We are all too anxious to do the right thing and to be known to the right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology with the air of connoisseurs; they drank down Hebrew virtues with a vigorous relish. Then came a rococo and affected age, neat, conceited, and trim; yet in the middle of that stood out a great rugged figure like Johnson, full to the brim of impassioned force. Then again the intellect, the poetry of the nation stirred and woke. In Wordsworth, in Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest against the dulness of prosperity. But now we seem to have settled down comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on delicate instruments. The trumpet and the horn are silent.
Perhaps we must content ourselves with the vigorous advance of science, the determination to penetrate secrets, to know all that is to be known, not to form conclusions without evidence. But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment. Not in such a mood as this does humanity fare further and higher. Men become cautious, prudent, and decisive thus, instead of generous, hopeful, and high-hearted.
But to despair too soon of an era, to despise and satirise an age, a national temper, is a deep and fatal mistake. The world moves onwards patiently and inevitably, obeying a larger and a mightier law. What is rather the duty of all who love what is noble and beautiful is not to carp and bicker over faulty conditions, but to realise their aims and hopes, to labour abundantly and patiently, to speak and feel sincerely, to encourage rather than to condemn, Serviendum lietandum says the brave motto. To serve, one cannot avoid that; but to serve with blitheness, that is the secret.
XXII
I cannot help wondering what the substance was which my fellow-traveller to-day was consuming under the outward guise of cigarettes. It had a scent that was at once strange and afflicting. It was no more like tobacco than tobacco is like violets. It seemed as though it must have been carefully prepared and procured for some unknown purpose, but it was impossible to connect pleasure with it. It had a corroding mineral scent, and must have been digged, I think, out of the bowels of the surely not harmless earth. And the man himself! He was primly and precisely dressed, but he had an indefinable resemblance to a goat; his hair curled like horns; and he had the thin, restless, sneering lips, the impudent, inexpressive eyes of the goat. I found myself curiously oppressed by him. I hated his slow, deliberate movements; the idea that the air he breathed should mingle with the air of the carriage, and be transferred to my own lungs and blood, was horrible to me. I pitied those who had to serve him, and the relations compelled to own him. Yet I cannot trace the origin of this deep repugnance. There are innumerable natural objects far more hideous and outwardly repellent, but which yet do not possess this nauseating quality. Such shuddering hostility may lie far deeper than the outward appearance, and arise from some innate enmity of soul. It is a wholly unreasonable thing, no doubt, and yet it transcends all reason and surmounts all moral principle. I should not, I hope, refuse to help or succour such a man if he were in need or pain; but I do not wish to see him or to be near him, nor can I desire that he should continue to exist.
It is an interesting question how far it is allowable to dislike other people. Of course we are bound to love our enemies if we can, but even the Gospel sets us an example of unbounded and uncompromising denunciation, in the case of the Pharisees. It is the habit of preachers to say that when we are dealing with detestable and impossible people we should perform that subtle metaphysical process that is described as hating the sin and loving the sinner. But that is surely a very difficult thing to do? It is like saying that when one is contemplating a very ugly and repulsive face, we are to dislike the ugliness of it but admire the face; and the fact remains that it is an extremely difficult and complicated thing to do to separate an individual from his qualities. The most one can say is that one might like him if he were different from what he is; but as long as that remains what the grammarians call an unfulfilled condition, one's liking is of a very impersonal nature. Such a statement as that one would like a person well enough if he were only not what he is, is like the speech that was parodied by Archbishop Whately in the House of Lords. A speaker was recommending a measure on the ground that it would be a very satisfactory one if only the conditions which it was meant to meet were different. "As much as to say," said Whately to his neighbour on the conclusion of the speech, "that if my aunt were a man, he would be my uncle."
Of course the thing is easy enough when one is dealing, say, with a fine and generous nature which is disfigured by a conspicuous fault. If a man who is otherwise lovable and admirable has occasional outbursts of spiteful and vicious ill-temper, it is possible to love him, because one can conceive of him without the particular fault. But there are some faults that permeate and soak through a man's whole character, as in the Cornish squab pie, where an excellent pasty of bacon, potatoes, and other agreeable commodities is penetrated throughout with the oily flavour of a young cormorant which is popped in at the top just before the pie is baked.
If a man is malignant or unreliable or mean or selfish, the savour of his fault has a way of noisomely imbuing all his qualities, especially if he is not aware of the deficiency. If a man is humbly and sadly aware of the thing that is vile, if he makes clumsy and lamentable attempts to get rid of it, one may pity him so much that one may almost find oneself admiring him. One feels that he is made so, that he cannot wholly help it, and we lose ourselves in wondering why a human being should be so strangely hampered. But if a man displays an odious fault complacently; if he takes mean advantage of other people, and frankly considers people fools who do not condescend to the same devices; if he gives one to understand that he dislikes and despises one; if he reserves a spiteful respect only for those who can beat him with his own weapons; if he is vulgar, snobbish, censorious, unkind, and self-satisfied into the bargain, it is very hard to say what the duty of a Christian is in the matter. I met the other day, at a country house, a man whom I will frankly confess that I disliked. He was a tall, grim-looking man, of uncompromising manners, who told interminable stories, mostly to the discredit of other people—"not leaving Lancelot brave or Galahad clean." His chief pleasure seemed to be in making his hearers uncomfortable. His stories were undeniably amusing, but left a bad taste in the mouth. He had an attentive audience, mainly, I think, because most of us were afraid to say what we thought in his presence. He was a man of wide and accurate knowledge, and delighted in showing up other people's ignorance. I suppose the truest courage would have been to withstand him boldly, or, better still, to attempt to convert him to a more generous view of life. But it did not seem worth the trouble; it was impossible to argue with him successfully, and his conversion seemed more a thing to be prayed for than to be attempted. One aged and genial statesman who was present did indeed, by persistent courtesy, contrive to give him a few moments of uneasiness; and the sympathies of the party were so plainly on the side of the statesman that even our tyrant appeared to suspect that urbanity was sometimes a useful quality. We all breathed more freely when he took his departure, and there was a general sense of heightened enjoyment abroad.
Yet it is impossible to compassionate such a man, because he does not need compassion. He is perfectly satisfied with his position; he does not want people to like him—he would consider that to be sentimental, and for sentiment of every kind he has a profound abhorrence. His view of himself is, I suppose, of a brilliant and capable man who holds his own and makes himself felt. The only result on the mind, from contemplating him, is that one revels in the possibility of metempsychosis and pictures him as being born again to some dreary and thankless occupation, a scavenger or a sewer-cleaner, or, better still, penned in the body of some absurd and inefficient animal, a slug or a jelly-fish, where he might learn to be passive and contemptible.
Meanwhile it is true, of course, that the most detestable people generally do improve upon acquaintance. I have seldom spent any length of time in the enforced society of a disagreeable person without finding that I liked him better at the end than at the beginning. Very often one finds that the disagreeable qualities are used as a sort of defensive panoply, and that they are the result, to a certain extent, of unhappy experiences. Since I met our friend I have learnt a fact about him, which makes me view him in a somewhat different light, I have discovered that he was bullied at school. I am inclined to believe that his fondness for bullying other people is mainly the result of this, and that it arises partly from a rooted belief that other people are malevolent, and that the only method is to exhibit his own spines; partly also from a perverted sense of justice; on the ground that, as he had to bear undeserved persecution in the days when he was defenceless, it is but just that others should bear it in their turn. He is like the cabin-boy Ransome in Kidnapped, who, being treated with the grossest brutality by the officers, kept a rope's end of his own to wallop the little ones with. I do not say that this is a generous or high-hearted view of life. It would be better if he could say Miseris succurrere disco. What he rather says, to parody the words of the hermit in Edwin and Angelina, is—