{The Coming Terror 1891}

VI.

BENEFICENT ‘MURDER’ (1).*

AMID the storm of popular indignation over the horrors of the recent execution by electricity, one curious— and to me most significant—circumstance appears to have been overlooked. Simultaneously with the news of Kemmler’s judicial torture in the interests of Science, we have received from America the news that Count Tolstoi’s ‘ Kreutzer Sonata,’ and other ‘immoral’ books, have been suppressed in the interests of Morality. It has not, possibly, occurred to many that there is any other than an accidental connection between those two recent events; but to my mind they are only

     — * The two letters under this title are reprinted from the Daily Telegraph, where they appeared immediately after the execution of Kemmler. —

³²⁰ two aspects of the same social question, two strange results of the same political force which I have on a former occasion called ‘Providence made Easy.’ Both the conduct of life and its duration are regulated, for the time being, by the pragmatic sanction of the Legislator. All other sanctions are temporarily abolished. The reverence for human life, for the human body, has departed with the reverence for the Soul, for Freedom, for individual hope and aspiration; and, under the same cloak of empirical knowledge, Morality and Science shake hands. Was I not justified, then, in asserting that our modern Trades Union of scientists and materialists was merely a survival of the old Calvinism—that Calvinism which, ever since honest John triumphed in the burning of Servetus, has been ‘cruel as the grave’?
     How much further will the appetite for carnal knowledge, the lust for verification, lead the creature who loudly vaunts his descent from the anthropoid ape, and who looks forward to the dawning æon of the new god, Humanity? Everywhere the beneficent Demagogue, who would regulate the growth of individual evolution, who would experimentalize on the living subject, from the beast that crawls to the beast that stands upright, is busily at work, and the voice of the Legislature says, ‘Well done!’ While the cynic in the market-place loudly proclaims the death of all ³²¹ human hope and aspiration, while even the Judge on the bench accepts the destruction of Religion, but utters a pharisaic ‘If we can’t be pious, let us at least be moral,’ the scientific jerry-builder constructs his lordly pleasure-house out of the stones of dead creeds. The ethics of the dissecting-room and the torture-chamber replace the instincts of the human conscience, which conscience, if forced evolution continues to prevail, will soon become a mere register of average human prejudices. Meantime, having disintegrated all laws in succession, we remain at the mercy of the empirical laws of Demogorgon. To talk through the telephone or to talk into the phonograph is to penetrate the mysteries of Nature, and, heedless of the bolts of Zeus and kindred gods, we exult over Mr. Edison’s bottled thunder.
     All this would not matter much if the tyrannical will of the new Science and new Morality would suffer us to breathe in peace, and if the New Journalism, talking the shibboleth of Science and Morality, would leave our personal evolution alone. But we are being legislated for, not only in the Senate, but in the Vestry; not only by the County Councilman, but by the Penny-a-liner. With what result, may I ask? With the result that every day men and women are growing more indifferent and more mechanical, and that a nation of freemen is being transformed into a nation of sanitary prigs. If I may use the expression, we are becoming ³²² Teutonized; the peculiarity of the Teuton being that, although free, he forges his own fetters, and voluntarily accepts his slavery as a moral and political machine. For my own part, I find that I cannot procure certain books without police supervision; that I cannot see a play or write one without being guided for my good by a legal supervisor; that I cannot put my hand in my pocket to assist a beggar without being looked at askance by the Commissioners of Lunacy; that I cannot use my own judgment even in a literary contract without being pounced upon and bullied by a trades union of authors; that, in a word, I can do nothing, think nothing, be nothing, without some sort of organized social intervention. As for the right of private judgment, it is rapidly becoming a farce. Men no longer think or judge for themselves; they do it all by machinery. There are cheap manuals, mechanical guides, to classify and regulate even my tastes and likings. Little trade unions innumerable make up the corporate trades union, the State. And the individual member of society, the thinking and seeing man, becomes either a martyr or part of a Machine.
     The apogee of the moon of Dulness, of Mob Rule, of Beneficent Legislation, is reached at last, when the free people of America, in their zeal for the public good, furnish the world with the edifying spectacle of a judicial murder and torture by ³²³ electricity, and when, in the same breath, they consign the work of a daring thinker to the civic pit for rubbish. Let me say in this connection that I have no personal sympathy whatever with the diseased views of human passion taken by Count Tolstoi. Morality has made the man, as it makes the Council and the Legislature, raving mad. Science, Christian or un-Christian, renders the individual, as it renders the State, insane with the pride of empirical discovery, with the zeal of impious verification. And, after all, we can verify so little! What does it serve the lover to know that his beloved moonlight is made of green cheese or magnesium? How does it help human nature to learn that the beauty it yearns for fattens on corruption? to be told that every happy instinct, every function of the flesh, is dangerous, and to be summarily repressed? The new scientific Calvinism would turn the many-coloured picture of the world into one common black and white; would teach the maiden to analyze her first blush, and the boy to dissect his first love; would turn pure natural impulse into prurient inquiry, and put glass windows into everybody—as in the famous surgical case—to show us the mean processes of the Unconscious. Men who, like myself, were not born ‘moral’—men who refuse to measure themselves by the common standard which regulates social conduct, and who, above all, would secure for their fellows perfect freedom of moral evolution, stand ³²⁴ wondering in the darkness of eclipse, while Puritanism and espionage conspire against human nature.
     Now, more than ever, at this crucial point of the world’s history, it behoves all thinking men to cry, with Virchow, Restringamur! Do not permit Empiricism to go too far, either in the destroying of sanctions, or in the formulation of enactments, or in the legalizing of experiments; but let every man who thinks he has a message speak with a free tongue, and let Art, above all—in which may lie the salvation of the world—live a free and natural life. The example of Kemmler should be a warning to everyone of what beneficent legislation may yet do for us in the interests of the State, of Science, and of Morality!

VII.

BENEFICENT ‘MURDER’ (2).

