The masculine smile is, however, wearing thinner, as the absurd despotism is now almost as great among the stronger sex. Here also a group of commercial mathematicians evolve, every few months, a new combination of brim and crown and curve, and artists design new patterns of cloth and new contours of garment, and tyrannical journalists hold up to public execration the man of means or position who dares to find last year’s fashion sufficiently comfortable or decorative. “Not worn now, sir,” says the shopman, with indulgent smile, when you go to renew the hat or coat that has pleased you. The bewildering thing is, not that manufacturers should be eager to sell us new garments every few weeks, but that we bow with such docility to this ludicrous fiction of monarchy. Long trousers or short trousers, creased trousers or turned-up trousers, tight coats or loose coats, bowlers or trilbys—we listen submissively to the mandate, without the least consideration of our appearance or convenience.
Indeed, the only things that are permanent in this extravagant procession of fashions are the things that are ugly, inconvenient, or unhealthy, especially on the masculine side. The silk hat and the hard felt hat linger as if in these extraordinary creations the manufacturer had discovered the ideal head-covering. The swallow-tail coat survives as if æsthetics could advance no further in the attiring of wealthy men; even the buttons at the back, to which our fiery ancestor attached his sword, must not be abandoned. The more comfortable dinner-jacket remains a privileged client at the gate until some audacious peer or prince will dispel the oppressive reverence for the ancient swallow-tail; and peers and princes know how dangerous it is to tamper with the spirit of reverence. The starched collar and shirt are as rigidly prescribed as sacred vestments on high occasions. The lady must still hang a thick and heavy screen of cloth from her hips; first having it made too long and then holding it up with her hand in order to escape the rich organic deposit on our streets and the filth with which we suffer “domestic pets” to make our squares hideous. Her abdominal organs must, if one may credit the marvellous photographs published by the corset-makers, be reconstructed every few years to accommodate the latest scheme of body-curves. And from these upper reaches of our intellectual world, the tyranny descends through level after level of the community until it lays its last stern injunctions on the junior clerk and the post-office assistant; or passes beyond the seas and compels the Chinaman or the Japanese to discard his beautiful robe in favour of a frock-coat and silk hat, or a striped tweed and bowler, when he presents himself at the entrance-gate to civilisation.
We find an almost equally ludicrous tyranny of tradition or fashion in almost every part of the ritual of social life. Twenty years ago I issued from a rite-bound monastery into the free life of the world, to find it similarly swathed in ritual bonds. I purchased, and stealthily mastered, the “ceremonial” (as we used to call our rite-book) of this new world—a book on “etiquette”—and led for some months a strenuous and exacting life. I entered drawing-rooms with a nervous recollection of about a score of rules that had to be observed in the first five minutes, while the ritual of the mundane table entailed for a long time a good deal of furtive observation of my fellows and trembling under the butler’s eye. To this day I am not quite clear at what precise angle the elbow must stand in shaking hands. Social life is overspread by a network of these prescriptions of the unwritten law or the judicial decisions of the aristocracy which we call “manners.” There is, as a rule, so little discrimination between the formal rules of an artificial code and the real impulses of a gentlemanly nature that one has often to listen gravely and silently while ladies commend the “perfect manners” of a man whom one knows to be an adventurous ninny or a beast.
We need a new conception of civilisation, a sustained stimulation of the intelligence throughout life, a strong infusion of the Nietzschean gospel of personality and self-assertion. Some day we shall regard education as half of the nation’s serious business, and will devote half our national revenue to it. Let it not be imagined that this suggests a generation of dour and frightfully serious people who never smoke or play bridge. I omit the function of entertainment only because it has never been neglected. The supreme business of a State is to make its people happy, strong, and prosperous. We shall approach the ideal when we abolish war and reduce pauperism and crime by registering all workers, organising all industry, reforming justice and the penal system, and removing the morally diseased.
In those days education will be a vast, humane, scientific scheme for guiding the growth of human embryos into industrious and orderly citizens, and enabling the adult citizen pleasurably to cultivate his mind and taste. The development of each child will be followed as the development of a pupil is followed in the Jesuit Society, but with a care to develop its individuality fully, in harmony with the individualities of others. The child will not pass from the sphere of the educator at puberty, with unformed mind and character, to swell the great army of the intellectually listless. Ruskin’s noble ideal of “as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures” will replace the narrow standards of our Education Department, with which the child can have no sympathy. From the first dawn of intelligence it will feel that a well-wishing parent, the community, is training it to derive all the joy it can from life, consistently with the joy of others and the day’s duties, when its turn comes to don the toga virilis. It will have learned by that time that a development of its characteristic human powers is the richest possession it can have, and, coming to adolescence, will not at once cast aside the work of the teacher and dissipate its energy in the crude indulgence of elementary passions and futile imaginings. Neither child nor adult will shrink from work which stimulates the intelligence or refines the taste, and a fine alert race, impatient of untruth, injustice, and suffering, will set itself to develop fully the resources of this planet.
CHAPTER X.
THE CLERICAL SHAM
Throughout the preceding chapters there have been resentful or disdainful references to the Churches, and it may be suspected that, in assailing other people’s prejudices, I have cherished and proceeded upon the anti-clerical prejudice. A very cursory examination will, however, suffice to show that these criticisms were sound and pertinent, and are not due to some mysterious antipathy to the profession to which I once belonged. Few of those ugly or mischievous traditions which form what I have called the smothering ash in the intellectual activity of the nation have not the general support of the clergy. Few of the reforms here suggested do not meet their hostility. They constitute one of the most injurious conservative forces in modern life. Their bodies are strewn over the whole battlefield of the nineteenth century, and not one in a thousand of them fought on the side of progress. The esteem in which they are still widely held and the pretexts by which they guard this esteem are the last, and by no means the least, of those shams which hamper our advance and distract our energy.
A full and detailed indictment of the clergy would fill several columns, and I must confine myself here to two or three considerations which are at once sufficiently drastic and easily demonstrable. I will therefore be content to show:
1. That the clergy claim and receive a large measure of public confidence on the ground that they are the guardians of the most sacred and beneficent truths, yet impose on the less educated masses a preposterous collection of untruths, or statements which many of their own scholars, and most lay scholars, regard as untrue.
2. That the clergy pose as the most sensitive and effective custodians of our morals, yet their procedure is unjust, spiteful, and deceptive to an extent which would not be tolerated in any lay profession.