What's Wrong with the World
- --
2 >
3 >
4 > CONTENTS**
5 >
6 >
7 > **>
8 >
9 > PART ONE. THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN**
10 >
11 >
12 > I. THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
13 >
14 >
15 > II. WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
16 >
17 >
18 > III. THE NEW HYPOCRITE
19 >
20 >
21 > IV. THE FEAR OF THE PAST
22 >
23 >
24 > V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
25 >
26 >
27 > VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
28 >
29 >
30 > VII. THE FREE FAMILY
31 >
32 >
33 > VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
34 >
35 >
36 > IX. HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE
37 >
38 >
39 > X. OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
40 >
41 >
42 > XI. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
43 >
44 >
45 > **>
46 >
47 > PART TWO. IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT
48 > MAN**
49 >
50 >
51 > I. THE CHARM OF JINGOISM
52 >
53 >
54 > II. WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
55 >
56 >
57 > III. THE COMMON VISION
58 >
59 >
60 > IV. THE INSANE NECESSITY
61 >
62 >
63 > **>
64 >
65 > PART THREE. FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT
66 > WOMAN**
67 >
68 >
69 > I. THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE
70 >
71 >
72 > II. THE UNIVERSAL STICK
73 >
74 >
75 > III. THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY
76 >
77 >
78 > IV. THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT
79 >
80 >
81 > V. THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
82 >
83 >
84 > VI. THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE
85 >
86 >
87 > VII. THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN
88 >
89 >
90 > VIII. THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS
91 >
92 >
93 > IX. SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS
94 >
95 >
96 > X. THE HIGHER ANARCHY
97 >
98 >
99 > XI. THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES
100 >
101 >
102 > XII. THE MODERN SLAVE
103 >
104 >
105 > **>
106 >
107 > PART FOUR. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT
108 > THE CHILD**
109 >
110 >
111 > I. THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY
112 >
113 >
114 > II. THE TRIBAL TERROR
115 >
116 >
117 > III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT
118 >
119 >
120 > IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION
121 >
122 >
123 > V. AN EVIL CRY
124 >
125 >
126 > VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE
127 >
128 >
129 > VII. THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY
130 >
131 >
132 > VIII. THE BROKEN RAINBOW
133 >
134 >
135 > IX. THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS
136 >
137 >
138 > X. THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
139 >
140 >
141 > XI. THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES
142 >
143 >
144 > XII. THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS
145 >
146 >
147 > XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT
148 >
149 >
150 > XIV. FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION
151 >
152 >
153 > **>
154 >
155 > PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN**
156 >
157 >
158 > I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT
159 >
160 >
161 > II. THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND
162 >
163 >
164 > III. THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE
165 >
166 >
167 > IV. A LAST INSTANCE
168 >
169 >
170 > V. CONCLUSION
171 >
172 >
173 > **>
174 >
175 > THREE NOTES**
176 >
177 >
178 > I. ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE
179 >
180 >
181 > II. ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION
182 >
183 >
184 > III. ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP
185 >
186 >
187 **
188 ---
189 >
190 >
191 >
192 DEDICATION**
193 To C. F G. Masterman, M. P.
194 >
195 My Dear Charles,
196 I originally called this book “What is
197 > Wrong,” and it would
198 have satisfied your sardonic temper to note
199 > the number of social
200 misunderstandings that arose from the use of
201 > the title. Many a mild lady
202 visitor opened her eyes when I
203 > remarked casually, “I have been doing
204 ‘What is Wrong’ all this
205 > morning.” And one minister of religion moved
206 quite sharply in his
207 > chair when I told him (as he understood it) that I
208 had to run
209 > upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in
210 a
211 > minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannot
212 >
213 conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is, of
214 > having
215 written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite
216 > unworthy
217 to be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes, this
218 > book is what is
219 wrong and no mistake.
220 It may seem a
221 > refinement of insolence to present so wild a composition
222 to one
223 > who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of
224 > the moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who can
225 > make the map of England crawl with life; a most creepy and enviable
226 >
227 accomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which,
228 > even
229 if it achieves its object (which is monstrously unlikely) can
230 > only be a
231 thundering gallop of theory?
232 Well, I do it
233 > partly because I think you politicians are none the worse
234 for a
235 > few inconvenient ideals; but more because you will recognise the
236 > many arguments we have had, those arguments which the most wonderful
237 >
238 ladies in the world can never endure for very long. And, perhaps,
239 > you
240 will agree with me that the thread of comradeship and
241 > conversation must
242 be protected because it is so frivolous. It must
243 > be held sacred, it
244 must not be snapped, because it is not worth
245 > tying together again. It
246 is exactly because argument is idle that
247 > men (I mean males) must take it
248 seriously; for when (we feel),
249 > until the crack of doom, shall we have so
250 delightful a difference
251 > again? But most of all I offer it to you because
252 there exists not
253 > only comradeship, but a very different thing, called
254 friendship;
255 > an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which,
256 please
257 > God, will never break.
258 Yours always,
259 G. K.
260 > Chesterton.
261 >
262 >
PART ONE. THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN
4 (Texto do capítulo)
I. THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
7 A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply
8 defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables of
9 population, decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth of hysteria
10 among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a chapter
11 that is generally called “The Remedy.” It is almost wholly due to this
12 careful, solid, and scientific method that “The Remedy” is never found.
13 For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder; the first
14 great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before
15 we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that
16 in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the
17 disease.
18 The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern
19 madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of
20 the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British
21 Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The
22 moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we
23 begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a
24 centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of
25 perpetually talking about “young nations” and “dying nations,” as if a
26 nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that
27 Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is
28 losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a
29 literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new
30 moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be
31 decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar applications of
32 the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasing size of national
33 possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with
34 God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short in subtlety of the
35 parallel of a human body. They do not even ask whether an empire is
36 growing taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its old age. But of
37 all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is
38 that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social
39 sickness, and then propounding a social drug.
40 Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and
41 that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about the
42 way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape
43 in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to produce a new
44 kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by
45 necessity, may send a man home with one leg less: but it will not (in a
46 creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra. Medical science is
47 content with the normal human body, and only seeks to restore it.
48 But social science is by no means always content with the normal human
49 soul; it has all sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a social idealist
50 will say “I am tired of being a Puritan; I want to be a Pagan,” or “Beyond
51 this dark probation of Individualism I see the shining paradise of
52 Collectivism.” Now in bodily ills there is none of this difference about
53 the ultimate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine; but he
54 certainly wants health. No one says “I am tired of this headache; I want
55 some toothache,” or “The only thing for this Russian influenza is a few
56 German measles,” or “Through this dark probation of catarrh I see the
57 shining paradise of rheumatism.” But exactly the whole difficulty in our
58 public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would
59 regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of
60 health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease. Mr.
61 Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea of property than
62 with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is not a tooth, but a
63 toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German
64 efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr.
65 Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would rather have
66 rheumatics.
67 This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern social discussion;
68 that the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the aim.
69 We agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear each
70 other’s eyes out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad thing. We
71 should not by any means all admit that an active aristocracy would be a
72 good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood; but some of
73 us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one. Everyone is
74 indignant if our army is weak, including the people who would be even more
75 indignant if it were strong. The social case is exactly the opposite of
76 the medical case. We do not disagree, like doctors, about the precise
77 nature of the illness, while agreeing about the nature of health. On the
78 contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy, but half of us would not
79 look at her in what the other half would call blooming health. Public
80 abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people
81 into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that, while we agree about
82 the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them.
83 Mr. Cadbury and I would agree about the bad public house. It would be
84 precisely in front of the good public-house that our painful personal
85 fracas would occur.
86 I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological method is quite
87 useless: that of first dissecting abject poverty or cataloguing
88 prostitution. We all dislike abject poverty; but it might be another
89 business if we began to discuss independent and dignified poverty. We all
90 disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity. The only
91 way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We
92 can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? I have
93 called this book “What Is Wrong with the World?” and the upshot of the
94 title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not
95 ask what is right.
96 ---
II. WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
10 There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless and
11 useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which came first,
12 the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood, it is so
13 futile an inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter on those
14 deep metaphysical and theological differences of which the chicken and egg
15 debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. The evolutionary
16 materialists are appropriately enough represented in the vision of all
17 things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ that had laid
18 itself by accident. That other supernatural school of thought (to which I
19 personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified in the fancy that this
20 round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by a sacred unbegotten
21 bird; the mystic dove of the prophets. But it is to much humbler functions
22 that I here call the awful power of such a distinction. Whether or no the
23 living bird is at the beginning of our mental chain, it is absolutely
24 necessary that it should be at the end of our mental chain. The bird is
25 the thing to be aimed at—not with a gun, but a life-bestowing wand.
26 What is essential to our right thinking is this: that the egg and the bird
27 must not be thought of as equal cosmic occurrences recurring alternatively
28 forever. They must not become a mere egg and bird pattern, like the egg
29 and dart pattern. One is a means and the other an end; they are in
30 different mental worlds. Leaving the complications of the human
31 breakfast-table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists
32 to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to
33 produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God,
34 and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life,
35 he is, or may be, valuable in himself. Now our modern politics are full of
36 a noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this happy and
37 conscious life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises.
38 We talk of nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we
39 only think of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of
40 seeking to breed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or
41 whatever we happen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and
42 the embryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes
43 doubtful and even morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything; and our
44 politics are rotten eggs.
45 Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence. Idealism
46 only means that we should consider a poker in reference to poking before
47 we discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we should ask if an egg
48 is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before we decide that the egg
49 is bad enough for practical politics. But I know that this primary pursuit
50 of the theory (which is but pursuit of the aim) exposes one to the cheap
51 charge of fiddling while Rome is burning. A school, of which Lord Rosebery
52 is representative, has endeavored to substitute for the moral or social
53 ideals which have hitherto been the motive of politics a general coherency
54 or completeness in the social system which has gained the nick-name of
55 “efficiency.” I am not very certain of the secret doctrine of this sect in
56 the matter. But, as far as I can make out, “efficiency” means that we
57 ought to discover everything about a machine except what it is for. There
58 has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things
59 go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that
60 when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least,
61 we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily
62 practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you
63 must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work
64 at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right
65 to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
66 It is then necessary to drop one’s daily agnosticism and attempt rerum
67 cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy
68 man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely
69 that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be
70 dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more
71 complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be
72 the theorist who is needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases, no
73 one but the man (probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could
74 possibly say what was the matter with it.
75 “Efficiency,” of course, is futile for the same reason that strong men,
76 will-power and the superman are futile. That is, it is futile because it
77 only deals with actions after they have been performed. It has no
78 philosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore it has no power of
79 choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is over; if
80 it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong. There is no
81 such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winner when he is
82 backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side; one fights
83 to find out which is the winning side. If any operation has occurred, that
84 operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the murder was efficient. A
85 tropical sun is as efficient in making people lazy as a Lancashire foreman
86 bully in making them energetic. Maeterlinck is as efficient in filling a
87 man with strange spiritual tremors as Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in
88 filling a man with jam. But it all depends on what you want to be filled
89 with. Lord Rosebery, being a modern skeptic, probably prefers the
90 spiritual tremors. I, being an orthodox Christian, prefer the jam. But
91 both are efficient when they have been effected; and inefficient until
92 they are effected. A man who thinks much about success must be the
93 drowsiest sentimentalist; for he must be always looking back. If he only
94 likes victory he must always come late for the battle. For the man of
95 action there is nothing but idealism.
96 This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our
97 existing English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the
98 present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were
99 originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man demands
100 what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really wanted
101 first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it
102 himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a pandemonium
103 of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely prevent any
104 heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical compromise. One
105 can only find the middle distance between two points if the two points
106 will stand still. We may make an arrangement between two litigants who
107 cannot both get what they want; but not if they will not even tell us what
108 they want. The keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer
109 should give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis or boiled
110 elephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his head in
111 his hands, plunged in arithmetical calculations about how much food there
112 can be on the premises. Most of us have suffered from a certain sort of
113 ladies who, by their perverse unselfishness, give more trouble than the
114 selfish; who almost clamor for the unpopular dish and scramble for the
115 worst seat. Most of us have known parties or expeditions full of this
116 seething fuss of self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of
117 such admirable women, our practical politicians keep things in the same
118 confusion through the same doubt about their real demands. There is
119 nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small
120 surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians who are in
121 favor of secular education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who
122 desire total prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who
123 regret compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want
124 peasant proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this
125 dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If
126 our statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we
127 ask for something in the abstract we might get something in the concrete.
128 As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it is
129 impossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainly
130 like a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in the old
131 bargaining has wholly vanished. We forget that the word “compromise”
132 contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word “promise.”
133 Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The middle point
134 is as fixed as the extreme point.
135 If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as
136 a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable
137 distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate and
138 I differ. There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which the
139 plank tips up. My common-sense ends just before that instant; the pirate’s
140 common-sense begins just beyond it. But the point itself is as hard as any
141 geometrical diagram; as abstract as any theological dogma.
142 ---
III. THE NEW HYPOCRITE
13 But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the old
14 English compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an improvement
15 merely because it is complete. They call it utopian and revolutionary that
16 anyone should really have his own way, or anything be really done, and
17 done with. Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no
18 bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is
19 better than a whole loaf.
20 As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our
21 everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new
22 kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man
23 whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they
24 were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious,
25 while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. The Rev. Brown, the
26 Wesleyan minister, sturdily declares that he cares nothing for creeds, but
27 only for education; meanwhile, in truth, the wildest Wesleyanism is
28 tearing his soul. The Rev. Smith, of the Church of England, explains
29 gracefully, with the Oxford manner, that the only question for him is the
30 prosperity and efficiency of the schools; while in truth all the evil
31 passions of a curate are roaring within him. It is a fight of creeds
32 masquerading as policies. I think these reverend gentlemen do themselves
33 wrong; I think they are more pious than they will admit. Theology is not
34 (as some suppose) expunged as an error. It is merely concealed, like a
35 sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theological atmosphere as much as Lord
36 Halifax; only it is a different one. If Dr. Clifford would ask plainly for
37 Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainly for Catholicism, something might
38 be done for them. We are all, one hopes, imaginative enough to recognize
39 the dignity and distinctness of another religion, like Islam or the cult
40 of Apollo. I am quite ready to respect another man’s faith; but it is too
41 much to ask that I should respect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and
42 fictions, his political bargain and make-believe. Most Nonconformists with
43 an instinct for English history could see something poetic and national
44 about the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is
45 when he does the rational British statesman that they very justifiably get
46 annoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for pluck and simplicity could admire
47 Dr. Clifford as a Baptist minister. It is when he says that he is simply a
48 citizen that nobody can possibly believe him.
49 But indeed the case is yet more curious than this. The one argument that
50 used to be urged for our creedless vagueness was that at least it saved us
51 from fanaticism. But it does not even do that. On the contrary, it creates
52 and renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to itself. This is at
53 once so strange and so true that I will ask the reader’s attention to it
54 with a little more precision.
55 Some people do not like the word “dogma.” Fortunately they are free, and
56 there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two things
57 only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a
58 rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical
59 epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is
60 a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is
61 a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything should be eaten is a
62 prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal. Now a direction is
63 always far more fantastic than a plan. I would rather have the most
64 archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general recommendation to turn
65 to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel must meet at last; but
66 curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might walk along the frontier
67 of France and Germany, one on the one side and one on the other, so long
68 as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each other. And this is a
69 strictly true parable of the effect of our modern vagueness in losing and
70 separating men as in a mist.
71 It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed
72 unites men—so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites.
73 Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to
74 each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two homeless
75 agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell’s chapel. “I say God is One,” and “I
76 say God is One but also Three,” that is the beginning of a good
77 quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds into
78 tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as such
79 (because it was his “temperament”), and he would turn up later with three
80 hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it would turn
81 the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall. It would force
82 that previously healthy person not only to admit that there was one God,
83 but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for a long enough
84 period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like the Dong) they would
85 appear again; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a Panegoist, both
86 quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other than before.
87 It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides men,
88 it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in clear
89 weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a Tory can
90 walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is Socialism. But
91 if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime atmosphere, a noble,
92 indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps out of its way; and quite right
93 too. One can meet an assertion with argument; but healthy bigotry is the
94 only way in which one can meet a tendency. I am told that the Japanese
95 method of wrestling consists not of suddenly pressing, but of suddenly
96 giving way. This is one of my many reasons for disliking the Japanese
97 civilization. To use surrender as a weapon is the very worst spirit of the
98 East. But certainly there is no force so hard to fight as the force which
99 it is easy to conquer; the force that always yields and then returns. Such
100 is the force of a great impersonal prejudice, such as possesses the modern
101 world on so many points. Against this there is no weapon at all except a
102 rigid and steely sanity, a resolution not to listen to fads, and not to be
103 infected by diseases.
104 In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice in an
105 age of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in an age of
106 logic. But the difference between the two mental methods is marked and
107 unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudices are
108 divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bump into
109 each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other’s way. A creed is a
110 collective thing, and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a private
111 thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with our existing
112 divisions. They keep out of each other’s way; the Tory paper and the
113 Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other. Genuine
114 controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has become in
115 our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist is above all
116 things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never interrupts; he
117 listens to the enemy’s arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the
118 enemy’s arrangements. But if you attempt an actual argument with a modern
119 paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted
120 between violence and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or
121 silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the
122 honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called dignity. Or
123 he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism. In
124 neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern
125 party combatants is to charge out of earshot.
126 The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal. In
127 dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental as is
128 consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we have some
129 doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution may
130 turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to
131 maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now
132 consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will
133 invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution
134 can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more
135 light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work
136 underground; he will soon become an underground animal, like a mole. He
137 need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep seas; he will
138 soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to alter conditions,
139 conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be beaten small enough to
140 fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the slave until
141 he forgets the fetters. To all this plausible modern argument for
142 oppression, the only adequate answer is, that there is a permanent human
143 ideal that must not be either confused or destroyed. The most important
144 man on earth is the perfect man who is not there. The Christian religion
145 has specially uttered the ultimate sanity of Man, says Scripture, who
146 shall judge the incarnate and human truth. Our lives and laws are not
147 judged by divine superiority, but simply by human perfection. It is man,
148 says Aristotle, who is the measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture,
149 who shall judge the quick and the dead.
150 Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissensions; rather a doctrine alone
151 can cure our dissensions. It is necessary to ask, however, roughly, what
152 abstract and ideal shape in state or family would fulfil the human hunger;
153 and this apart from whether we can completely obtain it or not. But when
154 we come to ask what is the need of normal men, what is the desire of all
155 nations, what is the ideal house, or road, or rule, or republic, or king,
156 or priesthood, then we are confronted with a strange and irritating
157 difficulty peculiar to the present time; and we must call a temporary halt
158 and examine that obstacle.
159 ---
IV. THE FEAR OF THE PAST
16 The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the
17 romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand
18 what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what
19 will happen—which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no
20 longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in
21 writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson.
22 Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly
23 under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere,
24 even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott
25 stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past;
26 Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel
27 of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a
28 winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen—.” The new story
29 has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen—.”
30 The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something
31 spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again
32 the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the
33 memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar
34 phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.
35 But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of poetry
36 and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to maintain
37 here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice
38 of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even its pugnacity
39 is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible not because he
40 is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why modern armaments do
41 not inflame the imagination like the arms and emblazonments of the
42 Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical ugliness or beauty. Some
43 battleships are as beautiful as the sea; and many Norman nosepieces were
44 as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric ugliness that surrounds our
45 scientific war is an emanation from that evil panic which is at the heart
46 of it. The charge of the Crusades was a charge; it was charging towards
47 God, the wild consolation of the braver. The charge of the modern
48 armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout, a retreat, a flight from
49 the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is impossible to imagine a
50 mediaeval knight talking of longer and longer French lances, with
51 precisely the quivering employed about larger and larger German ships The
52 man who called the Blue Water School the “Blue Funk School” uttered a
53 psychological truth which that school itself would scarcely essentially
54 deny. Even the two-power standard, if it be a necessity, is in a sense a
55 degrading necessity. Nothing has more alienated many magnanimous minds
56 from Imperial enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as
57 stealthy or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear. The
58 Boer War, for instance, was colored not so much by the creed that we were
59 doing something right, as by the creed that Boers and Germans were
60 probably doing something wrong; driving us (as it was said) to the sea.
61 Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said that the war was a feather in his cap and
62 so it was: a white feather.
63 Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic
64 armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The
65 modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue,
66 not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled
67 towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase,
68 knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus
69 eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist,
70 because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not
71 merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The
72 brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been
73 so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we
74 cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of
75 military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future
76 is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older
77 generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to
78 escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the
79 Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn
80 children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own
81 name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible
82 scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I
83 can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as
84 broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is
85 really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old
86 ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look
87 back.
88 Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among the
89 many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes
90 on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in history who
91 have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon
92 the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very word proves my
93 case. The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare began with the
94 digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of poets absolutely
95 arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great mediaeval revival
96 was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation looked back to the
97 Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic movement has looked back to
98 patristic times. But that modern movement which many would count the most
99 anarchic of all is in this sense the most conservative of all. Never was
100 the past more venerated by men than it was by the French Revolutionists.
101 They invoked the little republics of antiquity with the complete
102 confidence of one who invokes the gods. The Sans-culottes believed (as
103 their name might imply) in a return to simplicity. They believed most
104 piously in a remote past; some might call it a mythical past. For some
105 strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard.
106 Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster, with
107 his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future
108 luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he
109 tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point
110 with imbecility, which some call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man
111 must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees
112 it directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who
113 have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The
114 Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to
115 stone. The modern sociological scientists (with their excruciating
116 Eugenics) are turned to stone. The only difference is that the Puritans
117 make dignified, and the Eugenists somewhat amusing, statues.
118 But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies
119 and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless future.
120 I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes
121 abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy to a
122 restless and rather morbid generation; and they maintain a strange silence
123 about them—sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They keep
124 them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of their
125 history books. For example, they will often tell you (in their praises of
126 the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United States of Europe.
127 But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away from a United
128 States of Europe, that such a thing existed literally in Roman and
129 essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that the international
130 hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent, the mere
131 breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they will tell
132 you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great rising of the
133 poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that France made that
134 magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the world allowed it to
135 be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that nothing is so marked
136 in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined
137 with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone can test this for himself.
138 Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets advocating peace in Europe and
139 see how many of them praise the old Popes or Emperors for keeping the
140 peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays and poems in praise of social
141 democracy, and see how many of them praise the old Jacobins who created
142 democracy and died for it. These colossal ruins are to the modern only
143 enormous eyesores. He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a
144 perspective of splendid but unfinished cities. They are unfinished, not
145 always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness, mental
146 fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies. We have not only left undone
147 those things that we ought to have done, but we have even left undone
148 those things that we wanted to do
149 It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the
150 ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments.
151 I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look
152 at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man—in the
153 looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers
154 built up of all the most towering visions of the past? Have we really
155 fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the other, from our
156 naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth with a stone knife,
157 through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint to our own grandfather
158 or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by the Manchester Yeomanry
159 or shot in the ‘48? Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now
160 tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we
161 have either speared or spared? When we decline (in a marked manner) to fly
162 the red flag and fire across a barricade like our grandfathers, are we
163 really declining in deference to sociologists—or to soldiers? Have
164 we indeed outstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical saint? I fear
165 we only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away
166 from him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him
167 without bowing.
168 This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new
169 ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism is
170 narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination. We
171 must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old things.
172 The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all the good
173 that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not got all the
174 good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the good out of them.
175 And the need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as
176 revolution.
177 We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel
178 attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really
179 any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than
180 in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he
181 who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the
182 first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much
183 free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be
184 as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my
185 present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am
186 to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this:
187 the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become
188 impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they
189 are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious
190 answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be
191 restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way
192 society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon
193 any plan that has ever existed.
194 There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on
195 it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable,
196 please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the
197 stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be
198 very inadvisable to do it; but certainly it is not impossible as bringing
199 back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that
200 I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution
201 the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that should seem to
202 eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would eliminate some
203 evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying cold and harsh
204 strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the right to propose
205 the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign
206 city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best way out of our
207 troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles; we could not have
208 in a small state, for instance, those enormous illusions about men or
209 measures which are nourished by the great national or international
210 newspapers. You could not persuade a city state that Mr. Beit was an
211 Englishman, or Mr. Dillon a desperado, any more than you could persuade a
212 Hampshire Village that the village drunkard was a teetotaller or the
213 village idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that
214 the Browns and the Smiths should be collected under separate tartans. Nor
215 do I even propose that Clapham should declare its independence. I merely
216 declare my independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the
217 universe; and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely
218 because they have been used.
219 ---
V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
19 The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by the
20 fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated it has
21 been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other way. The
22 lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world. If a man
23 says that the Young Pretender would have made England happy, it is hard to
24 answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England happy, I hope we
25 all know what to answer. That which was prevented is always impregnable;
26 and the only perfect King of England was he who was smothered. Exactly be
27 cause Jacobitism failed we cannot call it a failure. Precisely because the
28 Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot say that it collapsed as a
29 system. But such outbursts were brief or incidental. Few people realize
30 how many of the largest efforts, the facts that will fill history, were
31 frustrated in their full design and come down to us as gigantic cripples.
32 I have only space to allude to the two largest facts of modern history:
33 the Catholic Church and that modern growth rooted in the French
34 Revolution.
35 When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of
36 Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black
37 admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his
38 brains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realise
39 what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were
40 distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great mediaeval
41 conception that the church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a
42 priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was
43 simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest. The
44 judiciary was itself sub judice. The kings were themselves in the dock.
45 The idea was to create an invisible kingdom, without armies or prisons,
46 but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of the
47 earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society we cannot
48 affirm definitely; because the church never was a supreme church. We only
49 know that in England at any rate the princes conquered the saints. What
50 the world wanted we see before us; and some of us call it a failure. But
51 we cannot call what the church wanted a failure, simply because the church
52 failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England had not yet made the great
53 Protestant discovery that the king can do no wrong. The king was whipped
54 in the cathedral; a performance which I recommend to those who regret the
55 unpopularity of church-going. But the discovery was made; and Henry VIII
56 scattered Becket’s bones as easily as Tracy had scattered his brains.
57 Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics were
58 tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the
59 church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the
60 chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was
61 unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians.
62 Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But
63 at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to end it long
64 before it could have done its work. In the nature of things it needed a
65 common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet the mediaeval system
66 began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the
67 slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies, like
68 the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority. And it
69 is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe apart before
70 the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together. The Prussians, for
71 instance, were not converted to Christianity at all until quite close to
72 the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time to become Catholics
73 before they were told to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of
74 their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most
75 evident case of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past
76 failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not
77 being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather
78 mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The
79 Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found
80 difficult; and left untried.
81 It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great
82 part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French
83 Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was the
84 decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have, indeed,
85 destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a free peasantry
86 in almost all Christian countries except England; of which we shall say
87 more anon. But representative government, the one universal relic, is a
88 very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theory of the French
89 Revolution presupposed two things in government, things which it achieved
90 at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed to its imitators in
91 England, Germany, and America. The first of these was the idea of
92 honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something of a stoic; the
93 second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative English
94 writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it was that
95 men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best answer is
96 that they were admired for being poor—poor when they might have been
97 rich.
98 No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute politique
99 of this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is
100 actually based on exactly the opposite argument; it is based on the theory
101 that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to financial
102 trickery. Whether the history of the English aristocracy, from the
103 spoliation of the monasteries to the annexation of the mines, entirely
104 supports this theory I am not now inquiring; but certainly it is our
105 theory, that wealth will be a protection against political corruption. The
106 English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a silver
107 spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the
108 silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is our faith in this protection by
109 plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting our empire in the hands of
110 families which inherit wealth without either blood or manners. Some of our
111 political houses are parvenue by pedigree; they hand on vulgarity like a
112 coat of-arms. In the case of many a modern statesman to say that he is
113 born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is at once inadequate and
114 excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his mouth. But all this only
115 illustrates the English theory that poverty is perilous for a politician.
116 It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have come about with
117 the Revolution legend touching publicity. The old democratic doctrine was
118 that the more light that was let in to all departments of State, the
119 easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptly against wrong.
120 In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses, that mobs might
121 throw stones. Again, no admirer of existing English politics (if there is
122 any admirer of existing English politics) will really pretend that this
123 ideal of publicity is exhausted, or even attempted. Obviously public life
124 grows more private every day. The French have, indeed, continued the
125 tradition of revealing secrets and making scandals; hence they are more
126 flagrant and palpable than we, not in sin but in the confession of sin.
127 The first trial of Dreyfus might have happened in England; it is exactly
128 the second trial that would have been legally impossible. But, indeed, if
129 we wish to realise how far we fall short of the original republican
130 outline, the sharpest way to test it is to note how far we fall short even
131 of the republican element in the older regime. Not only are we less
132 democratic than Danton and Condorcet, but we are in many ways less
133 democratic than Choiseul and Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before
134 the revolt were needy middle-class people compared with our Rothschilds
135 and Roseberys. And in the matter of publicity the old French monarchy was
136 infinitely more democratic than any of the monarchies of today.
137 Practically anybody who chose could walk into the palace and see the king
138 playing with his children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the
139 monarch, as the people possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move
140 it, but they can sprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded
141 on the excellent principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a
142 cat may not look at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the
143 press is free for criticism it is only used for adulation. The substantial
144 difference comes to something uncommonly like this: Eighteenth century
145 tyranny meant that you could say “The K__ of Br__rd is a profligate.”
146 Twentieth century liberty really means that you are allowed to say “The
147 King of Brentford is a model family man.”
148 But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical
149 purpose of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great
150 mediaeval dream, has in a strict and practical sense been a dream
151 unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England it is not that we
152 have carried out too literally, or achieved with disappointing
153 completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket or the equality of Marat.
154 Now I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of ten
155 thousand other cases; the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas, these
156 uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and crumbling
157 ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a
158 bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a
159 deserted cemetery.
160 ---
VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
22 But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessary
23 on the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to that
24 historic fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers will
25 expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I have
26 no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal
27 imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like
28 so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day that any
29 copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an earthquake
30 on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun;
31 and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June,
32 you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals. There is only
33 one really startling thing to be done with the ideal, and that is to do
34 it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and its frightful
35 consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning thunderbolt to
36 fulfil the law than to destroy it. It is true of both the cases I have
37 quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored purity: Athena,
38 Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began defiantly to practice
39 purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot
40 coals. The world had always loved the notion of the poor man uppermost; it
41 can be proved by every legend from Cinderella to Whittington, by every
42 poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings went mad against
43 France not because she idealized this ideal, but because she realized it.
44 Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia quite agreed that the people
45 should rule; what horrified them was that the people did. The French
46 Revolution, therefore, is the type of all true revolutions, because its
47 ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but its fulfilment almost as fresh, as
48 miraculous, and as new as the New Jerusalem.
49 But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary
50 spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the
51 old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough
52 Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice;
53 they have wearied of waiting for it.
54 Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these old
55 ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle of
56 domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of
57 history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like the
58 church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have never
59 known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless modern
60 women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they have never
61 known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse
62 without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the cultured
63 class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as the working
64 class is shouting to be let into it.
65 Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the
66 simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make
67 something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can
68 make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be
69 unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the
70 combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure, therefore, is to
71 possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to be
72 half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The
73 excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions
74 will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet on
75 an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking a
76 sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero out
77 of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics. This
78 fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy entertainment
79 of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. But the mass of men have
80 neither time nor aptitude for the invention of invisible or abstract
81 beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be
82 expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions—the idea of
83 property. The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he
84 can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and though he arranges it with
85 red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still
86 an artist; because he has chosen. The average man cannot paint the sunset
87 whose colors be admires; but he can paint his own house with what color he
88 chooses, and though he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an
89 artist; because that is his choice. Property is merely the art of the
90 democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape
91 in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven. But because he
92 is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal
93 with limits; properly with limits that are strict and even small.
94 I am well aware that the word “property” has been defied in our time by
95 the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people
96 talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of
97 property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are
98 enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but
99 other people’s. When they remove their neighbor’s landmark, they also
100 remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought to love
101 it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by giving him
102 more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with the true
103 poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith’s
104 garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown’s. He cannot see the shape
105 of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbor’s. It is the
106 negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms
107 in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all
108 our wives in one harem.
109 ---
VII. THE FREE FAMILY
25 As I have said, I propose to take only one central instance; I will take
26 the institution called the private house or home; the shell and organ of
27 the family. We will consider cosmic and political tendencies simply as
28 they strike that ancient and unique roof. Very few words will suffice for
29 all I have to say about the family itself. I leave alone the speculations
30 about its animal origin and the details of its social reconstruction; I am
31 concerned only with its palpable omnipresence. It is a necessity far
32 mankind; it is (if you like to put it so) a trap for mankind. Only by the
33 hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any one contrive to talk of “free
34 love”; as if love were an episode like lighting a cigarette, or whistling
35 a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a cigarette, a towering genie arose
36 from the rings of smoke and followed him everywhere as a huge slave.
37 Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune he “drew an angel down” and had to
38 walk about forever with a seraph on a string. These catastrophic images
39 are but faint parallels to the earthquake consequences that Nature has
40 attached to sex; and it is perfectly plain at the beginning that a man
41 cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied man. The second
42 element that creates the family is that its consequences, though colossal,
43 are gradual; the cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant
44 seraph. Thence arises the necessity for some prolonged system of
45 co-operation; and thence arises the family in its full educational sense.
46 It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist
47 institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the
48 State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of
49 custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning that the State
50 has no authority over families; that State authority is invoked and ought
51 to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most normal cases of family
52 joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry. It is not so much that
53 the law should not interfere, as that the law cannot. Just as there are
54 fields too far off for law, so there are fields too near; as a man may see
55 the North Pole before he sees his own backbone. Small and near matters
56 escape control at least as much as vast and remote ones; and the real
57 pains and pleasures of the family form a strong instance of this. If a
58 baby cries for the moon, the policeman cannot procure the moon—but
59 neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so close to each other as husband
60 and wife, or a mother and children, have powers of making each other happy
61 or miserable with which no public coercion can deal. If a marriage could
62 be dissolved every morning it would not give back his night’s rest to a
63 man kept awake by a curtain lecture; and what is the good of giving a man
64 a lot of power where he only wants a little peace? The child must depend
65 on the most imperfect mother; the mother may be devoted to the most
66 unworthy children; in such relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the
67 abnormal cases where the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly
68 found; as many a bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from
69 starvation by taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a
70 wife’s heart because her husband has already broken her head. The State
71 has no tool delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled
72 affections of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are
73 glued together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in
74 between them. The man and the woman are one flesh—yes, even when
75 they are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and
76 anarchic intimacy, types of government have little or no effect; it is
77 happy or unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and genial habit, under
78 the republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even a republic in
79 Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins.
80 The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt under the
81 freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of mankind has not
82 believed in freedom in this matter, but rather in a more or less lasting
83 tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about the occasions on which we may
84 loosen the bond, but they all agree that there is a bond to be loosened,
85 not a mere universal detachment. For the purposes of this book I am not
86 concerned to discuss that mystical view of marriage in which I myself
87 believe: the great European tradition which has made marriage a sacrament.
88 It is enough to say here that heathen and Christian alike have regarded
89 marriage as a tie; a thing not normally to be sundered. Briefly, this
90 human belief in a sexual bond rests on a principle of which the modern
91 mind has made a very inadequate study. It is, perhaps, most nearly
92 paralleled by the principle of the second wind in walking.
93 The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every
94 pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so
95 that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the
96 first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of
97 learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the
98 sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the
99 honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of
100 surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential
101 surrender.
102 In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no
103 one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the
104 Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead.
105 Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the
106 sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite an other matter, it is
107 amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a
108 fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy.
109 The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people must
110 be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty minutes at
111 a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage In both cases the point is,
112 that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on and force
113 himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and anarchy (or
114 what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because it is
115 essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free
116 to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no
117 one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It would be so
118 embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper, and then have to
119 shout the last half of it because the other party was floating away into
120 the free and formless ether. The two must hold each other to do justice to
121 each other. If Americans can be divorced for “incompatibility of temper” I
122 cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy
123 marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to
124 fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes
125 unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
126 ---
VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
28 In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is called
29 the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty of modern
30 industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the difficulty is
31 not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth. It is the special
32 psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life. Some experience of
33 modern movements of the sort called “advanced” has led me to the
34 conviction that they generally repose upon some experience peculiar to the
35 rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I have already
36 spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That implies a long
37 holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor car in which to
38 wander looking for others; it also implies money for maintenances. An
39 omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own wife, let alone other
40 people’s. And the success with which nuptial estrangements are depicted in
41 modern “problem plays” is due to the fact that there is only one thing
42 that a drama cannot depict—that is a hard day’s work. I could give
43 many other instances of this plutocratic assumption behind progressive
44 fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase
45 “Why should woman be economically dependent upon man?” The answer is that
46 among poor and practical people she isn’t; except in the sense in which he
47 is dependent upon her. A hunter has to tear his clothes; there must be
48 somebody to mend them. A fisher has to catch fish; there must be somebody
49 to cook them. It is surely quite clear that this modern notion that woman
50 is a mere “pretty clinging parasite,” “a plaything,” etc., arose through
51 the somber contemplation of some rich banking family, in which the banker,
52 at least, went to the city and pretended to do something, while the
53 banker’s wife went to the Park and did not pretend to do anything at all.
54 A poor man and his wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a
55 firm of publishers interviews the authors while the other interviews the
56 clerks, is one of them economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty
57 parasite clinging to Stoughton? Was Marshall a mere plaything for
58 Snelgrove?
59 But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this:
60 the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say)
61 is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. This is
62 indeed a rich man’s opinion. The rich man knows that his own house moves
63 on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by regiments of servants,
64 by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand, every sort of vagabondage
65 of romance is open to him in the streets outside. He has plenty of money
66 and can afford to be a tramp. His wildest adventure will end in a
67 restaurant, while the yokel’s tamest adventure may end in a police-court.
68 If he smashes a window he can pay for it; if he smashes a man he can
69 pension him. He can (like the millionaire in the story) buy an hotel to
70 get a glass of gin. And because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone
71 of nearly all “advanced” and “progressive” thought, we have almost
72 forgotten what a home really means to the overwhelming millions of
73 mankind.
74 For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place
75 of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on
76 the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment
77 or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict
78 rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can
79 eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it
80 myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would
81 be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man
82 can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house; while I am sure that
83 this would not be permitted at the Savoy, though I never actually tested
84 the point. If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on
85 the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them. But
86 if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock tea or
87 convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man the home is
88 not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place
89 in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he
90 can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants
91 to. When a man spends every night staggering from bar to bar or from
92 music-hall to music-hall, we say that he is living an irregular life. But
93 he is not; he is living a highly regular life, under the dull, and often
94 oppressive, laws of such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit
95 down in the bars; and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the
96 music-halls. Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to
97 dress; and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden to
98 smoke. A man can only picnic at home.
99 Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this possession
100 of a definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working model for the
101 present inquiry. Whether we can give every English man a free home of his
102 own or not, at least we should desire it; and he desires it. For the
103 moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he expects to get. He wants,
104 for instance, a separate house; he does not want a semi-detached house. He
105 may be forced in the commercial race to share one wall with another man.
106 Similarly he might be forced in a three-legged race to share one leg with
107 another man; but it is not so that he pictures himself in his dreams of
108 elegance and liberty. Again, he does not desire a flat. He can eat and
109 sleep and praise God in a flat; he can eat and sleep and praise God in a
110 railway train. But a railway train is not a house, because it is a house
111 on wheels. And a flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts. An
112 idea of earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation
113 and independence, is a part of this instructive human picture.
114 I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man desires
115 a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires a house of
116 his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof above him and a
117 chair below him; he wants an objective and visible kingdom; a fire at
118 which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can open to what friends
119 he chooses. This is the normal appetite of men; I do not say there are not
120 exceptions. There may be saints above the need and philanthropists below
121 it. Opalstein, now he is a duke, may have got used to more than this; and
122 when he was a convict may have got used to less. But the normality of the
123 thing is enormous. To give nearly everybody ordinary houses would please
124 nearly everybody; that is what I assert without apology. Now in modern
125 England (as you eagerly point out) it is very difficult to give nearly
126 everybody houses. Quite so; I merely set up the desideratum; and ask the
127 reader to leave it standing there while he turns with me to a
128 consideration of what really happens in the social wars of our time.
129 ---
IX. HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE
31 There is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery in Hoxton, dripping with
32 disease and honeycombed with crime and promiscuity. There are, let us say,
33 two noble and courageous young men, of pure intentions and (if you prefer
34 it) noble birth; let us call them Hudge and Gudge. Hudge, let us say, is
35 of a bustling sort; he points out that the people must at all costs be got
36 out of this den; he subscribes and collects money, but he finds (despite
37 the large financial interests of the Hudges) that the thing will have to
38 be done on the cheap if it is to be done on the spot. He therefore, runs
39 up a row of tall bare tenements like beehives; and soon has all the poor
40 people bundled into their little brick cells, which are certainly better
41 than their old quarters, in so far as they are weather proof, well
42 ventilated and supplied with clean water. But Gudge has a more delicate
43 nature. He feels a nameless something lacking in the little brick boxes;
44 he raises numberless objections; he even assails the celebrated Hudge
45 Report, with the Gudge Minority Report; and by the end of a year or so has
46 come to telling Hudge heatedly that the people were much happier where
47 they were before. As the people preserve in both places precisely the same
48 air of dazed amiability, it is very difficult to find out which is right.
49 But at least one might safely say that no people ever liked stench or
50 starvation as such, but only some peculiar pleasures en tangled with them.
51 Not so feels the sensitive Gudge. Long before the final quarrel (Hudge v.
52 Gudge and Another), Gudge has succeeded in persuading himself that slums
53 and stinks are really very nice things; that the habit of sleeping
54 fourteen in a room is what has made our England great; and that the smell
55 of open drains is absolutely essential to the rearing of a viking breed.
56 But, meanwhile, has there been no degeneration in Hudge? Alas, I fear
57 there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up as
58 unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life, grow every day more and
59 more lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed of
60 defending, except as crude necessities, things like common kitchens or
61 infamous asbestos stoves, begin to shine quite sacredly before him, merely
62 because they reflect the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the aid of
63 eager little books by Socialists, that man is really happier in a hive
64 than in a house. The practical difficulty of keeping total strangers out
65 of your bedroom he describes as Brotherhood; and the necessity for
66 climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare say he calls
67 Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is this: that one
68 has come to defending indefensible slums and still more indefensible
69 slum-landlords, while the other has come to treating as divine the sheds
70 and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge is now a corrupt and
71 apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club; if you mention poverty to him he
72 roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice something that is conjectured to be
73 “Do ‘em good!” Nor is Hudge more happy; for he is a lean vegetarian with a
74 gray, pointed beard and an unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling
75 everybody that at last we shall all sleep in one universal bedroom; and he
76 lives in a Garden City, like one forgotten of God.
77 Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely
78 introduce as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding which
79 is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery men are
80 put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human soul loathes
81 them both. A man’s first desire is to get away as far as possible from the
82 rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a model dwelling. The
83 second desire is, naturally, to get away from the model dwelling, even if
84 it should lead a man back to the rookery. But I am neither a Hudgian nor a
85 Gudgian; and I think the mistakes of these two famous and fascinating
86 persons arose from one simple fact. They arose from the fact that neither
87 Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man
88 might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the
89 ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians.
90 We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis about the
91 praise of the future and the failures of the past. A house of his own
92 being the obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask (taking this need as
93 typical of all such needs) why he hasn’t got it; and whether it is in any
94 philosophical sense his own fault. Now, I think that in some philosophical
95 sense it is his own fault, I think in a yet more philosophical sense it is
96 the fault of his philosophy. And this is what I have now to attempt to
97 explain.
98 Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think, that
99 an Englishman’s house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining; for as
100 it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose house is
101 not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of peasant
102 proprietorship; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is only lord
103 of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has
104 certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the
105 landlord does a little work. But I am not concerned with the defense of
106 small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it exists almost
107 everywhere except in England. It is also true, however, that this estate
108 of small possession is attacked everywhere today; it has never existed
109 among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors. We have,
110 therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human affairs generally, and in
111 this domestic ideal in particular, that has really ruined the natural
112 human creation, especially in this country.
113 Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he
114 always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has a
115 house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him waist
116 deep in slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has
117 always been looking for that home which is the subject matter of this
118 book. But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has
119 been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be chilled,
120 not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time in history
121 he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on the earth. He
122 has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.
123 Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies (or in other words,
124 under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man has really become
125 bewildered about the goal of his efforts; and his efforts, therefore, grow
126 feebler and feebler. His simple notion of having a home of his own is
127 derided as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicably Christian. Under
128 various verbal forms he is recommended to go on to the streets—which
129 is called Individualism; or to the work-house—which is called
130 Collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat more carefully in a
131 moment. But it may be said here that Hudge and Gudge, or the governing
132 class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern phrase to cover
133 their ancient predominance. The great lords will refuse the English
134 peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot
135 refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him the three
136 acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the cow on
137 grounds of humanitarianism.
138 And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence
139 that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are, I
140 believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It
141 is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some
142 thirty years ago over the day’s newspaper and woke up last week over the
143 later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one
144 paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr.
145 Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In the
146 other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr.
147 Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. If this is
148 not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it
149 is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences.
150 ---
X. OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
34 But we are not here concerned with the nature and existence of the
35 aristocracy, but with the origin of its peculiar power, why is it the last
36 of the true oligarchies of Europe; and why does there seem no very
37 immediate prospect of our seeing the end of it? The explanation is simple
38 though it remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of aristocracy often
39 praise it for preserving ancient and gracious traditions. The enemies of
40 aristocracy often blame it for clinging to cruel or antiquated customs.
41 Both its enemies and its friends are wrong. Generally speaking the
42 aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad traditions; it does not
43 preserve anything except game. Who would dream of looking among
44 aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might as well look for an old
45 costume! The god of the aristocrats is not tradition, but fashion, which
46 is the opposite of tradition. If you wanted to find an old-world Norwegian
47 head-dress, would you look for it in the Scandinavian Smart Set? No; the
48 aristocrats never have customs; at the best they have habits, like the
49 animals. Only the mob has customs.
50 The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the opposite
51 of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes is this:
52 that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is called
53 Progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quite easy to
54 an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances of that
55 frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a luxury
56 verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the past and
57 with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, for the future.
58 But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it was
59 their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was being most
60 talked about among university dons or fussy financiers. Thus they were on
61 the side of the Reformation against the Church, of the Whigs against the
62 Stuarts, of the Baconian science against the old philosophy, of the
63 manufacturing system against the operatives, and (to-day) of the increased
64 power of the State against the old-fashioned individualists. In short, the
65 rich are always modern; it is their business. But the immediate effect of
66 this fact upon the question we are studying is somewhat singular.
67 In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary
68 Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, for
69 some particular reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morning and
70 discovered that the public things, which for eight hundred years he had
71 used at once as inns and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and savagely
72 abolished, to increase the private wealth of about six or seven men. One
73 would think he might have been annoyed at that; in many places he was, and
74 was put down by the soldiery. But it was not merely the army that kept him
75 quiet. He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the soldiers; the six or
76 seven men who took away the inns of the poor told him that they were not
77 doing it for themselves, but for the religion of the future, the great
78 dawn of Protestantism and truth. So whenever a seventeenth century noble
79 was caught pulling down a peasant’s fence and stealing his field, the
80 noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I or James II (which at
81 that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) and thus diverted the
82 simple peasant’s attention. The great Puritan lords created the
83 Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land. They saved their poorer
84 countrymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money, by taking from them the
85 plow money and spade money which they were doubtless too weak to guard. A
86 fine old English rhyme has immortalized this easy aristocratic habit—
87 You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common,
88 But leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.
89 But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange
90 problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose, one can
91 only say that he was a great goose to stand it. The truth is that they
92 reasoned with the goose; they explained to him that all this was needed to
93 get the Stuart fox over seas. So in the nineteenth century the great
94 nobles who became mine-owners and railway directors earnestly assured
95 everybody that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a newly
96 discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous politicians of our own
97 generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with
98 their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in
99 public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at by
100 everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism. For
101 an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace.
102 Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying to live
103 to-morrow.
104 ---
XI. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
37 Thus the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has (in England at
38 least) always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Englishman has been
39 duped out of his old possessions, such as they were, and always in the
40 name of progress. The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread and
41 gave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white
42 pebble of the Lord’s elect. They took away his maypole and his original
43 rural life and promised him instead the Golden Age of Peace and Commerce
44 inaugurated at the Crystal Palace. And now they are taking away the little
45 that remains of his dignity as a householder and the head of a family,
46 promising him instead Utopias which are called (appropriately enough)
47 “Anticipations” or “News from Nowhere.” We come back, in fact, to the main
48 feature which has already been mentioned. The past is communal: the future
49 must be individualist. In the past are all the evils of democracy, variety
50 and violence and doubt, but the future is pure despotism, for the future
51 is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know I was a human fool, but to-morrow I can
52 easily be the Superman.
53 The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should be perpetually
54 kept out, for one reason after another, from the house in which he had
55 meant his married life to begin. This man (Jones let us call him) has
56 always desired the divinely ordinary things; he has married for love, he
57 has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat; he is ready to be
58 a great grandfather and a local god. And just as he is moving in,
59 something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly debars
60 him from the home; and he has to take his meals in the front garden. A
61 passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, the man who
62 turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the railings, explains to
63 him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of nature which
64 will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in the front garden
65 more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean lodgings in the next
66 spring. The philosopher (who turned him out), happening to call at these
67 lodgings, with the probable intention of raising the rent, stops to
68 explain to him that he is now in the real life of mercantile endeavor; the
69 economic struggle between him and the landlady is the only thing out of
70 which, in the sublime future, the wealth of nations can come. He is
71 defeated in the economic struggle, and goes to the workhouse. The
72 philosopher who turned him out (happening at that very moment to be
73 inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is now at last in that
74 golden republic which is the goal of mankind; he is in an equal,
75 scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the State and ruled by
76 public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime future.
77 Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still dreams at
78 night of this old idea of having an ordinary home. He asked for so little,
79 and he has been offered so much. He has been offered bribes of worlds and
80 systems; he has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New Jerusalem, and he
81 only wanted a house; and that has been refused him.
82 Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts of English
83 history. The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house
84 on to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of progress.
85 They did literally force them into factories and the modern wage-slavery,
86 assuring them all the time that this was the only way to wealth and
87 civilization. Just as they had dragged the rustic from the convent food
88 and ale by saying that the streets of heaven were paved with gold, so now
89 they dragged him from the village food and ale by telling him that the
90 streets of London were paved with gold. As he entered the gloomy porch of
91 Puritanism, so he entered the gloomy porch of Industrialism, being told
92 that each of them was the gate of the future. Hitherto he has only gone
93 from prison to prison, nay, into darkening prisons, for Calvinism opened
94 one small window upon heaven. And now he is asked, in the same educated
95 and authoritative tones, to enter another dark porch, at which he has to
96 surrender, into unseen hands, his children, his small possessions and all
97 the habits of his fathers.
98 Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old
99 openings of Puritanism and Industrialism can be discussed later. But there
100 can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed
101 upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an
102 instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly
103 hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to “administer” Collectivism
104 as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such
105 a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them. It will
106 not be so hard as some innocent Socialists seem to suppose to induce the
107 Honorable Tomnoddy to take over the milk supply as well as the stamp
108 supply—at an increased salary. Mr. Bernard Shaw has remarked that
109 rich men are better than poor men on parish councils because they are free
110 from “financial timidity.” Now, the English ruling class is quite free
111 from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will be quite ready to be
112 Administrator of Sussex at the same screw. Sir William Harcourt, that
113 typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. “We” (that is, the
114 aristocracy) “are all Socialists now.”
115 But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end. My main
116 contention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism and
117 Collectivism have been accepted as necessities—not as naked ideals
118 or desires. Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the only
119 way of producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured as
120 the only way of preventing poverty. Nobody’s real heart is in the idea of
121 preventing a free man from owning his own farm, or an old woman from
122 cultivating her own garden, any more than anybody’s real heart was in the
123 heartless battle of the machines. The purpose of this chapter is
124 sufficiently served in indicating that this proposal also is a pis aller,
125 a desperate second best—like teetotalism. I do not propose to prove
126 here that Socialism is a poison; it is enough if I maintain that it is a
127 medicine and not a wine.
128 The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families
129 free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of
130 one man one house—this remains the real vision and magnet of
131 mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less
132 human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who
133 makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism
134 may be the world’s deliverance, but it is not the world’s desire.
PART TWO. IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN
40 (Texto do capítulo)
I. THE CHARM OF JINGOISM
43 I have cast about widely to find a title for this section; and I confess
44 that the word “Imperialism” is a clumsy version of my meaning. But no
45 other word came nearer; “Militarism” would have been even more misleading,
46 and “The Superman” makes nonsense of any discussion that he enters.
47 Perhaps, upon the whole, the word “Caesarism” would have been better; but
48 I desire a popular word; and Imperialism (as the reader will perceive)
49 does cover for the most part the men and theories that I mean to discuss.
50 This small confusion is increased, however, by the fact that I do also
51 disbelieve in Imperialism in its popular sense, as a mode or theory of the
52 patriotic sentiment of this country. But popular Imperialism in England
53 has very little to do with the sort of Caesarean Imperialism I wish to
54 sketch. I differ from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes’ and Kipling; but I
55 do not think, as some of its opponents do, that it is an insolent creation
56 of English harshness and rapacity. Imperialism, I think, is a fiction
57 created, not by English hardness, but by English softness; nay, in a
58 sense, even by English kindness.
59 The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental as the
60 most sentimental reasons for believing in heaven. New South Wales is quite
61 literally regarded as a place where the wicked cease from troubling and
62 the weary are at rest; that is, a paradise for uncles who have turned
63 dishonest and for nephews who are born tired. British Columbia is in
64 strict sense a fairyland, it is a world where a magic and irrational luck
65 is supposed to attend the youngest sons. This strange optimism about the
66 ends of the earth is an English weakness; but to show that it is not a
67 coldness or a harshness it is quite sufficient to say that no one shared
68 it more than that gigantic English sentimentalist—the great Charles
69 Dickens. The end of “David Copperfield” is unreal not merely because it is
70 an optimistic ending, but because it is an Imperialistic ending. The
71 decorous British happiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes
72 would be embarrassed by the perpetual presence of the hopeless tragedy of
73 Emily, or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and
74 Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them
75 with no conceivable cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomes
76 contented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of a
77 sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.
78 To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only objection
79 is that it is an illusion of comfort; that an Empire whose heart is
80 failing should be specially proud of the extremities, is to me no more
81 sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose brain is gone should still be
82 proud of his legs. It consoles men for the evident ugliness and apathy of
83 England with legends of fair youth and heroic strenuousness in distant
84 continents and islands. A man can sit amid the squalor of Seven Dials and
85 feel that life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on the veldt. Just
86 so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that life was
87 innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbiton. Brixton and Surbiton are
88 “new”; they are expanding; they are “nearer to nature,” in the sense that
89 they have eaten up nature mile by mile. The only objection is the
90 objection of fact. The young men of Brixton are not young giants. The
91 lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets, singing with the sweet energy
92 of the spring. Nor are the people of the Colonies when you meet them young
93 giants or pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys who have lost their last
94 music of real things by getting out of the sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard
95 Kipling, a man of real though decadent genius, threw a theoretic glamour
96 over them which is already fading. Mr. Kipling is, in a precise and rather
97 startling sense, the exception that proves the rule. For he has
98 imagination, of an oriental and cruel kind, but he has it, not because he
99 grew up in a new country, but precisely because he grew up in the oldest
100 country upon earth. He is rooted in a past—an Asiatic past. He might
101 never have written “Kabul River” if he had been born in Melbourne.
102 I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion), that
103 Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both weak
104 and perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create a kind of
105 sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, which it
106 can only share. It is a love of living with one’s inferiors. The notion of
107 restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is a dream that has
108 haunted every Christian nation in a different shape and in almost every
109 shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent and conservative people;
110 therefore they embodied that attempt at Empire in long and lingering
111 dynasties. The French are a violent people, and therefore they twice
112 conquered that Empire by violence of arms. The English are above all a
113 poetical and optimistic people; and therefore their Empire is something
114 vague and yet sympathetic, something distant and yet dear. But this dream
115 of theirs of being powerful in the uttermost places, though a native
116 weakness, is still a weakness in them; much more of a weakness than gold
117 was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. If ever we were in collision with our
118 real brothers and rivals we should leave all this fancy out of account. We
119 should no more dream of pitting Australian armies against German than of
120 pitting Tasmanian sculpture against French. I have thus explained, lest
121 anyone should accuse me of concealing an unpopular attitude, why I do not
122 believe in Imperialism as commonly understood. I think it not merely an
123 occasional wrong to other peoples, but a continuous feebleness, a running
124 sore, in my own. But it is also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism
125 that is an amiable delusion partly in order to show how different it is
126 from the deeper, more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have
127 been forced to call Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter. In
128 order to get to the root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism we
129 must cast back and begin anew with a more general discussion of the first
130 needs of human intercourse.
131 ---
II. WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
46 It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace.
47 Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and
48 monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to everybody,
49 can stop one’s heart with the very thought of them. But while this is
50 granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely true that
51 these universal things are strange; it is moreover true that they are
52 subtle. In the last analysis most common things will be found to be highly
53 complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the difficulty by
54 dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they will call first love the
55 instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct of self-preservation.
56 But this is only getting over the difficulty of describing peacock green
57 by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That there is a strong physical
58 element in both romance and the Memento Mori makes them if possible more
59 baffling than if they had been wholly intellectual. No man could say
60 exactly how much his sexuality was colored by a clean love of beauty, or
61 by the mere boyish itch for irrevocable adventures, like running away to
62 sea. No man could say how far his animal dread of the end was mixed up
63 with mystical traditions touching morals and religion. It is exactly
64 because these things are animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of
65 all the difficulties begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny
66 the hard part and go home to their tea.
67 It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore
68 it is not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-room song
69 of my youth which began “In the gloaming, O, my darling,” was vulgar
70 enough as a song; but the connection between human passion and the
71 twilight is none the less an exquisite and even inscrutable thing. Or to
72 take another obvious instance: the jokes about a mother-in-law are
73 scarcely delicate, but the problem of a mother-in-law is extremely
74 delicate. A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the
75 twilight. She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things—law and
76 a mother. The caricatures misrepresent her; but they arise out of a real
77 human enigma. “Comic Cuts” deals with the difficulty wrongly, but it would
78 need George Meredith at his best to deal with the difficulty rightly. The
79 nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this: it is not that a
80 mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.
81 But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have
82 all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument, the
83 custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it “the very nadir
84 and scoff of good conversationalists.” Now there are very deep reasons for
85 talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well as deep; they
86 lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. First of all it is a
87 gesture of primeval worship. The sky must be invoked; and to begin
88 everything with the weather is a sort of pagan way of beginning everything
89 with prayer. Jones and Brown talk about the weather: but so do Milton and
90 Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary idea in politeness—equality.
91 For the very word politeness is only the Greek for citizenship. The word
92 politeness is akin to the word policeman: a charming thought. Properly
93 understood, the citizen should be more polite than the gentleman; perhaps
94 the policeman should be the most courtly and elegant of the three. But all
95 good manners must obviously begin with the sharing of something in a
96 simple style. Two men should share an umbrella; if they have not got an
97 umbrella, they should at least share the rain, with all its rich
98 potentialities of wit and philosophy. “For He maketh His sun to shine....”
99 This is the second element in the weather; its recognition of human
100 equality in that we all have our hats under the dark blue spangled
101 umbrella of the universe. Arising out of this is the third wholesome
102 strain in the custom; I mean that it begins with the body and with our
103 inevitable bodily brotherhood. All true friendliness begins with fire and
104 food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. Those who will not
105 begin at the bodily end of things are already prigs and may soon be
106 Christian Scientists. Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself
107 the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the
108 flesh to meet mankind.
109 Briefly, in the mere observation “a fine day” there is the whole great
110 human idea of comradeship. Now, pure comradeship is another of those broad
111 and yet bewildering things. We all enjoy it; yet when we come to talk
112 about it we almost always talk nonsense, chiefly because we suppose it to
113 be a simpler affair than it is. It is simple to conduct; but it is by no
114 means simple to analyze. Comradeship is at the most only one half of human
115 life; the other half is Love, a thing so different that one might fancy it
116 had been made for another universe. And I do not mean mere sex love; any
117 kind of concentrated passion, maternal love, or even the fiercer kinds of
118 friendship are in their nature alien to pure comradeship. Both sides are
119 essential to life; and both are known in differing degrees to everybody of
120 every age or sex. But very broadly speaking it may still be said that
121 women stand for the dignity of love and men for the dignity of
122 comradeship. I mean that the institution would hardly be expected if the
123 males of the tribe did not mount guard over it. The affections in which
124 women excel have so much more authority and intensity that pure
125 comradeship would be washed away if it were not rallied and guarded in
126 clubs, corps, colleges, banquets and regiments. Most of us have heard the
127 voice in which the hostess tells her husband not to sit too long over the
128 cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love, seeking to destroy Comradeship.
129 All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have remarked
130 in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has a sort of
131 broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we are all under
132 the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the “winged rock”
133 of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bond as the essential
134 one; for comradeship is simply humanity seen in that one aspect in which
135 men are really equal. The old writers were entirely wise when they talked
136 of the equality of men; but they were also very wise in not mentioning
137 women. Women are always authoritarian; they are always above or below;
138 that is why marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw. There are only three
139 things in the world that women do not understand; and they are Liberty,
140 Equality, and Fraternity. But men (a class little understood in the modern
141 world) find these things the breath of their nostrils; and our most
142 learned ladies will not even begin to understand them until they make
143 allowance for this kind of cool camaraderie. Lastly, it contains the third
144 quality of the weather, the insistence upon the body and its indispensable
145 satisfaction. No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not
146 accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking,
147 an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You
148 may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential.
149 It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay,
150 its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness
151 there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into
152 the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of the
153 weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that are
154 common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic.
155 Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.
156 The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word
157 “affinity.” There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members, men
158 and women, call each other “Comrade.” I have no serious emotions, hostile
159 or otherwise, about this particular habit: at the worst it is
160 conventionality, and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only to
161 point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers
162 together, lilies and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and call them
163 all daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word daisy.
164 If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if you include
165 under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable prophetess, the
166 interest of a man in a beautiful woman who baffles him, the pleasure of a
167 philosophical old fogy in a girl who is impudent and innocent, the end of
168 the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most mountainous love; if you
169 are going to call all these comradeship, you will gain nothing, you will
170 only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and universal and open; but they are
171 only one kind of flower. Comradeship is obvious and universal and open;
172 but it is only one kind of affection; it has characteristics that would
173 destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or
174 in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase
175 used in debating clubs which is strictly true to the masculine emotion;
176 they call it “speaking to the question.” Women speak to each other; men
177 speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest man has sat
178 in a ring of his five best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in
179 the room while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to
180 intellectual men; men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about
181 God or about golf. Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No
182 one remembers after a really good talk who has said the good things. Every
183 man speaks to a visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called the
184 club.
185 It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential to
186 the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers. It
187 leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these things
188 so long as it is honorable; comradeship must be in some degree ugly. The
189 moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils are stopped
190 with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must be physically dirty
191 if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos
192 of habits that always goes with males when left entirely to themselves has
193 only one honorable cure; and that is the strict discipline of a monastery.
194 Anyone who has seen our unhappy young idealists in East End Settlements
195 losing their collars in the wash and living on tinned salmon will fully
196 understand why it was decided by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St.
197 Benedict, that if men were to live without women, they must not live
198 without rules. Something of the same sort of artificial exactitude, of
199 course, is obtained in an army; and an army also has to be in many ways
200 monastic; only that it has celibacy without chastity. But these things do
201 not apply to normal married men. These have a quite sufficient restraint
202 on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common-sense of the other sex.
203 There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women.
204 ---
III. THE COMMON VISION
49 Now this masculine love of an open and level camaraderie is the life
50 within all democracies and attempts to govern by debate; without it the
51 republic would be a dead formula. Even as it is, of course, the spirit of
52 democracy frequently differs widely from the letter, and a pothouse is
53 often a better test than a Parliament. Democracy in its human sense is not
54 arbitrament by the majority; it is not even arbitrament by everybody. It
55 can be more nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody. I mean that it rests
56 on that club habit of taking a total stranger for granted, of assuming
57 certain things to be inevitably common to yourself and him. Only the
58 things that anybody may be presumed to hold have the full authority of
59 democracy. Look out of the window and notice the first man who walks by.
60 The Liberals may have swept England with an over-whelming majority; but
61 you would not stake a button that the man is a Liberal. The Bible may be
62 read in all schools and respected in all law courts; but you would not bet
63 a straw that he believes in the Bible. But you would bet your week’s
64 wages, let us say, that he believes in wearing clothes. You would bet that
65 he believes that physical courage is a fine thing, or that parents have
66 authority over children. Of course, he might be the millionth man who does
67 not believe these things; if it comes to that, he might be the Bearded
68 Lady dressed up as a man. But these prodigies are quite a different thing
69 from any mere calculation of numbers. People who hold these views are not
70 a minority, but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have
71 full democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody. What you
72 would observe before any newcomer in a tavern—that is the real
73 English law. The first man you see from the window, he is the King of
74 England.
75 The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay of
76 democracy, has undoubtedly weakened this masculine spirit of equality. I
77 remember that a roomful of Socialists literally laughed when I told them
78 that there were no two nobler words in all poetry than Public House. They
79 thought it was a joke. Why they should think it a joke, since they want to
80 make all houses public houses, I cannot imagine. But if anyone wishes to
81 see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is necessary (to males, at least)
82 he can find it as well as anywhere in the great old tavern disputes which
83 come down to us in such books as Boswell’s Johnson. It is worth while to
84 mention that one name especially because the modern world in its morbidity
85 has done it a strange injustice. The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was
86 “harsh and despotic.” It was occasionally harsh, but it was never
87 despotic. Johnson was not in the least a despot; Johnson was a demagogue,
88 he shouted against a shouting crowd. The very fact that he wrangled with
89 other people is proof that other people were allowed to wrangle with him.
90 His very brutality was based on the idea of an equal scrimmage, like that
91 of football. It is strictly true that he bawled and banged the table
92 because he was a modest man. He was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed
93 or even overlooked. Addison had exquisite manners and was the king of his
94 company; he was polite to everybody; but superior to everybody; therefore
95 he has been handed down forever in the immortal insult of Pope—
96 “Like Cato, give his little Senate laws And sit attentive to his own
97 applause.”
98 Johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of Irish Member
99 in his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was hated.
100 Johnson was an insolent equal and therefore was loved by all who knew him,
101 and handed down in a marvellous book, which is one of the mere miracles of
102 love.
103 This doctrine of equality is essential to conversation; so much may be
104 admitted by anyone who knows what conversation is. Once arguing at a table
105 in a tavern the most famous man on earth would wish to be obscure, so that
106 his brilliant remarks might blaze like the stars on the background of his
107 obscurity. To anything worth calling a man nothing can be conceived more
108 cold or cheerless than to be king of your company. But it may be said that
109 in masculine sports and games, other than the great game of debate, there
110 is definite emulation and eclipse. There is indeed emulation, but this is
111 only an ardent sort of equality. Games are competitive, because that is
112 the only way of making them exciting. But if anyone doubts that men must
113 forever return to the ideal of equality, it is only necessary to answer
114 that there is such a thing as a handicap. If men exulted in mere
115 superiority, they would seek to see how far such superiority could go;
116 they would be glad when one strong runner came in miles ahead of all the
117 rest. But what men like is not the triumph of superiors, but the struggle
118 of equals; and, therefore, they introduce even into their competitive
119 sports an artificial equality. It is sad to think how few of those who
120 arrange our sporting handicaps can be supposed with any probability to
121 realize that they are abstract and even severe republicans.
122 No; the real objection to equality and self-rule has nothing to do with
123 any of these free and festive aspects of mankind; all men are democrats
124 when they are happy. The philosophic opponent of democracy would
125 substantially sum up his position by saying that it “will not work.”
126 Before going further, I will register in passing a protest against the
127 assumption that working is the one test of humanity. Heaven does not work;
128 it plays. Men are most themselves when they are free; and if I find that
129 men are snobs in their work but democrats on their holidays, I shall take
130 the liberty to believe their holidays. But it is this question of work
131 which really perplexes the question of equality; and it is with that that
132 we must now deal. Perhaps the truth can be put most pointedly thus: that
133 democracy has one real enemy, and that is civilization. Those utilitarian
134 miracles which science has made are anti-democratic, not so much in their
135 perversion, or even in their practical result, as in their primary shape
136 and purpose. The Frame-Breaking Rioters were right; not perhaps in
137 thinking that machines would make fewer men workmen; but certainly in
138 thinking that machines would make fewer men masters. More wheels do mean
139 fewer handles; fewer handles do mean fewer hands. The machinery of science
140 must be individualistic and isolated. A mob can shout round a palace; but
141 a mob cannot shout down a telephone. The specialist appears and democracy
142 is half spoiled at a stroke.
143 ---
IV. THE INSANE NECESSITY
52 The common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture is that men
53 have slowly worked their way out of inequality into a state of comparative
54 equality. The truth is, I fancy, almost exactly the opposite. All men have
55 normally and naturally begun with the idea of equality; they have only
56 abandoned it late and reluctantly, and always for some material reason of
57 detail. They have never naturally felt that one class of men was superior
58 to another; they have always been driven to assume it through certain
59 practical limitations of space and time.
60 For example, there is one element which must always tend to oligarchy—or
61 rather to despotism; I mean the element of hurry. If the house has caught
62 fire a man must ring up the fire engines; a committee cannot ring them up.
63 If a camp is surprised by night somebody must give the order to fire;
64 there is no time to vote it. It is solely a question of the physical
65 limitations of time and space; not at all of any mental limitations in the
66 mass of men commanded. If all the people in the house were men of destiny
67 it would still be better that they should not all talk into the telephone
68 at once; nay, it would be better that the silliest man of all should speak
69 uninterrupted. If an army actually consisted of nothing but Hanibals and
70 Napoleons, it would still be better in the case of a surprise that they
71 should not all give orders together. Nay, it would be better if the
72 stupidest of them all gave the orders. Thus, we see that merely military
73 subordination, so far from resting on the inequality of men, actually
74 rests on the equality of men. Discipline does not involve the Carlylean
75 notion that somebody is always right when everybody is wrong, and that we
76 must discover and crown that somebody. On the contrary, discipline means
77 that in certain frightfully rapid circumstances, one can trust anybody so
78 long as he is not everybody. The military spirit does not mean (as Carlyle
79 fancied) obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the
80 military spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man,
81 obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men. Submission
82 to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is only servility.
83 Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europe is
84 not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not a system of
85 spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the caste system of
86 India, or even like the old Greek distinction between free men and slaves.
87 It is simply the remains of a military organization, framed partly to
88 sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partly to break and avenge the awful
89 onslaught of Islam. The word Duke simply means Colonel, just as the word
90 Emperor simply means Commander-in-Chief. The whole story is told in the
91 single title of Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, which merely means
92 officers in the European army against the contemporary Yellow Peril. Now
93 in an army nobody ever dreams of supposing that difference of rank
94 represents a difference of moral reality. Nobody ever says about a
95 regiment, “Your Major is very humorous and energetic; your Colonel, of
96 course, must be even more humorous and yet more energetic.” No one ever
97 says, in reporting a mess-room conversation, “Lieutenant Jones was very
98 witty, but was naturally inferior to Captain Smith.” The essence of an
99 army is the idea of official inequality, founded on unofficial equality.
100 The Colonel is not obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is
101 the Colonel. Such was probably the spirit of the system of dukes and
102 counts when it first arose out of the military spirit and military
103 necessities of Rome. With the decline of those necessities it has
104 gradually ceased to have meaning as a military organization, and become
105 honeycombed with unclean plutocracy. Even now it is not a spiritual
106 aristocracy—it is not so bad as all that. It is simply an army
107 without an enemy—billeted upon the people.
108 Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as comrade-like aspect; and the
109 case of militarism is not the only case of such specialist submission. The
110 tinker and tailor, as well as the soldier and sailor, require a certain
111 rigidity of rapidity of action: at least, if the tinker is not organized
112 that is largely why he does not tink on any large scale. The tinker and
113 tailor often represent the two nomadic races in Europe: the Gipsy and the
114 Jew; but the Jew alone has influence because he alone accepts some sort of
115 discipline. Man, we say, has two sides, the specialist side where he must
116 have subordination, and the social side where he must have equality. There
117 is a truth in the saying that ten tailors go to make a man; but we must
118 remember also that ten Poets Laureate or ten Astronomers Royal go to make
119 a man, too. Ten million tradesmen go to make Man himself; but humanity
120 consists of tradesmen when they are not talking shop. Now the peculiar
121 peril of our time, which I call for argument’s sake Imperialism or
122 Caesarism, is the complete eclipse of comradeship and equality by
123 specialism and domination.
124 There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable—personal
125 government and impersonal government. If my anarchic friends will not have
126 rules—they will have rulers. Preferring personal government, with
127 its tact and flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal
128 government, with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.
129 Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh; at least,
130 I know no more philosophic word for it. You can be guided by the
131 shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler, or by the equality and
132 ascertained justice of one rule; but you must have one or the other, or
133 you are not a nation, but a nasty mess. Now men in their aspect of
134 equality and debate adore the idea of rules; they develop and complicate
135 them greatly to excess. A man finds far more regulations and definitions
136 in his club, where there are rules, than in his home, where there is a
137 ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance, carries
138 this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole system is
139 stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis Carroll. You
140 would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly silent. You
141 would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it on to go away;
142 therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on to stop in.
143 Names are forbidden, and a man must call his own father “my right
144 honorable friend the member for West Birmingham.” These are, perhaps,
145 fantasies of decay: but fundamentally they answer a masculine appetite.
146 Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal; men feel that law
147 is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is a wild fairness in the
148 thing—as there is in tossing up.
149 Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack such cases as
150 the Commons it is always on the points (perhaps the few points) where the
151 Commons are right. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop, and
152 complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one respect
153 in which the Commons are actually like the Common People. If they love
154 leisure and long debate, it is because all men love it; that they really
155 represent England. There the Parliament does approach to the virile
156 virtues of the pothouse.
157 The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section when we
158 spoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the sense of
159 counsel and community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure,
160 laughter, loud and equal argument; but there stands a specter in our hall.
161 We are conscious of the towering modern challenge that is called
162 specialism or cut-throat competition—Business. Business will have
163 nothing to do with leisure; business will have no truck with comradeship;
164 business will pretend to no patience with all the legal fictions and
165 fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects its egalitarian ideal.
166 The modern millionaire, when engaged in the agreeable and typical task of
167 sacking his own father, will certainly not refer to him as the right
168 honorable clerk from the Laburnum Road, Brixton. Therefore there has
169 arisen in modern life a literary fashion devoting itself to the romance of
170 business, to great demigods of greed and to fairyland of finance. This
171 popular philosophy is utterly despotic and anti-democratic; this fashion
172 is the flower of that Caesarism against which I am concerned to protest.
173 The ideal millionaire is strong in the possession of a brain of steel. The
174 fact that the real millionaire is rather more often strong in the
175 possession of a head of wood, does not alter the spirit and trend of the
176 idolatry. The essential argument is “Specialists must be despots; men must
177 be specialists. You cannot have equality in a soap factory; so you cannot
178 have it anywhere. You cannot have comradeship in a wheat corner; so you
179 cannot have it at all. We must have commercial civilization; therefore we
180 must destroy democracy.” I know that plutocrats have seldom sufficient
181 fancy to soar to such examples as soap or wheat. They generally confine
182 themselves, with fine freshness of mind, to a comparison between the state
183 and a ship. One anti-democratic writer remarked that he would not like to
184 sail in a vessel in which the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the
185 captain. It might easily be urged in answer that many a ship (the
186 Victoria, for instance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a
187 cabin-boy could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply; the essential
188 fallacy is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were
189 all born in a state; we were not all born on a ship; like some of our
190 great British bankers. A ship still remains a specialist experiment, like
191 a diving-bell or a flying ship: in such peculiar perils the need for
192 promptitude constitutes the need for autocracy. But we live and die in the
193 vessel of the state; and if we cannot find freedom camaraderie and the
194 popular element in the state, we cannot find it at all. And the modern
195 doctrine of commercial despotism means that we shall not find it at all.
196 Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot (it says) be
197 run without the whole brutal business of bossing and sacking, “too old at
198 forty” and all the rest of the filth. And they must be run, and therefore
199 we call on Caesar. Nobody but the Superman could descend to do such dirty
200 work.
201 Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge modern
202 heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of
203 altering human conditions to fit the human soul. If soap boiling is really
204 inconsistent with brotherhood, so much the worst for soap-boiling, not for
205 brotherhood. If civilization really cannot get on with democracy, so much
206 the worse for civilization, not for democracy. Certainly, it would be far
207 better to go back to village communes, if they really are communes.
208 Certainly, it would be better to do without soap rather than to do without
209 society. Certainly, we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels, systems,
210 specialties, physical science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of
211 happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern. I
212 do not say the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it will be easy.