IN view of the reproaches of some correspondents, who contend that they do not quite know what I mean or what I am complaining about, I find it necessary to add a few further words of explanation. I never posed as a Gnostic, as ‘one who knows,’ and if I show scant respect for authoritative opinions, I feel quite as little respect for any opinions of my own. I invariably try, however, to make these opinions clear. Since I appear to have failed in the first instance, let me try again.
³²⁵  I am not, to begin with, a Socialist in the ordinary sense of the word, and I distinguish in both the moral and the political world between sympathetic co-operation and arbitrary trades unionism. I will combine with no man, with no body of men, to dictate absolutely to others how they are to think and act. True Socialism I believe to be the self-protection of minorities against the despotism of majorities, the self-protection of individuals against the tyranny of mob-elected legislators, against encroachments on the part of the State, of the Church, of Capital, of the working as well as of the governing classes, and of Society. False Socialism I believe to be the combination of organized classes or communities to limit the free action of the individual, and to force unnatural evolution all along the line. A true Socialist accepts patiently the inevitable limitations put by the community on his personal activity. He is perfectly well aware that government is necessary, and that, if his fellow-men are to be comfortable, he cannot do just as he pleases. If he protests against taxes, it is only when he considers them iniquitous—e.g., taxes for foolish wars, for the support of discredited institutions, of unnecessary offices, of sinecures. He cheerfully contributes to the lighting and draining of cities, to the wages of a necessary police, to the support of the helpless and deserving poor, to the necessary institutions of the State. But there he pauses. Having done ³²⁶ his duty as a citizen, he retires on his rights as a man. He complains if he has to support a Church in which he has ceased to believe, and contends that if his neighbours require the services of a clergyman they should not ask him to pay for them. If he seeks entertainment he elects to choose it for himself, without legislative supervision. If he likes statues and pictures of the nude (as I do), he contends that he has a right to enjoy them, despite the fact that they create nasty sensations in ‘moral’ people. So with Books and with the Drama. He claims a free choice in their selection, no matter how many ‘young persons’ may be peeping round the corner. Despite the Priests in Absolution of the New Journalism, he protests against combinations which rnake life hideous—e.g., the inquisitorial Newspaper. But even here he does not interfere; he only smiles, and prays that God may send poor Humanity a better religion and better literature. And so on, and so on, to the end of the chapter.
     I hope this is very simple. Well, in the present condition of affairs, how does the true Socialist—or, in other words, the rational, peace-loving citizen—find himself treated?
     He finds, in the first place, that false Socialism, using the shibboleth of the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number,’ is, both here and in Germany, bolstering up the tyrannies of an all-present officialism. He finds that powerful organizations ³²⁷ of men are trying to legalize in our cities what is in his sight the abomination of abominations. He finds that the finest course of action a Government can adopt to repress crimes of murder and of violence is to imitate them, or even, as lately in America, to excel their horrors. He finds that, by our marriage laws, men and women are chained like beasts together, and that their very despairing effort to escape from each other is called ‘collusion.’ He finds that everywhere in Society, wherever the Puritanical bias prevails, the simplest and purest natural functions are looked upon as unclean; that Morality despises the body now, as Religion despised it long ago. He is told of the spread of education; he finds that he is being told merely of a spread of half-instructed ignorance. He finds our leading scientists justifying War and Appropriation, as our leading Spiritualists and Churchmen used to justify them. He finds it dangerous, or at least incompatible, to express his real opinion of any existing institution, particularly if that institution is either ‘moral’ or ‘religious.’ He is not led to the stake, but he is ‘boycotted’; he is a discredited and suspected person. He finds, in one word, that at every point of his individual advance he is confronted by the mass of organized cruelty and unintelligence.
     All this, of course, is no new thing. As a child, I saw Robert Owen stoned for saying that Marriages were not always made in Heaven! ³²⁸  But at no period of history, except that period when false Christianity was most dominant, have individuals been so much at the mercy of a false Morality. In literature especially the extent of completed ignorance is something scarcely credible—ignorance not only of the uneducated, but of the cultivated and the superfine. To illustrate it I need go no further than a recent number of the Quarterly Review, where conventional Morality speaks out loudly as a trumpet on the subject of the French nation and of French fiction. Even the School Board, it appears, has not killed the insular prejudice that every Frenchman is a sensualist and every French book an outrage on decency. But what is to be said of a writer (the mouthpiece of a large class, or we should not find him in the Quarterly) who lumps Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola together as writers of the same calibre, and actually affirms that ‘Balzac was a materialist, who did not believe in God’? Poor Balzac! who swore by Godhead and the Monarchy, and was so mercilessly roasted for his leaning to these aristocracies. ‘His (Balzac’s) only faith was faith in money; he is the supreme artist who excels in consummating the type of the ignoble, even of the cadaverous. His characters are always intrinsically vicious, and he anticipated the worst things of Zola.’ And this of the writer who gave us ‘Eugénie Grandet,’ and ‘Cousin Pons,’ and ‘Modeste Mignon,’ and a hundred other imperishable ³²⁹ types of human beauty and goodness. Is it any wonder that the wretched poor flock to hear the tumult of the Salvation Army, when the rich and cultured combine to support such dismal howling as I have quoted, such utter ignorance of the subject, such spasmodic stumbling, as of the blind leading the blind?
     For myself, I still find in France the centre of the World’s free thought. The mad political craze, the whirl from one system to another, is nothing; the bold and fearless freedom of the great French writers, from Diderot downwards, is everything. No matter if they have now torn open the sewers, as long ago they tore down the superstructures of society.They have taught men to think and feel. Even Zola among the shambles is better than Chadband among the churches, better than the easy English novelist who cloaks up the ulcers of society, better than Mr. Chaos-come-again and his army of howling teetotalers and Sabbatarians.
     But I find I am wandering away into criticism. What I wanted to point out was, that it is not the freedom of individuals we have to fear, but the combinations of classes—the trades unions of well-intentioned political moralists, culminating in the tyrannies of the Legislature. England under the new Radicalism is growing as terrible as Sheffield under Broadhead! We have too much legislation and too little individual responsibility. Men who used to fight for their own hands now cling ³³⁰ tremulously to the skirts of officialism, and cry, ‘Help us; instruct us. We are too weak to help and instruct ourselves.’ Small wonder that, in their extremity, they turn from the conscience implanted in them by God to the legerdemain of Providence made Easy. If we want to know whither a large portion of the community is drifting, let us glance for a moment at General Booth’s view of the Millennium, given in a publication called ‘All the World.’ ‘First, we should have Hyde Park roofed in, with towers climbing to the stars, as the world’s great, grand, central temple! . . . And, then, what demonstrations, what processions, what mighty assemblies, what grand reviews, what crowded streets, impassable with the joyful multitudes marching to and fro! . . . Five million hearts would turn to God with voices of thanksgiving and with shouts of praise!’*
     Far be it from me to underrate the good work General Booth is doing in some directions; but take such a proclamation as this, and it is an attempt to turn Humanity into a huge barrel-organ, with an accompaniment of ‘shouting’ performers. And herein, as we are aware, lies the secret of his triumph. Knowing how little is done to amuse the masses, seeing their utter wretchedness and dulness, he shows them how to exercise

— * See, further on, the remarks on the Social Aid side of General Booth’s scheme. —

³³¹ their bodies and use their lungs by organizing for one universal Shout. Out of this tumult, to which the ‘tom-tom’ of the poor savage is music, peace and salvation are to come.Looming in the near future is the Golden Age, when any individual who refuses to join in the general noise will be regarded as anti-social, as an unsympathetic member of the community. In the face of this and kindred horrors, we are asked to believe that beneficent and philanthropic Organization is everything, and that individual peace and personal freedom are of little or no consequence.

VIII.

BOOKSELLERS^’ ROMANCE.

MR. RIDER HAGGARD, whose own work in fiction is at present delighting all who take pleasure in the marvellous, and who possesses in a certain measure the imagination of a poet, has published in the Contemporary Review a diatribe against the novel of the period, the moral of which appears to be: ‘If modern fiction fails to content you, try back to “Robinson Crusoe;” and if home scenery fails to inspire you, go to Africa.’ Now, it is no part of my business to defend our modern novelists from their latest critic, any more than it is to deny the novelty and the charm of Mr. Haggard’s own flights into easy romance; but in this particular instance I looked for a Daniel come to judgment, and I ³³² find only a Jeremiah. Leaving out of sight all that my clever contemporaries have done in fiction, work at least equal to the finest ore ever dug out of the Dark Continent, I want seriously to ask if Mr. Haggard, in the heyday of his sudden popularity, is not rather overestimating the prodigy of his own advent; and whether, after all, true Romance has very much to do with those wild fancy-flights which transport the booksellers for a season, but alarm the quiet students of human nature? Romance, if I understand it rightly, is the art of idealizing the splendid facts of life, of seizing human nature at its highest, and presenting it in types of poetic beauty, rather than the art of telling tales for the marines, and disseminating the philosophy of the preposterous.If the hope of the English public lay in Mr. Haggard’s way, we should have to recognise Jules Verne as a fine romancist, and place the fairy taletellers right over the head of Shakespeare; snatch the Bible frorn its shelf and substitute the ‘Arabian Nights;’ and instead of Walter Scott and Charles Reade, Dumas and Victor Hugo, content ourselves with the author of the wonderful adventures of Peter Wilkins. I am not, let it be borne in mind, underrating the author of ‘King Solomon’s Mines,’ although, if I were to pronounce an opinion, I should say that a commonplace, vivid, truthful bit of work like ‘Kidnapped’ was really more imaginative; but even Mr. Louis Stevenson would ³³³ be the last man to maintain that his work in this direction was a new departure. The point I wish to insist upon is that great fiction, instead of escaping from the realm of common-sense into that of pure fancy, throws the light of imagination over that realm of common-sense in such a way as to make of it a veritable fairyland. Nor is Mr. Haggard in any way justified as a romancist because, in the manner of M. Verne, he puts in the centre of his domain of fancy a few excessively prosy and old-fashioned realistic types, such as the wonderful Englishman with the white legs, the wandering African chief, and the hideous sibyl of innumerable story-tellers. He is quite within his right in escaping human character, but if he were a true rumancist he would certainly not escape it; and, again, if he were a new as well as a true romancist, he would leave on the mind a higher and nobler impression than is to be derived from the literature written for, and beloved by, the boys of England. In his story of ‘She,’ he certainly does show imagination; but surely the whole work is marred and spoiled by the inconsistency which blends a good poetical idea, worthy treatment in verse, with the commonplace associations and stereotyped characters so long familiar in books of the modern marvellous written for Paternoster Row, and published with illustrations. The idea of ‘She’ is fine; the treatment, in spite of its cleverness, is not far beyond the method of ³³⁴ M. Verne. Instead of truth irradiated by idealism, we have beauty degraded by commonplace; and as a consequence, the tale, in spite of all its clever workmanship, leaves the impression of a large canvas painted to order. This, of course, does not prevent it from being very amusing; only the fact of having written an amusing book does not justify an author in affirming that amusement is to be the prime vocation of the novelist of the future.
     To compare great things with small, Æschylus is a true Romancist. When he deals with the great issues of life, he uses the supernatural only as a background; but his ideas and his pictures would be quite as true, and just as noble, if his supernatural were merely an atmosphere, as it often is. Homer, perhaps, is more to the point; his tales of gods and men have all the strength of early fable, none of the mixture of aricient and modern moods. Dante writes romance in colossal cipher, never mean and never small. But to come down to modern times, Swift is a romancist, and Defoe is a realist; each in his turn is too wise to mix with foreign matter the elements peculiarly his own. Sublime human Romance attained its zenith in Hugo, who accepted Nature as she is, and craved no fable, but found in Nature’s own bosom the god, the godlike man, as well as the monster and the chimera. It is cruel to Mr. Haggard to mention him in connection with these masters, but the man who coolly relegates Zola to ³³⁵ the Limbo of the Unclean, and who indirectly indicates his own form of art as higher and purer than that which produced ‘Une Page d’Amour,’ must at least aspire to be a master. And with all that has been done in England even in recent years, Mr. Haggard is discontented. He has no good word to say for any of his elder brethren—for Charles Reade, for Walter Besant, for the author of‘Lorna Doone,’ or even for the author of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ All to him is leather and prunella, except Robinson Crusoe, African cram, and the merry boys of England. Unto this last we are coming, he says, since the good Howells avails us not, and the bad Zola grows more and more insufferable. The romance of the future is to justify, not Shakespeare, not Scott, not Dumas, not Hugo, not Dickens, not Reade, but M. Jules Verne, Mr. R. M. Ballantyne, and Captain Mayne Reid. For five shilling pot-pourris we are to exchange the oldest school of Idealism and the newest school of Naturalism! The panorama business, the book of travel business, the highly coloured showman business, is to take the place of human nature and human passion; and poetry and prose jumbled together are to supplant the literature of patient imagination. Really Mr. Andrew Lang and the Saturday Review have much to answer for, unless Mr. Rider Haggard, whom their praises have persuaded to this deliverance, is laughing at us in his sleeve.

336

IX.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY’S MIRACULOUS CONVERSION (1).*

I HAVE only just read, with feelings of mingled surprise and delight, Professor Huxley’s letter to the Times newspaper on the subject of the Salvation Army and General Booth. It is so sweet to find one’s self a true prophet; and did I not prophesy some little time ago, in a contemporary, that Professor Huxley would soon be converted ‘like another Saul’? The Arch-Sociologist, the denier of the natural freedom and equality of man, the upholder of ‘a statute of limitations in matters of wrong-doing,’ the denouncer of Freedom as laissez-faire, the preacher of Providence made Easy and special Governmental supervision in all departments, now wheels round in the very face of Mr. Spencer, and cries: ‘I said so! Organization is dangerous! the safeguard of society lies in the freedom of the Individual!’ And all this because one man of untutored intellect, with limited reasoning powers and miraculous powers of organization, has done in a few short years what all the Churches, including the Church of Pragmatic Science, have utterly failed to do—has awakened the imagination of the British Philistine to the fact that the miseries of the social deposits must be reckoned with, and has, in a measure, pointed

— * The first of the following letters appeared in the Times and Daily Chronicle, the second in the Chronicle only. —

³³⁷ out ‘the way.’ Why, only a while ago the militant Professor was stumping the magazines and advocating the possibility of advancing evolution by force from without and from above; was ‘persecuting’ the faithful who clamoured to be saved or damned in their own fashion; and here he is, already struck down by a Light from Heaven (or some other dwelling-place of the aristocracy) proclaiming that he, too, is of the Faithful, of the poor persecuted remnant which ‘believes’!
     I was severely rebuked when I dared to defend Mr: Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of absolute ethics against the savage attack of Professor Huxley; because I questioned the reasoning powers, while fully admitting the ingenuity, of my opponent. I am now, therefore, on the horns of a dilemma. Either Professor Huxley was always rational, or he was, all along the line, inconsistent. If he was rational, he failed to express his ideas logically; and if he was inconsistent, like most persecutors, he needed, besides logic, fuller light and edification. With what fervour did he argue (in his favourite metaphorical manner) against the fatuity which would place the guidance of a Ship in the hands of the crew, instead of those of the Captain; against the ‘reasoned savagery’ of those who would, it seemed to him, uphold the natural ‘rights’ of even the man-eating tiger! Then we wanted leadership, organization, espionage even, and scientific police; now, all these things are ³³⁸ perilous, and General Booth, with his tom-toms and his military orders, is threatening the lives of ‘individual’ men. Yesterday Professor Huxley was championing that Over-legislation which would mean the slavery of all mankind; to-day he is protesting against the strong men, and questioning the would-be legislators. A little while ago he was Mr. Herbert Spencer’s deadliest opponent; just a pirouette, and here he is at Mr. Spencer’s feet. Truly a miraculous conversion! All our fears were vain. The protector of the loaves and fishes, the peripatetic Providence incarnate, will harm us no more. Only a few steps further, and the Saul of the status quo will be the St. Paul of Individualism.
     Frankly, however, I distrust both this Saul and that other of the New Testament as persons possessing neither great logic nor trustworthy insight into human nature. The converted Persecutor is sure to lapse backwards during the very process of edification. And now, to my poor judgment, the Professor Huxley who refuses to disgorge his friend’s thousand pounds, on the ground that he will not countenance any form of social or religious ‘tyranny,’ is fully as suspicious a figure as the Professor Huxley who avowed that ‘the equality of men before God was an equality either of insignificance or imperfection,’ and that there was a strong argument for supposing that Force, reasonably applied, was an indispensable factor of our ³³⁹ civilization. Am I wrong in suggesting that, now as always, the pragmatic temperament and the anti- theological bias has far more to do with Professor Huxley’s attitude than any real conversion to the Individualism he has hated so cordially and so long? I may be wronging a true convert, but I cannot help believing that Professor Huxley would be far less shocked by the Salvation Army if it used the shibboleth of Science in lieu of that of Christianity—if it were beating its tom-toms in the name of David Hume instead of that of Jesus of Nazareth. Your scientist will endure a good deal of noise, a great deal of fussy organization, when the object is secular, and not religious.
     It is no part of my purpose to uphold the scheme of General Booth; I have not studied it sufficiently to justify or condemn it. So far as it involves a tyrannous organization, an interference with the right of private judgment, an upholding of effete superstitions, it has no sympathy of mine, and not all the approval of all the Churches would induce me to utter one word on its behalf. But the merest tyro in history must see that Professor Huxley’s attempt to liken it to the schemes of Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola is simply absurd, illogical, and uninstructed—worthy, in fact, of the mind which justified Jacob against Esau on the ground of ‘practical expedience.’ For if one thing is clear, it is that the religion of General Booth, whatever its crude forms and ordinances ³⁴⁰ may be, is at once unsectarian and beneficent, practical as opposed to dogmatic. The use of the Christian vocabulary is a detail. I have nowhere read that the General troubles himself about Christian dogmas. His cry has rather been, ‘A truce to your dogmas, and even to your moralities; let us see if we cannot save the “submerged tenth” by making it conscious of happy responsibility—by enabling it to live.’ The comparison with Mormonism is equally unfortunate; and, in any case, Mormonism is an institution which has existed with few or no crimes; no Wars, no Brothels, and no ‘Hells’—all accredited ornaments of our higher civilization. Say what we may of General Booth—and I myself (horrified by the clamour in the street) have said some hard things—he has struck a chord of beneficence which vibrates round the world; he has cried to the rich and powerful, ‘Lo! these also are your brethren’; he has succeeded in startling the Bishops from their armchairs, and the priests from their confessionals; he has said, ‘What you for eighteen centuries have failed to do—what you have scarcely even cared to do—I, an individual, a man of the people, will at least try to do.’ And in the face of this man, whose hand is open to the outcast and the fallen; who turns his back on no human creature, however base; who knows the world far better than any scientist that was ever born, Professor Huxley buttons up his pockets, purses up his lips, and ³⁴¹ tries to escape from the imputation of inconsistency, of inhumanity, by avowing his adherence to Principles which he has been opposing all his life.
     But no; Professor Huxley is not inconsistent. He stands where he has always stood, among those who are by temperament deprived of the true philosophic vision and the real enthusiasm of humanity. A genuine scientific student, capable of much careful verification on a low plane of inquiry, he cannot generalize and cannot organize. He has vindicated centuries of wrong-doing; he has upheld the tyrannies of Force and Convention; he has sided with Society against the Individual on the ground of utility, and with the Strong against the Weak on the score of necessity; and so, after all, even this last miraculous conversion—a sham, like all things seemingly miraculous—cannot save him. He is condemned out of his own mouth as the Pharisee who passes by, while General Booth is justified, by his own act, as the Samaritan who at least endeavours to heal and bless.*

     — * Professor Huxley’s only comment on this was a protest that I utterly misstated his views, and that I was, he believed, merely a writer of ‘works of imagination.’ The good Professor’s contempt for his opponents, for all who dare to question his empirical statements, is notorious. To him, even Mr. Spencer was only ‘an abstract Philosopher.’ —

342

X.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY^’S MIRACULOUS CONVERSION (2).

     In the Times of December 9, 1890, appeared another letter from Professor Huxley, written in the same vein as his first diatribe, on General Booth’s scheme, and attached to it was the letter from my pen, which was printed in the Daily Chronicle (and the Daily Chronicle only) on the previous day. Now, my letter was issued to the public Press on the previous Sunday, but several of the dailies passed it by without insertion, on the conventional ground that the letter of which it was a criticism ‘had not appeared in their columns.’ The Times, however, with characteristic unfairness, published it a day late, in order that, when my protest was seen and read, Professor Huxley might have another opportunity of raising false issues on the subject. These, as we all know, are the usual tactics of the great organ of British Philistia. It cannot be fair and honest, even in so small a matter as the printing of correspondence. From the day when it fought on the side of Slavery during the American Civil War to the day when it organized the Pigott forgery, and from that day to the present, when it lets loose the quasi-scientific Boanerges to fulminate against the Salvation Army and talk half-instructed twaddle about Simon ³⁴³ Magus and the Mendicant Friars, it has been steadily posing as the enemy of human progress and human enlightenment.
     It is not, however, with the Times I have to deal, but with the gentleman in full ‘useful-knowledge canonicals,’ who now, as heretofore, refuses to give General Booth his blessing—for which, I am sure, the General never prayed. By what right of achievement or attainment Professor Huxley assumes to speak authoritatively on social questions I have never been able to discover. Both he and Professor Tyndall, who steps forward to support him, have done very little to justify any faith in either their sympathy or their insight. But both, we have to bear in mind, have one mission in common—to translate the jargon of Carlyle into the easy patter of Cheap Science, so that ‘he who runs may read.’ Professor Huxley, on the grounds of his recent ‘miraculous conversion’ to Spencerian principles, now poses as an Individualist; but we must be careful to distinguish between such individualism as his and the deeply reasoned individualism of the Philosopher he has denounced so often and so long.We must remember that his warning is not philosophical, but empirical; that he has on previous occasions committed himself to a defence of the present social cosmos, or chaos, as opposed to the aspirations of human freedom; that, in a word, he embodies the kind of opinion which would oppose to ³⁴⁴ the Enthusiasm of Humanity the dreary conventionalities of the Pragmatic Sanction.
     For what, after all, has this self-canonized lecturer on useful knowledge to say on the subject at issue? What is his criticism of the Man who, like his great Prototype, has actually descended into Hell, hoping to snatch thence the submerged ‘tenth’ of our population? Firstly, that there are many philanthropies in the world, and that General Booth’s is only one of them. This, surely, we knew already. Secondly, that earlier labourers in the field of Socialism had no army organization, no beating drums, no general fanfaronade, and that such organization belongs rather to the raving mystagogues of the East than to the steady social workers of the West. In this connection, curiously enough, the empirical Professor, always inconsistent in argument, while ever consistent in temperament, sighs for the old-fashioned and quiet ways of the Apostles, about whose ‘quietness,’ by the way, he might have learned something by a few more visits to the British Museum. It is surely news to all the world that the early Christians were peaceful, non-revolutionary, non-organizing persons, in no way troublesome to persons of opposite opinion and lovers of laissez faire. Thirdly and finally, Professor Huxley, while recognising the fact of human misery, asserts that General Booth’s scheme to check it is likely to do ‘more harm than good.’
³⁴⁵  And then he begins to tell us ‘why.’ Then, for the first time, we begin to get at what he really does mean. ‘It is primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the Soul,’ writes General Booth, ‘that I seek the salvation of the Body.’ This means, according to Professor Huxley, that ‘men are to be made sober and industrious mainly that, as washed, shorn, and docile sheep, they may be driven into the narrow theological fold which Mr. Booth patronizes.’ Does it mean anything of the kind? I, for one, have about as much belief as Professor Huxley in any religious dogma or Christian formula, but I have never gathered from General Booth that he bases his scheme on any foundation of abstract theology. But, if he did, surely the man who, with any formula whatever, can make the wretched millions ‘sober and industrious,’ is achieving fully two-thirds of the objects of all human science, of all human regeneration. Here, again, Professor Huxley is illogical; for once make a man ‘sober and industrious’—once make him to some extent a rational creature—and be sure you will not ‘drive’ him very far. You have given eyes to the blind: those eyes will see.
     ‘I have been in the habit of thinking,’ proceeds Professor Huxley, ‘that self-respect and thrift are the rungs of the ladder by which men must surely climb out of the slough of the despond of want, and I have regarded them as perhaps the most eminent of the practical virtues.’ Après? Has ³⁴⁶ General Booth ever denounced self-respect and thrift? No, admits the Professor; but he has said that ‘envy’ is the corner-stone of our competitive system, and that the sufferings of starving men are the consequence of ‘the sins of the capitalist’! Here we get a fine glimpse of the good Professor who defended the Status quo on the score of expediency, and who demanded for the landgrabber and the capitalist, enriched by centuries of wrong-doing, a certain statute of limitations. Does anyone but an empirical scientist, confusing the survival of the socially successful with the natural survival of the fittest, doubt for a moment that ‘envy’ and greed are the crying sins of our generation, and that many men starve because their fellow-men refuse to feel? Read, in this connection, the solemn and beautiful words of Mr. Henry John Atkinson, printed in the very number of the Times which contains the Professor’s grisly diatribe: ‘I cannot sit still in warmth and comfort when I know that many of my countrymen are wandering about London without food or shelter all through these inclement nights, and that General Booth and his corps of workers wish to help them, and cannot get the means. My wife and I will give £300’—while Professor Huxley, who would cheerfully, no doubt, contribute to a scheme for the extension of Vivisection, buttons up his trousers-pockets and keeps his friend’s ‘thousand pounds.’
³⁴⁷  Further on, Professor Huxley pushes his objection further home by citing a case of so-called ‘persecution.’ A girl was ‘seduced twice,’ and applied to the Salvationists, who thereupon ‘hunted up the man, threatened him with exposure, and forced from him the payment to his victim of £60 down, an allowance of £1 a week, and an assurance on his life of £450 in her favour.’ Intimidation with a vengeance, very Jedburgh justice, says the Professor. Let us not be quite sure. Let us not assume too hastily that the case was not fully investigated. Let us reflect at the same time what the precious Law would have done for the victim of this seducer. It would have enabled her to take out a summons, perhaps, and, if there were a child, secure a weekly sum of half a crown while that child was of tender years! Professor Huxley thinks that, in all possibility, it was a mere question of relative moral delinquency between the parties, and that the man, so brought to book, was as much a ‘victim’ as the woman. Excellent Professor! True upholder of masculine law-making and the survival of the culpable fittest! May we not in all seriousness wish Mr. Spencer joy of his last proselyte?
     When all is said and done, all that Professor Huxley can advance against the Salvation Army is that it is ‘noisy’; that it uses the vocabulary of superstition; that it reproaches the rich for the sorrows of the poor; and that, whenever it can, ³⁴⁸ it tries to bring delinquents to justice! Well, admit every one of the indictments, and what is proved? That every beneficent scheme has some little drawbacks, but that every such scheme must be judged by the totality, by the entire moral efficacy, of its influence. What the Salvation Army has done is this—it has, first of all, awakened the sleeping conscience of the world. It has told Dives that he must not sleep so long as Lazarus starves; it has proclaimed that there is hope for every man, even for the basest, if he will try to be ‘honest and industrious’; it has held out hands to the Penitent Thief (as it would hold out hands to the penitent Professor), and it has broken bread with the Magdalen. Then think for a moment what Cheap Science, with its demagogues of the dissecting-room, its peripatetic professors, has done, or tried to do. It has prattled glibly of Natural Law and the Survival of the Fittest; it has cast in its lot with the Times and the governing classes; it has paraded forged documents to enslave the Irish people and discredit a nationality; it has countenanced the ‘unco’ gude’ and joined in the holy horror against the destroyers of national institutions, such as War and Prostitution; it has contented itself with Carlyle’s Gospel according to the Printer’s Devil and the faith which confuses natural Freedom and Equality with ‘reasoned savagery’; and last, and greatest of its achievements, it has instituted the beneficent ³⁴⁹ tortures of Vivisection. Well, if we have to choose between Simon Magus and Professor Huxley, or between General Booth and Professor Ferrier, let us give our vote to those who are the friends of both man and beast—with the workers who are tender to the weak and merciful to the fallen, not with those who turn with complacency to acts of beneficent legislation, and — let the lost go by! As for Professor Huxley, he is only our old friend the Priest in another guise, as unsympathetic, as bigoted, as retrograde as anyone who ever wore soutane or cowl. Even in his new aspect as a convert to Individualism, he will convince no sane man that Folly and Enthusiasm are synonymous terms.

[Note:
Professor Huxley’s letters to The Times, to which Buchanan is responding above, are available in the Letters to the Press section.]

XI.

‘THE JOURNALIST IN ABSOLUTION.’*

WRITING neither as a person having authority, nor as one of the scribes, I wish to put on record, if you will permit me, my complete and absolute sympathy with Mr. Parnell. He may, or may not, be an Adulterer—that, in any case, I consider a detail chiefly interesting to himself; but I contend that his technical and legal guilt is no proof whatever of his moral turpitude. No question involving the relation of the sexes can be absolutely decided in the tainted atmosphere of

— * First published just after the divorce suit of O’Shea v. Parnell. —

³⁵⁰ our foul Divorce Court, and the case of ‘O’ Shea v. Parnell’ was established by the unworthiest of all evidence, that of prying chambermaids, prurient lodging-house keepers, and all the miserable human fry who swim in the unclean shallows of the legal puddle. To my mind, Mr. Parnell’s stern and absolute silence, his determination not to be dragged through the obscene mire, is negative evidence in his favour. He has chosen, like a strong man, to let the blow fall on his own shoulders, and the result is that Mrs. O’Shea has been spared and almost forgotten, while all the moral wolves are clamouring for Mr. Parnell’s blood. But even if Mr. Parnell is guilty, no man can tell in what degree. That, as I have said, is a matter chiefly concerning himself. What concerns us, men who stand as simple spectators of a persecution unparalleled in the history of Politics, is the means which are being adopted to hound a great man out of public life.
     It is on record, I believe, or at any rate it has been stated, that immediately after the decision of the Divorce Court a well-known Journalist waited upon Mr. Parnell and informed him that unless full ‘confession’ was made at once, and the leadership of the Irish Party simultaneously resigned, the said journalist would appeal to the Puritans of England to ‘let loose the dogs’ of moral War. Whether threatened or not, the thing has been done, and Mr. Parnell has been hunted down, not ³⁵¹ by honest public opinion, not by British virtue, not even by the British Matron, but by the Journalism of the Sewers on the one side and the Journalism of the Back-kitchen on the other. For whence chiefly arises this ferocious clamour of prurient Morality, this talk about the sanctity of the household, and the eternal symbolism of the bed-post? Firstly, from the source out of which arose the publication of a scandal so infamous, and described so infamously, that the very air of Nature was polluted as by a cesspool, the stench of which penetrated like poison into every household of the land. Secondly, from the individual who invented the journalism of Paul Pry, who has violated all the privileges of social life, while haunting the back-kitchens of the aristocracy, and counting the candle-ends of the governing classes; and who, finally, proposed not long ago in the House of Commons, to the manifest satisfaction of a crowd of fellow-demagogues, to pollute the ears of his fellow-members by opening up in broad day the sewer of another foul and loathsome scandal.The other attacks on the character of the member for Cork may be set aside as purely political. The attacks to which I draw attention are specifically ‘moral.’ It is the latter to which I wish to confine your attention, while demanding whether we are to substitute for the old and discredited priesthoods, the priesthood of the Journalist in Absolution?
³⁵²  No ‘Confessional Unmasked’ has yet, to my mind, furnished so sad an illustration of human prurience as the new Confessional of the Journal. Manifold as are the injuries which Journalism in general has done to Society, to Literature, and to Art, by fostering the uninstruction of the general reader, and parading the ephemeral judgments of the hour, those injuries are small to the crimes committed by the Journalism which masquerades in the guise of Morality, which deals in household garbage, and, in the interests of vulgar curiosity, institutes a Public Confessional. Dismal indeed is the lot of the human being who, like Mr. Parnell, sits in the confession-box, with the Priest of Prurience on one side and the Priest of Scandal on the other. If he refuses, as Mr. Parnell has done, to make any kind of utterance, woe to him and to his generation! The flood-gates of denunciation are opened; the whole army of back-kitchen moralists and scandal-mongers is arrayed against him; the standard of the Cross is raised, and men prepare for the luxury of the auto da fé. Honest citizens bar their doors, and peep from their windows in terror. Everywhere, ushered by the newsboy with his ‘latest edition,’ walk the agents of the Inquisition.
     To most men who would live their lives in peace, Journalism is merely Babbage’s Organ in the Street; they stop their ears, and try to think and work in spite of it. But to all men who ³⁵³ value the security of their homes and the right of private judgment, the New Journalism, with its aggression, its tyrannical bias, and its shameless indecency, is the old Priest in Absolution forcing a way into every household. Tartuffe and Melchior live again in the columns of the inquisitorial newspaper, while the Scapin of Politics walks hand-in-hand with the Mawworm of Morality. At this moment, therefore, when a wave of prurient Puritanism is rising higher and higher to destroy all that makes the world sweet and wholesome, it is with no common interest that we who are neither inquisitorial nor ‘moral’ watch the fate of Mr. Parnell.If he stands like a rock, refusing to be doomed by the Divorce Court, and defying the clamour of penny-a-lining Pharisees, there is still hope for Society. If he falls, bestraddled over by the rampant Journalist in Absolution, we who loathe his would-be Confessors may well despair. I shall say nothing here of his public services, of his power and prescience as the one man capable of interpreting the hopes and wishes of the Irish race; nothing of the constitutional bigotry which has led even so honest a man as Mr. Gladstone to join in the cry against him. It should be remembered, nevertheless, that Mr. Parnell retains his position, not because he is privately virtuous, but because he is politically puissant, and that Mr. Gladstone, despite all his noble disinterestedness, is a retrograde moralist, who repudiates Divorce ³⁵⁴ under any circumstances, and founds his repudiation on the diseased ravings of mediæval monks and saints. I for one believe that issues far deeper than any issues merely political will be determined by the ultimate position of Mr. Parnell.I for one refuse to accept the discredited disclosures of the Divorce Court, and the obscene comments of the Journalist in Absolution, as any final test of human life and character.

XII.

THE COURTESAN ON THE STAGE.

I HAVE recently read, with no usual interest, a clever and trenchant article on ‘Stage Courtesans.’ To ‘shatter the sentiment,’ as the writer expresses it, of such plays as the ‘Lady of the Camellias,’ is a task which even his able pen is quite unable to accomplish; for that sentiment, I believe, is founded on some of the strongest instincts of human nature. Moreover, the type of Camille is, according to my small experience, quite as common as the type of Cora Pearl; and from the days of the Magdalen to those of De Quincey’s Ann the street-walker, the class named ‘unfortunate’ has claimed, and claimed justly, the sympathy of all mortals except a few supervestal virgins and a large proportion of matchmaking matrons. I am not, however, vindicating in this connection the morbid psychology of the sentimental ³⁵⁵ school of the early Empire. I am simply contending for justice to a type of character which, with all its depravities, is full of irresistible artistic fascinations.
     The ethical question involved in the article I have named is far too involved a one to be discussed in the space of a brief note. All I wish to do is to protest against the Pharisaism which, both in life and literature, describes certain characters and certain subjects as unfit for the treatment of dramatic art. In England, only those situations and characters are held justifiable which have received, or are likely to receive, the sanction of Mr. Gilbert’s young lady of fifteen; and the result is a Drama which, to my thinking, leaves out of sight at least the half of human life, and supplies us with the barest possible profile of human nature. In the field of pure literature the result is dispiriting enough; in the field of dramatic art it is simply stupefying. I believe myself that playgoers would be a healthier race if their morals were less tenderly taken care of; that even morbid psychology is a healthier thing than morbid prudery or ‘Podsnappery’; that before the stage can be a great literary influence, its tongue must be set free and its moral speech unfettered; that, in a word, we want a breezier atmosphere and a saner method if our stagecraft is to grapple at all with the great problems of life and religion.
     The courtesan is the creature of society—pure ³⁵⁶ and noble, as in the case of Aspasia; bold and vicious, as in the case of Nell Gwynne; sad and hectic, as in the case of Marguerite Gautier; or simply carnivorous, as in the case of Nana and Cora Pearl. As long as she exists, either as a worker of that social safety-valve recognised in the execrable ethics of Swedenborg, or as a sad ‘necessity’ created by the evils of modern society, she will have her fit place in literature as well as in life. Those who know the Courtesan best believe that Cora Pearl, who, when her lover destroys himself, simply thinks of the stains on her carpet, is a monstrosity—that is, true to a certain monstrous form of womanhood as Faustine or Messalina. For one creature of this sort there exist a thousand creatures who are not the avenging furies, but the victims and martyrs, of an infamous social law. Far distant be the day when personal purity and chastity is not recognised as the highest quality and prerogative of womanhood—when we forget to desiderate in all noble women the qualities we respect in our mothers and our sisters. Yet, since the Courtesan is what the sensuality of man has made her, let us, if we are in the mood for stone-throwing, aim our missiles, not at her, but at the men who have created her to minister to their appetites. Do not let us, above all, simulate indignation when we see her momentarily transfigured on the page of a poet or behind the footlights of a theatre; but let us ³⁵⁷ remember in connection with her the infinite pathos and tenderness with which she has been surrounded for eighteen hundred years, through the sagacious beneficence of the law-abiding Founder of Christianity.

XIII.

GOETHE AND CRITICISM.

WHEN Goethe found his sheep’s-head on a common, and proclaimed his discovery of the inter-maxillary bone, he was doing better work for Humanity than when, in his minor poems and romances, he preached the retrograde gospel of Egoismus. Science may possibly have gained something by his anatomical generalizations, but Literature has lost everything by his successful sermonizing. To a belated idealist like myself, the whole work of Goethe is a clumsy pyramid on the world’s highway. By one solitary effort of true imagination the great pagan saved his soul for posterity, and just where he was most primitive, most conventional, least egoistical, did he achieve his poetical success. A commonplace story of seduction, relieved by the cynical asides of a conventional Devil, remains as Goethe’s masterpiece. Meantime his mean and selfish gospel has sunk deep into the souls of little men, emerging from time to time to paralyze sentiment and imagination, ³⁵⁸ and creating literary monsters as hideous as the Frenchman Zola and as crude and unfinished as the Scandinavian Ibsen. That this same gospel of Egoismus appeals to a certain order of intelligence may at once be conceded; it is a fact proved by the vitality of Goethe as a literary influence. Although that influence has been mainly in the region of criticism, and although, in spite of it, the great humanists Balzac and Hugo have emerged triumphant, it is still a force to be reckoned with, more especially as in recent manifestations it combines itself with the inchoate force of Science. It is, however, in its very essence anti-literary—a statement easily proved by a reference to the literary history of this century. Goethe has begotten a whole race of Critics, but not one modern Poet, not one modern writer of genius, has turned to him for paternal inspiration.

