Yet the truth is that a very small number of the inhabitants of these isles can be justly labelled civilised. We must search, as it were, in the mode of Diogenes for "the highly organised man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honour and taste," who stands for Emerson's type of civilised humanity. That such examples are not unknown at this stage is as certain as the fact that many more are in the process of evolution. And although savagery in idea and practice confronts us this way and that in each scale of society, we shall do ill if we approach the study of modern barbarism in a vein of mocking pessimism. It is also necessary that a lively faith in the evolutionary principle applied to human nature should be tempered by a look behind while our hopes are young.
Slowly and painfully are we "working out the beast," slowly and painfully must we climb the stages till we cease to obey the blind dictates of instinctive impulse and to base our codes on the reigning opinions of the irrational mass. It is hardly needful to reiterate even one of the preliminary conclusions of all philosophers and humanists to prove that most men have no reasoned views upon the conduct of life. Seneca says that "the common sort find it easier to believe than to judge, and content themselves with what is usual, never examining whether it be good or no. By the common sort is intended the man of title as well as the clouted shoe." The veracity of Swift's aphorism that most men have as much turn for flying as for thinking, and of Carlyle's laconic "mostly fools," is unquestioned.
It is therefore no unsupported postulate that the larger part of civilised people always tend to lead barbaric lives, and that what each class is apt to accept as an approximation to a complete civilisation is a very inchoate form of that truer culture urged upon society by individualist reformers in each successive age. A very slight examination of the thought and pursuits of what is called the highest class in our existing social scale will serve to demonstrate the prevalence of barbarism. For there, as in the lower circles, we find the lines of apathy, vulgarity, and animalism graven on patrician faces, and proclaimed in the talk of the dinner-table, the smoking-room, and the covert-side. Obviously, all our peers are not ultra-barbarians; neither are all our bargees and coalheavers savages. Yet the dominant tone is just as often low and inane in the mansion as in the tenement, and with much less to offer in its extenuation. Millions toil and ache, and are vulgarised in order that a coterie of hereditary lords and titled parvenus shall enjoy the leisure which they mainly devote to frivolity and the killing of the æons of time. Upon these, the intimates of monarchs, the protectors of the sacred pheasant, the distributors of largess, a barbaric populace alternately lavishes its affection and its abuse. So long as the baron flings his groats to the churls, all is peace in vassaldom; but when rents are racked, game laws enforced to their utmost limits, and the dice rattled in the hall, the voice of the people is upraised in tumult, and the virtuous artizan, clinking his silver winnings on the way from the racecourse, thanks heaven he is not as these nobles are, gamblers, adulterers, and oppressors of the widow and the orphan.
Set a barbarian to lash a barbarian if you wish to see injustice done. The fact is that, being barbarous, we first allow an accident of birth to raise a man to a position of power, and then run atilt at our shoddy dignities because the power tends to impede general well-being. Worth of mind is the one qualification for esteem, a trite enough dictum in the mouths of those who persistently ignore its truth. But the time must come when the aristocracy of character will be the only recognised aristocracy in civilised nations.
I think that if one should suggest that it is right to hate the members of our "bloated aristocracy," he is no less absurd than those who fawn around the lackeys of a court. Our noble lords are not of one type, as our common people are not of one cast, though in many rude examples of nobility we can trace the basic elements of ruffianism, and see the bestial fruits thereof. What most concerns us is the question whether a society that grants titles to its successful money-grabbers is clean-purged of its antique barbarism. An academical diploma conferred upon a teacher of the arts or sciences is possibly one means by which the respectful heed of the uncultured is secured for new doctrine. For the one who appends certain characters to his signature will be held in esteem by the many as a man worth hearing. Even in the matter of degrees given to scholars of distinction, we too often discover that such award fosters moral and mental deterioration, and that it narrows and mars the career of thinkers who are elevated to a throne of authority. Our laureates must need be eminently wary in their main theories, though they may pipe an undernote of revolt in the sequestered grove, to ease their souls of the sting of the stultifying penalty of vulgar rank. Yes, titles of all kinds seem to have a tendency to degrade; and the sun of courtly favour often withers the real and aids the growth of the spurious nobility. "Brave old Samuel," ever a Respectable in leading sentiments, was more so when he took a dole from the palace. There is little hope for the amendment of the semi-barbaric prophet when he is taken from the wilderness and thrust into a position only tenurable by wily compromise with the Respectabilities.
Very engrossing is the study of Respectability in high places. "These be the men we are told to look up to," said a tattered plebeian, whose eyes had been blasted by the hunting magistrate who was riding on other men's land. But that we do "look up to" our rich, idle folk with an avid awe is undoubted. Few persons in a town are especially interested in hearing that Mr. Herbert Spencer is there on a visit; but we are most of us anxious to shake hands with a prize-fighter, or the "Jubilee Plunger," or to take tea with a millionaire's wife. We look up to or hunt after such because they have vulgar notoriety or money, and we are not concerned to know how they came by their popularity and their cash, and whether they deserve either, and make a good use of their power. Were it not for the few civilised beings who dare to be considered odd, this odious admiration of trivial character and empty claims would mean a ripening to the decay of society. Involuntarily, the civilised make the ways of barbarity easy to thousands, for they absolve the lethargic from the exertion of severe thinking.
The paradise towards which the bourgeoisie strive is not the leisure to refine the mind, but the opportunity to vie with the more commonplace section of the upper class in dissipation. The labourer who resents the lordling's contumely, and indicts him for living a lazy life, may only work when he is starving, and perhaps not then. His ideal may rise no higher than perpetual beer and ninepins, while the squire craves no higher satisfaction in life than hunting six days a week, and champagne, billiards, and the sporting papers on Sunday. The evil is in the setting up of a barbaric aim of life in all classes. Our greatest ideals are the commercial and the voluptuous. The eternal pursuit of the frivolous, which makes up the chief part of what is foolishly termed "high life," and the sordid middle-class struggle to amass money, are accepted by the shallow as tokens of our progress in civilisation. We are rich and luxurious; we are therefore far above the savage. Yet how far? Our leisured and affluent have for the greater number returned to the employment of a pre-pastoral epoch. Look at the lives of thousands of English gentlemen. Truer barbarians never existed of old than many of those whose whole thought, energy, and wealth are given up to sport. Many of them are restless nomads, ever hurrying from one quarter of the globe to another in search of fresh game to kill. I do not underrate the need for the development of the physical man, nor ignore the value of sports rightly comprehended as a means to the end of training and recreating the body. But what shall be said of that multitude of our countrymen who live to amuse themselves in such primitive fashion? It is these who waste their powers, and barbarise the vulgar by the force of ill example.
Let us not wonder that, in bygone days, a gaping peasantry, with quaint uncouth notions of what constituted an efficient mouthpiece of their wants, yelled at the hustings for the return of those who rode straight, and could pummel the best man of the mob in a brace of rounds. Of such order are still the credentials in some of the Pagan constituencies, where the beer-steeped intelligence pleads the election of "an old-fashioned sort and a thorough sportsman."