Scenes and Portraits

by Frederic Manning

Renan smiled.

"No," he said; "the Chinese are not a socialistic nation. They have not the notion of the State which is peculiar to socialism. But they are a nation governed by trades-unions and examining boards; and through the same institutions we may arrive at the same stagnation. Our progress at present seems to follow that direction, because the aim of our materialistic civilisation is to make everything cheap, food, education, state-offices; and its final effect will be to make men cheap, then we shall have large, flat, arid masses of humanity, to whom few luxuries will be possible, and the forms of our civilisation will become stereotyped. As it was with Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt, as it is with China, so it will be with us. Evolution is the progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity; but the process is not indefinite.

"After a race or a nation has produced a great number of diverse personalities, it becomes decadent and tends to produce a single type: the process of evolution is arrested, and the race may either lie dormant for centuries if like the Chinese it has been prolific and exists in sufficient numbers; or, if sparse and scattered like the Phœnicians, they may be completely annihilated by their more vigorous neighbours. Socialism is neither a remedy nor a disease, but it may be a symptom. No society has been free from socialistic groups. Jerusalem had its ebionim; there was the eclectic philosophy of Rome under Nero, the Flavians, and the Antonines; primitive Christianity was communistic, and Neo-Christianity under Joachim of Flora and St Francis was an imitation of it. The Jacobins had communistic notions. The poor, the humble, the oppressed have always been liable to the dreams of millenarism; and the difference between the Maccabean aspiration, which was, according to Daniel, to establish the kingdom of God upon earth, and the aspiration of Robespierre, who wished 'to found upon earth the empire of wisdom, of justice, and of virtue,' is merely the difference of time and place. A beautiful, but intangible vision; a divine inspiration! Like all divine inspirations, alas! it is by its nature impracticable. Imagine a sudden uprising of the proletariate, a vast social movement, an European revolution. Slowly, after its momentary chaos, a new cohesion would take effect. The abstract virtues, from which the movement had had its derivation, would become personified in our most popular legislators; the new constitution would include, beside the disadvantages of an untried mechanism, many errors latent in the old patterns which it would necessarily follow; and we should discover, after a series of futile and extravagant adventures, that the laws which govern society are essentially natural laws, the slow growth of tacit acceptance, and not merely the dusty records of a popular legislating assembly. Mankind does not learn the lesson easily. One revolution engenders another, and eventually the habit becomes ingrained. The history of mine own country, from 1789 through the nineteenth century, a history of revolution, of the conflict between ideals and realities, is a signal and a reminder to the nations."

"You treat Christianity and Jacobinism as cognate ideas," said Leo, after a pause. "There is surely this distinction between them, that one was almost entirely religious, and the other almost entirely political."

"Ah," said Renan, with a deprecating smile, "all religions are political, just as all politics are religious. Christianity with its notion of mankind as a brotherhood, and the Papacy with its notions of a spiritual empire, a suzerainty, over all peoples, have destroyed the ancient conception of the unity of Church and State. The religion of the Greeks was embodied in their laws; and the politics of the Jews, in their religion. The ideal conception of religion as something quite distinct from the State has proved unworkable, if not disastrous. All the churches have had to smite their mystics with the thunders of excommunication, to extinguish the inward light, to restrain the free play of thought. Even the most primitive form of Christianity, the Messianic notion, was purely political. If we are to talk on social questions we cannot separate religion from politics. The distinction between them is artificial; they are merely the opposite poles of a single idea."

"Ah, well!" said Leo, shrugging his shoulders; "the progress of humanity is a chimæra if it ends merely in stagnation. These bleak, arid masses of mankind living without pleasures in their Chinese frugality, what future have they before them?"

"An awakening," said Renan prophetically; "the Kings of Uruk reigning over a decadent civilisation, Sardanapalus foreseeing the stagnation of his people did not dream of a future which they had helped to create. The process of evolution acts in tides; there is a continuous ebb and flow; the seed lies hidden in the ground until the wizardry of Spring calls it forth, and rain and sunlight nourishing it into new life, it ripens for the harvest. Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen. In the ruined palaces of Nineveh the beasts of the desert bring forth their young, and the green lizards creep out from the crevices to sun themselves upon a fragment of some boastful inscription; but the music which echoed in its painted halls, the dancing and the choirs, the great processions of its Kings, its wisdom and folly, its vain desires and failures, its tears and laughter, these have their being still, they move mysteriously in us, a breath would quicken them into life again, we can rebuild them in moments that seem to have all the profundity of time."

"Poet!" said Leo, with a smile creasing about his lean jaws. "The world does not become socialist, it becomes Chinese; our civilisation tends to a variety of forms, becomes uniform, and then again becomes diverse in endless recurrence. Continue, Monsieur, but let us keep within the bounds of our own age. Socialism is a definite political force; and even if it do not triumph completely it must create certain new conditions. I, myself, have condemned socialism in one of my encyclicals. I have denied the sacred right of insurrection. Human institutions, which we may think have survived their usefulness, are in reality only waiting for their transformation, their character is moulded from outside. We may sometimes fail to understand their mission, or to grasp the reasons which impel them to follow certain paths, because these reasons are pale reflections of some unappreciated causes. The world seems to progress, within the limits of natural laws, by a series of unforeseen developments. The future is latent in us; but the force which impels it is hidden."

"Yes," answered Renan; "some internal conscience directs all progress, and is the force which impels humanity on its way. This conscience has a secret action long before it finds a voice. Its influence at first is something subterranean and obscure; its bias is necessarily against the official creeds, but it moves against them slowly, informing them with the new spirit. I like to find this conscience acting through the poorer and humbler classes of the people, the folk who are of the soil, whose faith is something native and spontaneous, whose life and happiness depends upon the sun and rain. It is significant that all the gods were originally agricultural gods, that the history of every nation begins in Eden. To the artisan, the dweller in towns, whose whole life consists in turning out from a machine certain articles of a stereotyped pattern, the universe is simply a piece of mechanism; he is himself merely a machine, or part of a machine, performing a certain number of invariable motions to produce a definite and invariable result. He lacks inspiration, he has no vivid knowledge of the great element of chance which moves, like one of those primitive elemental gods, behind all human affairs, at times compassionate and friendly to man, at times bursting out into a sudden fury of wanton destruction. He demands a fixed wage, fixed hours of work, fixed prices for the commodities which he consumes, the certainty of a pension in his old age. In a world of fluctuations and vicissitudes he demands absolute security. He is confident that he is going to do great things, that he has already worked wonders. With the aid of science and art, which he starves, he is going to make the earth pleasant and beautiful. He is quite confident that in a few generations he will be born in an incubator, and die, without pain, of sheer satiety. For him a fantastic assembly of politicians, removable at his own will, represents Providence and the divine wisdom. Is he less absurd than the savages who employ rain-makers and witch doctors? I do not think so. Clearly he is not a person from whom we can expect any but the most crude and mechanical readings of life; his vague, restless, childish discontent, that hunger for barren and tawdry pleasures which is characteristic of half-educated minds, that lack of intercourse with the great elemental forces of Nature, can issue in nothing but his own mental, moral, and physical damnation.

"For any new readings of life, for any renaissance of art and religion, we must look to the simple folk, who are still close to the breasts of Earth: the folk who of old imagined Apollo as a herd in the service of Admetus; who found Demeter sitting by the well, and comforted her; who, after the vintage had been gathered in, took down the grotesque masks, which they had hung upon the vines to scare the birds and foxes from the grapes, and acted in them, singing the hymns of Dionysos to the music of pipes and flutes. Poetry, religion, love, the three things which quicken life to new effort, are never far from the soil. The great conventional middle-classes, even those heretics from Philistia, the followers of Comte and Marx, the mediocre intelligences whose political principles are communist, and whose religious principles are positivist, these have little influence on the future. Socialism differs from all previous Utopian dreams simply because it lacks their vital energy; it is material and mechanical where the older ideas were spiritual and natural; it is lacking in a sense of morality, in a sense of beauty, in a sense of truth. You will not find the conscience of humanity in any of these creeds."