XIV.

‘DRAMATIC CRITICISM AS SHE IS WROTE.’*

‘IF an English school, which heaven forefend! should be moved to attempt a similar pleasantry’ (p. 9). Mr. Archer means to say the reverse of what he writes. In English the sentence would

     — * Extracts from a book called ‘About the Theatre.’ by William Archer. See ante, ‘The Modern Young Man as Critic.’ —

³⁵⁹ run: ‘If an English school should be moved (which heaven forefend!) to attempt a similar pleasantry.’
     ‘Which of our countless humiliations was it that broke the camel’s back, and made it morbidly eager to balance matters by splitting its sides?’ (p. 13). How a ‘humiliation’ could ‘break’ anything, how a ‘camel’s back’ could be ‘morbidly eager,’ especially to ‘split its sides,’ I must leave my reader to explain.
     ‘A Lyceum first night has now become a solemn “function,” which peers, millionaires and honourable women “intrigue to see”’ (p. 4). Mr. Archer must indeed be considered superhuman in his insight; he can ‘see’ a ‘function.’
     ‘This genus all’ is Mr. Archer’s elegant translation of hoc genus omne. Yet we are authoritatively informed that Mr. Archer has been to school, in Scotland.
     ‘The audience knows perfectly well he is intended for a bishop, accepts him for one, and (such is their reverence) laughs at him accordingly’ (pp. 147, 148).
     ‘The theatrical critic who desires to write, I do not say a good style, but English of moderate purity, has a hard time of it’ (p. 203). We had always imagined literary style to be a quality of something written. To ‘write a style’ is a phrase as full of meaning as ‘to paint an art’ or ‘to sing a tone.’
     ‘Though the logical difference between this case ³⁶⁰ and that of the “ensemble” may not be apparent, I believe that even the Americans have trusted to their ears rather than their logic, and have accepted the one and rejected the other’! (p. 207). Does Mr. Archer mean by this that the poor Americans have accepted a certain ‘logic’ at the expense of the rejection of their ‘ears’?
     ‘It (the Censorship) is destructive, because it takes out of the people’s hands a power that they alone can wield, and thus deadens their feeling of responsibility for the morals of the stage’ (p. 157). Imagine the ‘feeling of responsibility’ for theatrical morals conceived by the ‘people’s hands’!
     But I hear my readers cry, ‘Hold, enough!’ Mr. Archer’s book is full of flowers such as I have transplanted.

_____

361

FINAL WORDS.

_____

363

FINAL WORDS.

I.

THE PARADOX.

THE paradox of this book, permeating it throughout, is the one stated in the letters entitled 'Are Men born Free and Equal?' to the effect that true Socialism is another name for Individualism. A little reflection, however, may convince us that it is perhaps no paradox at all.
     Personally, I should be grieved and disheartened if any friends of mine should class me with the enemies of the higher Socialism, which has all my sympathy and all my prayers. My contention is in favour of the right of individuals to agitate for purposes of self-protection, to destroy false economics, cruel monopolies, tyrannical interferences with the conduct of life. For example, in the admirable series of economic and historical statements published by the Fabian Society, there is scarcely a word from which I should dissent, if I were allowed to qualify the preposterous conclusions based upon those statements. Rational ³⁶⁴ Socialism has worked wonders for society; but how? By protecting the weak against the strong, the worker against the capitalist, the average man against the organization of hereditary monopolists. But surely such Socialism is only the fruit of the labours performed by temporarily discredited minorities—in a word, by aggressive and self-assertive Individualism? Latter-day agitators are very fond of regarding those who disagree with them, about the extent to which democratic legislation should be carried, as selfish and anarchic faddists—men who would leave the ‘strugglers for life’ to take care of themselves, and who use as mottoes, Laissez faire and Laissez aller. These Socialists base all their hopes of a social cosmos on a system of State organization, worked by a democratic majority, which would gradually average the laws of life for all men, and suppress all individual development.
     Yet it is here, I think, that my friends are themselves paradoxical, for I would be quite content to canvass them on most of the questions discussed in the preceding pages, and abide by the result. They, surely, would contend for the natural freedom and equality of Man, as I understand it; for the emancipation of the weaker sex; for the freedom of art and letters; for the right of private judgment in matters moral and religious; for the repression of scientific or quasi-scientific experiments on the lives of human beings and helpless animals; ³⁶⁵ for the destruction of War and Prostitution. Yet here, as may readily be shown, they are contending with the minority, they are fighting for individual liberties and privileges which the State at present denies them. Their power in the land is already great, and will be greater as time advances. The abstract principles they are preaching will slowly leaven the mass of misery and crime. But why? Not because they are waging a mad crusade against Society as rationally constituted, but because they are organizing, under able individual leaders, to disintegrate the present too common social evils; because, in one word, they are proving that every sane human being is not merely a member of Society, but an individual possessing natural rights, liberties, and privileges.
     This, I say, is the Paradox, the Riddle of the Sphynx: How to preserve the freedom of Humanity while preserving the freedom of individual men?
     On one point there can be no dispute, and has been no dispute. The present system of Society, it is admitted, includes structures honeycombed by centuries of wrong-doing. It is indisputable, nevertheless, that such wrongs as have been redressed already have been redressed less by mob-organization of any kind than by the free and unfettered primary action of martyred individuals. It was the Five Members who, to their own great peril, destroyed the social and political prerogatives of the Right Divine. It was Milton ³⁶⁶ who, in the face of English Puritanism, established the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, the right of men to save or lose their Souls by literature in their own way; and it was the same Milton who vindicated, against the Christian Socialism of his own age, the liberties of Divorce—liberties still denied to us by the advocates of the status quo. It was the pertinacious Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, who passed the first Mining Act; it was the unconventional Howard who reformed our prisons; and it was Robert Owen, an unpopular ‘faddist,’ who passed the Cotton Mills Act in 1819. In the eyes of his own generation, each of these men was looked upon as an eccentric Individualist, as an enemy of the social organization. Nay, are not many of our own energetic philanthropists themselves considered, by the majority of their countrymen, as individuals accelerating the period ofabsolute social anarchy? To be called ‘a Socialist,’ even nowadays, is to receive a name of opprobrium, and to be discredited by the great majority of human beings.
     No more extraordinary example of the futility of generalizations can be found than the manner in which many modern Socialists confuse Capitalism with Individualism—a confusion based apparently on the fact that certain individuals have become enormous capitalists! I should have conceived myself, in following the arguments intended to establish so absurd a proposition, that the history ³⁶⁷ of Capital is simply the history of successful attempts to place each individual labourer at the mercy of Capital. Surely Individualism means the moral rights of individuals, not the right of any one individual to steal, to amass money, to do no manner of work but to live on the labour of his fellows? Capitalists themselves are strong only when, like banditti, they league themselves together, and utilize the very machinery advocated by the friends of Trades-unionism. From which point we return to the statement that the true Socialist is an absolute Individualist—one who establishes his own rights by clearly defining the rights of others, by limiting accumulation and oppression in any shape, by asserting, on the plea that each labourer is worthy of his hire, his own plea to possess the results of his personal activity.
     Socialism, again, is not to be confounded with Democracy, or Mob-Rule, and the Rational Socialist, therefore, invariably distrusts the Demagogue; but these facts do not altogether imply that State interference is not desirable within limitations to be determined by the conscience of Individuals. The question may perhaps be stated thus: So long as Socialism is a condition of active revolt, qualifying the conditions of political order, and ameliorating abuses, it is practically beneficent; so soon as it becomes an overpowering State organism, paralyzing individual resistance and asserting a claim to absolute power, it is likely to become ³⁶⁸ tyrannical. Now, as always, the strength and justice of a people lie with the intellectual minority, and that minority at present is, in my sense of the word, individualistic.

II.

THE SOCIAL SANCTION.