PART THREE. FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN
55 (Texto do capítulo)
I. THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE
58 It will be better to adopt in this chapter the same process that appeared
59 a piece of mental justice in the last. My general opinions on the feminine
60 question are such as many suffragists would warmly approve; and it would
61 be easy to state them without any open reference to the current
62 controversy. But just as it seemed more decent to say first that I was not
63 in favor of Imperialism even in its practical and popular sense, so it
64 seems more decent to say the same of Female Suffrage, in its practical and
65 popular sense. In other words, it is only fair to state, however
66 hurriedly, the superficial objection to the Suffragettes before we go on
67 to the really subtle questions behind the Suffrage.
68 Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection to
69 the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On the
70 contrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a
71 military thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is that it
72 comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under certain
73 rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes the government and
74 proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is
75 peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this soldierly and
76 decisive sense; first, because they are women; and, secondly, because they
77 are very few women. But they can raise something else; which is altogether
78 another pair of shoes. They do not create revolution; what they do create
79 is anarchy; and the difference between these is not a question of
80 violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its
81 nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men may
82 have what opinions they please about the beheading of King Charles or King
83 Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot
84 and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered; something occurred. You can only
85 knock off the King’s head once. But you can knock off the King’s hat any
86 number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long
87 as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to
88 enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself
89 and renew itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but
90 only wanted to be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any
91 government arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a
92 proceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion.
93 It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes their
94 superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none of the
95 advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test. War is a
96 dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably—numbers,
97 and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two urgent matters; how many
98 rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead. But a tiny
99 minority, even an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever.
100 There is also, of course, in the case of these women, the further falsity
101 that is introduced by their sex. It is false to state the matter as a mere
102 brutal question of strength. If his muscles give a man a vote, then his
103 horse ought to have two votes and his elephant five votes. The truth is
104 more subtle than that; it is that bodily outbreak is a man’s instinctive
105 weapon, like the hoofs to the horse or the tusks to the elephant. All riot
106 is a threat of war; but the woman is brandishing a weapon she can never
107 use. There are many weapons that she could and does use. If (for example)
108 all the women nagged for a vote they would get it in a month. But there
109 again, one must remember, it would be necessary to get all the women to
110 nag. And that brings us to the end of the political surface of the matter.
111 The working objection to the Suffragette philosophy is simply that
112 overmastering millions of women do not agree with it. I am aware that some
113 maintain that women ought to have votes whether the majority wants them or
114 not; but this is surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal
115 democracy to the destruction of actual democracy. What should the mass of
116 women decide if they do not decide their general place in the State? These
117 people practically say that females may vote about everything except about
118 Female Suffrage.
119 But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and possibly
120 unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the matter in a
121 slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the real roots of
122 woman’s position in the western state, and the causes of our existing
123 traditions or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this purpose it
124 is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic, the mere
125 Suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which, though much more
126 old, are, I think, considerably more fresh.
127 ---
II. THE UNIVERSAL STICK
61 Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or
62 four things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at
63 least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let me
64 suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a
65 fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one speciality;
66 that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral things is a
67 universal thing; made to supply many different needs; and while tottering
68 pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some old custom, the
69 truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins. The knife is meant
70 to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut throats; for a myriad
71 ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick is meant partly to hold a
72 man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to point with like a
73 finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole, partly to
74 trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a giant;
75 it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an extra leg. The
76 case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which the strangest
77 modern views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire
78 exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness,
79 to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to
80 cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered
81 shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red
82 heart of a man’s house and that hearth for which, as the great heathens
83 said, a man should die.
84 Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing
85 substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always answer one
86 purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man will wave a
87 cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil with a little
88 screwing pencil-sharpener instead of a knife; and he will even boldly
89 offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have my doubts
90 about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils; and about hot water
91 pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those other requirements
92 that these institutions answered, there opens before us the whole horrible
93 harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision a world where a
94 man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener; where a man must
95 learn single-stick with a cigarette; where a man must try to toast muffins
96 at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the surface of hot
97 water pipes.
98 The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a comparison
99 between the ancient and universal things and the modern and specialist
100 things. The object of a theodolite is to lie level; the object of a stick
101 is to swing loose at any angle; to whirl like the very wheel of liberty.
102 The object of a lancet is to lance; when used for slashing, gashing,
103 ripping, lopping off heads and limbs, it is a disappointing instrument.
104 The object of an electric light is merely to light (a despicable modesty);
105 and the object of an asbestos stove... I wonder what is the object of an
106 asbestos stove? If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at
107 least think of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope; and
108 some of them might even be practical. He could tow a boat or lasso a
109 horse. He could play cat’s-cradle, or pick oakum. He could construct a
110 rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes for a travelling
111 maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could hang himself. Far
112 otherwise with the unfortunate traveller who should find a telephone in
113 the desert. You can telephone with a telephone; you cannot do anything
114 else with it. And though this is one of the wildest joys of life, it falls
115 by one degree from its full delirium when there is nobody to answer you.
116 The contention is, in brief, that you must pull up a hundred roots, and
117 not one, before you uproot any of these hoary and simple expedients. It is
118 only with great difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got
119 to see that any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old
120 method has four or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions
121 are quadrupeds; and some of them are centipedes.
122 Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation of a
123 general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six
124 purposes; everywhere now there are six small things; or, rather (and there
125 is the trouble), there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, we will not
126 say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless or
127 inexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone; I may any day
128 thank God for the lancet; and there is none of these brilliant and narrow
129 inventions (except, of course, the asbestos stove) which might not be at
130 some moment necessary and lovely. But I do not think the most austere
131 upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old, many-sided
132 institutions an element of unity and universality which may well be
133 preserved in its due proportion and place. Spiritually, at least, it will
134 be admitted that some all-round balance is needed to equalize the
135 extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to carry the parable of
136 the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, the immortal maiden,
137 has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind. She provided
138 men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos and also with
139 the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She
140 taught logic to the student and told fairy tales to the children; it was
141 her business to confront the nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh,
142 and also to see the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that
143 there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The
144 large uses of religion have been broken up into lesser specialities, just
145 as the uses of the hearth have been broken up into hot water pipes and
146 electric bulbs. The romance of ritual and colored emblem has been taken
147 over by that narrowest of all trades, modern art (the sort called art for
148 art’s sake), and men are in modern practice informed that they may use all
149 symbols so long as they mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience
150 has been dried up into the science of ethics; which may well be called
151 decency for decency’s sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren
152 of artistic flower. The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and
153 cosmology, has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been
154 sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we
155 shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on
156 the ground that they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who
157 openly advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all
158 one wild divorce court; nevertheless, there are many who still hear in
159 their souls the thunder of authority of human habit; those whom Man hath
160 joined let no man sunder.
161 This book must avoid religion, but there must (I say) be many, religious
162 and irreligious, who will concede that this power of answering many
163 purposes was a sort of strength which should not wholly die out of our
164 lives. As a part of personal character, even the moderns will agree that
165 many-sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked. This
166 balance and universality has been the vision of many groups of men in many
167 ages. It was the Liberal Education of Aristotle; the jack-of-all-trades
168 artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends; the august amateurishness
169 of the Cavalier Person of Quality like Sir William Temple or the great
170 Earl of Dorset. It has appeared in literature in our time in the most
171 erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible music by Walter Pater
172 and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt Whitman. But the great mass of
173 men have always been unable to achieve this literal universality, because
174 of the nature of their work in the world. Not, let it be noted, because of
175 the existence of their work. Leonardo da Vinci must have worked pretty
176 hard; on the other hand, many a government office clerk, village constable
177 or elusive plumber may do (to all human appearance) no work at all, and
178 yet show no signs of the Aristotelian universalism. What makes it
179 difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the average man
180 has to be a specialist; he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn
181 it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. This is
182 generally true of males from the first hunter to the last electrical
183 engineer; each has not merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to
184 be a mighty hunter before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the
185 other hunters. The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical
186 engineer, or he is outstripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those
187 very miracles of the human mind on which the modern world prides itself,
188 and rightly in the main, would be impossible without a certain
189 concentration which disturbs the pure balance of reason more than does
190 religious bigotry. No creed can be so limiting as that awful adjuration
191 that the cobbler must not go beyond his last. So the largest and wildest
192 shots of our world are but in one direction and with a defined trajectory:
193 the gunner cannot go beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short;
194 the astronomer cannot go beyond his telescope and his telescope goes such
195 a little way. All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a
196 mountain and seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down
197 different paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is
198 right; there must be people traveling to different towns; there must be
199 specialists; but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankind be
200 specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be
201 monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be
202 monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman
203 and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things,
204 that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-all-trades. It has decided,
205 rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalism shall be
206 divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men and wisdom for
207 women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few sad and certain
208 things.
209 But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense) must
210 long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the frightful
211 furnaces of ambition and eager technicality. A man must be partly a
212 one-idead man, because he is a one-weaponed man—and he is flung
213 naked into the fight. The world’s demand comes to him direct; to his wife
214 indirectly. In short, he must (as the books on Success say) give “his
215 best”; and what a small part of a man “his best” is! His second and third
216 best are often much better. If he is the first violin he must fiddle for
217 life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair
218 fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand at whist, a gun,
219 and an image of God.
220 ---
III. THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY
64 And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to develop
65 one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called our competitive
66 system, but would equally exist under any rationally conceivable kind of
67 Collectivism. Unless the Socialists are frankly ready for a fall in the
68 standard of violins, telescopes and electric lights, they must somehow
69 create a moral demand on the individual that he shall keep up his present
70 concentration on these things. It was only by men being in some degree
71 specialist that there ever were any telescopes; they must certainly be in
72 some degree specialist in order to keep them going. It is not by making a
73 man a State wage-earner that you can prevent him thinking principally
74 about the very difficult way he earns his wages. There is only one way to
75 preserve in the world that high levity and that more leisurely outlook
76 which fulfils the old vision of universalism. That is, to permit the
77 existence of a partly protected half of humanity; a half which the
78 harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only troubles indirectly.
79 In other words, there must be in every center of humanity one human being
80 upon a larger plan; one who does not “give her best,” but gives her all.
81 Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need
82 not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is that
83 it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is like the
84 fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire is like the
85 wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to excel in
86 cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is earning the
87 coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman
88 is expected to tell tales to the children, not original and artistic
89 tales, but tales—better tales than would probably be told by a
90 first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to illuminate and
91 ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the wildest winds of
92 thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking stones or
93 lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this
94 universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive
95 or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a
96 school mistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator
97 but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive
98 dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike
99 the man, may develop all her second bests. This is what has been really
100 aimed at from the first in what is called the seclusion, or even the
101 oppression, of women. Women were not kept at home in order to keep them
102 narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them
103 broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of
104 cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting
105 and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six
106 professions and so come almost as near to God as the child when he plays
107 at a hundred trades. But the woman’s professions, unlike the child’s, were
108 all truly and almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing
109 but her universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This
110 is the substance of the contention I offer about the historic female
111 position. I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured;
112 but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by
113 the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive
114 clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition
115 women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do
116 not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; but I
117 say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do not
118 pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a
119 general servant.
120 The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands
121 for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must
122 return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way
123 to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way back
124 is the lunatic’s. There must in every machine be a part that moves and a
125 part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes a part
126 that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns hastily
127 condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the center and
128 pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience, and even her
129 pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of a universal
130 remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She has to be an
131 optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the happy-go-lucky
132 husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put upon, and the bully
133 from putting upon others. The French King wrote—
134 “Toujours femme varie Bien fol qui s’y fie,”
135 but the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why we
136 always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its
137 antidote in common-sense is not (as the moderns seem to think) to be in
138 the position of a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position of Aristotle
139 or (at the lowest) Herbert Spencer, to be a universal morality, a complete
140 system of thought. The slave flatters; the complete moralist rebukes. It
141 is, in short, to be a Trimmer in the true sense of that honorable term;
142 which for some reason or other is always used in a sense exactly opposite
143 to its own. It seems really to be supposed that a Trimmer means a cowardly
144 person who always goes over to the stronger side. It really means a highly
145 chivalrous person who always goes over to the weaker side; like one who
146 trims a boat by sitting where there are few people seated. Woman is a
147 trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous and romantic trade.
148 The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing it
149 to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in
150 dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of
151 special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult
152 to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the
153 line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became
154 the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior. Two
155 gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who
156 frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially
157 prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural
158 operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be
159 taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a
160 trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman
161 is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he
162 asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It
163 would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if
164 anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from
165 modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more
166 protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can
167 understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth
168 while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the
169 world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not
170 merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question.
171 For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they
172 mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the
173 difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only
174 means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a
175 man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at
176 Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is
177 trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give
178 it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a
179 definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be
180 Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and
181 books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners,
182 theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind,
183 but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career
184 to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small
185 career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad
186 to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone?
187 No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not
188 because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task;
189 I will never pity her for its smallness.
190 But though the essential of the woman’s task is universality, this does
191 not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely
192 wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than man
193 that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if one
194 may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three things
195 which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in parenthesis that
196 much of the recent official trouble about women has arisen from the fact
197 that they transfer to things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness
198 only proper to the primary things which a woman was set to guard. One’s
199 own children, one’s own altar, ought to be a matter of principle—or
200 if you like, a matter of prejudice. On the other hand, who wrote Junius’s
201 Letters ought not to be a principle or a prejudice, it ought to be a
202 matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry. But take an energetic
203 modern girl secretary to a league to show that George III wrote Junius,
204 and in three months she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her
205 employers. Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of
206 domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home,
207 and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of
208 the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they
209 ought not to do it.
210 ---
IV. THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT
67 The larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things
68 slightly more intoxicating to the eye than the desk or the typewriter; and
69 it cannot be denied that in defending these, women have developed the
70 quality called prejudice to a powerful and even menacing degree. But these
71 prejudices will always be found to fortify the main position of the woman,
72 that she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat within small compass
73 but on all sides. On the one or two points on which she really
74 misunderstands the man’s position, it is almost entirely in order to
75 preserve her own. The two points on which woman, actually and of herself,
76 is most tenacious may be roughly summarized as the ideal of thrift and the
77 ideal of dignity.
78 Unfortunately for this book it is written by a male, and these two
79 qualities, if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But if
80 we are to settle the sex question at all fairly, all males must make an
81 imaginative attempt to enter into the attitude of all good women toward
82 these two things. The difficulty exists especially, perhaps, in the thing
83 called thrift; we men have so much encouraged each other in throwing money
84 right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort of chivalrous and
85 poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a broader and more candid
86 consideration the case scarcely stands so.
87 Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than
88 extravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the matter;
89 for I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever since I was born.
90 But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic.
91 Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is
92 waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw
93 anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that
94 is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic thing about the house
95 is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the new fastidious and
96 aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral menage the dustbin must
97 be bigger than the house. If a man could undertake to make use of all
98 things in his dustbin he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare. When
99 science began to use by-products; when science found that colors could be
100 made out of coaltar, she made her greatest and perhaps her only claim on
101 the real respect of the human soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to
102 use the by-products, or, in other words, to rummage in the dustbin.
103 A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke or
104 expedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private house on
105 a rainy day. A man’s definite daily work is generally run with such rigid
106 convenience of modern science that thrift, the picking up of potential
107 helps here and there, has almost become unmeaning to him. He comes across
108 it most (as I say) when he is playing some game within four walls; when in
109 charades, a hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or a tea-cozy just do
110 for a cocked hat; when a toy theater needs timber and cardboard, and the
111 house has just enough firewood and just enough bandboxes. This is the
112 man’s occasional glimpse and pleasing parody of thrift. But many a good
113 housekeeper plays the same game every day with ends of cheese and scraps
114 of silk, not because she is mean, but on the contrary, because she is
115 magnanimous; because she wishes her creative mercy to be over all her
116 works, that not one sardine should be destroyed, or cast as rubbish to the
117 void, when she has made the pile complete.
118 The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and other
119 things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yet come
120 into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and liberal
121 also. There is never a war between two sects, but only between two
122 universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is the collision
123 of one cosmos with another. So in a smaller way it must be first made
124 clear that this female economic ideal is a part of that female variety of
125 outlook and all-round art of life which we have already attributed to the
126 sex: thrift is not a small or timid or provincial thing; it is part of
127 that great idea of the woman watching on all sides out of all the windows
128 of the soul and being answerable for everything. For in the average human
129 house there is one hole by which money comes in and a hundred by which it
130 goes out; man has to do with the one hole, woman with the hundred. But
131 though the very stinginess of a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth,
132 it is none the less true that it brings her into conflict with the special
133 kind of spiritual breadth that belongs to the males of the tribe. It
134 brings her into conflict with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of
135 chaotic feasting and deafening debate, which we noted in the last section.
136 The very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the
137 more into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the
138 other for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his
139 moral weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength,
140 the male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; he
141 always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always thinks
142 of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor
143 districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get their
144 husbands home, simple minded “social workers” always imagine that every
145 husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It
146 never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser
147 conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries to
148 get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the
149 teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money
150 that is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of time
151 that is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth but
152 what cometh out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man. They
153 will raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks) the
154 ridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wanted to
155 make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick. But the
156 real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the real
157 feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality of the
158 ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but there is
159 the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and where is
160 the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to crush her,
161 to produce a result; the coster does not argue with another coster in
162 order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at once the sound of his own
163 voice, the clearness of his own opinions and the sense of masculine
164 society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness about the male
165 enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottomless bucket; thought plunges into
166 a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman against the Public House—that
167 is, against the Parliament House. She is there to prevent waste; and the
168 “pub” and the parliament are the very palaces of waste. In the upper
169 classes the “pub” is called the club, but that makes no more difference to
170 the reason than it does to the rhyme. High and low, the woman’s objection
171 to the Public House is perfectly definite and rational, it is that the
172 Public House wastes the energies that could be used on the private house.
173 As it is about feminine thrift against masculine waste, so it is about
174 feminine dignity against masculine rowdiness. The woman has a fixed and
175 very well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners nobody
176 else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity, and
177 grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that there are many very
178 polite men, but none that I ever heard of who were not either fascinating
179 women or obeying them. But indeed the female ideal of dignity, like the
180 female ideal of thrift, lies deeper and may easily be misunderstood. It
181 rests ultimately on a strong idea of spiritual isolation; the same that
182 makes women religious. They do not like being melted down; they dislike
183 and avoid the mob. That anonymous quality we have remarked in the club
184 conversation would be common impertinence in a case of ladies. I remember
185 an artistic and eager lady asking me in her grand green drawing-room
186 whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and why not. I was
187 driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer “Because if I were
188 to treat you for two minutes like a comrade you would turn me out of the
189 house.” The only certain rule on this subject is always to deal with woman
190 and never with women. “Women” is a profligate word; I have used it
191 repeatedly in this chapter; but it always has a blackguard sound. It
192 smells of oriental cynicism and hedonism. Every woman is a captive queen.
193 But every crowd of women is only a harem broken loose.
194 I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly all the women I
195 have known. It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women
196 individually; but I think it would be quite true to say that she detests
197 them in a confused heap. And this is not because she despises her own sex,
198 but because she respects it; and respects especially that sanctity and
199 separation of each item which is represented in manners by the idea of
200 dignity and in morals by the idea of chastity.
201 ---
V. THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
70 We hear much of the human error which accepts what is sham and what is
71 real. But it is worth while to remember that with unfamiliar things we
72 often mistake what is real for what is sham. It is true that a very young
73 man may think the wig of an actress is her hair. But it is equally true
74 that a child yet younger may call the hair of a negro his wig. Just
75 because the woolly savage is remote and barbaric he seems to be
76 unnaturally neat and tidy. Everyone must have noticed the same thing in
77 the fixed and almost offensive color of all unfamiliar things, tropic
78 birds and tropic blossoms. Tropic birds look like staring toys out of a
79 toy-shop. Tropic flowers simply look like artificial flowers, like things
80 cut out of wax. This is a deep matter, and, I think, not unconnected with
81 divinity; but anyhow it is the truth that when we see things for the first
82 time we feel instantly that they are fictive creations; we feel the finger
83 of God. It is only when we are thoroughly used to them and our five wits
84 are wearied, that we see them as wild and objectless; like the shapeless
85 tree-tops or the shifting cloud. It is the design in Nature that strikes
86 us first; the sense of the crosses and confusions in that design only
87 comes afterwards through experience and an almost eerie monotony. If a man
88 saw the stars abruptly by accident he would think them as festive and as
89 artificial as a firework. We talk of the folly of painting the lily; but
90 if we saw the lily without warning we should think that it was painted. We
91 talk of the devil not being so black as he is painted; but that very
92 phrase is a testimony to the kinship between what is called vivid and what
93 is called artificial. If the modern sage had only one glimpse of grass and
94 sky, he would say that grass was not as green as it was painted; that sky
95 was not as blue as it was painted. If one could see the whole universe
96 suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored toy, just as the South
97 American hornbill looks like a bright-colored toy. And so they are—both
98 of them, I mean.
99 But it was not with this aspect of the startling air of artifice about all
100 strange objects that I meant to deal. I mean merely, as a guide to
101 history, that we should not be surprised if things wrought in fashions
102 remote from ours seem artificial; we should convince ourselves that nine
103 times out of ten these things are nakedly and almost indecently honest.
104 You will hear men talk of the frosted classicism of Corneille or of the
105 powdered pomposities of the eighteenth century, but all these phrases are
106 very superficial. There never was an artificial epoch. There never was an
107 age of reason. Men were always men and women women: and their two generous
108 appetites always were the expression of passion and the telling of truth.
109 We can see something stiff and quaint in their mode of expression, just as
110 our descendants will see something stiff and quaint in our coarsest slum
111 sketch or our most naked pathological play. But men have never talked
112 about anything but important things; and the next force in femininity
113 which we have to consider can be considered best perhaps in some dusty old
114 volume of verses by a person of quality.
115 The eighteenth century is spoken of as the period of artificiality, in
116 externals at least; but, indeed, there may be two words about that. In
117 modern speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort of
118 deceit; and the eighteenth century was far too artificial to deceive. It
119 cultivated that completest art that does not conceal the art. Its fashions
120 and costumes positively revealed nature by allowing artifice; as in that
121 obvious instance of a barbering that frosted every head with the same
122 silver. It would be fantastic to call this a quaint humility that
123 concealed youth; but, at least, it was not one with the evil pride that
124 conceals old age. Under the eighteenth century fashion people did not so
125 much all pretend to be young, as all agree to be old. The same applies to
126 the most odd and unnatural of their fashions; they were freakish, but they
127 were not false. A lady may or may not be as red as she is painted, but
128 plainly she was not so black as she was patched.
129 But I only introduce the reader into this atmosphere of the older and
130 franker fictions that he may be induced to have patience for a moment with
131 a certain element which is very common in the decoration and literature of
132 that age and of the two centuries preceding it. It is necessary to mention
133 it in such a connection because it is exactly one of those things that
134 look as superficial as powder, and are really as rooted as hair.
135 In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the seventeenth
136 and eighteenth centuries especially, you will find a perpetual reproach
137 against woman in the matter of her coldness; ceaseless and stale similes
138 that compare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosom to
139 snow. Now most of us have always supposed these old and iterant phrases to
140 be a mere pattern of dead words, a thing like a cold wall-paper. Yet I
141 think those old cavalier poets who wrote about the coldness of Chloe had
142 hold of a psychological truth missed in nearly all the realistic novels of
143 today. Our psychological romancers perpetually represent wives as striking
144 terror into their husbands by rolling on the floor, gnashing their teeth,
145 throwing about the furniture or poisoning the coffee; all this upon some
146 strange fixed theory that women are what they call emotional. But in truth
147 the old and frigid form is much nearer to the vital fact. Most men if they
148 spoke with any sincerity would agree that the most terrible quality in
149 women, whether in friendship, courtship or marriage, was not so much being
150 emotional as being unemotional.
151 There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection of a
152 more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation
153 there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the
154 female in anger is noli me tangere. I take this as the most obvious and at
155 the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality in the
156 female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almost immeasurably
157 misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cant of immoralists.
158 The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of
159 prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to
160 a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whatever else it is, it is
161 the thing which a thousand poets and a million lovers have called the
162 coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the classical, and is at least the
163 opposite of the grotesque. And since we are talking here chiefly in types
164 and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of the idea may be found
165 in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is highly typical of the
166 rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere for emancipation, that a
167 little while ago it was common for an “advanced” woman to claim the right
168 to wear trousers; a right about as grotesque as the right to wear a false
169 nose. Whether female liberty is much advanced by the act of wearing a
170 skirt on each leg I do not know; perhaps Turkish women might offer some
171 information on the point. But if the western woman walks about (as it
172 were) trailing the curtains of the harem with her, it is quite certain
173 that the woven mansion is meant for a perambulating palace, not for a
174 perambulating prison. It is quite certain that the skirt means female
175 dignity, not female submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all
176 tests. No ruler would deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters of a
177 slave; no judge would appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish
178 to be safely impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts,
179 the long, trailing robes of female dignity The whole world is under
180 petticoat government; for even men wear petticoats when they wish to
181 govern.
182 ---
VI. THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE
73 We say then that the female holds up with two strong arms these two
74 pillars of civilization; we say also that she could do neither, but for
75 her position; her curious position of private omnipotence, universality on
76 a small scale. The first element is thrift; not the destructive thrift of
77 the miser, but the creative thrift of the peasant; the second element is
78 dignity, which is but the expression of sacred personality and privacy.
79 Now I know the question that will be abruptly and automatically asked by
80 all that know the dull tricks and turns of the modern sexual quarrel. The
81 advanced person will at once begin to argue about whether these instincts
82 are inherent and inevitable in woman or whether they are merely prejudices
83 produced by her history and education. Now I do not propose to discuss
84 whether woman could now be educated out of her habits touching thrift and
85 dignity; and that for two excellent reasons. First it is a question which
86 cannot conceivably ever find any answer: that is why modern people are so
87 fond of it. From the nature of the case it is obviously impossible to
88 decide whether any of the peculiarities of civilized man have been
89 strictly necessary to his civilization. It is not self-evident (for
90 instance), that even the habit of standing upright was the only path of
91 human progress. There might have been a quadrupedal civilization, in which
92 a city gentleman put on four boots to go to the city every morning. Or
93 there might have been a reptilian civilization, in which he rolled up to
94 the office on his stomach; it is impossible to say that intelligence might
95 not have developed in such creatures. All we can say is that man as he is
96 walks upright; and that woman is something almost more upright than
97 uprightness.
