all about them, remained incredible. Presently some falling mass smote them down, or the ground opened beneath their feet. They died incredulous.” So incredulous indeed died Babylon, Tyre, Rome; each refusing to believe that it was witnessing the end of a world.
How far is this sombre vision a nightmare merely? How far a warning of the things which may come to pass? Mr. Wells requires for his Götterdämmerung no fresh influx of barbarian hordes to smash civilisation brutally to pieces, such as is feared by some: not even the upheaval from below, in the consolidated masses of the poor, which has seemed to M. Anatole France and others a force destined to consume civilisation in fire and blood. He had accepted the undeniable note of the age, that material advance has far transcended moral progress, and that this inequality is full of the elements of danger. Man has wrested secrets from sun and star, equipped himself with apparatus which should make him rival the older gods, stolen, like Prometheus, the fire of heaven to be his servant, and made the earth and the air to obey him. Yet this unparalleled control of dead things has failed to eliminate his silly national jealousies, his little prejudices and selfishnesses, his clumsy determination to make his life a brutal, irrational thing. Mr. Wells outpours his vials of wrath upon the Crowd: the vacant street-bred people, the “common abundant life,” “flowing, in its cheerful, aimless way,” towards the Abyss. His hero, one of this Crowd, Mr. Bert Smallways, is one of “the sort of men who had made England and America what they are.” “He had lived all his life in narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, and in a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape. He thought the whole duty of man was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands, as he put it, ‘on the dibs,’ and have a good time.” But the author need not have gone to the Crowd for his illustration. No lunacy that flourishes amongst the little but is intensified amongst the great. The German Professors, the conversation of an Oxford College Common Room will exhibit as dangerous a combination of truculence and terror as any gathering of patriots at a public-house bar. The war scare of a halfpenny paper, with its frantic appeals to race prejudice and passion, is revealed in deepening imbecilities in sixpenny magazines which circulate amongst the country clergy, or half-crown reviews which lie upon the table of country houses. Countless millions in Europe and Asia and America, “instead of being born rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise, and startled into the strangest forms and reactions.” Everywhere in the early twentieth century this observer finds “a sort of heated, irascible stupidity”; everywhere “congested nations in inconvenient areas, stopping the exchange of population and produce with each other, annoying each other with tariffs and every possible commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies and armies that grow every year more portentious.”
“The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people,” says M. Anatole France of his “Penguins.” “They kept on making them still higher. They built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices, shops, banks, societies, one above another. They dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town.” Everything here was constructed efficiently for the production of wealth. The organisation was perfect. The ancient aristocracies and democracies had alike departed. The Trusts, with their Directors, were omnipotent. “Like all true aristocrats, like the patricians of Republican Rome or the squires of old England, these powerful men affected a great severity in their habits and customs. They were the ascetics of wealth. At the meetings of the Trusts an observer would have noticed their smooth and puffy faces, their lantern cheeks, their sunken eyes and wrinkled brows.... Denying themselves all happiness, all pleasure, and all rest, they spent their miserable lives in rooms without light or air, furnished only with electrical apparatus, living on eggs and milk, and sleeping on camp beds. By doing nothing except pressing nickel buttons with their fingers, these mystics heaped up riches of which they never saw the signs, and acquired the vain possibility of gratifying desires that they never experienced.” Society, as a whole, became organised on a plutocratic, as once on a military, basis; and all classes endeavoured to approximate themselves to the ideal standard set from above. Like insects, the huge hive laboured night and day, driven forward by the blind, furious instinct for accumulation. “All passions which injured the increase or the preservation of wealth were regarded as dishonourable. Neither indolence, nor idleness, nor the taste for disinterested study, nor love of the arts, nor, above all, extravagance, was ever forgiven. Pity was condemned as a dangerous weakness.” “The State was firmly based on two great public virtues: respect for the rich, contempt for the poor.” As they devoted their whole intelligence to business, they sought no intellectual pleasures. The theatre was reduced to pantomime and comic dances. The very rich formed only a minority, but their collaborators were the entire people. The agents of commerce or banking, the engineers and managers of factories, received immense salaries, and were recruited from the talent to whom this supreme career was always open. The system sucked the efficient and enterprising from the populace below. What remained, a spongy morass of low-grade life, shepherded, controlled, fed, and housed by their masters, presented every sign of physical and moral degeneration. “Of low stature, with small heads and narrow chests, they were further distinguished from the comfortable classes by a multitude of physiological anomalies, and, in particular, by a common want of symmetry between the head and the limbs.” The more robust of them became soldiers. From the remainder the employers continually and methodically selected out the enterprising and talented, leaving alone “labourers who were incapable of defending their rights, but were yet intelligent enough to perform their toil, which highly perfected machines rendered extremely simple.” “In a word, these miserable employees were plunged in a gloomy apathy that nothing enlightened and nothing exasperated. They were necessary instruments for the social order, and well adapted to their purpose.”