INDIVIDUALISM, however, is not to be confounded with unlimited freedom of personal conduct. In exact proportion to the duty Society owes to the Individual, is the duty owed by the Individual to Society.
     The late Thomas Carlyle, in that wild chaos of vague assertions and unreasoned socialistic prejudices which humorists call his ‘philosophy,’ preached, following his master, Goethe, the worship of successful Individuals, men of genius, men of ‘worth,’ but in doing so lost sight of the rights of Humanity in general, and wrote a succession of variations on the glorification of so many Jonathan Wilds. Individualism, like Socialism, protects the weak, and insists that even Genius possesses no privilege entitling it to disregard human responsibilities. The worship of mere intellectual or physical power, the moral carte blanche given to an aristocracy of intellect, the argument which justifies the selfishness of a Goethe, or the sexual hysteria of Goethe’s worst disciples, is essentially as irrational and ³⁶⁹ anarchic—at once as anti-individualist and anti-social—as the worship of our aristocracy or our plutocracy. To say this is not to say that men of genius are to be judged by the sham conventions of Society; but neither are any individuals, however free of genius, to be so judged. It is well to remember that there is, at the present moment, both in literature and art, a great and growing tendency towards sham, as distinguished from true, Individualism—a tendency to represent Society as entirely wicked, and Revolt as of necessity commendable. The modern school of literary reformers has not as yet improved very much on the Weimar standard of ethics, and the result is that revolt has remained self-conscious, self-seeking, and self-conceited. Curiously enough, many of our leading Socialists have distinguished themselves by sympathy with the new births of sham literary Individualism—the intellectual prig, the super-moral female, the selfanalyzing pessimist, et hoc genus omne—a fact which, while it establishes my postulate that Socialism and Individualism are convertible terms, also shows that Socialism hardly understands as yet the meaning or the consequences of its own propaganda. For a moral or intellectual aristocracy is as much to be feared and dreaded as a political one; and the man who conceives he has an intellectual privilege to put himself above or beyond the just standards of conduct is as dangerous as the man who claims a class-privilege ³⁷⁰ to avoid the just standards of natural competition.
     Society is impossible if we have no ethical standards at all; if any given course of conduct is regarded as quite as good as another; and if human Society is considered, as some writers appear to consider it, necessarily false and conventional. The problem is, how to separate what is false and conventional from what is true and necessary; in other words, to learn those laws of common well-being which may fairly be termed absolute. Kant’s categoric imperative may possibly serve us here. No law of conduct should be made compulsory which the individual would consider arbitrary and cruel if applied to his own case; and to define such laws, it is essential that individuals should agree as to certain absolute ethical standards, free of Empiricism on the one hand, and free of Convention on the other.

III.

THE OUTCOME IN MINOR LITERARY CRITICISM.

SINCE the first publication of ‘The Young Man as Critic,’ and of the correspondence which in this book follows it in sequence (‘Is Chivalry still Possible?’), at least two of the persons severely censured have made both my criticism and myself the subject of continual animadversion, or, rather, recrimination. This was only natural, and to be expected. I have ³⁷¹ now, therefore, to revise my judgment, as every honest writer is bound to do, and to indicate those particulars in which I feel myself to have exaggerated the truth. It appears to me, then, on reflection, that I have been unfair to some of our young men, in so far as I have accused them of a want of any intellectual ideal whatsoever. Further familiarity with their writings convinces me that they have certainly the virtue of sincerity, and that, allowing for the aberrations of personal malice, they are conscientiously endeavouring to criticise literature according to their lights.Their belief is that our literary salvation lies in the direction of absolute and trivial Realism; their conception of a work of Art is that it should be an unimpeachable transcription ‘from the life.’ They have faith, also, like their teacher, Goethe, in the power of Womanhood as a force to disintegrate social convention and moral superstition — a faith, by the way, which (pace! these gentlemen’s reproaches) I have been preaching all my life. On the whole, then, I conceive that the difference between writers of this class and myself is temperamental rather than intellectual; that, different as our methods and our sympathies may be, our conclusions are not always diverse.
     And, further, it appears to me that little or no harm can be done to the literature of Imagination by any hostile critic who is thoroughly in earnest. To find edification in the dreary family anecdotes ³⁷² and dingy back-parlour chronicles which are now called ‘dramas,’ and to conceive life as drab-coloured and lugubrious throughout, is far less harmful than to have no taste for novelty and no zeal for humanity. The present apotheosis of what is mean and trivial and cheaply scientific—the present conception of Art as a series of dingy amateur photographs taken in the scullery during sunless weather—is only the inevitable reaction following the great period of loose and unfettered Ideality through which we have just passed. Presently, no doubt, it will be discovered that there is even more falsehood to Nature in a bad photograph than in a wildly-executed painting; that no amount of truth to outlines and to shadows, no obtrusion of minor details, can compensate for the glow of light, of colour, of imagination. In the meantime, the craving for Photography in Literature may serve some good purpose if it leads men to be zealous for general truth of presentation. There will always be critics who are colour-blind. There will always, on the other hand, be writers who find in Nature not merely one common black and white, but all the radiant colours of the prism.
     It is on ethical grounds, however, that the minor critics of the new photographic creed claim to be finally judged. They claim that Morality should have a foremost place in Art, particularly the art dramatic; and the morality they parade is the anti-social morality of Egoismus. Now, Egoismus, as ³⁷³ I conceive it, is Individuality under diseased conditions. Falk and Nora in Ibsen’s dramas, for example, are types of violent moral crudity in revolt against the ‘conventions’ of society. The one is a sulky provincial Byron, who, out of cowardly self-love, refuses his happiness when it is offered to him; the other is a petulant little monster, whose eccentricities are only comprehensible on the score of some obscure epileptic disturbance, and who is equally detestable when sucking lollipops or suggesting syllogisms. The minor criticism applauds these and cognate monstrosities as phenomenally interesting and important to literature; in point of fact, they have neither human interest nor any literary importance, save as indications of the fatal influence that morbid self-analysis has had on thought and on expression.
     Egoismus is a literary complaint first contracted by the men who drank too deeply of the poisoned waters of Weimar. Its signs are feverish dissatisfaction with society, irritation at social trifles, suspicion of all sanctions, and incapacity for honest laughter. In its worst examples it bereaves the literary organism of all colour but black and white, and gives to its victim the complexion either of the negro or the albino.

374

IV.

TYPES OF EGOISMUS.

ALTHOUGH the type I am attempting to describe may be traced far back in history, the chief modern example is Goethe*; not the Goethe of ‘Faust’ and the ‘Divan,’ but the Goethe of ‘Wilhelm Meister’ and the ‘Elective Affinities.’ In spite of all that wise critics have said to the contrary, I have always contended that Goethe, so far from being an ‘Art for Art’ philosopher, was permeated through and through with the self-consciousness of a haunting non-moral Morality. It was he who first among moderns began to analyze and to dissect his own sensations, and to reduce his heart-beats to a science. In his case, however, it was a strong and healthy man condescending to that self-analysis which, in less vigorous natures, develops into anæmia and vainglory. The result was to be found less in the giant himself than in his numerous literary progeny—a tainted and exhausted breed still lingering among us, chiefly in the form of the albino.
     In cases of this kind it is of little consequence whether the personal bias is moral or whether it is what is called ‘immoral.’ The impeccable albino

— * See my article, ‘The Character of Goethe,’ in ‘A Look Round Literature.’ —

³⁷⁵ Mr. Howells is just as much tainted with Egoismus as the nerve-shocking negroesque M. Zola. The self-analyzing and hypercultured young lady of Boston is as disagreeable in her superfinity as the nevrose heroine of ‘La Curée’ is in her sexual mania. In either case Morality has poisoned and perverted Art. Here, as in other developments of the disease, I see in the so-called Gospel of the Ego, not a new revelation, but the last slimy trail of the Goethe system of ethics, shown in productions which, like the forgotten and worthless portion of Goethe’s work, were devoid of imagination and true human sentiment. What is new and immense to the young men of the ferociously ‘moral’ newspapers has been familiar and detestable to me from the first moment I began to think and write. Where they find literary salvation I have found only the last dregs of a Devil’s gospel which has corrupted almost every branch of modern literature, and which, had Heaven not sent the world its literary knights errant in Victor Hugo and Dumas, would have long ago destroyed all poetry in the world. To them the moral of the Ego is novel; to me it is as old as the ‘Elective Affinities’ and Goethe’s self culture, with little new in it, and that little untrue, and delivered without a gleam of consecrating insight.

376

V.

‘MORALITY’ AS LITERATURE.

THE literary character is curiously inconsistent. A little while ago we were being assured on every hand that Art had nothing whatever to do with Ethics, and a large number of intelligent writers, in order to vindicate that theory, were joining together in a wild revel of indecent exposure. The reaction has come. We are now assured with equal vehemence that the functions of Art are ethical or nothing, and an equally large number of intelligent writers are flooding the world with sermons upon questions of Morality.
     Now, the truth lies in the via media—the way between two absurd theories. It makes all the difference whether, in a work of Art, we place edification in the first place or in the second. In reality it exists in all true Literature, but there its place is secondary, and it is subservient, even incidental; it is the perfume, not the body, of the flower. Directly it assumes the first place, as in Goethe’s inferior writings, in the albino or negroesque novelists, in the chamber-dramas of Ibsen and Björnson, and in the recent imitations by English novelists and dramatists, Art becomes diseased and stultified; all its free and vigorous life is gone.
     The tendency of English literature generally, as ³⁷⁷ of the English life and character, has been towards edification. For a long time under the old sanctions this edification was religious; at present, under the new Providence made Easy and the new literature made moral, it is ethical. We have banished all the superior gods, but the Furies and the Eumenides remain, and shriek the new shibboleth of ‘Heredity’ and ‘Evolution.’ The cant-phrase of our most destructive propagandists, the last word of both Atheism and Positivism, is, ‘Since we know Religion to be fiction, let us assure ourselves of the one fact, Morality.’ Hence, in literature, the dreary latter-day treatises of George Eliot; hence, on the stage, St. Ibsen’s Epistle to the Young Men as Critics; hence, over there in France, the vivisection of human nature to verify theories of hereditary moral diseases and of the survival of the morally unfittest; hence, yonder in America, the hyperæsthesia of Moral Cock-Certainty, the nervous exhaustion of the well-conducted Man-Milliner. We are anxious to be ‘good,’ but do not yet know how. We think we can cozen the Devil (in whom we still religiously believe) by a system of self-examination and self-dissection. And in our despair of individual success we turn to Sociology for ‘facts,’ and to practical Politics, the Limbo of the Legislator, for inspiration.
     The outcome of late in literature and in the drama has been a series of stories and plays in which the characters are moral chameleons, who, ³⁷⁸ both in act and deed, shock nature and belie experience, and who are just as like life as the ‘edifying’ creations of the Religious Tract Society. Quite recently, in an egregious drama by Messrs. Henley and Stevenson, acted at the Haymarket, we have had the last ethical flavour of ‘edification’ imported into the story of a beau and roué of half a century ago; and to hear Mr. Beerbohm Tree, in the costume of a Beau Nash, talking the patter of Ibsen, and listening to the reproaches of an Ibsenite young woman in the Dresden China costume of our grandmothers, was a sight for the gods to smile at. If Shakespeare in his tragedy of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ were suddenly to turn Juliet into an oracular Miss Blimber, or in his tragedy of Othello should make Desdemona just before her strangulation lecture Othello on the moral-philosophical disadvantages of marrying a person of colour, we should find Shakespeare doing on occasion what the modern literary moralist does almost invariably. Such feats of psychological legerdemain may please a small section of the public; but why, because those persons like to turn the theatre into a museum of moral monstrosities, should every writer who has tried to give innocent amusement to his countrymen be vilified? Why should I, for example, because I think the ‘Doll’s House’ is a literary crudity, be attacked for upholding ‘Institutions,’ taunted with a belief in the ‘conventionalities’ of personal honour, honest humour, and natural affection?
³⁷⁹  One of my critics has abused me roundly for describing Ibsen as ‘a Zola with a wooden leg.’ Another writer avers that ‘A Doll’s House’ is the only play which has not ‘bored’ him within the last few years, and adds (what is more to the point) that the nightly ‘storm of discussion’ over Ibsen’s ‘ethics’ is a proof of the dramatist’s genius and originality. Now, as a matter of fact, nothing is so easy as to outrage commonsense, and so arouse discussion and opposition; nothing is so difficult as to please, to refine, and to charm. A playgoer witnessing the great masterpieces of dramatic literature does not become polemical; he carries away with him the pathos, the solemnity, and the calm of life itself. He has been to a theatre, not to a debating-room; he has been enjoying a work of Art, not a feverish and irritating platform controversy. It has ever been the aim of the great dramatists, from Sophocles downwards, to magnify the divine meaning of life, to depict that truth which is beautiful and spiritualizing. The mission of prosaists like Ibsen is the mission of dullards like Zola—to shock and to revolt us with the meannesses of life, and to assume that those meannesses most abound where Religion and Morality are most powerful. My callow critic is not merely disgusted with the modern dramatist; he describes the average home as a ‘harem,’ the domestic affections of average men and women as stupid and conventional, the religious instincts of average humanity as instincts ‘he grew ³⁸⁰ out of before he was born.’ The same jaded and foolish creature who sees in Ibsen’s Nora a living woman representing Woman in the Abstract, would see in the banalities of ‘La Terre,’ if produced upon the stage, a glorious lesson convincing us of the monkeydom of humanity. We want no such lesson, for we have had it of late years ad nauseam. We have not yet arrived at the point of believing that every institution is vile merely because it is an ‘institution.’ The collective sentiment of Humanity has formulated a religion of Altruism, not of Egoism; it has felt from generation to generation that only by our faithfulness to those who love and depend upon us, our forbearance to those whom we think weak and helpless, our tenderness and compassion, our supreme pity for others, can we save ourselves. In the eyes of rational beings, not infected with the poison of the egoistic gospel, the woman who would save her own soul without first seeking to save those of her little children is, under any circumstances, a monster of selfishness and self-conceit; the man who thinks redemption comes through mere self-culture is a man ignorant of the world and its lessons; the dramatist who represents society as an aggregate of moral ‘prigs’ and self-conscious feminine ‘cads,’ catching from the common sunlight all the colours of the chameleon, is not merely unfamiliar with human nature, but ignorant of the first elements of that art which still keeps Shakespeare a triumphant certainty.

381

VI.

THE OUTCOME IN IDEALISM.

I AM perfectly prepared to meet any charge of inconsistency, made upon the ground that I am at once an advocate of Socialism and an advocate of Individualism. I would destroy false Individualism by the socialistic test, and I would destroy sham Socialism by the test which is converse. One half of this book is devoted to proving, with Mill, that individuals have a natural right to free, unfettered, and even eccentric development; while the argument of the other half is that individual development, being often crass, anarchic, selfish, and harmful to Society, has to be carefully watched and qualified by the corporate conscience.
     There is no more amusing illustration of the silliness of ultra-individualism than the favour shown by a certain portion of the public to that recent gospel of Egoismus to which I have alluded. Modern writers, indignant at the very constitution of Society, and exaggerating its evils, have presented us with innumerable types of character illustrating, unconsciously, the intellectual crudity of self-love. ‘A man has first of all to save his own Soul,’ say these writers, following their master Goethe. How far this precious zeal for spiritual self-preservation may be perverted may now be seen in the sunless ³⁸² pages of numberless saturnine writers. It is needless to say that the true Individualist, despite all his opposition to social and political conventions, is well aware that no man can save his own Soul alone, or without the help of his human environment. ‘We live by admiration, hope, and love,’ says the poet. Liberty and equality do not preclude responsibility or exclude the social sanction; on the contrary, they determine the one and postulate the other.
     There is no doubt that at the present moment the Enthusiasm of Humanity, which has worked so many miracles of love and healing, is just temporarily receding here and there (fortunately not everywhere) like a great tide, and leaving dry and arid shores of dark Reality, over which we are invited to wander, searching for the shells and bones of fact, and examining the shallow pools for living specimens. Moral philosophy, and abstract philosophy of all kinds, is out of fashion, and Poetry paddles through the mud. Little cynics run about with their toy spades, building up a politics and a literature of slime and sand, and getting very dirty in the process. Nevertheless, the great Ocean still exists, and in a very little while the tide must turn. But in the meantime we may be satisfied that our time is not being absolutely wasted, and that the present interest in morbid psychology and pessimism, like our present faith in State nostrums, will not be without its good fruits. After the reaction we shall be curious and accurate, as well as sympathetic and ³⁸³ enthusiastic. Truth will receive more justice, and Beauty more verification. True, the houses of mud and sand will crumble away, and the ephemeral names written on the shore will be effaced. But when all around us has ‘suffered a sea-change,’ whatever is great and imperishable in Thought and Sentiment, as well as in Society, will remain.

VII.

‘POOR HUMANITY.^’

HUMANITY, at the present moment, may be compared to a Hypochondriac, to Molière’s own ‘Malade Imaginaire.’
     His chief concern is with his own personal ailments, some of them quite imaginary. With the aid of the microscope, he examines his own secretions; yet he still plucks at the entrails of beasts to consult them as an augury. He swallows all new panaceas indiscriminately; bolts his door against the old charlatans of Religion, but admits by the side-entrance the new charlatans of Useful Knowledge. His firm conviction is that his disease is incurable, that he has soon to die!
     And only a little while ago, in the robust faith of his youth and strength, he believed himself immortal! The physicians of Positivism and cognate creeds assure him that he is still immortal, in the abstract; but abstract consolations are of no ³⁸⁴ use in hypochondria! In a fit of disgust at his own body, he becomes super-moral, disgusted at every natural appetite, afraid of every natural function. In a mood of sexual madness, he becomes indecent, and descends to all the banalities of self-exposure. Nothing to him is innocent or clean during these aberrations. He thinks all Society, and every institution, rotten at the root. He has invented the Modern Newspaper, that he may gloat over the obscene details of his own case, over the general diseases of his social organism; and he has fabricated the modern Novel, that he may discover other hazy diseases, never to be classified by Science. With all this, he is not in such a bad way as he imagines. His hypochondria is only at the early stage, and not yet chronic. To cure him, only freedom, good food, and fresh air are necessary. Free exercise of all his functions will put him right—at least, let us hope so. He will cease to contemplate his secretions, to be haunted by thoughts of his own excrement. He will cease to prate about ‘morality’ and ‘immorality.’ He will know how absurd he looks, eternally feeling his own pulse. And then, when he is renovated by free oxygen, he will burn his treatises of domestic medicine, his tractates of empirical knowledge about Morality and other ailments, his illustrated books of disease-germs enlarged by the microscope, his prescriptions of Providence made Easy and of State Socialism, and look heavenward once more for sunlight and consolation. ³⁸⁵ Then the lost Gods may appear again, radiant and beautiful as ever, and the lost Poets will be reborn with the lost Gods.Before this happy change, however, will come the crisis of a real illness, some of the features of which I have tried to foreshadow in these pages. Humanity will sicken almost to death; but after all, the old creed of Youth, and Hope, and Light is a true creed, and Humanity, so far from dying yet, will live to a good old age.

THE END.

_________________________________________

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.

_____

The Coming Terror Contents