98 And the second point is this: that upon the whole we rather prefer women
99 (nay, even men) to walk upright; so we do not waste much of our noble
100 lives in inventing any other way for them to walk. In short, my second
101 reason for not speculating upon whether woman might get rid of these
102 peculiarities, is that I do not want her to get rid of them; nor does she.
103 I will not exhaust my intelligence by inventing ways in which mankind
104 might unlearn the violin or forget how to ride horses; and the art of
105 domesticity seems to me as special and as valuable as all the ancient arts
106 of our race. Nor do I propose to enter at all into those formless and
107 floundering speculations about how woman was or is regarded in the
108 primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savage countries which
109 we cannot understand. Even if these people segregated their women for low
110 or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons barbaric; and I am
111 haunted with a tenacious suspicion that these people’s feelings were
112 really, under other forms, very much the same as ours. Some impatient
113 trader, some superficial missionary, walks across an island and sees the
114 squaw digging in the fields while the man is playing a flute; and
115 immediately says that the man is a mere lord of creation and the woman a
116 mere serf. He does not remember that he might see the same thing in half
117 the back gardens in Brixton, merely because women are at once more
118 conscientious and more impatient, while men are at once more quiescent and
119 more greedy for pleasure. It may often be in Hawaii simply as it is in
120 Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work because the man tells her to work
121 and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the
122 man to work and he hasn’t obeyed. I do not affirm that this is the whole
123 truth, but I do affirm that we have too little comprehension of the souls
124 of savages to know how far it is untrue. It is the same with the relations
125 of our hasty and surface science, with the problem of sexual dignity and
126 modesty. Professors find all over the world fragmentary ceremonies in
127 which the bride affects some sort of reluctance, hides from her husband,
128 or runs away from him. The professor then pompously proclaims that this is
129 a survival of Marriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil
130 thrown over the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether women ever
131 were married by capture I think they pretended to be; as they do still.
132 It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift and
133 dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness, the
134 wastefulness, and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of masculine
135 companionship. Wise women allow for the thing; foolish women try to crush
136 it; but all women try to counteract it, and they do well. In many a home
137 all round us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is reversed.
138 The queen is in the counting-house, counting out the money. The king is in
139 the parlor, eating bread and honey. But it must be strictly understood
140 that the king has captured the honey in some heroic wars. The quarrel can
141 be found in moldering Gothic carvings and in crabbed Greek manuscripts. In
142 every age, in every land, in every tribe and village, has been waged the
143 great sexual war between the Private House and the Public House. I have
144 seen a collection of mediaeval English poems, divided into sections such
145 as “Religious Carols,” “Drinking Songs,” and so on; and the section
146 headed, “Poems of Domestic Life” consisted entirely (literally, entirely)
147 of the complaints of husbands who were bullied by their wives. Though the
148 English was archaic, the words were in many cases precisely the same as
149 those which I have heard in the streets and public houses of Battersea,
150 protests on behalf of an extension of time and talk, protests against the
151 nervous impatience and the devouring utilitarianism of the female. Such, I
152 say, is the quarrel; it can never be anything but a quarrel; but the aim
153 of all morals and all society is to keep it a lovers’ quarrel.
154 ---
VII. THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN
76 But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has
77 happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this
78 ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes
79 has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth
80 century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to
81 the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been
82 right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more
83 important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had
84 always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity
85 to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in
86 the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste
87 of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a
88 waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and
89 grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our
90 hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst
91 with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the
92 men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer
93 court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which
94 her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.
95 Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us. Males, like
96 females, in the course of that old fight between the public and private
97 house, had indulged in overstatement and extravagance, feeling that they
98 must keep up their end of the see-saw. We told our wives that Parliament
99 had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed our minds
100 that our wives would believe it. We said that everyone must have a vote in
101 the country; similarly our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the
102 drawing room. In both cases the idea was the same. “It does not matter
103 much, but if you let those things slide there is chaos.” We said that Lord
104 Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew
105 quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men
106 should be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew
107 it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly,
108 without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we
109 ourselves hardly believed when we said it. The solemnity of politics; the
110 necessity of votes; the necessity of Huggins; the necessity of Buggins;
111 all these flow in a pellucid stream from the lips of all the suffragette
112 speakers. I suppose in every fight, however old, one has a vague
113 aspiration to conquer; but we never wanted to conquer women so completely
114 as this. We only expected that they might leave us a little more margin
115 for our nonsense; we never expected that they would accept it seriously as
116 sense. Therefore I am all at sea about the existing situation; I scarcely
117 know whether to be relieved or enraged by this substitution of the feeble
118 platform lecture for the forcible curtain-lecture. I am lost without the
119 trenchant and candid Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know what to do with the
120 prostrate and penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern woman
121 has taken us all so much by surprise that it is desirable to pause a
122 moment, and collect our wits about what she is really saying.
123 As I have already remarked, there is one very simple answer to all this;
124 these are not the modern women, but about one in two thousand of the
125 modern women. This fact is important to a democrat; but it is of very
126 little importance to the typically modern mind. Both the characteristic
127 modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is
128 whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might be put,
129 somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority
130 that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. But in this state
131 of things the democratic argument obviously falls out for the moment; and
132 we are bound to take the prominent minority, merely because it is
133 prominent. Let us eliminate altogether from our minds the thousands of
134 women who detest this cause, and the millions of women who have hardly
135 heard of it. Let us concede that the English people itself is not and will
136 not be for a very long time within the sphere of practical politics. Let
137 us confine ourselves to saying that these particular women want a vote and
138 to asking themselves what a vote is. If we ask these ladies ourselves what
139 a vote is, we shall get a very vague reply. It is the only question, as a
140 rule, for which they are not prepared. For the truth is that they go
141 mainly by precedent; by the mere fact that men have votes already. So far
142 from being a mutinous movement, it is really a very Conservative one; it
143 is in the narrowest rut of the British Constitution. Let us take a little
144 wider and freer sweep of thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate
145 point and meaning of this odd business called voting.
146 ---
VIII. THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS
79 Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and all
80 nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly fallacious than
81 to fancy that in ruder or simpler ages ruling, judging and punishing
82 appeared perfectly innocent and dignified. These things were always
83 regarded as the penalties of the Fall; as part of the humiliation of
84 mankind, as bad in themselves. That the king can do no wrong was never
85 anything but a legal fiction; and it is a legal fiction still. The
86 doctrine of Divine Right was not a piece of idealism, but rather a piece
87 of realism, a practical way of ruling amid the ruin of humanity; a very
88 pragmatist piece of faith. The religious basis of government was not so
89 much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not put
90 their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly institutions
91 which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were never talked of as
92 good things; they were always talked of as necessary evils. A pagan spoke
93 of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern business man speaks of one
94 merchant sacking ten clerks: “It’s very horrible; but how else can society
95 be conducted?” A mediaeval scholastic regarded the possibility of a man
96 being burned to death just as a modern business man regards the
97 possibility of a man being starved to death: “It is a shocking torture;
98 but can you organize a painless world?” It is possible that a future
99 society may find a way of doing without the question by hunger as we have
100 done without the question by fire. It is equally possible, for the matter
101 of that, that a future society may reestablish legal torture with the
102 whole apparatus of rack and fagot. The most modern of countries, America,
103 has introduced with a vague savor of science, a method which it calls “the
104 third degree.” This is simply the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue;
105 which is surely uncommonly close to their extortion by bodily pain. And
106 this is legal and scientific in America. Amateur ordinary America, of
107 course, simply burns people alive in broad daylight, as they did in the
108 Reformation Wars. But though some punishments are more inhuman than others
109 there is no such thing as humane punishment. As long as nineteen men claim
110 the right in any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make
111 him even mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole proceeding must be a
112 humiliating one for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men
113 have always felt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman,
114 the jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear
115 but with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights
116 and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even
117 admiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully
118 was unpardonable. The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish his
119 weapon. But the executioner was always masked.
120 This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary
121 but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say that
122 government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and
123 muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on force.
124 Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice. A
125 king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal, evil, uses the
126 general strength to crush it out; the strength is his tool, but the belief
127 is his only sanction. You might as well say that glass is the real reason
128 for telescopes. But arising from whatever reason the act of government is
129 coercive and is burdened with all the coarse and painful qualities of
130 coercion. And if anyone asks what is the use of insisting on the ugliness
131 of this task of state violence since all mankind is condemned to employ
132 it, I have a simple answer to that. It would be useless to insist on it if
133 all humanity were condemned to it. But it is not irrelevant to insist on
134 its ugliness so long as half of humanity is kept out of it.
135 All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government
136 which is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kinds of
137 government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic.
138 Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective kind of
139 riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of aristocracy,
140 sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed for aristocracy any
141 virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental virtues, courage,
142 variety and adventure. There is no case anywhere of aristocracy having
143 established a universal and applicable order, as despots and democracies
144 have often done; as the last Caesars created the Roman law, as the last
145 Jacobins created the Code Napoleon. With the first of these elementary
146 forms of government, that of the king or chieftain, we are not in this
147 matter of the sexes immediately concerned. We shall return to it later
148 when we remark how differently mankind has dealt with female claims in the
149 despotic as against the democratic field. But for the moment the essential
150 point is that in self-governing countries this coercion of criminals is a
151 collective coercion. The abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a
152 million fists and kicked by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all
153 flogged him; if a man is hanged, we all hanged him. That is the only
154 possible meaning of democracy, which can give any meaning to the first two
155 syllables and also to the last two. In this sense each citizen has the
156 high responsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, to
157 be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a
158 republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.
159 ---
IX. SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS
82 When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against Female Suffrage
83 keeps women out of activity, social influence and citizenship, let us a
84 little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it actually does keep
85 her out of. It does definitely keep her out of the collective act of
86 coercion; the act of punishment by a mob. The human tradition does say
87 that, if twenty men hang a man from a tree or lamp-post, they shall be
88 twenty men and not women. Now I do not think any reasonable Suffragist
89 will deny that exclusion from this function, to say the least of it, might
90 be maintained to be a protection as well as a veto. No candid person will
91 wholly dismiss the proposition that the idea of having a Lord Chancellor
92 but not a Lady Chancellor may at least be connected with the idea of
93 having a headsman but not a headswoman, a hangman but not a hangwoman. Nor
94 will it be adequate to answer (as is so often answered to this contention)
95 that in modern civilization women would not really be required to capture,
96 to sentence, or to slay; that all this is done indirectly, that
97 specialists kill our criminals as they kill our cattle. To urge this is
98 not to urge the reality of the vote, but to urge its unreality. Democracy
99 was meant to be a more direct way of ruling, not a more indirect way; and
100 if we do not feel that we are all jailers, so much the worse for us, and
101 for the prisoners. If it is really an unwomanly thing to lock up a robber
102 or a tyrant, it ought to be no softening of the situation that the woman
103 does not feel as if she were doing the thing that she certainly is doing.
104 It is bad enough that men can only associate on paper who could once
105 associate in the street; it is bad enough that men have made a vote very
106 much of a fiction. It is much worse that a great class should claim the
107 vote be cause it is a fiction, who would be sickened by it if it were a
108 fact. If votes for women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean what
109 they were meant to mean. A woman can make a cross on a paper as well as a
110 man; a child could do it as well as a woman; and a chimpanzee after a few
111 lessons could do it as well as a child. But nobody ought to regard it
112 merely as making a cross on paper; everyone ought to regard it as what it
113 ultimately is, branding the fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow, signing
114 the death warrant. Both men and women ought to face more fully the things
115 they do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing them.
116 On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished, private
117 executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things grossly
118 unsuited to the moral sentiment of a society cannot be safely done in
119 broad daylight; but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting
120 heretics alive, in a private room. It is very likely (to speak in the
121 manner foolishly called Irish) that if there were public executions there
122 would be no executions. The old open-air punishments, the pillory and the
123 gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law; and in actual practice
124 they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as well as rotten eggs;
125 of crying “Hosannah” as well as “Crucify.” But I do not like the public
126 executioner being turned into the private executioner. I think it is a
127 crooked oriental, sinister sort of business, and smells of the harem and
128 the divan rather than of the forum and the market place. In modern times
129 the official has lost all the social honor and dignity of the common
130 hangman. He is only the bearer of the bowstring.
131 Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity only in order to
132 emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else from
133 which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize the fact that
134 the mere modern veiling of the brutality does not make the situation
135 different, unless we openly say that we are giving the suffrage, not only
136 because it is power but because it is not, or in other words, that women
137 are not so much to vote as to play voting. No suffragist, I suppose, will
138 take up that position; and a few suffragists will wholly deny that this
139 human necessity of pains and penalties is an ugly, humiliating business,
140 and that good motives as well as bad may have helped to keep women out of
141 it. More than once I have remarked in these pages that female limitations
142 may be the limits of a temple as well as of a prison, the disabilities of
143 a priest and not of a pariah. I noted it, I think, in the case of the
144 pontifical feminine dress. In the same way it is not evidently irrational,
145 if men decided that a woman, like a priest, must not be a shedder of
146 blood.
147 ---
X. THE HIGHER ANARCHY
85 But there is a further fact; forgotten also because we moderns forget that
86 there is a female point of view. The woman’s wisdom stands partly, not
87 only for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a wholesome
88 hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine and
89 perversely true in that phrase of Wilde’s, that people should not be
90 treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man the
91 remark was a little effeminate; for Wilde did lack the masculine power of
92 dogma and of democratic cooperation. But if a woman had said it it would
93 have been simply true; a woman does treat each person as a peculiar
94 person. In other words, she stands for Anarchy; a very ancient and
95 arguable philosophy; not anarchy in the sense of having no customs in
96 one’s life (which is inconceivable), but anarchy in the sense of having no
97 rules for one’s mind. To her, almost certainly, are due all those working
98 traditions that cannot be found in books, especially those of education;
99 it was she who first gave a child a stuffed stocking for being good or
100 stood him in the corner for being naughty. This unclassified knowledge is
101 sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes motherwit. The last phrase
102 suggests the whole truth, for none ever called it fatherwit.
103 Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy when it
104 works well. And we ought to realize that in one half of the world—the
105 private house—it does work well. We modern men are perpetually
106 forgetting that the case for clear rules and crude penalties is not
107 self-evident, that there is a great deal to be said for the benevolent
108 lawlessness of the autocrat, especially on a small scale; in short, that
109 government is only one side of life. The other half is called Society, in
110 which women are admittedly dominant. And they have always been ready to
111 maintain that their kingdom is better governed than ours, because (in the
112 logical and legal sense) it is not governed at all. “Whenever you have a
113 real difficulty,” they say, “when a boy is bumptious or an aunt is stingy,
114 when a silly girl will marry somebody, or a wicked man won’t marry
115 somebody, all your lumbering Roman Law and British Constitution come to a
116 standstill. A snub from a duchess or a slanging from a fish-wife are much
117 more likely to put things straight.” So, at least, rang the ancient female
118 challenge down the ages until the recent female capitulation. So streamed
119 the red standard of the higher anarchy until Miss Pankhurst hoisted the
120 white flag.
121 It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason to the
122 eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man must be
123 dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic
124 alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth. All
125 modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always a reaction
126 from what went before. When you meet a modern man he is always coming from
127 a place, not going to it. Thus, mankind has in nearly all places and
128 periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainly as that there is a
129 sun and moon. But because a narrow Protestant sect called Materialists
130 declared for a short time that there was no soul, another narrow
131 Protestant sect called Christian Science is now maintaining that there is
132 no body. Now just in the same way the unreasonable neglect of government
133 by the Manchester School has produced, not a reasonable regard for
134 government, but an unreasonable neglect of everything else. So that to
135 hear people talk to-day one would fancy that every important human
136 function must be organized and avenged by law; that all education must be
137 state education, and all employment state employment; that everybody and
138 everything must be brought to the foot of the august and prehistoric
139 gibbet. But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind
140 will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that
141 voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short
142 that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself
143 if he chose. The huge fundamental function upon which all anthropology
144 turns, that of sex and childbirth, has never been inside the political
145 state, but always outside of it. The state concerned itself with the
146 trivial question of killing people, but wisely left alone the whole
147 business of getting them born. A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say that
148 the government is an absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies
149 himself with providing for the old age of people who have never been
150 infants. I will not deal here in any detail with the fact that some
151 Eugenists have in our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought
152 to control marriage and birth as they control labor and death. Except for
153 this inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall have to deal with
154 later) all the Eugenists I know divide themselves into two sections:
155 ingenious people who once meant this, and rather bewildered people who
156 swear they never meant it—nor anything else. But if it be conceded
157 (by a breezier estimate of men) that they do mostly desire marriage to
158 remain free from government, it does not follow that they desire it to
159 remain free from everything. If man does not control the marriage market
160 by law, is it controlled at all? Surely the answer is broadly that man
161 does not control the marriage market by law, but the woman does control it
162 by sympathy and prejudice. There was until lately a law forbidding a man
163 to marry his deceased wife’s sister; yet the thing happened constantly.
164 There was no law forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife’s
165 scullery-maid; yet it did not happen nearly so often. It did not happen
166 because the marriage market is managed in the spirit and by the authority
167 of women; and women are generally conservative where classes are
168 concerned. It is the same with that system of exclusiveness by which
169 ladies have so often contrived (as by a process of elimination) to prevent
170 marriages that they did not want and even sometimes procure those they
171 did. There is no need of the broad arrow and the fleur-de lis, the
172 turnkey’s chains or the hangman’s halter. You need not strangle a man if
173 you can silence him. The branded shoulder is less effective and final than
174 the cold shoulder; and you need not trouble to lock a man in when you can
175 lock him out.
176 The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we call
177 infant education: an architecture reared wholly by women. Nothing can ever
178 overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male child is
179 born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staring at that
180 frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of the
181 sexes. Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tom-boy; but
182 every boy is brought up like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of
183 femininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house; and
184 even the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by being born. Man
185 that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but nobody can
186 picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong to such a
187 monster as man that was born of a man.
188 ---
XI. THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES
88 But, indeed, with this educational matter I must of necessity embroil
89 myself later. The fourth section of discussion is supposed to be about the
90 child, but I think it will be mostly about the mother. In this place I
91 have systematically insisted on the large part of life that is governed,
92 not by man with his vote, but by woman with her voice, or more often, with
93 her horrible silence. Only one thing remains to be added. In a sprawling
94 and explanatory style has been traced out the idea that government is
95 ultimately coercion, that coercion must mean cold definitions as well as
96 cruel consequences, and that therefore there is something to be said for
97 the old human habit of keeping one-half of humanity out of so harsh and
98 dirty a business. But the case is stronger still.
99 Voting is not only coercion, but collective coercion. I think Queen
100 Victoria would have been yet more popular and satisfying if she had never
101 signed a death warrant. I think Queen Elizabeth would have stood out as
102 more solid and splendid in history if she had not earned (among those who
103 happen to know her history) the nickname of Bloody Bess. I think, in
104 short, that the great historic woman is more herself when she is
105 persuasive rather than coercive. But I feel all mankind behind me when I
106 say that if a woman has this power it should be despotic power—not
107 democratic power. There is a much stronger historic argument for giving
108 Miss Pankhurst a throne than for giving her a vote. She might have a
109 crown, or at least a coronet, like so many of her supporters; for these
110 old powers are purely personal and therefore female. Miss Pankhurst as a
111 despot might be as virtuous as Queen Victoria, and she certainly would
112 find it difficult to be as wicked as Queen Bess, but the point is that,
113 good or bad, she would be irresponsible—she would not be governed by
114 a rule and by a ruler. There are only two ways of governing: by a rule and
115 by a ruler. And it is seriously true to say of a woman, in education and
116 domesticity, that the freedom of the autocrat appears to be necessary to
117 her. She is never responsible until she is irresponsible. In case this
118 sounds like an idle contradiction, I confidently appeal to the cold facts
119 of history. Almost every despotic or oligarchic state has admitted women
120 to its privileges. Scarcely one democratic state has ever admitted them to
121 its rights The reason is very simple: that something female is endangered
122 much more by the violence of the crowd. In short, one Pankhurst is an
123 exception, but a thousand Pankhursts are a nightmare, a Bacchic orgie, a
124 Witches Sabbath. For in all legends men have thought of women as sublime
125 separately but horrible in a herd.
126 ---
XII. THE MODERN SLAVE
91 Now I have only taken the test case of Female Suffrage because it is
92 topical and concrete; it is not of great moment for me as a political
93 proposal. I can quite imagine anyone substantially agreeing with my view
94 of woman as universalist and autocrat in a limited area; and still
95 thinking that she would be none the worse for a ballot paper. The real
96 question is whether this old ideal of woman as the great amateur is
97 admitted or not. There are many modern things which threaten it much more
98 than suffragism; notably the increase of self-supporting women, even in
99 the most severe or the most squalid employments. If there be something
100 against nature in the idea of a horde of wild women governing, there is
101 something truly intolerable in the idea of a herd of tame women being
102 governed. And there are elements in human psychology that make this
103 situation particularly poignant or ignominous. The ugly exactitudes of
104 business, the bells and clocks the fixed hours and rigid departments, were
105 all meant for the male: who, as a rule, can only do one thing and can only
106 with the greatest difficulty be induced to do that. If clerks do not try
107 to shirk their work, our whole great commercial system breaks down. It is
108 breaking down, under the inroad of women who are adopting the
109 unprecedented and impossible course of taking the system seriously and
110 doing it well. Their very efficiency is the definition of their slavery.
111 It is generally a very bad sign when one is trusted very much by one’s
112 employers. And if the evasive clerks have a look of being blackguards, the
113 earnest ladies are often something very like blacklegs. But the more
114 immediate point is that the modern working woman bears a double burden,
115 for she endures both the grinding officialism of the new office and the
116 distracting scrupulosity of the old home. Few men understand what
117 conscientiousness is. They understand duty, which generally means one
118 duty; but conscientiousness is the duty of the universalist. It is limited
119 by no work days or holidays; it is a lawless, limitless, devouring
120 decorum. If women are to be subjected to the dull rule of commerce, we
121 must find some way of emancipating them from the wild rule of conscience.
122 But I rather fancy you will find it easier to leave the conscience and
123 knock off the commerce. As it is, the modern clerk or secretary exhausts
124 herself to put one thing straight in the ledger and then goes home to put
125 everything straight in the house.
126 This condition (described by some as emancipated) is at least the reverse
127 of my ideal. I would give woman, not more rights, but more privileges.
128 Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in
129 banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be
130 free. And with that we come to the last point of all; the point at which
131 we can perceive the needs of women, like the rights of men, stopped and
132 falsified by something which it is the object of this book to expose.
133 The Feminist (which means, I think, one who dislikes the chief feminine
134 characteristics) has heard my loose monologue, bursting all the time with
135 one pent-up protest. At this point he will break out and say, “But what
136 are we to do? There is modern commerce and its clerks; there is the modern
137 family with its unmarried daughters; specialism is expected everywhere;
138 female thrift and conscientiousness are demanded and supplied. What does
139 it matter whether we should in the abstract prefer the old human and
140 housekeeping woman; we might prefer the Garden of Eden. But since women
141 have trades they ought to have trades unions. Since women work in
142 factories, they ought to vote on factory-acts. If they are unmarried they
143 must be commercial; if they are commercial they must be political. We must
144 have new rules for a new world—even if it be not a better one.” I
145 said to a Feminist once: “The question is not whether women are good
146 enough for votes: it is whether votes are good enough for women.” He only
147 answered: “Ah, you go and say that to the women chain-makers on Cradley
148 Heath.”
149 Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy of
150 Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must
151 grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some time
152 ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost our
153 way we must lose our map also; and because we have missed our ideal, we
154 must forget it. “There are numbers of excellent people who do not think
155 votes unfeminine; and there may be enthusiasts for our beautiful modern
156 industry who do not think factories unfeminine.” But if these things are
157 unfeminine it is no answer to say that they fit into each other. I am not
158 satisfied with the statement that my daughter must have unwomanly powers
159 because she has unwomanly wrongs. Industrial soot and political printer’s
160 ink are two blacks which do not make a white. Most of the Feminists would
161 probably agree with me that womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the
162 shops and mills. But I want to destroy the tyranny. They want to destroy
163 womanhood. That is the only difference.
164 Whether we can recover the clear vision of woman as a tower with many
165 windows, the fixed eternal feminine from which her sons, the specialists,
166 go forth; whether we can preserve the tradition of a central thing which
167 is even more human than democracy and even more practical than politics;
168 whether, in word, it is possible to re-establish the family, freed from
169 the filthy cynicism and cruelty of the commercial epoch, I shall discuss
170 in the last section of this book. But meanwhile do not talk to me about
171 the poor chain-makers on Cradley Heath. I know all about them and what
172 they are doing. They are engaged in a very wide-spread and flourishing
173 industry of the present age. They are making chains.
PART FOUR. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD
94 (Texto do capítulo)
I. THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY
97 When I wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is needless
98 to say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to answer and to
99 criticise the book from the same disinterested and impartial standpoint
100 from which Mr. Shaw had criticised the subject of it. I was not withheld
101 by any feeling that the joke was getting a little obvious; for an obvious
102 joke is only a successful joke; it is only the unsuccessful clowns who
103 comfort themselves with being subtle. The real reason why I did not answer
104 Mr. Shaw’s amusing attack was this: that one simple phrase in it
105 surrendered to me all that I have ever wanted, or could want from him to
106 all eternity. I told Mr. Shaw (in substance) that he was a charming and
107 clever fellow, but a common Calvinist. He admitted that this was true, and
108 there (so far as I am concerned) is an end of the matter. He said that, of
109 course, Calvin was quite right in holding that “if once a man is born it
110 is too late to damn or save him.” That is the fundamental and subterranean
111 secret; that is the last lie in hell.
