Nature does not desire that thirty-five men should be destroyed because one could not resist the temptation of a pipe; but fire-damp is highly inflammable, and the explosion is a simple consequence. Society does not desire to exclude you because you will not wear evening dress; but the dress is customary, and your exclusion is merely a consequence of your nonconformity. The view of society goes no farther in this than the artistic conception (not very delicately artistic, perhaps) that it is prettier to see men in black coats regularly placed between ladies round a dinner-table than men in gray coats or brown coats. The uniformity of costume appears to represent uniformity of sentiment and to ensure a sort of harmony amongst the convives. What society really cares for is harmony; what it dislikes is dissent and nonconformity. It wants peace in the dining-room, peace in the drawing-room, peace everywhere in its realm of tranquil pleasure. You come in your shooting-coat, which was in tune upon the moors, but is a dissonance amongst ladies in full dress. Do you not perceive that fustian and velveteen, which were natural amongst gamekeepers, are not so natural on gilded chairs covered with silk, with lace and diamonds at a distance of three feet? You don’t perceive it? Very well: society does not argue the point with you, but only excludes you.
It has been said that in the life of every intellectual man there comes a time when he questions custom at all points. This seems to be a provision of nature for the reform and progress of custom itself, which without such questioning would remain absolutely stationary and irresistibly despotic. You rebels against the established custom have your place in the great work of progressive civilization. Without you, Western Europe would have been a second China. It is to the continual rebellion of such persons as yourself that we owe whatever progress has been accomplished since the times of our remotest forefathers. There have been rebels always, and the rebels have not been, generally speaking, the most stupid part of the nation.
But what is the use of wasting this beneficial power of rebellion on matters too trivial to be worth attention? Does it hurt your conscience to appear in a dress-coat? Certainly not, and you would be as good-looking in it as you are in your velveteen shooting-jacket with the pointers on the bronze buttons. Let us conform in these trivial matters, which nobody except a tailor ought to consider worth a moment’s attention, in order to reserve our strength for the protection of intellectual liberty. Let society arrange your dress for you (it will save you infinite trouble), but never permit it to stifle the expression of your thought. You find it convenient, because you are timid, to exclude yourself from the world by refusing to wear its costume; but a bolder man would let the tailor do his worst, and then go into the world and courageously defend there the persons and causes that are misunderstood and slanderously misrepresented. The fables of Spenser are fables only in form, and a noble knight may at any time go forth, armed in the panoply of a tail-coat, a dress waistcoat, and a manly moral courage, to do battle across the dinner-table and in the drawing-room for those who have none to defend them.
It is unphilosophical to set ourselves obstinately against custom in the mass, for it multiplies the power of men by settling useless discussion and clearing the ground for our best and most prolific activity. The business of the world could not be carried forward one day without a most complex code of customs; and law itself is little more than custom slightly improved upon by men reflecting together at their leisure, and reduced to codes and systems. We ought to think of custom as a most precious legacy of the past, saving us infinite perplexity, yet not as an infallible rule. The most intelligent community would be conservative in its habits, yet not obstinately conservative, but willing to hear and adopt the suggestions of advancing reason. The great duty of the intellectual class, and its especial function, is to confirm what is reasonable in the customs that have been handed down to us, and so maintain their authority, yet at the same time to show that custom is not final, but merely a form suited to the world’s convenience. And whenever you are convinced that a custom is no longer serviceable, the way to procure the abolition of it is to lead men very gradually away from it, by offering a substitute at first very slightly different from what they have been long used to. If the English had been in the habit of tattooing, the best way to procure its abolition would have been to admit that it was quite necessary to cover the face with elaborate patterns, yet gently to suggest that these patterns would be still more elegant if delicately painted in water-colors. Then you might have gone on arguing—still admitting, of course, the absolute necessity for ornament of some kind—that good taste demanded only a moderate amount of it; and so you would have brought people gradually to a little flourish on the nose or forehead, when the most advanced reformers might have set the example of dispensing with ornament altogether. Many of our contemporaries have abandoned shaving in this gradual way, allowing the whiskers to encroach imperceptibly, till at last the razor lay in the dressing-case unused. The abominable black cylinders that covered our heads a few years ago were vainly resisted by radicals in custom, but the moderate reformers gradually reduced their elevation, and now they are things of the past.
