How are we to expect this morality—if so we may still term it—to prevail? Jules de Gaultier, as we have seen, realising that the old moralities have melted away, seems to think that the morality of art, by virtue of its life, will take the place of that which is dead. But he is not specially concerned to discuss in detail the mechanism of this replacement, though he looks to the social action of artists in initiation and stimulation. That was the view of Guyau, and it fitted in with his sociological conception of art as being one with life; great poets, great artists, Guyau believed, will become the leaders of the crowd, the priests of a social religion without dogmas.[[153]] But Gaultier’s conception goes beyond this. He cannot feel that the direct action of poets and artists is sufficient. They only reveal the more conspicuous aspects of the æsthetic sense. Gaultier considers that the æsthetic sense, in humbler forms, is mixed up with the most primitive manifestations of human life, wherein it plays a part of unsuspected importance.[[154]] The more thorough investigation of these primitive forms, he believes, will make it possible for the lawmaker to aid the mechanism of this transformation of morality.

Having therewith brought us to the threshold of the æsthetic revolution, Jules de Gaultier departs. It remains necessary to point out that it is only the threshold. However intimately the elements of the æsthetic sense may be blended with primitive human existence, we know too well that, as the conditions of human existence are modified, art seems to contract and degenerate, so we can hardly expect the æsthetic sense to develop in the reverse direction. At present, in the existing state of civilisation, with the decay of the controlling power of the old morality, the æsthetic sense often seems to be also decreasing, rather than increasing, in the masses of the population.[[155]] One need not be troubled to find examples. They occur on every hand and whenever we take up a newspaper. One notes, for instance, in England, that the most widespread spectacularly attractive things outside cities may be said to be the private parks and the churches. (Cities lie outside the present argument, for their inhabitants are carefully watched whenever they approach anything that appeals to the possessive instinct.) Formerly the parks and churches were freely open all day long for those who desired to enjoy the spectacle of their beauty and not to possess it. The owners of parks and the guardians of churches have found it increasingly necessary to close them because of the alarmingly destructive or predatory impulses of a section of the public. So the many have to suffer for the sins of what may only be the few. It is common to speak of this as a recent tendency of our so-called civilisation. But the excesses of the possessive instinct cannot have been entirely latent even in remote times, though they seem to have been less in evidence. The Platonic Timæus attributed to the spectacle of the sun and the moon and the stars the existence of philosophy. He failed to note that the sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago—as even their infinitely more numerous analogues on the earth beneath are likely to disappear—had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. But the warps and strains of civilised life, with its excessive industrialism and militarism, seem to disturb the wholesome balance of even the humblest elements of the possessive and æsthetic instincts. This means, in the first and most important place, that the liberty of the whole community in its finest manifestations is abridged by a handful of imbeciles. There are infinite freedoms which it would be a joy for them to take, and a help to their work, and a benefit to the world, but they cannot be allowed to take them because there are some who can only take them and perish, damning others with themselves. Besides this supreme injury to life, there are perpetual minor injuries that the same incapable section of people are responsible for in every direction, while the actual cost of them in money, to the community they exert so pernicious an influence on, is so great and so increasing that it constitutes a social and individual burden which from time to time leads to outbursts of anxious expostulation never steady enough to be embodied in any well-sustained and coherent policy.

It is not, indeed, to be desired that the eugenic action of society should be directly aimed at any narrowly æsthetic or moral end. That has never been the ideal of any of those whose conceptions of social life deserve to be taken seriously, least of all Galton, who is commonly regarded as the founder of the modern scientific art of eugenics. “Society would be very dull,” he remarked, “if every man resembled Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede.” He even asserted that “we must leave morality as far as possible out of the discussion,” since moral goodness and badness are shifting phases of a civilisation; what is held morally good in one age is held bad in another. That would hold true of any æsthetic revolution. But we cannot afford to do without the sane and wholesome persons who are so well balanced that they can adjust themselves to the conditions of every civilisation as it arises and carry it on to its finest issues. We should not, indeed, seek to breed them directly, and we need not, since under natural conditions Nature will see to their breeding. But it is all the more incumbent upon us to eliminate those ill-balanced and poisonous stocks produced by the unnatural conditions which society in the past had established.[[156]] That we have to do alike in the interests of the offspring of these diseased stocks and in the interests of society. No power in Heaven or Earth can ever confer upon us the right to create the unfit in order to hang them like millstones around the necks of the fit. The genius of Galton enabled him to see this clearly afresh and to indicate the reasonable path of human progress. It was a truth that had long been forgotten by the strenuous humanitarians who ruled the nineteenth century, so anxious to perpetuate and multiply all the worst spawn of their humanity. Yet it was an ancient truth, carried into practice, however unconsciously and instinctively, by Man throughout his upward course, probably even from Palæolithic times, and when it ceased Man’s upward course also ceased. As Carr-Saunders has shown, in a learned and comprehensive work which is of primary importance for the understanding of the history of Man, almost every people on the face of the earth has adopted one or more practices—notably infanticide, abortion, or severe restriction of sexual intercourse—adapted to maintain due selection of the best stocks and to limit the excess of fertility. They largely ceased to work because Man had acquired the humanity which was repelled by such methods and lost the intelligence to see that they must be replaced by better methods. For the process of human evolution is nothing more than a process of sifting, and where that sifting ceases evolution ceases, becomes, indeed, devolution.[[157]]