112 The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about whether
113 some priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred. It is about
114 whether any word or gesture is significant and sacred. To the Catholic
115 every other daily act is dramatic dedication to the service of good or of
116 evil. To the Calvinist no act can have that sort of solemnity, because the
117 person doing it has been dedicated from eternity, and is merely filling up
118 his time until the crack of doom. The difference is something subtler than
119 plum-puddings or private theatricals; the difference is that to a
120 Christian of my kind this short earthly life is intensely thrilling and
121 precious; to a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw it is confessedly automatic and
122 uninteresting. To me these threescore years and ten are the battle. To the
123 Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession) they are only a long procession
124 of the victors in laurels and the vanquished in chains. To me earthly life
125 is the drama; to him it is the epilogue. Shavians think about the embryo;
126 Spiritualists about the ghost; Christians about the man. It is as well to
127 have these things clear.
128 Now all our sociology and eugenics and the rest of it are not so much
129 materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are chiefly occupied in
130 educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a
131 singular depression about what one can do with the populace, combined with
132 a strange disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity. These
133 essential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more liberal and
134 universal parts of Calvinism, such as the belief in an intellectual design
135 or an everlasting happiness. But though Mr. Shaw and his friends admit it
136 is a superstition that a man is judged after death, they stick to their
137 central doctrine, that he is judged before he is born.
138 In consequence of this atmosphere of Calvinism in the cultured world of
139 to-day, it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education
140 with some mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal. All
141 I shall have to say, however, on heredity will be very brief, because I
142 shall confine myself to what is known about it, and that is very nearly
143 nothing. It is by no means self-evident, but it is a current modern dogma,
144 that nothing actually enters the body at birth except a life derived and
145 compounded from the parents. There is at least quite as much to be said
146 for the Christian theory that an element comes from God, or the Buddhist
147 theory that such an element comes from previous existences. But this is
148 not a religious work, and I must submit to those very narrow intellectual
149 limits which the absence of theology always imposes. Leaving the soul on
150 one side, let us suppose for the sake of argument that the human character
151 in the first case comes wholly from parents; and then let us curtly state
152 our knowledge rather than our ignorance.
153 ---
II. THE TRIBAL TERROR
100 Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild as
101 old wives’ tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, explained to
102 millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle of blue
103 beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads; and so the child is
104 like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just as well have
105 said that if the father has two legs and the mother has two legs, the
106 child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a question of simple
107 addition or simple division of a number of hard detached “qualities,” like
108 beads. It is an organic crisis and transformation of the most mysterious
109 sort; so that even if the result is unavoidable, it will still be
110 unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow beads; it is like
111 blue mixed with yellow; the result of which is green, a totally novel and
112 unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live in a complete cosmos of
113 blue and yellow, like the “Edinburgh Review”; a man might never have seen
114 anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire sky; and still he might
115 never have had so wild a fancy as green. If you paid a sovereign for a
116 bluebell; if you spilled the mustard on the blue-books; if you married a
117 canary to a blue baboon; there is nothing in any of these wild weddings
118 that contains even a hint of green. Green is not a mental combination,
119 like addition; it is a physical result like birth. So, apart from the fact
120 that nobody ever really understands parents or children either, yet even
121 if we could understand the parents, we could not make any conjecture about
122 the children. Each time the force works in a different way; each time the
123 constituent colors combine into a different spectacle. A girl may actually
124 inherit her ugliness from her mother’s good looks. A boy may actually get
125 his weakness from his father’s strength. Even if we admit it is really a
126 fate, for us it must remain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its
127 causes, the Calvinists and materialists may be right or wrong; we leave
128 them their dreary debate. But considered in regard to its results there is
129 no doubt about it. The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every
130 birth is as lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a
131 monstrosity.
132 On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent
133 ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral
134 heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that is
135 that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases, say, of
136 a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of character as his
137 grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhaps sixty. But
138 there are not two cases, there is not one case, there are no cases at all,
139 of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather will have a grandson
140 with the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal with heredity as we deal
141 with omens, affinities and the fulfillment of dreams. The things do
142 happen, and when they happen we record them; but not even a lunatic ever
143 reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreams and omens, is a barbaric
144 notion; that is, not necessarily an untrue, but a dim, groping and
145 unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself a little more free
146 from his family. Before Christianity these tales of tribal doom occupied
147 the savage north; and since the Reformation and the revolt against
148 Christianity (which is the religion of a civilized freedom) savagery is
149 slowly creeping back in the form of realistic novels and problem plays.
150 The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and superstitious as the curse
151 of Ravenswood; only not so well written. But in this twilight barbaric
152 sense the feeling of a racial fate is not irrational, and may be allowed
153 like a hundred other half emotions that make life whole. The only
154 essential of tragedy is that one should take it lightly. But even when the
155 barbarian deluge rose to its highest in the madder novels of Zola (such as
156 that called “The Human Beast”, a gross libel on beasts as well as
157 humanity), even then the application of the hereditary idea to practice is
158 avowedly timid and fumbling. The students of heredity are savages in this
159 vital sense; that they stare back at marvels, but they dare not stare
160 forward to schemes. In practice no one is mad enough to legislate or
161 educate upon dogmas of physical inheritance; and even the language of the
162 thing is rarely used except for special modern purposes, such as the
163 endowment of research or the oppression of the poor.
164 ---
III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT
103 After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is only with the
104 born child that anybody dares to deal; and the question is not eugenics
105 but education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresome terminology of
106 popular science, it is not a question of heredity but of environment. I
107 will not needlessly complicate this question by urging at length that
108 environment also is open to some of the objections and hesitations which
109 paralyze the employment of heredity. I will merely suggest in passing that
110 even about the effect of environment modern people talk much too
111 cheerfully and cheaply. The idea that surroundings will mold a man is
112 always mixed up with the totally different idea that they will mold him in
113 one particular way. To take the broadest case, landscape no doubt affects
114 the soul; but how it affects it is quite another matter. To be born among
115 pine-trees might mean loving pine-trees. It might mean loathing
116 pine-trees. It might quite seriously mean never having seen a pine-tree.
117 Or it might mean any mixture of these or any degree of any of them. So
118 that the scientific method here lacks a little in precision. I am not
119 speaking without the book; on the contrary, I am speaking with the blue
120 book, with the guide-book and the atlas. It may be that the Highlanders
121 are poetical because they inhabit mountains; but are the Swiss prosaic
122 because they inhabit mountains? It may be the Swiss have fought for
123 freedom because they had hills; did the Dutch fight for freedom because
124 they hadn’t? Personally I should think it quite likely. Environment might
125 work negatively as well as positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in
126 spite of their wild skyline, but be cause of their wild skyline. The
127 Flemings may be fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but
128 because of it.
129 I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in matters admittedly
130 within its range, popular science goes a great deal too fast, and drops
131 enormous links of logic. Nevertheless, it remains the working reality that
132 what we have to deal with in the case of children is, for all practical
133 purposes, environment; or, to use the older word, education. When all such
134 deductions are made, education is at least a form of will-worship; not of
135 cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a department that we can control; it
136 does not merely darken us with the barbarian pessimism of Zola and the
137 heredity-hunt. We shall certainly make fools of ourselves; that is what is
138 meant by philosophy. But we shall not merely make beasts of ourselves;
139 which is the nearest popular definition for merely following the laws of
140 Nature and cowering under the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains
141 much moonshine; but not of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots
142 the slaves of a silver magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent
143 arena there are fads, but not frenzies. Doubtless we shall often find a
144 mare’s nest; but it will not always be the nightmare’s.
145 ---
IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION
106 When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, a
107 certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken by
108 the superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened of
109 sacred words and wearied of theology, if this largely unreasoning
110 irritation against “dogma” did arise out of some ridiculous excess of such
111 things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up a fine
112 crop of cant for our descendants to grow tired of. Probably the word
113 “education” will some day seem honestly as old and objectless as the word
114 “justification” now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thought it
115 frightfully funny that people should have fought about the difference
116 between the “Homoousion” and the “Homoiousion.” The time will come when
117 somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered against Sectarian
118 Education and also against Secular Education; that men of prominence and
119 position actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed and also for
120 not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look rather alike; but
121 they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed do not look
122 alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens to be the Latin
123 for faith.
124 Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education, and even
125 written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and indeterminate
126 discussion going on all around me almost ever since I was born, about
127 whether religion was part of education, about whether hygiene was an
128 essential of education, about whether militarism was inconsistent with
129 true education, I naturally pondered much on this recurring substantive,
130 and I am ashamed to say that it was comparatively late in life that I saw
131 the main fact about it.
132 Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing.
133 It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word
134 like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may be
135 healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with
136 definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles.
137 Education is a word like “transmission” or “inheritance”; it is not an
138 object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views
139 or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts
140 or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities; but if
141 they are handed on from one generation to another they are education.
142 Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior or superior
143 thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and
144 education are to each other like a love-letter to the General Post Office.
145 Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably
146 more educational. It is giving something—perhaps poison. Education
147 is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.
148 This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our
149 political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little
150 house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast, to take
151 his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his
152 Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him
153 to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear
154 false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish the
155 boy’s breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine; Count Tolstoi
156 would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford would stop his
157 prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically denounce Sunday
158 clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of these advanced
159 views, not even Fagin’s. But I do ask what, between the lot of them, has
160 become of the abstract entity called education. It is not (as commonly
161 supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus Christianity; Mr.
162 Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus crime. The truth
163 is, that there is nothing in common at all between these teachers, except
164 that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the one thing they
165 profess to dislike: the general idea of authority. It is quaint that
166 people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only
167 thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher
168 who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
169 ---
V. AN EVIL CRY
109 The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people something
110 that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think it was some sort
111 of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotchpotch of hygienic
112 meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air and freehand drawing, we can
113 produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we cannot
114 conceive. These pages have, of course, no other general purpose than to
115 point out that we cannot create anything good until we have conceived it.
116 It is odd that these people, who in the matter of heredity are so sullenly
117 attached to law, in the matter of environment seem almost to believe in
118 miracle. They insist that nothing but what was in the bodies of the
119 parents can go to make the bodies of the children. But they seem somehow
120 to think that things can get into the heads of the children which were not
121 in the heads of the parents, or, indeed, anywhere else.
122 There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of
123 the confusion. I mean the cry, “Save the children.” It is, of course, part
124 of that modern morbidity that insists on treating the State (which is the
125 home of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic. This
126 terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist and other
127 schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in a
128 famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers, as men do in
129 a shipwreck. That a human community might conceivably not be in a
130 condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. This
131 cry of “Save the children” has in it the hateful implication that it is
132 impossible to save the fathers; in other words, that many millions of
133 grown-up, sane, responsible and self-supporting Europeans are to be
134 treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion; called
135 dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead of private
136 houses; called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work;
137 called dullards if they still adhere to conventions, and called loafers if
138 they still love liberty. Now I am concerned, first and last, to maintain
139 that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the children; that
140 at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save ourselves. We cannot
141 teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have
142 forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is only truth in a state of
143 transmission; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our
144 hand? Thus we find that education is of all the cases the clearest for our
145 general purpose. It is vain to save children; for they cannot remain
146 children. By hypothesis we are teaching them to be men; and how can it be
147 so simple to teach an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain and
148 hopeless to find one for ourselves?
149 I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this
150 difficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all, does
151 not teach by authority at all. They present the process as coming, not
152 from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy.
153 Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the
154 dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish
155 soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean
156 collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this
157 imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic
158 secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn. The
159 educator only draws out the child’s own unapparent love of long division;
160 only leads out the child’s slightly veiled preference for milk pudding to
161 tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation; I have heard the
162 disgraceful suggestion that “educator,” if applied to a Roman
163 schoolmaster, did not mean leading our young functions into freedom; but
164 only meant taking out little boys for a walk. But I am much more certain
165 that I do not agree with the doctrine; I think it would be about as sane
166 to say that the baby’s milk comes from the baby as to say that the baby’s
167 educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creature a
168 collection of forces and functions; but education means producing these in
169 particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or it means
170 nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the whole
171 situation. You may indeed “draw out” squeals and grunts from the child by
172 simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel pastime to
173 which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and watch very
174 patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him. That you
175 have got to put into him; and there is an end of the matter.
176 ---
VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE
112 But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of
113 authority in education; it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say) that
114 parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed.
115 Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming a child’s
116 mind. In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself; for he hates
117 something inseparable from human life. I only mentioned educere and the
118 drawing out of the faculties in order to point out that even this mental
119 trick does not avoid the inevitable idea of parental or scholastic
120 authority. The educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and coercive as
121 the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses. He decides
122 what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be developed. He
123 does not (I suppose) draw out the neglected faculty of forgery. He does
124 not (so far at least) lead out, with timid steps, a shy talent for
125 torture. The only result of all this pompous and precise distinction
126 between the educator and the instructor is that the instructor pokes where
127 he likes and the educator pulls where he likes. Exactly the same
128 intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now
129 we must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence.
130 Education is violent; because it is creative. It is creative because it is
131 human. It is as reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing
132 a picture; as brutal as building a house. In short, it is what all human
133 action is; it is an interference with life and growth. After that it is a
134 trifling and even a jocular question whether we say of this tremendous
135 tormentor, the artist Man, that he puts things into us like an apothecary,
136 or draws things out of us, like a dentist.
137 The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims the right to take his
138 mother Nature under his control; he claims the right to make his child the
139 Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creative authority of man,
140 and the whole courageous raid which we call civilization wavers and falls
141 to pieces. Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that
142 we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to
143 endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially
144 shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our
145 fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean
146 the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and
147 handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the
148 one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you
149 dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are
150 fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that
151 their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they
152 cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. This,
153 of course, is connected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a
154 separate subject. Suffice it to say here that when I say that we should
155 instruct our children, I mean that we should do it, not that Mr. Sully or
156 Professor Earl Barnes should do it. The trouble in too many of our modern
157 schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few,
158 allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they
159 have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private
160 house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the
161 oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and
162 experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day
163 the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The
164 flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered
165 the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a
166 school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even
167 the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it
168 is, may learn something from experience. But this, as I say, is all due to
169 the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system
170 presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern their children.
171 To-day we all use Popular Education as meaning education of the people. I
172 wish I could use it as meaning education by the people.
173 The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators do not avoid
174 the violence of authority an inch more than the old school masters. Nay,
175 it might be maintained that they avoid it less. The old village
176 schoolmaster beat a boy for not learning grammar and sent him out into the
177 playground to play anything he liked; or at nothing, if he liked that
178 better. The modern scientific schoolmaster pursues him into the playground
179 and makes him play at cricket, because exercise is so good for the health.
180 The modern Dr. Busby is a doctor of medicine as well as a doctor of
181 divinity. He may say that the good of exercise is self-evident; but he
182 must say it, and say it with authority. It cannot really be self-evident
183 or it never could have been compulsory. But this is in modern practice a
184 very mild case. In modern practice the free educationists forbid far more
185 things than the old-fashioned educationists. A person with a taste for
186 paradox (if any such shameless creature could exist) might with some
187 plausibility maintain concerning all our expansion since the failure of
188 Luther’s frank paganism and its replacement by Calvin’s Puritanism, that
189 all this expansion has not been an expansion, but the closing in of a
190 prison, so that less and less beautiful and humane things have been
191 permitted. The Puritans destroyed images; the Rationalists forbade fairy
192 tales. Count Tostoi practically issued one of his papal encyclicals
193 against music; and I have heard of modern educationists who forbid
194 children to play with tin soldiers. I remember a meek little madman who
195 came up to me at some Socialist soiree or other, and asked me to use my
196 influence (have I any influence?) against adventure stories for boys. It
197 seems they breed an appetite for blood. But never mind that; one must keep
198 one’s temper in this madhouse. I need only insist here that these things,
199 even if a just deprivation, are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old
200 vetoes and punishments were often idiotic and cruel; though they are much
201 more so in a country like England (where in practice only a rich man
202 decrees the punishment and only a poor man receives it) than in countries
203 with a clearer popular tradition—such as Russia. In Russia flogging
204 is often inflicted by peasants on a peasant. In modern England flogging
205 can only in practice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man. Thus
206 only a few days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course)
207 was sentenced to flogging and imprisonment for five years for having
208 picked up a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d. I am
209 entirely on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested
210 against this almost bestial ignorance about boys. But I do think it a
211 little unfair that these humanitarians, who excuse boys for being robbers,
212 should denounce them for playing at robbers. I do think that those who
213 understand a guttersnipe playing with a piece of coal might, by a sudden
214 spurt of imagination, understand him playing with a tin soldier. To sum it
215 up in one sentence: I think my meek little madman might have understood
216 that there is many a boy who would rather be flogged, and unjustly
217 flogged, than have his adventure story taken away.
218 ---
VII. THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY
115 In short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no it is as
116 high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff with
117 authority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that they
118 are forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that the
119 boy would think so. The average boy’s impression certainly would be simply
120 this: “If your father is a Methodist you must not play with soldiers on
121 Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not play with them even on
122 week days.” All educationists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian. You
123 cannot have free education; for if you left a child free you would not
124 educate him at all. Is there, then, no distinction or difference between
125 the most hide-bound conventionalists and the most brilliant and bizarre
126 innovators? Is there no difference between the heaviest heavy father and
127 the most reckless and speculative maiden aunt? Yes; there is. The
128 difference is that the heavy father, in his heavy way, is a democrat. He
129 does not urge a thing merely because to his fancy it should be done; but,
130 because (in his own admirable republican formula) “Everybody does it.” The
131 conventional authority does claim some popular mandate; the unconventional
132 authority does not. The Puritan who forbids soldiers on Sunday is at least
133 expressing Puritan opinion; not merely his own opinion. He is not a
134 despot; he is a democracy, a tyrannical democracy, a dingy and local
135 democracy perhaps; but one that could do and has done the two ultimate
136 virile things—fight and appeal to God. But the veto of the new
137 educationist is like the veto of the House of Lords; it does not pretend
138 to be representative. These innovators are always talking about the
139 blushing modesty of Mrs. Grundy. I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more
140 modest than they are; but I am sure she is more humble.
141 But there is a further complication. The more anarchic modern may again
142 attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be an
143 enlargement of the mind, an opening of all the organs of receptivity.
144 Light (he says) should be brought into darkness; blinded and thwarted
145 existences in all our ugly corners should merely be permitted to perceive
146 and expand; in short, enlightenment should be shed over darkest London.
147 Now here is just the trouble; that, in so far as this is involved, there
148 is no darkest London. London is not dark at all; not even at night. We
149 have said that if education is a solid substance, then there is none of
150 it. We may now say that if education is an abstract expansion there is no
151 lack of it. There is far too much of it. In fact, there is nothing else.
152 There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only
153 most people are educated wrong. The state schools were not the first
154 schools, but among the last schools to be established; and London had been
155 educating Londoners long before the London School Board. The error is a
156 highly practical one. It is persistently assumed that unless a child is
157 civilized by the established schools, he must remain a barbarian. I wish
158 he did. Every child in London becomes a highly civilized person. But here
159 are so many different civilizations, most of them born tired. Anyone will
160 tell you that the trouble with the poor is not so much that the old are
161 still foolish, but rather that the young are already wise. Without going
162 to school at all, the gutter-boy would be educated. Without going to
163 school at all, he would be over-educated. The real object of our schools
164 should be not so much to suggest complexity as solely to restore
165 simplicity. You will hear venerable idealists declare we must make war on
166 the ignorance of the poor; but, indeed, we have rather to make war on
167 their knowledge. Real educationists have to resist a kind of roaring
168 cataract of culture. The truant is being taught all day. If the children
169 do not look at the large letters in the spelling-book, they need only walk
170 outside and look at the large letters on the poster. If they do not care
171 for the colored maps provided by the school, they can gape at the colored
172 maps provided by the Daily Mail. If they tire of electricity, they can
173 take to electric trams. If they are unmoved by music, they can take to
174 drink. If they will not work so as to get a prize from their school, they
175 may work to get a prize from Prizy Bits. If they cannot learn enough about
176 law and citizenship to please the teacher, they learn enough about them to
177 avoid the policeman. If they will not learn history forwards from the
178 right end in the history books, they will learn it backwards from the
179 wrong end in the party newspapers. And this is the tragedy of the whole
180 affair: that the London poor, a particularly quick-witted and civilized
181 class, learn everything tail foremost, learn even what is right in the way
182 of what is wrong. They do not see the first principles of law in a law
183 book; they only see its last results in the police news. They do not see
184 the truths of politics in a general survey. They only see the lies of
185 politics, at a General Election.
186 But whatever be the pathos of the London poor, it has nothing to do with
187 being uneducated. So far from being without guidance, they are guided
188 constantly, earnestly, excitedly; only guided wrong. The poor are not at
189 all neglected, they are merely oppressed; nay, rather they are persecuted.
190 There are no people in London who are not appealed to by the rich; the
191 appeals of the rich shriek from every hoarding and shout from every
192 hustings. For it should always be remembered that the queer, abrupt
193 ugliness of our streets and costumes are not the creation of democracy,
194 but of aristocracy. The House of Lords objected to the Embankment being
195 disfigured by trams. But most of the rich men who disfigure the
196 street-walls with their wares are actually in the House of Lords. The
197 peers make the country seats beautiful by making the town streets hideous.
198 This, however, is parenthetical. The point is, that the poor in London are
199 not left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and
200 despotic advice. They are not like sheep without a shepherd. They are more
201 like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are shouting at. All the
202 newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the new medicines and new
203 theologies, all the glare and blare of the gas and brass of modern times—it
204 is against these that the national school must bear up if it can. I will
205 not question that our elementary education is better than barbaric
206 ignorance. But there is no barbaric ignorance. I do not doubt that our
207 schools would be good for uninstructed boys. But there are no uninstructed
208 boys. A modern London school ought not merely to be clearer, kindlier,
209 more clever and more rapid than ignorance and darkness. It must also be
210 clearer than a picture postcard, cleverer than a Limerick competition,
211 quicker than the tram, and kindlier than the tavern. The school, in fact,
212 has the responsibility of universal rivalry. We need not deny that
213 everywhere there is a light that must conquer darkness. But here we demand
214 a light that can conquer light.
215 ---
VIII. THE BROKEN RAINBOW
118 I will take one case that will serve both as symbol and example: the case
119 of color. We hear the realists (those sentimental fellows) talking about
120 the gray streets and the gray lives of the poor. But whatever the poor
121 streets are they are not gray; but motley, striped, spotted, piebald and
122 patched like a quilt. Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be monochrome; and
123 there is nothing of the Celtic twilight about it. As a matter of fact, a
124 London gutter-boy walks unscathed among furnaces of color. Watch him walk
125 along a line of hoardings, and you will see him now against glowing green,
126 like a traveler in a tropic forest; now black like a bird against the
127 burning blue of the Midi; now passant across a field gules, like the
128 golden leopards of England. He ought to understand the irrational rapture
129 of that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about “that bluer blue, that greener
130 green.” There is no blue much bluer than Reckitt’s Blue and no blacking
131 blacker than Day and Martin’s; no more emphatic yellow than that of
132 Colman’s Mustard. If, despite this chaos of color, like a shattered
133 rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is not exactly intoxicated with art
134 and culture, the cause certainly does not lie in universal grayness or the
135 mere starving of his senses. It lies in the fact that the colors are
136 presented in the wrong connection, on the wrong scale, and, above all,
137 from the wrong motive. It is not colors he lacks, but a philosophy of
138 colors. In short, there is nothing wrong with Reckitt’s Blue except that
139 it is not Reckitt’s. Blue does not belong to Reckitt, but to the sky;
140 black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to the abyss. Even the finest
141 posters are only very little things on a very large scale. There is
142 something specially irritant in this way about the iteration of
143 advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury; a thing in its
144 nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special irony in these
145 starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to such very little
146 meat. Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungent pleasure. But to
147 look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who should swallow
148 gallons of mustard. He would either die, or lose the taste of mustard
149 altogether.
150 Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings with
151 those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals recorded their
152 dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than a single
153 sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold. The
154 difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature more hasty
155 than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancient artist was
156 serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving the lords. It is that
157 the old artist contrived to convey an impression that colors really were
158 significant and precious things, like jewels and talismanic stones. The
159 color was often arbitrary; but it was always authoritative. If a bird was
160 blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was silver, if a cloud was scarlet,
161 the artist managed to convey that these colors were important and almost
162 painfully intense; all the red red-hot and all the gold tried in the fire.
163 Now that is the spirit touching color which the schools must recover and
164 protect if they are really to give the children any imaginative appetite
165 or pleasure in the thing. It is not so much an indulgence in color; it is
166 rather, if anything, a sort of fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in
167 heraldry as straitly as a green field in peasant proprietorship. It would
168 not fling away gold leaf any more than gold coin; it would not heedlessly
169 pour out purple or crimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed
170 blameless blood. That is the hard task before educationists in this
171 special matter; they have to teach people to relish colors like liquors.
172 They have the heavy business of turning drunkards into wine tasters. If
173 even the twentieth century succeeds in doing these things, it will almost
174 catch up with the twelfth.
175 The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life. Morris and the
176 merely aesthetic mediaevalists always indicated that a crowd in the time
177 of Chaucer would have been brightly clad and glittering, compared with a
178 crowd in the time of Queen Victoria. I am not so sure that the real
179 distinction is here. There would be brown frocks of friars in the first
180 scene as well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second. There would be
181 purple plumes of factory girls in the second scene as well as purple
182 lenten vestments in the first. There would be white waistcoats against
183 white ermine; gold watch chains against gold lions. The real difference is
184 this: that the brown earth-color of the monk’s coat was instinctively
185 chosen to express labor and humility, whereas the brown color of the
186 clerk’s hat was not chosen to express anything. The monk did mean to say
187 that he robed himself in dust. I am sure the clerk does not mean to say
188 that he crowns himself with clay. He is not putting dust on his head, as
189 the only diadem of man. Purple, at once rich and somber, does suggest a
190 triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy. But the factory girl does not
191 intend her hat to express a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy; far
192 from it. White ermine was meant to express moral purity; white waistcoats
193 were not. Gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity; gold watch chains
194 do not. The point is not that we have lost the material hues, but that we
195 have lost the trick of turning them to the best advantage. We are not like
196 children who have lost their paint box and are left alone with a gray
197 lead-pencil. We are like children who have mixed all the colors in the
198 paint-box together and lost the paper of instructions. Even then (I do not
199 deny) one has some fun.
200 Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a pretty
201 perfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals and especially
202 with our modern education. It is the same with ethical education, economic
203 education, every sort of education. The growing London child will find no
204 lack of highly controversial teachers who will teach him that geography
205 means painting the map red; that economics means taxing the foreigner,
206 that patriotism means the peculiarly un-English habit of flying a flag on
207 Empire Day. In mentioning these examples specially I do not mean to imply
208 that there are no similar crudities and popular fallacies upon the other
209 political side. I mention them because they constitute a very special and
210 arresting feature of the situation. I mean this, that there were always
211 Radical revolutionists; but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The
212 modern Conservative no longer conserves. He is avowedly an innovator. Thus
213 all the current defenses of the House of Lords which describe it as a
214 bulwark against the mob, are intellectually done for; the bottom has
215 fallen out of them; because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of
216 the day, the House of Lords is a mob itself; and exceedingly likely to
217 behave like one.
218 ---
IX. THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS
121 Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our main
122 conclusion. The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion,
123 but very decidedly of selection—and rejection. The educationist must
124 find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, it must
125 still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it must be
126 orthodox. The teacher may think it antiquated to have to decide precisely
127 between the faith of Calvin and of Laud, the faith of Aquinas and of
128 Swedenborg; but he still has to choose between the faith of Kipling and of
129 Shaw, between the world of Blatchford and of General Booth. Call it, if
130 you will, a narrow question whether your child shall be brought up by the
131 vicar or the minister or the popish priest. You have still to face that
132 larger, more liberal, more highly civilized question, of whether he shall
133 be brought up by Harmsworth or by Pearson, by Mr. Eustace Miles with his
134 Simple Life or Mr. Peter Keary with his Strenuous Life; whether he shall
135 most eagerly read Miss Annie S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short,
136 whether he shall end up in the mere violence of the S. D. F., or in the
137 mere vulgarity of the Primrose League. They say that nowadays the creeds
138 are crumbling; I doubt it, but at least the sects are increasing; and
139 education must now be sectarian education, merely for practical purposes.
140 Out of all this throng of theories it must somehow select a theory; out of
141 all these thundering voices it must manage to hear a voice; out of all
142 this awful and aching battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to
143 give shape to them, it must manage somehow to trace and to track a star.
144 I have spoken so far of popular education, which began too vague and vast
145 and which therefore has accomplished little. But as it happens there is in
146 England something to compare it with. There is an institution, or class of
147 institutions, which began with the same popular object, which has since
148 followed a much narrower object, but which had the great advantage that it
149 did follow some object, unlike our modern elementary schools.
150 In all these problems I should urge the solution which is positive, or, as
151 silly people say, “optimistic.” I should set my face, that is, against
152 most of the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist. Most
153 educators of the poor seem to think that they have to teach the poor man
154 not to drink. I should be quite content if they teach him to drink; for it
155 is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink that is accountable
156 for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary
157 friends) that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the much
158 more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. I do
159 not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not
160 to shut up churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of
161 learning or destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude
162 effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper.
163 In many cases, let it be remembered, such action is not merely going back
164 to the old ideal, but is even going back to the old reality. It would be a
165 great step forward for the gin shop to go back to the inn. It is
166 incontrovertibly true that to mediaevalize the public schools would be to
167 democratize the public schools. Parliament did once really mean (as its
168 name seems to imply) a place where people were allowed to talk. It is only
169 lately that the general increase of efficiency, that is, of the Speaker,
170 has made it mostly a place where people are prevented from talking. The
171 poor do not go to the modern church, but they went to the ancient church
172 all right; and if the common man in the past had a grave respect for
173 property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of
174 his own. I therefore can claim that I have no vulgar itch of innovation in
175 anything I say about any of these institutions. Certainly I have none in
176 that particular one which I am now obliged to pick out of the list; a type
177 of institution to which I have genuine and personal reasons for being
178 friendly and grateful: I mean the great Tudor foundations, the public
179 schools of England. They have been praised for a great many things,
180 mostly, I am sorry to say, praised by themselves and their children. And
181 yet for some reason no one has ever praised them the one really convincing
182 reason.
183 ---
X. THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
124 The word success can of course be used in two senses. It may be used with
125 reference to a thing serving its immediate and peculiar purpose, as of a
126 wheel going around; or it can be used with reference to a thing adding to
127 the general welfare, as of a wheel being a useful discovery. It is one
128 thing to say that Smith’s flying machine is a failure, and quite another
129 to say that Smith has failed to make a flying machine. Now this is very
130 broadly the difference between the old English public schools and the new
131 democratic schools. Perhaps the old public schools are (as I personally
132 think they are) ultimately weakening the country rather than strengthening
133 it, and are therefore, in that ultimate sense, inefficient. But there is
134 such a thing as being efficiently inefficient. You can make your flying
135 ship so that it flies, even if you also make it so that it kills you. Now
136 the public school system may not work satisfactorily, but it works; the
137 public schools may not achieve what we want, but they achieve what they
138 want. The popular elementary schools do not in that sense achieve anything
139 at all. It is very difficult to point to any guttersnipe in the street and
140 say that he embodies the ideal for which popular education has been
141 working, in the sense that the fresh-faced, foolish boy in “Etons” does
142 embody the ideal for which the headmasters of Harrow and Winchester have
143 been working. The aristocratic educationists have the positive purpose of
144 turning out gentlemen, and they do turn out gentlemen, even when they
145 expel them. The popular educationists would say that they had the far
146 nobler idea of turning out citizens. I concede that it is a much nobler
147 idea, but where are the citizens? I know that the boy in “Etons” is stiff
148 with a rather silly and sentimental stoicism, called being a man of the
149 world. I do not fancy that the errand-boy is rigid with that republican
150 stoicism that is called being a citizen. The schoolboy will really say
151 with fresh and innocent hauteur, “I am an English gentleman.” I cannot so
152 easily picture the errand-boy drawing up his head to the stars and
153 answering, “Romanus civis sum.” Let it be granted that our elementary
154 teachers are teaching the very broadest code of morals, while our great
155 headmasters are teaching only the narrowest code of manners. Let it be
156 granted that both these things are being taught. But only one of them is
157 being learned.
158 It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage to
159 bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never
160 fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a real
161 sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strange
162 inversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for, but
163 does get what he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much longer
164 and reshapes the world much more than the actualities by which he
165 attempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter, which he thought so
166 practical. What endures is the spirit, which he felt to be unattainable
167 and even unutterable. It is exactly his schemes that are not fulfilled; it
168 is exactly his vision that is fulfilled. Thus the ten or twelve paper
169 constitutions of the French Revolution, which seemed so business-like to
170 the framers of them, seem to us to have flown away on the wind as the
171 wildest fancies. What has not flown away, what is a fixed fact in Europe,
172 is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea of a land full of mere
173 citizens all with some minimum of manners and minimum of wealth, the
174 vision of the eighteenth century, the reality of the twentieth. So I think
175 it will generally be with the creator of social things, desirable or
176 undesirable. All his schemes will fail, all his tools break in his hands.
177 His compromises will collapse, his concessions will be useless. He must
178 brace himself to bear his fate; he shall have nothing but his heart’s
179 desire.
180 Now if one may compare very small things with very great, one may say that
181 the English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same sort of
182 success and solid splendor as the French democratic politics. At least
183 they can claim the same sort of superiority over the distracted and
184 fumbling attempts of modern England to establish democratic education.
185 Such success as has attended the public schoolboy throughout the Empire, a
186 success exaggerated indeed by himself, but still positive and a fact of a
187 certain indisputable shape and size, has been due to the central and
188 supreme circumstance that the managers of our public schools did know what
189 sort of boy they liked. They wanted something and they got something;
190 instead of going to work in the broad-minded manner and wanting everything
191 and getting nothing.
192 The only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got. There is
193 something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modern people
194 attack an institution that really does demand reform, they always attack
195 it for the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our public schools,
196 imagining themselves to be very democratic, have exhausted themselves in
197 an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek. I can understand how Greek
198 may be regarded as useless, especially by those thirsting to throw
199 themselves into the cut throat commerce which is the negation of
200 citizenship; but I do not understand how it can be considered
201 undemocratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie has a hatred of Greek.
202 It is obscurely founded on the firm and sound impression that in any
203 self-governing Greek city he would have been killed. But I cannot
204 comprehend why any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch, or Mr. Will Crooks, I
205 or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be opposed to people learning the Greek
206 alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty. Why should Radicals dislike
207 Greek? In that language is written all the earliest and, Heaven knows, the
208 most heroic history of the Radical party. Why should Greek disgust a
209 democrat, when the very word democrat is Greek?
210 A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attacking the
211 athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and
212 brutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice of the
213 English public schools. There is much moral bullying, owing to the general
214 lack of moral courage in the public-school atmosphere. These schools do,
215 upon the whole, encourage physical courage; but they do not merely
216 discourage moral courage, they forbid it. The ultimate result of the thing
217 is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot even endure to wear a
218 bright uniform except when it is blurred and hidden in the smoke of
219 battle. This, like all the affectations of our present plutocracy, is an
220 entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the old aristocrats. The Black
221 Prince would certainly have asked that any knight who had the courage to
222 lift his crest among his enemies, should also have the courage to lift it
223 among his friends. As regards moral courage, then it is not so much that
224 the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly. But
225 physical courage they do, on the whole, support; and physical courage is a
226 magnificent fundamental. The one great, wise Englishman of the eighteenth
227 century said truly that if a man lost that virtue he could never be sure
228 of keeping any other. Now it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies
229 that physical courage is connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and
230 Kiplingite are nowhere more at one than in maintaining this. They have, I
231 believe, some small sectarian quarrel with each other, the one saying that
232 courage must be abandoned because it is connected with cruelty, and the
233 other maintaining that cruelty is charming because it is a part of
234 courage. But it is all, thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body
235 may make a man stupid or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does
236 not make him spiteful. And we may admit heartily (without joining in that
237 perpetual praise which public-school men are always pouring upon
238 themselves) that this does operate to the removal of mere evil cruelty in
239 the public schools. English public school life is extremely like English
240 public life, for which it is the preparatory school. It is like it
241 specially in this, that things are either very open, common and
242 conventional, or else are very secret indeed. Now there is cruelty in
243 public schools, just as there is kleptomania and secret drinking and vices
244 without a name. But these things do not flourish in the full daylight and
245 common consciousness of the school, and no more does cruelty. A tiny trio
246 of sullen-looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some ugly
247 business always; it may be indecent literature, it may be the beginning of
248 drink, it may occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on this stage
249 the bully is not a braggart. The proverb says that bullies are always
250 cowardly, but these bullies are more than cowardly; they are shy.
251 As a third instance of the wrong form of revolt against the public
252 schools, I may mention the habit of using the word aristocracy with a
253 double implication. To put the plain truth as briefly as possible, if
254 aristocracy means rule by a rich ring, England has aristocracy and the
255 English public schools support it. If it means rule by ancient families or
256 flawless blood, England has not got aristocracy, and the public schools
257 systematically destroy it. In these circles real aristocracy, like real
258 democracy, has become bad form. A modern fashionable host dare not praise
259 his ancestry; it would so often be an insult to half the other oligarchs
260 at table, who have no ancestry. We have said he has not the moral courage
261 to wear his uniform; still less has he the moral courage to wear his
262 coat-of-arms. The whole thing now is only a vague hotch-potch of nice and
263 nasty gentlemen. The nice gentleman never refers to anyone else’s father,
264 the nasty gentleman never refers to his own. That is the only difference,
265 the rest is the public-school manner. But Eton and Harrow have to be
266 aristocratic because they consist so largely of parvenues. The public
267 school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats, like an asylum, a place
268 where they go in and never come out. It is a factory for aristocrats; they
269 come out without ever having perceptibly gone in. The poor little private
270 schools, in their old-world, sentimental, feudal style, used to stick up a
271 notice, “For the Sons of Gentlemen only.” If the public schools stuck up a
272 notice it ought to be inscribed, “For the Fathers of Gentlemen only.” In
273 two generations they can do the trick.
274 ---
XI. THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES
127 These are the false accusations; the accusation of classicism, the
128 accusation of cruelty, and the accusation of an exclusiveness based on
129 perfection of pedigree. English public-school boys are not pedants, they
130 are not torturers; and they are not, in the vast majority of cases, people
131 fiercely proud of their ancestry, or even people with any ancestry to be
132 proud of. They are taught to be courteous, to be good tempered, to be
133 brave in a bodily sense, to be clean in a bodily sense; they are generally
134 kind to animals, generally civil to servants, and to anyone in any sense
135 their equal, the jolliest companions on earth. Is there then anything
136 wrong in the public-school ideal? I think we all feel there is something
137 very wrong in it, but a blinding network of newspaper phraseology obscures
138 and entangles us; so that it is hard to trace to its beginning, beyond all
139 words and phrases, the faults in this great English achievement.
140 Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English public
141 school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of
142 telling the truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladies in
143 remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to tell
144 the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment. Very
145 occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies,
146 which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the obscene
147 fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a lie. I may
148 wear another man’s coat, steal another man’s wit, apostatize to another
149 man’s creed, or poison another man’s coffee, all without ever telling a
150 lie. But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the
151 very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the
152 very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a
153 fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his “side”
154 when he is engaged in “playing the game.” He takes sides in his Union
155 debating society to settle whether Charles I ought to have been killed,
156 with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with which he takes sides in
157 the cricket field to decide whether Rugby or Westminster shall win. He is
158 never allowed to admit the abstract notion of the truth, that the match is
159 a matter of what may happen, but that Charles I is a matter of what did
160 happen—or did not. He is Liberal or Tory at the general election
161 exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race. He knows that sport
162 deals with the unknown; he has not even a notion that politics should deal
163 with the known. If anyone really doubts this self-evident proposition,
164 that the public schools definitely discourage the love of truth, there is
165 one fact which I should think would settle him. England is the country of
166 the Party System, and it has always been chiefly run by public-school men.
167 Is there anyone out of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System,
168 whatever its conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by
169 people particularly fond of truth?
170 The very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy. When a man
171 really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a
172 liar. David said in his haste, that is, in his honesty, that all men are
173 liars. It was afterwards, in some leisurely official explanation, that he
174 said the Kings of Israel at least told the truth. When Lord Curzon was
175 Viceroy he delivered a moral lecture to the Indians on their reputed
176 indifference to veracity, to actuality and intellectual honor. A great
177 many people indignantly discussed whether orientals deserved to receive
178 this rebuke; whether Indians were indeed in a position to receive such
179 severe admonition. No one seemed to ask, as I should venture to ask,
180 whether Lord Curzon was in a position to give it. He is an ordinary party
181 politician; a party politician means a politician who might have belonged
182 to either party. Being such a person, he must again and again, at every
183 twist and turn of party strategy, either have deceived others or grossly
184 deceived himself. I do not know the East; nor do I like what I know. I am
185 quite ready to believe that when Lord Curzon went out he found a very
186 false atmosphere. I only say it must have been something startlingly and
187 chokingly false if it was falser than that English atmosphere from which
188 he came. The English Parliament actually cares for everything except
189 veracity. The public-school man is kind, courageous, polite, clean,
190 companionable; but, in the most awful sense of the words, the truth is not
191 in him.
192 This weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools, in the
193 English political system, and to some extent in the English character, is
194 a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of superstitions, of
195 lying legends, of evident delusions clung to through low spiritual
196 self-indulgence. There are so many of these public-school superstitions
197 that I have here only space for one of them, which may be called the
198 superstition of soap. It appears to have been shared by the ablutionary
199 Pharisees, who resembled the English public-school aristocrats in so many
200 respects: in their care about club rules and traditions, in their
201 offensive optimism at the expense of other people, and above all in their
202 unimaginative plodding patriotism in the worst interests of their country.
203 Now the old human common sense about washing is that it is a great
204 pleasure. Water (applied externally) is a splendid thing, like wine.
205 Sybarites bathe in wine, and Nonconformists drink water; but we are not
206 concerned with these frantic exceptions. Washing being a pleasure, it
207 stands to reason that rich people can afford it more than poor people, and
208 as long as this was recognized all was well; and it was very right that
209 rich people should offer baths to poor people, as they might offer any
210 other agreeable thing—a drink or a donkey ride. But one dreadful
211 day, somewhere about the middle of the nineteenth century, somebody
212 discovered (somebody pretty well off) the two great modern truths, that
213 washing is a virtue in the rich and therefore a duty in the poor. For a
214 duty is a virtue that one can’t do. And a virtue is generally a duty that
215 one can do quite easily; like the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes.
216 But in the public-school tradition of public life, soap has become
217 creditable simply because it is pleasant. Baths are represented as a part
218 of the decay of the Roman Empire; but the same baths are represented as
219 part of the energy and rejuvenation of the British Empire. There are
220 distinguished public school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and high
221 politicians, who, in the course of the eulogies which from time to time
222 they pass upon themselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness
223 with moral purity. They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school
224 man is clean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while saints
225 can afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean. As if everyone did not
226 know that the harlot must be clean, because it is her business to
227 captivate, while the good wife may be dirty, because it is her business to
228 clean. As if we did not all know that whenever God’s thunder cracks above
229 us, it is very likely indeed to find the simplest man in a muck cart and
230 the most complex blackguard in a bath.
231 There are other instances, of course, of this oily trick of turning the
232 pleasures of a gentleman into the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon. Sport, like
233 soap, is an admirable thing, but, like soap, it is an agreeable thing. And
234 it does not sum up all mortal merits to be a sportsman playing the game in
235 a world where it is so often necessary to be a workman doing the work. By
236 all means let a gentleman congratulate himself that he has not lost his
237 natural love of pleasure, as against the blase, and unchildlike. But when
238 one has the childlike joy it is best to have also the childlike
239 unconsciousness; and I do not think we should have special affection for
240 the little boy who ever lastingly explained that it was his duty to play
241 Hide and Seek and one of his family virtues to be prominent in Puss in the
242 Corner.
243 Another such irritating hypocrisy is the oligarchic attitude towards
244 mendicity as against organized charity. Here again, as in the case of
245 cleanliness and of athletics, the attitude would be perfectly human and
246 intelligible if it were not maintained as a merit. Just as the obvious
247 thing about soap is that it is a convenience, so the obvious thing about
248 beggars is that they are an inconvenience. The rich would deserve very
249 little blame if they simply said that they never dealt directly with
250 beggars, because in modern urban civilization it is impossible to deal
251 directly with beggars; or if not impossible, at least very difficult. But
252 these people do not refuse money to beggars on the ground that such
253 charity is difficult. They refuse it on the grossly hypocritical ground
254 that such charity is easy. They say, with the most grotesque gravity,
255 “Anyone can put his hand in his pocket and give a poor man a penny; but
256 we, philanthropists, go home and brood and travail over the poor man’s
257 troubles until we have discovered exactly what jail, reformatory,
258 workhouse, or lunatic asylum it will really be best for him to go to.”
259 This is all sheer lying. They do not brood about the man when they get
260 home, and if they did it would not alter the original fact that their
261 motive for discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational one that beggars
262 are a bother. A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that
263 incidental act of charity, especially when the question is as genuinely
264 difficult as is the case of mendicity. But there is something quite
265 pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea that
266 it is not hard enough. If any man will really try talking to the ten
267 beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really so
268 much easier than the labor of writing a check for a hospital.
269 ---
XII. THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS
130 For this deep and disabling reason therefore, its cynical and abandoned
131 indifference to the truth, the English public school does not provide us
132 with the ideal that we require. We can only ask its modern critics to
133 remember that right or wrong the thing can be done; the factory is
134 working, the wheels are going around, the gentlemen are being produced,
135 with their soap, cricket and organized charity all complete. And in this,
136 as we have said before, the public school really has an advantage over all
137 the other educational schemes of our time. You can pick out a
138 public-school man in any of the many companies into which they stray, from
139 a Chinese opium den to a German Jewish dinner-party. But I doubt if you
140 could tell which little match girl had been brought up by undenominational
141 religion and which by secular education. The great English aristocracy
142 which has ruled us since the Reformation is really, in this sense, a model
143 to the moderns. It did have an ideal, and therefore it has produced a
144 reality.
145 We may repeat here that these pages propose mainly to show one thing: that
146 progress ought to be based on principle, while our modern progress is
147 mostly based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed in theory,
148 but by what has been already admitted in practice. That is why the
149 Jacobites are the last Tories in history with whom a high-spirited person
150 can have much sympathy. They wanted a specific thing; they were ready to
151 go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for it. But
152 modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they had
153 not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a reform,
154 Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform,
155 which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of armaments is only
156 a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of
157 sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor
158 children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force; the
159 police shut public houses by twelve o’clock, so soon they must shut them
160 by eleven o’clock; children stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon
161 they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of reason, no momentary
162 return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question,
163 can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by
164 precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution. By this logic of
165 events, the Radical gets as much into a rut as the Conservative. We meet
166 one hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather told him to stand by one
167 stile. We meet another hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather told him
168 only to walk along one lane.
169 I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument, because we
170 have just now come to the place where it is most startlingly and strongly
171 shown. The final proof that our elementary schools have no definite ideal
172 of their own is the fact that they so openly imitate the ideals of the
173 public schools. In the elementary schools we have all the ethical
174 prejudices and exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully copied for
175 people to whom they do not even roughly apply. We have the same wildly
176 disproportionate doctrine of the effect of physical cleanliness on moral
177 character. Educators and educational politicians declare, amid warm
178 cheers, that cleanliness is far more important than all the squabbles
179 about moral and religious training. It would really seem that so long as a
180 little boy washes his hands it does not matter whether he is washing off
181 his mother’s jam or his brother’s gore. We have the same grossly insincere
182 pretense that sport always encourages a sense of honor, when we know that
183 it often ruins it. Above all, we have the same great upperclass assumption
184 that things are done best by large institutions handling large sums of
185 money and ordering everybody about; and that trivial and impulsive charity
186 is in some way contemptible. As Mr. Blatchford says, “The world does not
187 want piety, but soap—and Socialism.” Piety is one of the popular
188 virtues, whereas soap and Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle
189 class.
190 These “healthy" ideals, as they are called, which our politicians and
191 schoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and applied to
192 the democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate to an
193 impoverished democracy. A vague admiration for organized government and a
194 vague distrust of individual aid cannot be made to fit in at all into the
195 lives of people among whom kindness means lending a saucepan and honor
196 means keeping out of the workhouse. It resolves itself either into
197 discouraging that system of prompt and patchwork generosity which is a
198 daily glory of the poor, or else into hazy advice to people who have no
199 money not to give it recklessly away. Nor is the exaggerated glory of
200 athletics, defensible enough in dealing with the rich who, if they did not
201 romp and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any means so much to
202 the point when applied to people, most of whom will take a great deal of
203 exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And for the third
204 case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoric about
205 corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental class cannot, merely
206 as it stands, be applicable to a dustman. A gentleman is expected to be
207 substantially spotless all the time. But it is no more discreditable for a
208 scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver to be wet. A sweep is no
209 more disgraced when he is covered with soot than Michael Angelo when he is
210 covered with clay, or Bayard when he is covered with blood. Nor have these
211 extenders of the public-school tradition done or suggested anything by way
212 of a substitute for the present snobbish system which makes cleanliness
213 almost impossible to the poor; I mean the general ritual of linen and the
214 wearing of the cast-off clothes of the rich. One man moves into another
215 man’s clothes as he moves into another man’s house. No wonder that our
216 educationists are not horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat’s
217 second-hand trousers, when they themselves have only taken up the
218 aristocrat’s second-hand ideas.
219 ---
XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT
133 There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper
134 inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The
135 only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the
136 children are the parents. Yet the English poor have very definite
137 traditions in many ways. They are hidden under embarrassment and irony;
138 and those psychologists who have disentangled them talk of them as very
139 strange, barbaric and secretive things. But, as a matter of fact, the
140 traditions of the poor are mostly simply the traditions of humanity, a
141 thing which many of us have not seen for some time. For instance,
142 workingmen have a tradition that if one is talking about a vile thing it
143 is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is the less likely to be
144 seduced into excusing it. But mankind had this tradition also, until the
145 Puritans and their children, the Ibsenites, started the opposite idea,
146 that it does not matter what you say so long as you say it with long words
147 and a long face. Or again, the educated classes have tabooed most jesting
148 about personal appearance; but in doing this they taboo not only the humor
149 of the slums, but more than half the healthy literature of the world; they
150 put polite nose-bags on the noses of Punch and Bardolph, Stiggins and
151 Cyrano de Bergerac. Again, the educated classes have adopted a hideous and
152 heathen custom of considering death as too dreadful to talk about, and
153 letting it remain a secret for each person, like some private
154 malformation. The poor, on the contrary, make a great gossip and display
155 about bereavement; and they are right. They have hold of a truth of
156 psychology which is at the back of all the funeral customs of the children
157 of men. The way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. The way to endure
158 a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit
159 people who must feel sad at least to feel important. In this the poor are
160 simply the priests of the universal civilization; and in their stuffy
161 feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of
162 Hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games of Patroclus.
163 The things philanthropists barely excuse (or do not excuse) in the life of
164 the laboring classes are simply the things we have to excuse in all the
165 greatest monuments of man. It may be that the laborer is as gross as
166 Shakespeare or as garrulous as Homer; that if he is religious he talks
167 nearly as much about hell as Dante; that if he is worldly he talks nearly
168 as much about drink as Dickens. Nor is the poor man without historic
169 support if he thinks less of that ceremonial washing which Christ
170 dismissed, and rather more of that ceremonial drinking which Christ
171 specially sanctified. The only difference between the poor man of to-day
172 and the saints and heroes of history is that which in all classes
173 separates the common man who can feel things from the great man who can
174 express them. What he feels is merely the heritage of man. Now nobody
175 expects of course that the cabmen and coal-heavers can be complete
176 instructors of their children any more than the squires and colonels and
177 tea merchants are complete instructors of their children. There must be an
178 educational specialist in loco parentis. But the master at Harrow is in
179 loco parentis; the master in Hoxton is rather contra parentem. The vague
180 politics of the squire, the vaguer virtues of the colonel, the soul and
181 spiritual yearnings of a tea merchant, are, in veritable practice,
182 conveyed to the children of these people at the English public schools.
