Nothing in controversy ever gave me keener satisfaction than to have drawn this “surmise,” this pearl of great price, from Dr. Stanton Coit in the very serious columns of the Ethical World. It shows clearly, I think, why his co-adjutors in the metaphysic of the larder were wise in their avoidance of discussion.
It seems to be a benign provision of Nature that those who allege altruistic reasons for selfish actions invariably make themselves ridiculous. “What would become of the Esquimaux?” was one of the questions often put to advocates of vegetarianism; probably it is the only instance on record of any solicitude for the welfare of that remote people. Then, again, we were frequently asked: “What would become of the animals?” the implication being that under a vegetarian regime there would be large numbers of uneaten and neglected quadrupeds left straying about the earth. An artist friend of mine once drew an amusing picture to illustrate this “Flesh-Eaters’ Dilemma.” A gentleman and lady, sitting at a well-ordered dinner-table, are terribly inconvenienced by an invasion, through the conservatory door, of a number of such superfluous animals: a cow is putting her head through the window; a sheep is snatching at the bread; a pig is playing with a rabbit on the floor; and in the distance a forlorn ox is seen lying in desperation against the garden gate.
Such are some of the sophisms of which cannibal’s conscience is prolific. They belong to that class of subterfuge which Bacon designated eidola specus, “idols of the cave,” as lurking in the inmost and darkest recesses of the human mind. “Fallacies of the Cave-Dweller” might perhaps be a fitting name for them; for they seem to be characteristic of the more primitive and uncivilized intelligence.
VI
GLIMPSES OF CIVILIZATION
Wealth is acquired by overreaching our neighbours, and is spent in insulting them.—William Godwin.
IN the ’eighties there were two movements especially attractive to one who was breaking away from the old academical traditions, to wit, Socialism, the more equitable distribution of wealth; and Simplification, the saner method of living. William Godwin, in many ways a true prophet, had foreshadowed the need of both these reforms in that pungent sentence of his Political Justice.
Simplification of life has in all ages had its advocates, but it was not till the time of Rousseau and the revolutionary epoch that it acquired its full significance, when the connection between simple living and a juster social state became obvious and unmistakable, and it was seen that luxury on the part of one man must involve drudgery on the part of another. Thoreau’s Walden, published in America in 1854, was beginning to be known in England some thirty years later; and Edward Carpenter’s essays, afterwards collected in his England’s Ideal (1887), were pointing the way to a wiser and healthier mode of life. I read some of those essays while still at Eton; and amid such surroundings they had a peculiarly vivid interest, as revealing, what was there quite overlooked, that it was possible to dispense with the greater part of the trappings with which we were encumbered, and to live far more simply and cheaply than was dreamed of in polite society.
The removal from a public school to a cottage among the Surrey hills was something more than a change of residence: it was an emigration, a romance, a strange new life in some remote antipodes, where the emblems of the old servitude, such as cap and gown, found new and better uses, like swords beaten into ploughshares. My gown was cut into strips for fastening creepers to walls: my top-hat, the last time I remember seeing it, was shading a young vegetable-marrow. Servants there were none; and with the loss of them we learnt two things: first that servants do a great deal more than their employers give them credit for; secondly, that much of what they do may be lessened or rendered needless by a little judicious forethought in the arrangement of a house.
One ungrateful office that servants perform is that of protecting their employers from personal interviews with beggars and tramps; they act as plenipotentiaries in the business of saying No. In country districts this certainly saves a good deal of a householder’s time, but whether it is altogether a benefit to him may be doubted, for tramps are sometimes an amusing folk, and by no means devoid of humour in their mode of levying taxes upon the well-to-do. One old mendicant, I remember, who called at my back door to solicit a small sum for a very special purpose, and told his tale so skilfully that from admiration, not conviction, I relieved him, as he himself expressed it, of his immediate difficulty. Two minutes later there was a gentle knock at my front door, and behold the same old rascal commencing the same old tale! He had made the mistake of supposing that a single cottage was two semi-detached ones, and when the door was opened by his late benefactor, I saw him shaken by a momentary spasm of laughter, so human as to disarm wrath.
Then there were the “tramps” in the metaphorical sense, the friends and bidden or unbidden guests whose visits were welcomed in that secluded region of bare heaths and hills. Edward Carpenter, as the writer of the books which had shown such life to be possible, was, of course, the tutelary deity of the place: Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, was the advocatus diaboli, whose professed hatred of the country gave an additional zest to his appearances there, and culminated in a characteristic article, “A Sunday on the Surrey Hills,” in which he described a wet walk on Hindhead and the extremity of his sufferings until he was restored to London by “the blessed rescuing train.”[16] But it is dangerous to jest on such subjects; and I regret to say that a local paper, some years afterwards, in reprinting “G.B.S.’s” jeremiad, added some scathing editorial comments, which showed a resentment unmitigated by time, on “a cockney gentleman possessing a very fine liver, but no soul above his stomach.”[17] In the simplification of household life, Shaw easily held his own; he was most conscientious and exemplary in “washing up,” and to see the methodical precision with which he made his bed was itself a lesson in domestic orderliness. Thus was realized the truth of what Clough had written in his Bothie: