Stand Up, Ye Dead

by Norman Maclean

CHAPTER VII

THE SLUM IN THE MAN

The misery which the slow evolution of urban and industrial civilisation has wrought in the crowded areas of our cities is manifest to the least observant eye. The pitiful condition of the man in the slum makes its clamorous appeal to the conscience of the race. But there is a condition even more pitiful. It is that of many of the dwellers in the spacious squares and terraces where the rich and the leisured are segregated. They are far removed from the slum where the miserable are massed; but they have created a slum in their own souls. And of the two, the condition of him whose soul is a slum is truly the more grievous.

I

They have everything that life can desire of material good. These houses stretching for miles in their regular uniformity are replete with appliances of luxury and comfort such as a Roman emperor might have sighed for in vain; every desire of their heart they have the power and the will to gratify;—and yet life is dreary. The people that ought to be supremely happy are on the whole miserable. They have reduced life to a series of sensations. But the dread spectre of satiety dogs the footsteps of the devotees of sense. If they were mere animals they would be perfectly happy. Their misery is that they are endowed with souls. And the starved soul will not let them rest.

What has pauperised the rich is this—they have lost the sense of God. Their fathers were saved from the tyranny of their senses by the fact that they kept open the window towards the Infinite. But the growth of knowledge and the triumphs of science gradually shut that window, so that now scarce a glow of light penetrates to the dusty and dark recesses of the soul. The soul no longer thrills with the Divine; all the thrill they can know is that of gratifying the body. And that way leads only to the self-loathing of repletion. To escape from themselves they rush in clouds of dust along the roads, demanding 'speed in the face of the Lord.' But all in vain is a sated body hurled from London to Brighton, for at the end it is sated still.

With the shutting of the window towards the Infinite, all restraint vanished. So long as there remained a sense of a moral order in the universe which could only emanate from a Moral Governor, and so long as the soul felt that the way of life lay in conformity to the will of the Unseen Ruler, life was kept under control. The will never wholly relaxed its effort to keep the outgoings of life in unison with God. But, then, there came the startling realisation that there was no God, or, if there was, that He was a mere negligible factor. The processes by which things came to be as they are could be explained; and because they could be explained, of course, God had nothing to do with them! God was steadily pushed further and further away. Back from a mythical Eden some five thousand years ago, He was pushed into the recesses of æons that made the brain reel to contemplate; away from a heaven which seemed quite near, He was removed far off into the abysses of heavens which had become astronomical. Everything could be explained—it was only a question of time when life would yield its secret. As the universe grew wider and wider there was in it no place for God. In that world which once He was deemed to have created, now He was superfluous. And the restraints which the thought of Him imposed were thrown to the winds. History once more repeated itself. 'They treat it,' wrote Bishop Butler of religion in his day, 'as if ... 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.' The dawn of the twentieth century found a generation which far outstripped the eighteenth. By its headlong plunge into the vortex of pleasure it was determined to avenge itself for the days when life was disciplined by the thought of the judgment-seat of God.

Alongside of this emancipation from the restraints of religion there was a singular development of interest in religious matters. Never were there so many books published regarding the sources of Christianity and the authenticity of that various literature which composes the Bible. And votaries went on incessantly tunnelling the great barrier which shuts us in from what lies beyond the visible, and they even heard, as it were, the tapping of those who drove a tunnel to meet them. But all that activity was wholly divorced from that religion which is inherently spirit and life. It was the interest of the antiquarian in the earthen vessel which holds the treasure, not the interest of the soul in the treasure itself. The frame was the object of endless discussion and speculation, but the eyes were blind to the picture enclosed by the frame. They thought that they were engaged in the works of religion, while their work was as remote from religion as the labour of one who would set himself to expound the glory and wonder of art by explaining the texture of canvas and analysing the chemical components of paint. And, while the ancient documents were studied more and more under the microscope, the image of the Son of Man faded more and more before the eyes of men, and the ideal of love of duty was left as lumber under accumulating dust: religion had a place in the social scheme, but the place was the museum of antiquities. It was no longer a power in life; it had become a matter of mere historic interest.

II

The new atmosphere in which men lived made it impossible to present the Christian appeal to them as that appeal came home to the heart of humanity for nineteen centuries. For the life-blood of religion was ever the passion of love and gratitude evoked by the forgiveness of sin. But the sense of sin died in the heart, and a generation that knew not sin could only wonder at the meaning of a gospel which proclaimed the forgiveness of sin. No golden age lay behind when man was sinless; there was no 'fall' from a high estate, and consequently no restoration was needed. The spiritual tale of man's first sin was a matter of mockery; and the teaching of prophet and saint regarding iniquity was but 'an obsolete and fanatical eccentricity.' Walt Whitman has given expression to man's new attitude:

'I could turn and live with animals, they are so
placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long;
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the night and weep for their sins.'

Nothing was, in fact, further from the thought of the latter-day generation than to lie awake weeping for their sins. 'As a matter of fact,' writes Sir Oliver Lodge, 'the higher man of to-day is not worrying about his sins at all, still less about their punishment; his mission, if he be good for anything, is to be up and doing.' That is an absolutely correct diagnosis. So little does the 'higher man of to-day' worry about his sins that he sinks into the slough of animalism undisturbed by any thought of wrong. Having sacrificed every canon of Christian morality, he goes forth out of his house where the peace is unbroken by the clamorous voices of children, and he pursues his mission of being 'up and doing'—directing his energies in Whitechapel to keeping alive the children of the diseased and the miserable. This is the fine fruit of our 'higher man': having destroyed in his home that race whose product he is, unrepentant of his crime, he devotes himself to saving the race in the slum. His mission to be 'up and doing' savours of the slime—but he knows it not. His whole life is the proof that he has forgotten the meaning of iniquity, and that he is incapable of worrying about his sins.

In all the books wherein the life of to-day is portrayed there move men and women whose consciences are no longer troubled by the thought of any wrong. With a photographic accuracy Arnold Bennett has set forth the lives of men and women emerging from the gutter into ease and riches, but the world to which they attain is a world where the thought of God ceases to inspire or disturb. He indeed pauses in a moment of grim satire to visualise a soul in the throes of realising sin. The heroine of three books, Hilda Lessways, shuts her ears to the call summoning her to her mother's bedside, only to find her dead when selfishness suffers her to arrive. From the house where her dead mother lies she goes to the station to meet a relative and comes face to face with a well-dressed epileptic. She watches him, almost shuddering. He stares at her with his epileptic eyes ... and she rushes home a nervous wreck. 'She knew profoundly and fatally,' expounds Mr. Bennett, 'the evil principle which had conquered her so completely that she had no power left with which to fight it. This evil principle was sin itself. She was the sinner convicted and self-convicted. One of the last intelligent victims of a malady which has now almost passed away from the civilised earth, she existed in the chill and stricken desolation of incommutable doom.' Our author knows his world, and in that world only the sight of an epileptic convinces of sin. And the realisation, as might be expected, only throws the victim more surely into the grip of sin. For that world knows no longer any God who saves from sin.

There is no ground left on which religion can appeal to the conscience of such a generation. In the eighteenth century Wesley and Whitefield sent through the decaying masses of England a vitalising breath as they proclaimed the joyful gospel of deliverance from sin, and men arose from the mire with lives transfigured. In our day religion can find no such approach and no such triumph. For like the whispering of an idle breeze is a proclamation of sin's forgiveness to those who know no sin. For us it is but a childish malady which we have long outgrown. The passion of sin forgiven will no longer thrill our souls.

III

And this life which our modern writers describe is one of appalling dreariness. As the new generation grow in knowledge every ideal vanishes; as they move upward in the social scale they shut out God. The Chapel loses its power; men wear Wesley's clothes but know not his spirit. Arnold Bennett makes us see the dying epoch. He describes the whole town assembled in the market-square to celebrate the centenary of Sunday schools. The vast crowd sing 'Rock of Ages' and 'There is a Fountain filled with Blood.' The volume of sound is overwhelming. 'Look at it,' says Edwin Clayhanger to Hilda Lessways; 'it only wants the Ganges at the bottom of the square.' 'Even if we don't believe,' she replies, 'we needn't make fun.' And amid the singing crowd, mocked at and jostled, struggles Mr. Shushions, the oldest Sunday-school teacher in the Five Towns, who long ago had rescued the Clayhangers from the workhouse, but now had 'lived too long' and 'survived his dignity.' 'The impression given was that the flesh would be unpleasant and uncanny to the touch.' It is a grim picture of an effete life still moving, mummified and repulsive, among men.

