That human plants give promise of blossoming into a moral beauty as yet undreamed of by the British public is patent to any wise observer of the confused social life of to-day. Our greatest realists in fiction note the point. We have George Meredith putting into the mouth of his hero, Matthew Weyburn, these significant words: “Eminent station among men doesn’t give a larger outlook ... I have come now and then across people we call common, slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of facts and ready to learn and logical. They were at the bottom of wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice upon which wisdom is founded ... that is what their rulers lack. Unless we have the sense of justice abroad like a common air there’s no peace and no steady advance. But these humble people had it. I felt them to be my superiors. On the other hand, I have not felt the same with our senators, rulers and lawgivers. They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.” (Lord Ormont and his Aminta.)
As regards physical health, I have shown the necessity for stirpiculture and the birth of the fit; as regards mental and moral health, i.e. Humanity’s efflorescence on higher planes—the need of the times is less eugenics than education and training. Germs of truth, justice, love, lie latent in the basic structure of our half-civilized race, and so long as we neglect or destroy these germs it were folly to desire material of finer quality. “Our raw material is of the very best,” said the headmistress of a London Board School, “our children are full of generous impulses and fearless spontaneity. I sometimes think the no-rule in the homes of the masses a better preparation for life than the factitious training given in homes of the classes. But our teachers are so few and so seldom scientifically enlightened that we spoil very much of the good material.” On behalf of the classes my reader might argue that susceptibility to beauty or the aesthetic sentiment with its creative expression in art belongs almost exclusively to the upper section of society, and is deemed by some social reformers the very foundation of moral life, the basis of the ethical temper.
It is not my purpose to provoke comparison between the classes and the masses, and I fully recognize the value of the fine arts as factors in the general elevation of life and character, but I submit that evolution does not pursue the same line of development in the various races of mankind, and in the British race an advanced ethical temper is in process of formation quite irrespective of the fine arts and the aesthetic sentiment.
Dr. Le Bon laid before the French Geographical Society an account of a primitive group of people, numbering several hundred thousand, who inhabit a remote region high up among the Carpathian mountains. Of this people, the Podhalians, he says, “they are born improvisatori, poets and musicians, singing their own songs, set to music of their own composition. Their poetry is tender and artless in sentiment, generous and elevated in style.” He attributes these qualities to the wealth of spontaneous resources possessed by natures which neither know violent passions nor unnatural excitements. The British race, moulded by different conditions—geographical and historical—has developed differently. Great masses of our population are wholly insensitive to the influences of art. The picture drawn by Wordsworth of his Peter Bell comes nearer to our native uncultured type—
A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart, he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky.