Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

I remember hearing a Nonconformist divine of the Nineties denounce the young man who, instead of taking a class, spent his Sunday afternoon “reading Herbert Spencer.”

It struck me at the time that the reverend gentleman was fighting an unusually extinct Satan. For even in the Nineties the number of young men who desecrated the Sabbath in this particular fashion was very small. Herbert Spencer had reached the stage of being much quoted and little read. Indeed, the reverence in which he was held had a strong resemblance to that which men pay to the departing or the departed. Lord Morley has quoted a competent critic who warned him, a day or two before the last volume of Spencer’s work was published, that the system expounded by him was, if not already dead, at least on the eve of death.

But if that were the case in England, it was by no means so in a country in which Herbert Spencer had shown from time to time considerable interest. The new agnostic Empire of Japan had taken most kindly to the Spencerian philosophy, partly because it was exceedingly prosaic and partly because it put forward a rather arrogant pretension to finality. The Japanese is intensely matter-of-fact, which is by no means the same thing as being practical, and is often the reverse of being practical; thus a Japanese engineer, in giving an estimate for a factory or a railway, will often state the cost to a fraction of a farthing—and in the end prove inaccurate by hundreds of thousands of pounds. This trait is in no way connected with stupidity: it is part of the character of a people wholly in love with formality, and dominated by a tyrannical passion for neatness of arrangement. The Japanese loves to pack his ideas, and dovetail them with one another, with the same precision with which he makes two dozen lacquer boxes fit into one, or constructs a house to hold exactly eight hundred and twenty floor-mats, each of just the same size, without an inch to spare.

What enchanted the Japanese was Herbert Spencer’s solemn way of assuming that the heavens and the earth, and all that in them is, all space, all time, all life, and all humanity could be measured and reckoned up to a millimetre or a half-centime by his particular philosophical abacus. During the Nineties the Herbert Spencer school was extraordinarily potent in Japan. At the head of it was that remarkable man, Professor Fukuzawa, who, more than any other, was responsible for supplying the moral and philosophical basis of the new Japanese civilisation. Occasionally the English master favoured his Oriental disciples with an encyclical, applauding them for their skill in keeping the masterful European at bay, and giving them hints as to how best they could realise a perfect morality unalloyed with the smallest taint of the superstition which still disgraced (and was almost necessary to) the West. At one time Herbert Spencer had apparently great hopes that Japan might realise his ideal of the State in which men are guided wholly by reason—a State untainted with imperialism, militarism, aristocratic prejudice, or ecclesiastical faddism.

HERBERT SPENCER.

Japan’s subsequent essays in self-revelation are a sufficient commentary on these facts. In one sense Japan may still be called a Spencerian country; unread here, the philosopher is still conned by hundreds of thousands of eager students in the Eastern Empire; he has been expanded and adopted by a whole succession of native pedants. Japan still admires the synthetic philosophy, but remains aristocratic, bureaucratic, imperialistic, and militarist. Most truly she does not copy the West, but makes what she borrows her own. Herbert Spencer, who was really not far from an anarchist, has been converted into one of the chief buttresses of the State which is the nearest approach extant to the Prussianised German Empire.

It must have been something of a shock, for those Japanese who had grown up in the Spencerian dogma, to meet Herbert Spencer in the flesh. Baron Kikuchi has recorded an impression of Spencer going on a railway journey in the Nineties. For such an expedition great preparations were necessary. A hammock was slung diagonally across a saloon carriage; into this the philosopher was hoisted just before the train started, and from its depths he was laboriously recovered at the journey’s end. All this ritual Baron Kikuchi witnessed at Paddington. “What,” he says, “surprised the onlooker after seeing the hammock slung and the cushions carefully packed into it was to see a fresh-complexioned gentleman proceed from a waiting-room where he had been reclining in an invalid chair, walk nimbly across the platform, and then be hoisted into the hammock.”

There was at every stage of Spencer’s life this singular contrast between the self-sufficiency of his speculative habit and his mournful physical dependence. He lived till his eighty-third year; he was not cursed with a specially feeble constitution; but he coddled himself into a state of body which is, to a very considerable extent, an explanation of his state of mind. The sedentary thinker is prone to two opposite errors. Like Carlyle, Froude, or Treitschke, he may become an extravagant admirer of mere strength. Or, perhaps like Mr. Wells, and certainly like Mr. Galsworthy to-day, he may quite unduly depreciate the value of the qualities of ordinary mankind. Herbert Spencer’s whole thought was vitiated by the valetudinarian’s contempt for things in which he could have little part. He not merely undervalued physical courage; he even saw in it something ridiculous or indelicate. On the other hand, he altogether over-appraised the kind of moral courage which reveals itself in disputatiousness. It was his lot to live in a period when heterodoxy involved no serious danger or inconvenience, and at the same time earned for its professor the reputation of intellectual daring and distinction. Thus he enjoyed most of the luxuries with few of the pangs of martyrdom; he felt all the thrills of conflict without running any of the risks; in his kind of warfare the worst that could happen was a hurt to his feelings, and against that he was protected by a vanity of triple proof. But thought that involves the thinker in no kind of responsibility tends to be irresponsible; and though Spencer boasted that he “developed his ideas rationally”—so that he did not get wrinkled like inferior men “who think from the outside”—few men were in truth more under the dominion of prejudice; nearly everything he wrote on matters of human concern was influenced by the fact that he was excessively vain, timid, and self-indulgent.

“It was one of my misfortunes,” he wrote in his autobiography, “to have no brothers, and a still greater misfortune to have no sisters.” Brothers and sisters are blessings—or otherwise—that the gods give or deny us. But most men can get a wife if they really want one. Spencer’s lack of a wife was probably a greater handicap than the absence of brothers and sisters. For whatever arguments there may be in favour of a celibate priesthood, the celibate social philosopher most obviously suffers from a grave disadvantage; he lacks both the knowledge and the discipline that prevent men of thought becoming mere pedants and theorists. No doubt a wife would not have helped Spencer to write more profoundly about the limits of the unknowable. But she and hers would have given him a far juster impression of a large slice of the knowable. Perpetually lecturing married, child-rearing, householding, and taxpaying men, Spencer passed his own life as a fussy bachelor in a succession of boarding-houses, and can hardly have paid income-tax during a great part of it. We find him as early as the middle of the century in a “fairly lively boarding-house” in St. John’s Wood, Huxley having warned him that he must not live a solitary life. At the beginning of the Nineties he made almost a home in a quiet street in the neighbourhood of Regent’s Park; but towards the end of the period (and of his life) he found that gardens and trees were poor company, and, longing for the breadth and openness of the sea, removed to Brighton. Wherever he lived, he was something of a tyrant, and very much of a crank. In his fits of depression he insisted on being carried upstairs and down in an invalid chair, and seemed never to realise that his very considerable weight was an unfair burden to a man-servant and a maid. When he was (or thought himself) ill, his bell was perpetually ringing. “Few men,” writes (very acutely) one of the ladies who kept house for him in his seventies, “are so thoughtful and considerate as he was, or so oblivious to the trouble and inconvenience they cause.”