We are still rearing these rude types in our public schools and universities, and for these we laudably reserve the chief places on the senate, on justiciary benches, and in local boards. Despite their educational chances and social opportunities, these are surely among the retrograde, with their argot culled from the racing journals, their strange drawling pronunciation of the English tongue, their points of breeding, their caddish hauteur, their rampant John Bullisms, and their innate aversion to thought and earnestness. "The fop of Charles's time," says Leslie, in Mr. Mallock's "New Republic," "aimed at seeming a wit and a scholar. The fop of ours aims at being a fool and a dunce."
Quitting this strange horde, let us descend to the mart for an examination of the Commercial Ideal. No one denies that for a nation of shopkeepers we have done great things in the world's history. In a very large measure we are civilised by the shop, and it is only when the shop absorbs the best of us, mental and physical, that commercial activity tends to retard progress. Provide that a man's moral sense and intellect are not warped or unexercised in the making of money, and there is nothing degrading, but the opposite, in his desire to succeed commercially. But in the fierceness of competition in an over-populated country, cruel barbarity and detestable meanness and cunning arise. And not only these, but the curse of intellectual and æsthetic atrophy lights upon the host. Out of this undue stress is developed a tendency to sordid living, a preference for the lower gratifications of life. Yet need money-getting always degrade the people? Will the prosperous business career of the future be alone compatible with a low standard of thought, and a corrupt canon of commercial morals?
"Life without industry is guilt; industry without art is brutality." Now, in the push and drive of industry at the close of this century it is as hard for myriads to keep the soul alive, as it is for many thousands to find food for the body. The trader who makes Mammon his idol, who thinks money, and spends his wealth irrationally, brutalises life. But for the others, let us rather pity and try to amend the condition of those who cannot, in plain terms, "leave the shop." There are strong-minded and somewhat exceptional tradesmen who can shake off the dust of the warehouse, and spend the hours of freedom in the cultivation of the intellect. There are men of business who do excellent work in art and science, while their jaded associates are satisfying their purely animal wants. The question is—Can a man live the higher life, and succeed in the worldly meaning of prosperity? Men do not grow money by storing the brain with knowledge, and the merchant who ponders upon a phase of evolution, or murmurs a rhythm of Tennyson while he is at the ledger, will most probably be an indifferent money-maker. Lamb's Good Clerk, you will remember, "gets on" because his first aim is to be a good piece of mechanism. It is a grievous reflection that zeal for the desk should eat up the brain and better part of a good man, and leave him a machine. The expert clerk is as valuable as the clever author or the great painter; but the trouble is that while the trader is making himself efficient as a trader, he is frequently neglecting his mind, narrowing his social judgments, and tending backwards.
Is there no escape from a seemingly invincible fate that restricts the thought and energy of the million to the bare affairs of the shop? It does almost seem at first that there is none. What we have to determine is whether we shall aid the production of mediocre shopkeepers, who will desire to live cultured lives, while they devote a due share of thought to the shop, or whether we shall continue to rear a class who place business first and culture last, or practically without their scheme of life. For every sociologist this is a great problem. Speaking out of my own prejudice, I would rather live in a country of moderately prosperous men, who read, and speculated, and had aspirations for something higher than lucre, than in the land where the mass were rich and unintellectual.
There is an economic aspect of the alternatives. Art thrives where there is wealth; but money does not of necessity make good art. At present two formidable hindrances stand in the way of developing culture—over-population, and a passion for ostentation. Regulate the reproductive faculty, and save the potential slave of industrialism from a struggle that waxes keener yearly. This must be done in the individual and national interest, to the gradual diminishment of abject poverty and the lessening of the awful strain in the congested centres. Allied with this teaching, there should be a wide inculcation of the value of a refined simplicity of material life, a substitution of high-thinking for mere barbarous display in living. These were the leading precepts of John Stuart Mill to an unheedful generation; but I, for one, take courage in the view that this will become the creed of many as we advance in the art of living. In Liberty, Mill writes:
"The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and demoralising effects of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time produce their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their power."