Civilisation seemed to have at length attained its ideal, and to have finally established a coherent, organic society. A system founded on “what is strongest in human nature, pride and cupidity,” would seem to have been guaranteed an earthly immortality. Yet there were grounds for uneasiness, especially on the score of physical health. “The health of the poor is what it must be,” said the experts in hygiene, “but that of the rich leaves much to be desired.” The multi-millionaires were bald at the age of eighteen. Some showed from time to time a dangerous weakness of mind. Overstrung and enfeebled, they gave enormous sums to ignorant charlatans, and there suddenly sprang up in the town the medical or theological fortune of some trumpery bath-attendant who had become a teacher or a prophet. The number of lunatics increased continually. Suicides multiplied in the world of wealth.
M. Anatole France requires no visitants from another world to ensure the destruction of his nightmare. He does not even need the national jealousies and insanities of Mr. Wells equipped with new weapons of destruction. His vision of a Penguin Chicago at Paris finally falls to pieces from its own internal rottenness. Anarchists, wielding tremendous explosives, accepted as deliverers by the enslaved and degenerate proletariat, smash Society into pieces. One of them, a clerk in the Electricity Trust, an afternoon in June, from the heights of Fort Saint-Michel, witnesses the beginning of the end. To a little child, playing there all unconscious of the coming cataclysm, he tells the story of human progress. “A fisherman once threw his net into the sea, and drew out a little sealed copper pot, which he opened with his knife. Smoke came out of it, and as it mounted up to the clouds the smoke grew thicker and thicker, and became a giant, who gave such a terrible yawn that the whole world was blown to dust.” The “yawn” is the weariness of a vast disillusionment: the awakening of a slave population to the futility of its further continuance. At first the Anarchists waged war on the Trusts, while the people stood aloof, resentful, indifferent. Later, in the panic that accompanied the immense ruin of property, the mob ceased work and indulged in a pandemonium of destruction. Men fought for food and for plunder in the darkened ways of the city. Society lost its structure and deliquesced into a kind of sloppy morass. Epidemics followed the fighting, bred from unburied corpses. Famine carried off those whom pestilence had spared. “Reforms were introduced into institutions, and great changes took place in habits and customs; but the country never recovered the loss of its capital, and never regained its former prosperity. Commerce and industry dwindled away. Civilisation abandoned those countries which for so long it had preferred to all others. They became insalubrious and sterile. The territories that had supported so many millions of men became nothing more than a desert. On the hill of Fort Saint-Michel wild horses cropped the coarse grass.”
The diastole had been followed by a systole. Mankind after the European, as after the Roman, civilisation fell back into darkness. A catastrophe of centuries was occupied by the evening, the midnight, and the dawn. As once the barbarians walked with wonder along the deserted Roman roads or suddenly emerged from forest and plain to gaze astonished on the vast ruins of aqueducts and coliseums and once populous cities, so the new child peoples which survived the cosmic catastrophe contemplated the embankments, the crumbling bridges, the tattered, torn fragments of deserted towns which marked the memories of our dead race. The wheel of history slowly revolved through the centuries, and after a time once again the unending cyclic process was renewed and another “civilisation” erected which thought itself the last word of human progress.
“Days flowed like water from the fountains, and the centuries passed like drops falling from the ends of stalactites. Hunters came to chase the bears upon the hills that covered the forgotten city. Shepherds fed their flocks upon them. Labourers turned up the soil with their ploughs. Gardeners cultivated their lettuces and grafted their pear trees. They were not rich, and they had no arts. The walls of their cabins were covered with old vines and roses. A goat-skin clothed their tanned limbs, while their wives dressed themselves with the wool that they themselves had spun. The goat-herds moulded little figures of men and animals out of clay, or sang songs about the young girl who follows her lover through woods or among the browsing goats; while the pine trees whisper together, and the water utters its murmuring sound. The master of the house grew angry with the beetles who devoured his figs. He planned snares to protect his fowls from the velvet-tailed fox, and he poured out wine for his neighbours, saying, ‘Drink! the flies have not spoilt my vintage; the vines were dry before they came.’
“In the course of ages the wealth of the villages and the corn that filled the fields were pillaged by barbarian invaders. The country changed its masters many times. The conquerors built castles on the hills. Cultivation increased: mills, forges, tanneries, and looms were established. Roads were opened through the woods and over the marshes. The river was covered with boats. The hamlets became large villages, and, joining together, formed a town which protected itself by deep trenches and lofty walls. Later, becoming the capital of a great State, it found itself straitened within its now useless ramparts, and it converted them into grass-grown villas. It grew very rich and large beyond measure.
“The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people. They kept on making them still higher. They built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices, shops, banks, societies, one above another. They dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town.”[30]
After a time, says a great writer, the earth grows sick of her children, like exhausted ground that will bear fruit no more. It is impossible that society could “blow up” with such rapidity as is here pictured; the process is, in any case, foreshortened. But any student who has followed the history of Rome’s destruction—the gradual disintegration of a society exceedingly complex and rational—will never conceal from himself the possibility of similar vast changes in the world of to-morrow. The process is always incredible to those who think that mankind henceforth has but to settle down and be comfortable in a world where tranquillity is secure. Dr. Dill has described such a life under the Roman peace, with the municipalities competing in magnificence of building, the arts of life secure, the farmhouse (in one picture) with the peacocks in the garden under the sunlight, and every accompanying element of enjoyment and repose. The only sorrow which disturbed such an age was the sometimes transient regret that all the great things had been accomplished; that humanity, in a completely rational society, had nothing to contemplate in the future but a continuous repetition of the present—an endless end of the world. A few generations later that farmhouse lies deserted, the cities are crumbling into ruin, society itself has fallen to pieces, terror, and with terror childlike superstition and ferocity, have achieved dominance. Night has resumed her ancient Empire. What guarantee does the present offer against the repetition of a similar catastrophe? Civilisation possesses weapons adequate to protection against forces without. It has no protection against forces within. One of the passing figures in Mr. Wells’s vision of desolation mourns over the vanishing of all the bright hopes of a transfigured world. “The sense of fine beginnings! It was all a sham. There were no beginnings. We’re just ants in ant-hill circles, in a world that doesn’t matter: that goes on and rambles into nothingness. New York—New York doesn’t even strike me as horrible. New York was nothing but an ant-hill kicked to pieces by a fool.”
These observers are justified at least in one contention: that the future, whether in orderly progress or with sudden or gradual retrogression, will be astonished at the “illusion of security” in which to-day society reposes; forgetting that but a thin crust separates it from the central elemental fires, that the heart of the earth is a flame. There are forces of resistance to disintegration and decay, even amongst this shabby crowd which appears to the indignant observer but an aggregation of aimless, impossible lives. Mr. Wells himself in earlier work has shown us the humanity and romantic ardour of Mr. Hoopdriver and the resolute hope of Mr. Lewisham, even if in later effort he can see little but the fatuous ineptitude of Mr. “Art” Kipps or the ineffective blunderings of Mr. Bert Smallways. Mr. Anatole France has revealed in his studies of contemporary life kindly intelligent citizens, doing bravely the work of the day. In no panic fear, certainly with no acquiescence and despair, the reformer to-day will contemplate the possible future of a society beyond measure complex, baffling and uncertain in its energies and aims. But the warning, always useful, but now more than ever necessary, cannot be too strongly emphasised: that with the vertical division between nation and nation armed to the teeth, and the horizontal division between rich and poor which has become a cosmopolitan fissure, the future of progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity—at best—appears but as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock, beaten by wind and wave; which cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning. The wise man will still go softly all his days; working always for greater economic equality on the one hand, for understanding between estranged peoples on the other; apprehending always how slight an effort of stupidity or violence could strike a death-blow to twentieth-century civilisation, and elevate the forces of destruction triumphant over the ruins of a world.