The old ideal was dead; but there was no ideal new-born. Life was dreary, but happiness was still pursued. When the family would move to the new house where science surrounded them with all the appliances of comfort and luxury, then Edwin Clayhanger was convinced he would find happiness. The day comes and they move to the new house. But that very morning there is a quarrel with his father. He had been ingenuous enough to believe that the new house somehow would mean the rebirth of himself and his family. 'Strange delusion! The bath-splashings and the other things gave him no pleasure, because he was saying to himself all the time, "There is going to be a row this morning. There is going to be a regular shindy this morning."' They come to the new house but they cannot sit down to dinner together.

'Father thinks I've been stealing his damned money,' snaps out the son in a barking voice, and refuses to meet him at table. And the father takes his dinner alone. The end of the ghastly quarrel is that the son gets an increase of half a crown to his weekly wage! That is the measure of the 'new birth' which he had so fondly anticipated. He does not realise that after being emptied from vessel to vessel, however much larger and more beautiful the vessels become, filthy water remains filthy water still.

What is there left to those for whom the vision of God thus fades? The fathers amassed money, and they had the joy of conflict, and a sense of duty. But the sons have not the joy of conflict. They inherit houses built for them, and money for which they have not toiled. What are they to do? Their fathers found endless interest in Church and Chapel, and they gave of their wealth. The sons no longer believe in Church and Chapel. They have no traditions of social service. They regard the class from which their fathers sprang with aversion and with fear. Their favourite topic of conversation is the shortcomings of the working-classes. One whole winter they denounced the iniquity of the State making any provision, however pitifully small, for the decayed veterans who fall out of the ranks of toil; another winter they declaimed with bitterness against the crime of the State making provision through insurance for the ill-health of their servants and employees! They have little taste for books, and money cannot buy the sense by which beauty floods the heart. There is nothing left them but self-indulgence. To that they sacrifice everything. Food and clothes and physical pleasure fill up the circuit of the days. Then weariness seizes them. They become the captives of boredom. They rush hither and thither. They carry to the Highlands a life which is intolerable hi London; they bring back to London a life which is intolerable in the Highlands. They live lives isolated from the joy and innocence of childhood—for that is the ideal they have made their own. They rush after anything which will promise the 'easier and quicker passing of the impracticable hours.' They still maintain some connection with the Church, but their attitude is that of patronage and not of allegiance. The preacher must be an echo of their voices or they will have none of him. There must be no preaching of stern duty or of judgment to come—that is antiquated! When they come to church there must be the gospel of soothing rest—fulsomely administered in a saccharine form! Religion must be a narcotic; its end that they may forget. But even then it must be in the smallest doses and at long intervals. Thus their places in church are getting emptier and emptier, and the day of worship saw their cars stand in serried rows by wayside inns. They have created for themselves a grey, dull world. 'If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts, all or most of them,' wrote Carlyle, 'then will be seen for some length of time, perhaps for some centuries, such a world as few are dreaming of.' And that is what they were fast doing when the thunder of the guns echoed doom. They were without God and without hope in the world.

To some this may appear an exaggerated and distorted picture. It may in fact be pointed out that in these last years there was a greater activity of social service directed towards the help of the poor and miserable than ever before. That is true. But it is true also that it was wholly ineffective. It was the activity mainly of ignorance. It was the throwing of half-crowns to the starving; it was not the giving of love. They gave charity; they did not give themselves. They acquiesced with hardly a protest in the social organisation which inevitably swelled the ranks of the poor and increased the burden of their misery. By that social organisation many of them profited. They gave doles; but it was to pacify their poor consciences. They instituted 'charity organisation societies,' making charity as it were a deal on the Stock Exchange. If only they had thought of it they would have instituted a 'Divine Spirit Organisation Society.' The one would not be more irreverent than the other; for charity is the fruit of the Spirit. They were to have charity without the Spirit—so they adopted the methods of the market-place. By means of ledgers and visitors they were to separate the deserving poor from the undeserving. Their charity was to be directed towards the deserving. They forgot that there could not be such a thing as charity for the deserving—only justice! There was the noise of much machinery, but the noise was made by a handful. The rest gave only of their lucre. And all the time, while they studied the social problem and organised charity, the measure of human misery went on increasing. The rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer, amid the greatest activity of social reformers. It was all futile because it was uninstructed. It only palliated the pain; it never sought to dry up the fountains of human misery. The professional charity organisers saw the human wrecks being borne on the flood to doom, and from the banks, in security, they threw them life-belts. But they never thought of plunging themselves into the wild waters and breasting the flood at the risk of their own lives that they might save. Man cannot save man without blood, and there was only water in their veins.