When we survey the history of Man we are constantly reminded of the profound truth which often lay beneath the parables of Jesus, and they might well form the motto for any treatise on eugenics. Jesus was constantly seeking to suggest the necessity of that process of sifting in which all human evolution consists; he was ever quick to point out how few could be, as it was then phrased, “saved,” how extremely narrow is the path to the Kingdom of Heaven, or, as many might now call it, the Kingdom of Man. He proclaimed symbolically a doctrine of heredity which is only to-day beginning to be directly formulated: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.” There was no compunction at all in his promulgation of this radical yet necessary doctrine for the destruction of unfit stocks. Even the best stocks Jesus was in favour of destroying ruthlessly as soon as they had ceased to be the best: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, ... it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” Jesus has been reproached by Nietzsche for founding a religion for slaves and plebeians, and so in the result it may have become. But we see that, in the words of the Teacher as they have been handed down, the religion of Jesus was the most aristocratic of religions. Its doctrine embodied not even the permission to live for those human stocks which fall short of its aristocratic ideal. It need not surprise us to find that Jesus had already said two thousand years ago what Galton, in a more modern and—some would add—more humane way, was saying yesterday. If there had not been a core of vital truth beneath the surface of the first Christian’s teaching, it could hardly have survived so long. We are told that it is now dead, but should it ever be revived we may well believe that this is the aspect by which it will be commended. It is a significant fact that at the two spiritual sources of our world, Jesus and Plato, we find the assertion of the principle of eugenics, in one implicitly, in the other explicitly.

Jules de Gaultier was not concerned to put forward an aristocratic conception of his æsthetic doctrine, and, as we have seen, he remained on the threshold of eugenics. He was content to suggest, though with no positive assurance, a more democratic conception. He had, indeed, one may divine, a predilection for that middle class which has furnished so vast a number of the supreme figures in art and thought; by producing a class of people dispensed from tasks of utility, he had pointed out, “a society creates for itself an organ fitted for the higher life and bears witness that it has passed beyond the merely biological stage to reach the human stage.” But the middle class is not indispensable, and if it is doomed Gaultier saw ways of replacing it.[[158]] Especially we may seek to ensure that, in every social group, the individual task of utilitarian work shall be so limited that the worker is enabled to gain a leisure sufficiently ample to devote, if he has the aptitude, to works of intellect or art. He would agree with Otto Braun, the inspired youth who was slain in the Great War, that if we desire the enablement of the people “the eight-hours day becomes nothing less than the most imperative demand of culture.” It is in this direction, it may well be, that social evolution is moving, however its complete realisation may, by temporary causes, from time to time be impeded. The insistent demand for increased wages and diminished hours of work has not been inspired by the desire to raise the level of culture in the social environment, or to inaugurate any æsthetic revolution, yet, by “the law of irony” which so often controls the realisation of things, that is the result which may be achieved. The new leisure conferred on the worker may be transformed into spiritual activity, and the liberated utilitarian energy into æsthetic energy. The road would thus be opened for a new human adventure, of anxious interest, which the future alone can reveal.

We cannot be sure that this transformation will take place. We cannot be sure, indeed, that it is possible for it to take place unless the general quality of the population in whom so fine a process must be effected is raised by a more rigid eugenic process than there is yet any real determination among us to exert. Men still bow down before the fetish of mere quantity in population, and that worship may be their undoing. Giant social organisms, like the giant animal species of early times, may be destined to disappear suddenly when they have attained their extreme expansion.

Even if that should be so, even if there should be a solution of continuity in the course of civilisation, even then, as again Jules de Gaultier also held, we need not despair, for life is a fountain of everlasting exhilaration. No creature on the earth has so tortured himself as Man, and none has raised a more exultant Alleluia. It would still be possible to erect places of refuge, cloisters wherein life would yet be full of joy for men and women determined by their vocation to care only for beauty and knowledge, and so to hand on to a future race the living torch of civilisation. When we read Palladius, when we read Rabelais, we realise how vast a field lies open for human activity between the Thebaid on one side and Thelema on the other. Out of such ashes a new world might well arise. Sunset is the promise of dawn.

THE END

INDEX