“We do not lay stress,” Fitzgerald said gently, “on the temporal power of the Holy Father. As Sir Horace implied, this temporal power was once the one shining light in a chaotic world, and it was well that it should be set on a hill. But now the light is diffusing itself. It is our wish that, as the Vatican Œcumenical Council declared: ‘Intelligence, Knowledge, and Wisdom may grow and perfect themselves—as much with the mass as with individuals, with one man as with the whole church!’ We are no foes to Freedom. What we are foes to, is Anarchy! At the Reformation you gave the right of deciding on the deepest religious questions to every ignorant man that chose to discuss them, and the seamless robe of Christianity was rent into a hundred pieces! Look at all these miserable little protestant sects and sub-sects, Plymouth Brethren, Primitive Methodists, Ana-baptists, and I know not what noisy, ignorant fanatics. At the Revolution, you did the same for social questions, and what is the result? The Dynamiters of Russia, of Germany, of Ireland, initiated by what you, Dr. Maddock, so well call ‘such gentleness as was revealed in the diabolical deeds of the Commune,’—to say nothing of those of the Reign of Terror.”
Maddock half-deprecated, half-approved by a gesture and an inarticulate sound.
“Yes, but,” said Hawkesbury with the thrilled voice of suppressed passion, “has not history justified the Reformation? and how can you say that it will not justify the Revolution? These, as it seems to me, are the two fiery portals which lead to Religious and Social Liberty. But you are right to depreciate them: they knew nothing of the poetry of Culture and Catholicism, or of the prose of Protestantism and Science. They were volcanic eruptions of the People. Heine says well, when he talks of ‘the divine brutality’ of Luther, and we do not shrink from the same phrase for Hugo or Whitman. Sir Horace has painted us a Future which is indeed heavenly. It is thronged with sweet-singing angels, and there is not a shadow in its perfect light. But what has become of the men, and what, O what, has become of the devils? They have no place in this Future. You do not care for the People, I say, except as you care for your dog which, if he is quiet and docile, shall have a kennel and the bones and scraps from your table; or, if he is surly, shall be chained up; or, if he goes mad, shall be shot! Ah believe me, gentlemen, the People has a place in the Future, for the People, and none other, is the Future! ‘All for the modern,’ cries Whitman, ‘all for the average man of to-day.’ But you—you only care for the Upper and the Middle-class. Your scheme of civilization does not reach to the People. The Upper-class is exhausted: it needs invigorating. ‘Cultivate the Middle-class,’ is the cry, ‘Give us Higher Education for the Middle-class!’ This is the whole social teaching of the best representative man you have, Matthew Arnold. Now we, we Socialists as you call us, love the People, and (you will pardon me) hate the Middle-class;—the dispossessed, the sufferers, not the possessors, the usurpers! The People is the Prodigal Son. What sympathy have we, then, with a man like Arnold who has devoted himself to the edification of the Elder Brother? Arnold says once that he has evolved that perfect style of his which we know so well—that style which encloses a minimum of ideas in a maximum of catch-words—or, as he likes to call it, ‘plain popular exposition’—for the especial benefit of the British Philistine, the divine Middle-class, who otherwise could not be got to read him! He would have done better, perhaps, if he had not turned to the setting, but to the rising sun. The People are the masters of the Future, and the People’s great men will be the great men of the Future.”
There was a pause. Then:
“There is much truth in what Mr. Hawkesbury says,” says Gildea, “Just at present we think too much of the ultimate Culture of the Middle-class and too little of that of the People. But the fact is, that the question of the Middle-class is pressing: they are, as you say, Hawkesbury, the possessors; they are the Present! And this, I think, is why men like Arnold, who believe that, in the organization of the Present, lies the only hope of the success of the Future, are so anxious about it. It is a case, as he believes, of ‘Culture or Anarchy’—Culture now or Anarchy then. And Carlyle, a disciple of whom Mr. Hawkesbury has, in the admirable Preface to his second book of Poems, declared himself to be; Carlyle too, who laid much stress on what he calls ‘the radical element’ in himself, yet mocks at ‘Mill and Co.’ as he says, in whom he declares the opposite element was ‘so miserably lacking.’ Carlyle had no respect for ‘Rousseau fanaticisms,’ even in a man like Mazzini: he saw that, if the Middle-class were purblind and slow, the Socialists were only purblind and quick. Supposing that we grant that the Dynamiters of Russia are justified in meeting an absolutely dense despotism with violence, what excuse but impatience can we find for the Dynamiters of Ireland? The first have no means of free agitation, the second have every means. Ireland has been wronged: no one denies it; and never, in the whole course of her history, has England shown such alacrity as she is doing now to right the wrong; never, not even for herself. But the Irish Socialists are impatient: their cry is for everything to-day, this very hour! To grant it them would be the greatest unkindness possible. Well, they too have taken to dynamite as a hypochondriac takes to opium. The Russian Nihilists are noble people, none nobler, but they taught fools and knaves an appalling lesson when they inaugurated the reign of terror in Petersburg. At the present moment, as Heine clearly foresaw, the Civilization, not of Europe, but of the whole world is in danger.”
“You speak well, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “and express my opinions better than I could myself, but—Timeo.”
He, Gildea, and Fitzgerald smiled. Hawkesbury was grave. There was a pause. Then:
“I think,” he said, “that you do the People wrong. These extreme Socialists, the Nihilists as they are called, are not from the People, but from the Middle-class. They are, as a rule, men who have received the best education of the time, and who yet find themselves unrecognized and unrewarded. Most of them are journalists. It would astonish you, I think, to see the amount of really first-rate talent that is being flogged to death in the shafts of the modern Press. These men cannot work in shops and banks: the narrow material life has been made impossible to them. The only opening for the life they would—nay, that they must live, or perish, is that of Literature. Literature caters for the Middle-class, the ruling class. These men, then, are the slaves of the great caterers, the newspaper editors. One of the most thorough Socialists I ever knew, Holden, in fact, was on the regular staff of the English Spectator, the organ of the enlightened portion of the Middle-class; and there, as he said to me, he went as near Socialism as he could for threepence! (Threepence is the price of the paper.) This same man wrote, too, political articles for a distinguished radical politician, and I have seen the proof-sheets of these hacked and mauled by the patron to suit the palates of the Radicals. It was this man who once seriously contemplated dropping a bomb in the House of Lords, to show that herd of hereditary liars, as he put it, that there was such a thing as justice in the world! He loved the People: he hated the Middle-class, but the People cared nothing for him. It is, then, I think, a mistake to lay the paternity of Nihilism to the charge of any but the over-fed tyrannous Middle-class.”