IV

That life manifested the slum at its core in sundry unmistakable forms. Its literature was largely the record of man wallowing in the mud; and that Art which aforetime made humanity kneel at the shrine of the Mother and the Child became the handmaid of vice. In the name of Art the new generation demanded freedom, but the freedom was a freedom divorced from modesty and reverence. Only the play or the song that evoked the unclean laugh now crowded the theatre. But most striking of all was the manner in which they sought to escape from the ennui which afflicted their souls. Weird and vulgar dances had their day; grotesque attire claimed its devotees; but the chief way of escape was that which led to the feet of charlatans. A whole group of new religions sprang up; mysteries from the Ganges vied with mysteries imported from Chicago, and both found multitudes to seek after them. The growth of centuries, the slow evolution of truth handed down by the saintly and the wise—that was as nothing weighed against the dictum of a woman in America or a Hindu in Benares!

On a grey winter afternoon, some three years ago, I happened to arrive at one of our most beautiful cities—a city that justly prides itself on its culture. As I walked along the world's most beautiful street I was struck by the sight of a long line of motors that overflowed up a roadway leading to the turreted hill. I asked a motor-man what was happening that day. 'There is a black prophet,' said he, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, 'preaching in the Assembly Hall.' I needed no further explanation. I know nothing about the said prophet except that he isn't a Christian. That was of course the secret of his power. Because he wasn't, the leisured and the cultured sat in serried ranks at his feet. Perhaps he would give them what they had lost—peace! And there came the memory of another civilisation sinking into decay when the mysteries of the Nile and the Orontes established themselves on the banks of the Tiber, and the weary citizens of Rome, sated by a world's luxury, deemed no charlatan emerging from the East too gross for acceptance or his mystery too incredible for belief. In the dawn of its decay Rome bestowed 'the freedom of the city on all the gods of mankind.' In our day London and Edinburgh have followed along the same road. The God all-holy and loving, the All-Father—we have cast Him off. But no superstition is too mean for us to kneel at its shrine. History is truly a monotonous record. Nations and empires have all gone the same road to perdition. And they never knew they were treading it.

V

Such was the condition of the nation when the trumpet of judgment sounded and civilisation went reeling into the furnace. The slum-dwellers and the slum-infected were alike shaking back into paganism and the beast. For the time we have emerged from the greater horror of sin into the horror of war. But what is to happen after? Saved as by fire, are we to hug our slums again?

Surely it cannot be for the perpetuation on earth of life after this order, that five millions of men have arisen and faced death. If we are to be worthy of the price that has been paid for our deliverance, by a resurrection from the dead we must cleanse our souls and transform our slums. It is not for us as we are, or for our cities as they now are built, or for a State that denies to its children the decencies of life, or for the continued reign of that plutocracy that has darkened the windows of the soul—not for the continuance of these have our brothers died right joyfully in the glory of their youth. It was for another England, another Scotland—the kingdom of the heart's desire wherein shall be found no more either the slum-dweller or the slum-lover—that they fought and died. When we think of them we know what the early Christians felt when they said one to the other, 'We are bought with a price; we are no longer our own to do as we like; we are His.' And we—we are theirs. We must be worthy of them. We dare not any longer leave their children in noisome slums; we dare not any longer suffer our own lungs to inhale the vapours of the spiritual slum. To show that we are in some little measure worthy of the price paid for our life, paid for the Britain that shall be, we will arise and straightway rebuild—until our cities shall be the cities of God, and our straths and valleys shall be filled with the songs of happiness and love and praise. They will not then have died in vain!