Though I think we ought to submit to custom in matters of indifference, and to reform it gradually, whilst affecting submission in matters altogether indifferent, still there are other matters on which the only attitude worthy of a man is the most bold and open resistance to its dictates. Custom may have a right to authority over your wardrobe, but it cannot have any right to ruin your self-respect. Not only the virtues most advantageous to well-being, but also the most contemptible and degrading vices, have at various periods of the world’s history been sustained by the full authority of custom. There are places where forty years ago drunkenness was conformity to custom, and sobriety an eccentricity. There are societies, even at the present day, where licentiousness is the rule of custom, and chastity the sign of weakness or want of spirit. There are communities (it cannot be necessary to name them) in which successful fraud, especially on a large scale, is respected as the proof of smartness, whilst a man who remains poor because he is honest is despised for slowness and incapacity. There are whole nations in which religious hypocrisy is strongly approved by custom, and honesty severely condemned. The Wahabee Arabs may be mentioned as an instance of this, but the Wahabee Arabs are not the only people, nor is Nejed the only place, where it is held to be more virtuous to lie on the side of custom than to be an honorable man in independence of it. In all communities where vice and hypocrisy are sustained by the authority of custom, eccentricity is a moral duty. In all communities where a low standard of thinking is received as infallible common sense, eccentricity becomes an intellectual duty. There are hundreds of places in the provinces where it is impossible for any man to lead the intellectual life without being condemned as an eccentric. It is the duty of intellectual men who are thus isolated to set the example of that which their neighbors call eccentricity, but which may be more accurately described as superiority.
LETTER II.
TO A CONSERVATIVE WHO HAD ACCUSED THE AUTHOR OF A WANT OF RESPECT FOR TRADITION.
Transition from the ages of tradition to that of experiment—Attraction of the future—Joubert—Saint-Marc Girardin—Solved and unsolved problems—The introduction of a new element—Inapplicability of past experience—An argument against Republics—The lessons of history—Mistaken predictions that have been based on them—Morality and ecclesiastical authority—Compatibility of hopes for the future with gratitude to the past—That we are more respectful to the past than previous ages have been—Our feelings towards tradition—An incident at Warsaw—The reconstruction of the navy.
The astonishing revolution in thought and practice which is taking place amongst the intelligent Japanese, the throwing away of a traditional system of living in order to establish in its stead a system which, for an Asiatic people, is nothing more than a vast experiment, has its counterpart in many an individual life in Europe. We are like travellers crossing an isthmus between two seas, who have left one ship behind them, who have not yet seen the vessel that waits on the distant shore, and who experience to the full all the discomforts and inconveniences of the passage from one sea to the other. There is a break between the existence of our forefathers and that of our posterity, and it is we who have the misfortune to be situated exactly where the break occurs. We are leaving behind us the security, I do not say the safety, but the feeling of tranquillity which belonged to the ages of tradition; we are entering upon ages whose spirit we foresee but dimly, whose institutions are the subject of guesses and conjectures. And yet this future, of which we know so little, attracts us more by the very vastness of its enigma than the rich history of the past, so full of various incident, of powerful personages, of grandeur, and suffering, and sorrow. Joubert already noticed this forward-looking of the modern mind. “The ancients,” he observed, “said, ‘Our ancestors;’ we say, ‘Posterity.’ We do not love as they did la patrie, the country and laws of our forefathers; we love rather the laws and the country of our children. It is the magic of the future, and not that of the past, which seduces us.” Commenting on this thought of Joubert’s, Saint-Marc Girardin said that we loved the future because we loved ourselves, and fashioned the future in our own image; and he added, with partial but not complete injustice, that our ignorance of the past was a cause of this tendency in our minds, since it is shorter to despise the past than to study it. These critics and accusers of the modern spirit are not, however, altogether fair to it. If the modern spirit looks so much to the future, it is because the problems of the past are solved problems, whilst those of the future have the interest of a game that is only just begun. We know what became of feudalism, we know the work that it accomplished and the services that it rendered, but we do not yet know what will be the effects of modern democracy and of the scientific and industrial spirit. It is the novelty of this element, the scientific spirit and the industrial development which is a part (but only a part) of its results, that makes the past so much less reliable as a guide than it would have been if no new element had intervened, and therefore so much less interesting for us. As an example of the inapplicability of past experience, I may mention an argument against Republics which has been much used of late by the partisans of monarchy in France. They have frequently told us that Republics had only succeeded in very small States, and this is true of ancient democracies; but it is not less true that railways, and telegraphs, and the newspaper press have made great countries like France and the United States just as capable of feeling and acting simultaneously as the smallest Republics of antiquity. The parties which rely on what are called the lessons of history are continually exposed to great deceptions. In France, what may be called the historical party would not believe in the possibility of a united Germany, because fifty years ago, with the imperfect means of communication which then existed, Germany was not and could not be united. The same historical party refused to believe that the Italian kingdom could ever hold together. In England, the historical party predicted the dismemberment of the United States, and in some other countries it has been a favorite article of faith that England could not keep her possessions. But theories of this kind are always of very doubtful applicability to the present, and their applicability to the future is even more doubtful still. Steam and electricity have made great modern States practically like so many great cities, so that Manchester is like a suburb of London, and Havre the Piræus of Paris, whilst the most trifling occasions bring the Sovereign of Italy to any of the Italian capitals.