CHAPTER XI
POSTSCRIPT
SO at the end we are compelled to confess an essential ignorance. To-day’s “human comedy” still remains unwritten. Those who have essayed it are always unconsciously or deliberately foreshortening or distorting: exhibiting excess of darkness or sunshine. We know little of the forces fermenting in that strange laboratory which is the birthplace of the coming time. We are uncertain whether civilisation is about to blossom into flower, or wither in tangle of dead leaves and faded gold. We can find no answer to the inquiry, whether we are about to plunge into a new period of tumult and upheaval, whether we are destined to an indefinite prolongation of the present half-lights and shadows, whether, as we sometimes try to anticipate, a door is to be suddenly opened, revealing unimaginable glories.
In face of such uncertainty, the verdict is often one of criticism and despair. “The wisest man has warned us”—so runs a mournful verdict—“not to expect the world ever to improve so much that the better part of mankind will be in the majority. No wise man ever undertakes to correct the disorders of the public estate.” “He who cannot endure the madness of the public, but goeth about to think he can cure it, is himself no less mad than the rest.”
Such a verdict, however, pays little heed to the effort of those whose unregarded labour, now in patient adherence to duty, now in “something more heroical than this age affecteth,” has bought the good things which are the common heritage of to-day: a widespread comfort, opportunities for happiness and content, freedom which is always but hardly won and but hardly maintained.
Optimism and pessimism, in face of any civilisation in a changing world, are equally untrue, equally futile. All human societies mingle selfishness and sacrifice, exultation and weariness, laughter and tears. No one age is especially wicked, especially tired, especially noble. All ages are wicked, tired, noble. Progress is always impossible and always proceeding. Preservation is always hazardous and always attained. Every class is unfit to govern; and the government of the world continues. Austerities, simplicities, and a common danger breed virtues and devotions which are the parents of prosperity. Prosperity breeds arrogance, extravagance, and class hatreds. Opulence and pride in their turn breed national disasters. And these disasters engender the austerities and simplicities which start the cycle again anew.
To accept all and to reject all are in this case equally desperate courses. To turn aside in despair, to hold aloof in disdain, to proclaim from the heart of comfort an easy approval, are policies traitorous to the public good.
A king of France—so runs the medieval legend—when travelling in Catalonia, discovered an ancient man engaged unremittingly in the planting of date-kernels. “Why?” he asked, “do you sow the seeds of a tree of such tardy growth, seeing that the dates will not ripen till a hundred years be passed?” “Am I not then eating,” was the answer, “the fruit of trees planted by my forefathers, who took thought for those who were to come? And shall not I do like unto them?”[31]
It may be that the men “who took thought for those who were to come” will be found upon the winning side.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] F. M. Hueffer in “The Spirit of the People,” a clever and suggestive analysis of Middle Class England.
[2] The Island Pharisees. J. Galsworthy.
[3] At the Works. Lady Bell.
[4] A Poor Man’s House. Stephen Reynolds.
[5] The Town Child. R. A. Bray.
[6] Towards Social Reform. Canon and Mrs. Barrett.
[7] New Worlds for Old. H. G. Wells.
[8] Socialism. R. C. Ensor.
[9] Report of H.M. Factory Inspectors, 1907.
[10] Report of the Committee on Truck, 1909.
[11] Kipps. By H. G. Wells.
[12] Report of Parliamentary Committee on Home Work, 1908. To-day in Parliament a “Trades’ Boards Bill” seems at last to offer a way towards remedy.
[13] C. L. Marson in The “Commonwealth.”
[14] The Ruin of Rural England.
[15] D. C. Pedder. Where Men Decay.
[16] Before the Great Pillage. Dr. Jessop.
[17] England a Nation.
[18] Tolstoy, Fortnightly Review, February 1909.
[19] Modernism and Romance. By R. A. Scott James. The whole book forms a very interesting study of the possibilities of the survival of “Romance” in the modern world.
[20] Modernism and Romance.
[21] In a volume of essays, In Peril of Change.
[22] Tono-Bungay. By H. G. Wells.
[23] John Bull’s Other Island. G. Bernard Shaw.
[24] A Century of Meditations. Thomas Treherne.
[25] See The Story of My Heart. By Richard Jefferies.
[26] England a Nation.
[27] Life and Labour of the People. Religious Influences.
[28] Christianity and the Working Classes, edited by George Haw.
[29] The War in the Air. By H. G. Wells.
[30] In these summaries and quotations I have used the excellent translation of Mr. A. W. Evans’s Penguin Island (John Lane).
[31] Gentlemen Errant. Mrs. Cust.