The way of the civiliser is hard. If the men and women of ideals and broad sympathies go, as Mills enjoins, into Barbaria and Philistia as apostles, they must be prepared to receive the hurts of primitive weapons. Missionaries are not welcomed with barbaric shouts of glee when they land to subvert ancient faiths. Neither are apostles of righteousness and sweetness and light beloved of our children of darkness in Belgravia and Bloomsbury. But as Mr. Hamerton asks in his "Intellectual Life": "Are the Philistines to have all the talk to themselves for ever; are they to rehearse their stupid old platitudes without the least fear of contradiction? How long, O Lord, how long?" Yet, let your apostle be the quintessence of tact and humility, he will not escape slander, odium, and contempt when he essays to contradict the ancient platitudes. Broach boldly any subject, from religion to corset-wearing, in the drawing-room at Bloomsbury, or in the back parlour at Lambeth, and you will have to contend against stubborn apathy. To cultivate eccentricity of opinion and conduct for the purpose of evoking the curiosity of the languid Respectables, is a form of insanity which no one will suppose I am advocating as an effort towards civilisation. But social danger is always to be apprehended from conventionality that is stagnantly content with the existing order, and has not the desire nor energy to advance. It is, then, the onerous duty of a thoughtful member of the respectable classes to awaken his relatives or associates from a blank contentment with mere animal well-being and trivial aims. He must not shrink from the burden because it is the habit of unthinking persons to believe that the conclusions of sounder brains have been gained by the same meagre thinking as their own flimsy theories, or that his wrought-out views are only crotchets advanced to flatter his egoism. For by those who shirk deep thinking, intellectual seriousness in others is merely regarded as a more or less peculiar temperamental trait. They do not know that the eternal voluntary martyrdom of thinkers is their salvation. They are unaware that the good and the earnest toil daily in order that the evil and the frivolous may be preserved to reap the reward of toilsome thought, in which the apathetic have had no share, and for which they have little praise. Reflect upon what Darwin has done for morality, science, and art, and then mark the mean ingratitude and ignorant misrepresentation of some of those who are now being made whole by his sane science. Will the Respectables always crucify their social redeemers?
Not wholly encouraging is the investigation of barbarism in our industrial and proletarian classes. Yet perhaps, if there is one party above another that appears to be progressing rapidly towards a higher civilisation, it is the operative. When one thinks of what the working class has done, with its lack of advantage in the past, and its scant opportunity in the present, the progress is one of the most wonderful and hopeful omens of modern times. It is inevitable that the acquisition of a little knowledge should bear some ill fruit among the sound; but the humanising influences of education far exceed in their proved result the expectation of the early pioneers of a noble movement. Much has been done, and much remains to be accomplished, in the work of constructing the foundations and superstructure of an ultimate democratic civilisation. Whitman and Ibsen, latter-day prophets of sound social foresight, predicted at the outset of their careers that in the fibre and stuff of a cultured democracy lies our hope.
Undoubtedly, the moral tone of the industrial class is growing higher yearly. The rough hand of the artisan has fashioned much of our civilisation, and his hard, calculating intelligence will have a larger share in the government of the near future. I confess that it thrills me to hear that a set of miners in the North have begged the custodian of a public library to provide them with Mr. Meredith's fine but "difficult" novels. Again, we should rejoice to learn that a factory worker, who has taught himself to read at the age of forty, is studying Mr. Spencer's "First Principles."
As I have before tried to show, the neglect of civilising thought and study is not voluntary in the case of many busy men and women. It is largely an outcome of complex commercial rivalry and overpressure that thousands should not share in the higher refinements of civilisation, and that science should be outside their rule of life instead of at the bottom of it. Thoreau speaks of the best part of the husbandman being ploughed into the soil for compost; and the figure represents the case for legions of toilers. Mr. Ruskin is among the oracles when he announces that "the final outcome of all wealth is the producing as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures." Perhaps so; but for the nonce, we mostly plod on in that "dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being," which we are wont to describe as "getting on in the world."