183 But I wish here to ask a very plain and emphatic question. Can anyone
184 alive even pretend to point out any way in which these special virtues and
185 traditions of the poor are reproduced in the education of the poor? I do
186 not wish the coster’s irony to appeal as coarsely in the school as it does
187 in the tap room; but does it appear at all? Is the child taught to
188 sympathize at all with his father’s admirable cheerfulness and slang? I do
189 not expect the pathetic, eager pietas of the mother, with her funeral
190 clothes and funeral baked meats, to be exactly imitated in the educational
191 system; but has it any influence at all on the educational system? Does
192 any elementary schoolmaster accord it even an instant’s consideration or
193 respect? I do not expect the schoolmaster to hate hospitals and C.O.S.
194 centers so much as the schoolboy’s father; but does he hate them at all?
195 Does he sympathize in the least with the poor man’s point of honor against
196 official institutions? Is it not quite certain that the ordinary
197 elementary schoolmaster will think it not merely natural but simply
198 conscientious to eradicate all these rugged legends of a laborious people,
199 and on principle to preach soap and Socialism against beer and liberty? In
200 the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but
201 against the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of the
202 minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead of their
203 Christlike charity, their Shakespearean laughter and their high Homeric
204 reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them mere pedantic copies
205 of the prejudices of the remote rich. They must think a bathroom a
206 necessity because to the lucky it is a luxury; they must swing Swedish
207 clubs because their masters are afraid of English cudgels; and they must
208 get over their prejudice against being fed by the parish, because
209 aristocrats feel no shame about being fed by the nation.
210 ---
XIV. FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION
136 It is the same in the case of girls. I am often solemnly asked what I
137 think of the new ideas about female education. But there are no new ideas
138 about female education. There is not, there never has been, even the
139 vestige of a new idea. All the educational reformers did was to ask what
140 was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls; just as they asked
141 what was being taught to young squires and then taught it to young chimney
142 sweeps. What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong place.
143 Boys play football, why shouldn’t girls play football; boys have school
144 colors, why shouldn’t girls have school-colors; boys go in hundreds to
145 day-schools, why shouldn’t girls go in hundreds to day-schools; boys go to
146 Oxford, why shouldn’t girls go to Oxford—in short, boys grow
147 mustaches, why shouldn’t girls grow mustaches—that is about their
148 notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root
149 query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that, and why, anymore
150 than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and heart of the populace
151 in the popular education. There is nothing but plodding, elaborate,
152 elephantine imitation. And just as in the case of elementary teaching, the
153 cases are of a cold and reckless inappropriateness. Even a savage could
154 see that bodily things, at least, which are good for a man are very likely
155 to be bad for a woman. Yet there is no boy’s game, however brutal, which
156 these mild lunatics have not promoted among girls. To take a stronger
157 case, they give girls very heavy home-work; never reflecting that all
158 girls have home-work already in their homes. It is all a part of the same
159 silly subjugation; there must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of
160 a woman, because it is already a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though
161 a Saxon serf, if he wore that collar of cardboard, would ask for his
162 collar of brass.
163 It will then be answered, not without a sneer, “And what would you prefer?
164 Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with ringlets and
165 smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling a little in
166 Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar albums and
167 painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?” To which I answer,
168 “Emphatically, yes.” I solidly prefer it to the new female education, for
169 this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design, while there is
170 none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in point of practical
171 fact that elegant female would not have been more than a match for most of
172 the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and
173 shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain she was stronger,
174 sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could do one thing neither of
175 them could do: she could coolly and sensibly describe a man. I am not sure
176 that the old great lady who could only smatter Italian was not more
177 vigorous than the new great lady who can only stammer American; nor am I
178 certain that the bygone duchesses who were scarcely successful when they
179 painted Melrose Abbey, were so much more weak-minded than the modern
180 duchesses who paint only their own faces, and are bad at that. But that is
181 not the point. What was the theory, what was the idea, in their old, weak
182 water-colors and their shaky Italian? The idea was the same which in a
183 ruder rank expressed itself in home-made wines and hereditary recipes; and
184 which still, in a thousand unexpected ways, can be found clinging to the
185 women of the poor. It was the idea I urged in the second part of this
186 book: that the world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become
187 artists and perish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that
188 she may conquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she
189 must not be a private soldier in it. I do not think the elegant female
190 with her bad Italian was a perfect product, any more than I think the slum
191 woman talking gin and funerals is a perfect product; alas! there are few
192 perfect products. But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the new
193 woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it is
194 right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal. The
195 slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter of Antigone, the
196 obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady talking bad Italian
197 was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great and golden Italian lady,
198 the Renascence amateur of life, who could be a barrister because she could
199 be anything. Sunken and neglected in the sea of modern monotony and
200 imitation, the types hold tightly to their original truths. Antigone,
201 ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still bury her father. The elegant
202 female, vapid and fading away to nothing, still feels faintly the
203 fundamental difference between herself and her husband: that he must be
204 Something in the City, that she may be everything in the country.
205 There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God;
206 so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower
207 (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and
208 certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of
209 a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is
210 the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman—she
211 understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this,
212 that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious
213 amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and
214 would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run. To smatter the tongues
215 of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with
216 pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that
217 inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer
218 catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is that insanely frivolous
219 thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over
220 her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic
221 and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of
222 inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps
223 the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the
224 universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN
139 (Texto do capítulo)
I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT
142 A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress
143 because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need
144 scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision;
145 it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious
146 cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God, like
147 Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth which it is
148 here relevant to repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the French
149 Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode of
150 argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revolution appealed
151 to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or
152 convenience. If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of
153 man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he did not attack the
154 Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of jus divinum
155 (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he attacked it with
156 the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short, the argument of
157 evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere molded by or fitted
158 to its environment and institutions; in fact, that each people practically
159 got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have. “I
160 know nothing of the rights of men,” he said, “but I know something of the
161 rights of Englishmen.” There you have the essential atheist. His argument
162 is that we have got some protection by natural accident and growth; and
163 why should we profess to think beyond it, for all the world as if we were
164 the images of God! We are born under a House of Lords, as birds under a
165 house of leaves; we live under a monarchy as niggers live under a tropic
166 sun; it is not their fault if they are slaves, and it is not ours if we
167 are snobs. Thus, long before Darwin struck his great blow at democracy,
168 the essential of the Darwinian argument had been already urged against the
169 French Revolution. Man, said Burke in effect, must adapt himself to
170 everything, like an animal; he must not try to alter everything, like an
171 angel. The last weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism
172 and deism of the eighteenth century came in the voice of Sterne, saying,
173 “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.” And Burke, the iron
174 evolutionist, essentially answered, “No; God tempers the shorn lamb to the
175 wind.” It is the lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he either dies
176 or becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught.
177 The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere offense
178 at the grotesque notion of visiting one’s grandfather in a cage in the
179 Regent’s Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and many other
180 grotesque things; they do not much mind making beasts of themselves, and
181 would not much mind having beasts made of their forefathers. The real
182 instinct was much deeper and much more valuable. It was this: that when
183 once one begins to think of man as a shifting and alterable thing, it is
184 always easy for the strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all
185 kinds of unnatural purposes. The popular instinct sees in such
186 developments the possibility of backs bowed and hunch-backed for their
187 burden, or limbs twisted for their task. It has a very well-grounded guess
188 that whatever is done swiftly and systematically will mostly be done by a
189 successful class and almost solely in their interests. It has therefore a
190 vision of inhuman hybrids and half-human experiments much in the style of
191 Mr. Wells’s “Island of Dr. Moreau.” The rich man may come to breeding a
192 tribe of dwarfs to be his jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his
193 hall-porters. Grooms might be born bow-legged and tailors born
194 cross-legged; perfumers might have long, large noses and a crouching
195 attitude, like hounds of scent; and professional wine-tasters might have
196 the horrible expression of one tasting wine stamped upon their faces as
197 infants. Whatever wild image one employs it cannot keep pace with the
198 panic of the human fancy, when once it supposes that the fixed type called
199 man could be changed. If some millionaire wanted arms, some porter must
200 grow ten arms like an octopus; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must
201 go with a hundred trotting legs like a centipede. In the distorted mirror
202 of hypothesis, that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see such monstrous
203 and evil shapes; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left
204 but one nostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the mere
205 notion of adaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so
206 very far from the reality.
207 It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that we
208 should become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Pardon me, that
209 is exactly what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but some of the
210 tamest evolutionists too. There has risen high in recent history an
211 important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of the future—which
212 means the religion of those few weak-minded people who live in the future.
213 It is typical of our time that it has to look for its god through a
214 microscope; and our time has marked a definite adoration of the insect.
215 Like most things we call new, of course, it is not at all new as an idea;
216 it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes bees seriously but I doubt if
217 he would have kept bees as carefully as he wrote about them. The wise king
218 told the sluggard to watch the ant, a charming occupation—for a
219 sluggard. But in our own time has appeared a very different tone, and more
220 than one great man, as well as numberless intelligent men, have in our
221 time seriously suggested that we should study the insect because we are
222 his inferiors. The old moralists merely took the virtues of man and
223 distributed them quite decoratively and arbitrarily among the animals. The
224 ant was an almost heraldic symbol of industry, as the lion was of courage,
225 or, for the matter of that, the pelican of charity. But if the mediaevals
226 had been convinced that a lion was not courageous, they would have dropped
227 the lion and kept the courage; if the pelican is not charitable, they
228 would say, so much the worse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say,
229 permitted the ant to enforce and typify man’s morality; they never allowed
230 the ant to upset it. They used the ant for industry as the lark for
231 punctuality; they looked up at the flapping birds and down at the crawling
232 insects for a homely lesson. But we have lived to see a sect that does not
233 look down at the insects, but looks up at the insects, that asks us
234 essentially to bow down and worship beetles, like ancient Egyptians.
235 Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius always
236 carries a magnifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we have
237 seen the bees not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armies
238 and hierarchies of warriors and queens. Imagination perpetually peers and
239 creeps further down the avenues and vistas in the tubes of science, and
240 one fancies every frantic reversal of proportions; the earwig striding
241 across the echoing plain like an elephant, or the grasshopper coming
242 roaring above our roofs like a vast aeroplane, as he leaps from
243 Hertfordshire to Surrey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple of
244 enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on something wilder than
245 arms or backbones; in which the ribbed columns have the half-crawling look
246 of dim and monstrous caterpillars; or the dome is a starry spider hung
247 horribly in the void. There is one of the modern works of engineering that
248 gives one something of this nameless fear of the exaggerations of an
249 underworld; and that is the curious curved architecture of the under
250 ground railway, commonly called the Twopenny Tube. Those squat archways,
251 without any upright line or pillar, look as if they had been tunneled by
252 huge worms who have never learned to lift their heads. It is the very
253 underground palace of the Serpent, the spirit of changing shape and color,
254 that is the enemy of man.
255 But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic suggestions that writers
256 like Maeterlinck have influenced us in the matter; there is also an
257 ethical side to the business. The upshot of M. Maeterlinck’s book on bees
258 is an admiration, one might also say an envy, of their collective
259 spirituality; of the fact that they live only for something which he calls
260 the Soul of the Hive. And this admiration for the communal morality of
261 insects is expressed in many other modern writers in various quarters and
262 shapes; in Mr. Benjamin Kidd’s theory of living only for the evolutionary
263 future of our race, and in the great interest of some Socialists in ants,
264 which they generally prefer to bees, I suppose, because they are not so
265 brightly colored. Not least among the hundred evidences of this vague
266 insectolatry are the floods of flattery poured by modern people on that
267 energetic nation of the Far East of which it has been said that
268 “Patriotism is its only religion”; or, in other words, that it lives only
269 for the Soul of the Hive. When at long intervals of the centuries
270 Christendom grows weak, morbid or skeptical, and mysterious Asia begins to
271 move against us her dim populations and to pour them westward like a dark
272 movement of matter, in such cases it has been very common to compare the
273 invasion to a plague of lice or incessant armies of locusts. The Eastern
274 armies were indeed like insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in
275 their black nihilism of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to
276 individual life and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their
277 pessimistic courage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders
278 of the East are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth. But
279 never before, I think, have Christians called a Turk a locust and meant it
280 as a compliment. Now for the first time we worship as well as fear; and
281 trace with adoration that enormous form advancing vast and vague out of
282 Asia, faintly discernible amid the mystic clouds of winged creatures hung
283 over the wasted lands, thronging the skies like thunder and discoloring
284 the skies like rain; Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.
285 In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul of the Hive, we of
286 Christendom stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for the
287 essential and distinctive human idea that one good and happy man is an end
288 in himself, that a soul is worth saving. Nay, for those who like such
289 biological fancies it might well be said that we stand as chiefs and
290 champions of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whose
291 cognizance is the backbone, standing for the milk of the individual mother
292 and the courage of the wandering cub, representing the pathetic chivalry
293 of the dog, the humor and perversity of cats, the affection of the
294 tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion. It is more to the point,
295 however, to urge that this mere glorification of society as it is in the
296 social insects is a transformation and a dissolution in one of the
297 outlines which have been specially the symbols of man. In the cloud and
298 confusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as is
299 finally disappearing, the idea of the human family. The hive has become
300 larger than the house, the bees are destroying their captors; what the
301 locust hath left, the caterpillar hath eaten; and the little house and
302 garden of our friend Jones is in a bad way.
303 ---
II. THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND
145 When Lord Morley said that the House of Lords must be either mended or
146 ended, he used a phrase which has caused some confusion; because it might
147 seem to suggest that mending and ending are somewhat similar things. I
148 wish specially to insist on the fact that mending and ending are opposite
149 things. You mend a thing because you like it; you end a thing because you
150 don’t. To mend is to strengthen. I, for instance, disbelieve in oligarchy;
151 so I would no more mend the House of Lords than I would mend a thumbscrew.
152 On the other hand, I do believe in the family; therefore I would mend the
153 family as I would mend a chair; and I will never deny for a moment that
154 the modern family is a chair that wants mending. But here comes in the
155 essential point about the mass of modern advanced sociologists. Here are
156 two institutions that have always been fundamental with mankind, the
157 family and the state. Anarchists, I believe, disbelieve in both. It is
158 quite unfair to say that Socialists believe in the state, but do not
159 believe in the family; thousands of Socialists believe more in the family
160 than any Tory. But it is true to say that while anarchists would end both,
161 Socialists are specially engaged in mending (that is, strengthening and
162 renewing) the state; and they are not specially engaged in strengthening
163 and renewing the family. They are not doing anything to define the
164 functions of father, mother, and child, as such; they are not tightening
165 the machine up again; they are not blackening in again the fading lines of
166 the old drawing. With the state they are doing this; they are sharpening
167 its machinery, they are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are
168 making mere government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than
169 before. While they leave the home in ruins, they restore the hive,
170 especially the stings. Indeed, some schemes of labor and Poor Law reform
171 recently advanced by distinguished Socialists, amount to little more than
172 putting the largest number of people in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble.
173 Apparently, progress means being moved on—by the police.
174 The point it is my purpose to urge might perhaps be suggested thus: that
175 Socialists and most social reformers of their color are vividly conscious
176 of the line between the kind of things that belong to the state and the
177 kind of things that belong to mere chaos or uncoercible nature; they may
178 force children to go to school before the sun rises, but they will not try
179 to force the sun to rise; they will not, like Canute, banish the sea, but
180 only the sea-bathers. But inside the outline of the state their lines are
181 confused, and entities melt into each other. They have no firm instinctive
182 sense of one thing being in its nature private and another public, of one
183 thing being necessarily bond and another free. That is why piece by piece,
184 and quite silently, personal liberty is being stolen from Englishmen, as
185 personal land has been silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century.
186 I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist
187 means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because they both
188 go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a battle-ax and a
189 bootjack. The essential idea of an umbrella is breadth and protection. The
190 essential idea of a stick is slenderness and, partly, attack. The stick is
191 the sword, the umbrella is the shield, but it is a shield against another
192 and more nameless enemy—the hostile but anonymous universe. More
193 properly, therefore, the umbrella is the roof; it is a kind of collapsible
194 house. But the vital difference goes far deeper than this; it branches off
195 into two kingdoms of man’s mind, with a chasm between. For the point is
196 this: that the umbrella is a shield against an enemy so actual as to be a
197 mere nuisance; whereas the stick is a sword against enemies so entirely
198 imaginary as to be a pure pleasure. The stick is not merely a sword, but a
199 court sword; it is a thing of purely ceremonial swagger. One cannot
200 express the emotion in any way except by saying that a man feels more like
201 a man with a stick in his hand, just as he feels more like a man with a
202 sword at his side. But nobody ever had any swelling sentiments about an
203 umbrella; it is a convenience, like a door scraper. An umbrella is a
204 necessary evil. A walking-stick is a quite unnecessary good. This, I
205 fancy, is the real explanation of the perpetual losing of umbrellas; one
206 does not hear of people losing walking sticks. For a walking-stick is a
207 pleasure, a piece of real personal property; it is missed even when it is
208 not needed. When my right hand forgets its stick may it forget its
209 cunning. But anybody may forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a
210 shed that he has stood up in out of the rain. Anybody can forget a
211 necessary thing.
212 If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that the whole
213 Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men can share an
214 umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick. Umbrellas might
215 possibly be replaced by some kind of common awnings covering certain
216 streets from particular showers. But there is nothing but nonsense in the
217 notion of swinging a communal stick; it is as if one spoke of twirling a
218 communal mustache. It will be said that this is a frank fantasia and that
219 no sociologists suggest such follies. Pardon me if they do. I will give a
220 precise parallel to the case of confusion of sticks and umbrellas, a
221 parallel from a perpetually reiterated suggestion of reform. At least
222 sixty Socialists out of a hundred, when they have spoken of common
223 laundries, will go on at once to speak of common kitchens. This is just as
224 mechanical and unintelligent as the fanciful case I have quoted. Sticks
225 and umbrellas are both stiff rods that go into holes in a stand in the
226 hall. Kitchens and washhouses are both large rooms full of heat and damp
227 and steam. But the soul and function of the two things are utterly
228 opposite. There is only one way of washing a shirt; that is, there is only
229 one right way. There is no taste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody
230 says, “Tompkins likes five holes in his shirt, but I must say, give me the
231 good old four holes.” Nobody says, “This washerwoman rips up the left leg
232 of my pyjamas; now if there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg
233 ripped up.” The ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But
234 it is by no means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing
235 back cooked. Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even
236 perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal
237 and may be perverse. I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch
238 common sausages unless they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his
239 sausages fried to rags, yet he does not insist on his shirts being boiled
240 to rags. I do not say that such points of culinary delicacy are of high
241 importance. I do not say that the communal ideal must give way to them.
242 What I say is that the communal ideal is not conscious of their existence,
243 and therefore goes wrong from the very start, mixing a wholly public thing
244 with a highly individual one. Perhaps we ought to accept communal kitchens
245 in the social crisis, just as we should accept communal cat’s-meat in a
246 siege. But the cultured Socialist, quite at his ease, by no means in a
247 siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they were the same kind of
248 thing as communal laundries. This shows at the start that he
249 misunderstands human nature. It is as different as three men singing the
250 same chorus from three men playing three tunes on the same piano.
251 ---
III. THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE
148 In the quarrel earlier alluded to between the energetic Progressive and
149 the obstinate Conservative (or, to talk a tenderer language, between Hudge
150 and Gudge), the state of cross-purposes is at the present moment acute.
151 The Tory says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown; the
152 Socialist very reasonably points out to him that in Cindertown at present
153 there isn’t any family life to preserve. But Hudge, the Socialist, in his
154 turn, is highly vague and mysterious about whether he would preserve the
155 family life if there were any; or whether he will try to restore it where
156 it has disappeared. It is all very confusing. The Tory sometimes talks as
157 if he wanted to tighten the domestic bonds that do not exist; the
158 Socialist as if he wanted to loosen the bonds that do not bind anybody.
159 The question we all want to ask of both of them is the original ideal
160 question, “Do you want to keep the family at all?” If Hudge, the
161 Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for the natural
162 restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family. He must
163 brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having a preference for the
164 private house and a man for the public house. He must manage to endure
165 somehow the idea of a woman being womanly, which does not mean soft and
166 yielding, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very humorous. He must
167 confront without a quiver the notion of a child who shall be childish,
168 that is, full of energy, but without an idea of independence;
169 fundamentally as eager for authority as for information and butter-scotch.
170 If a man, a woman and a child live together any more in free and sovereign
171 households, these ancient relations will recur; and Hudge must put up with
172 it. He can only avoid it by destroying the family, driving both sexes into
173 sexless hives and hordes, and bringing up all children as the children of
174 the state—like Oliver Twist. But if these stern words must be
175 addressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escape a somewhat severe
176 admonition. For the plain truth to be told pretty sharply to the Tory is
177 this, that if he wants the family to remain, if he wants to be strong
178 enough to resist the rending forces of our essentially savage commerce, he
179 must make some very big sacrifices and try to equalize property. The
180 overwhelming mass of the English people at this particular instant are
181 simply too poor to be domestic. They are as domestic as they can manage;
182 they are much more domestic than the governing class; but they cannot get
183 what good there was originally meant to be in this institution, simply
184 because they have not got enough money. The man ought to stand for a
185 certain magnanimity, quite lawfully expressed in throwing money away: but
186 if under given circumstances he can only do it by throwing the week’s food
187 away, then he is not magnanimous, but mean. The woman ought to stand for a
188 certain wisdom which is well expressed in valuing things rightly and
189 guarding money sensibly; but how is she to guard money if there is no
190 money to guard? The child ought to look on his mother as a fountain of
191 natural fun and poetry; but how can he unless the fountain, like other
192 fountains, is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient arts
193 and functions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the woman
194 is out working and the man isn’t; and the child is forced by law to think
195 his schoolmaster’s requirements more important than his mother’s? No,
196 Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club must make
197 up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If they are content
198 to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and
199 there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old game called
200 domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let them have
201 their empire of insects; they will find plenty of Socialists who will give
202 it to them. But if they want a domestic England, they must “shell out,” as
203 the phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than any Radical politician
204 has yet dared to suggest; they must endure burdens much heavier than the
205 Budget and strokes much deadlier than the death duties; for the thing to
206 be done is nothing more nor less than the distribution of the great
207 fortunes and the great estates. We can now only avoid Socialism by a
208 change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save property, we must
209 distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the French
210 Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must revolutionize the
211 nation.
212 ---
IV. A LAST INSTANCE
151 And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the
152 reader’s ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the
153 suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the
154 quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that the
155 way in which they perpetually play into each other’s hands is not an
156 everlasting coincidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic
157 industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of
158 anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge calls
159 the woman’s work “freedom to live her own life.” Gudge wants steady and
160 obedient workmen, Hudge preaches teetotalism—to workmen, not to
161 Gudge—Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take
162 arms against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi that nobody must take arms
163 against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed gentleman;
164 Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of Gudge’s washing to people who
165 can’t practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of
166 sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with
167 the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore Hudge,
168 stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us
169 that the family is something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow.
170 I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious or
171 unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common man
172 homeless. I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets in the gray
173 twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red goblin
174 lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less his because he
175 has never been in it.
176 ---
V. CONCLUSION
154 Here, it may be said, my book ends just where it ought to begin. I have
155 said that the strong centers of modern English property must swiftly or
156 slowly be broken up, if even the idea of property is to remain among
157 Englishmen. There are two ways in which it could be done, a cold
158 administration by quite detached officials, which is called Collectivism,
159 or a personal distribution, so as to produce what is called Peasant
160 Proprietorship. I think the latter solution the finer and more fully
161 human, because it makes each man as somebody blamed somebody for saying of
162 the Pope, a sort of small god. A man on his own turf tastes eternity or,
163 in other words, will give ten minutes more work than is required. But I
164 believe I am justified in shutting the door on this vista of argument,
165 instead of opening it. For this book is not designed to prove the case for
166 Peasant Proprietorship, but to prove the case against modern sages who
167 turn reform to a routine. The whole of this book has been a rambling and
168 elaborate urging of one purely ethical fact. And if by any chance it
169 should happen that there are still some who do not quite see what that
170 point is, I will end with one plain parable, which is none the worse for
171 being also a fact.
172 A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern
173 law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that
174 all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course, all
175 little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are
176 common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors
177 interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular
178 interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into such
179 stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people must not
180 be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean lice in the
181 hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It never seems
182 to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it could be done. As is
183 common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thing is the pivot of
184 the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man (that is, to any
185 man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to a cabman’s daughter
186 ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will
187 not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter of fact apply their rule to a
188 Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will not ask, because I know. They do not
189 because they dare not. But what is the excuse they would urge, what is the
190 plausible argument they would use, for thus cutting and clipping poor
191 children and not rich? Their argument would be that the disease is more
192 likely to be in the hair of poor people than of rich. And why? Because the
193 poor children are forced (against all the instincts of the highly domestic
194 working classes) to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly
195 inefficient system of public instruction; and because in one out of the
196 forty children there may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so
197 ground down by the great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife
198 often has to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after
199 the children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the
200 workingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting
201 (literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on
202 his head, the workingman must allow his little girl’s hair, first to be
203 neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly,
204 to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl’s
205 hair. But he does not count.
206 Upon this simple principle (or rather precedent) the sociological doctor
207 drives gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into the
208 dirt, so that their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear. It
209 would be long and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants; it is
210 easier to cut off the hair of the slaves. In the same way, if it should
211 ever happen that poor children, screaming with toothache, disturbed any
212 schoolmaster or artistic gentleman, it would be easy to pull out all the
213 teeth of the poor; if their nails were disgustingly dirty, their nails
214 could be plucked out; if their noses were indecently blown, their noses
215 could be cut off. The appearance of our humbler fellow-citizen could be
216 quite strikingly simplified before we had done with him. But all this is
217 not a bit wilder than the brute fact that a doctor can walk into the house
218 of a free man, whose daughter’s hair may be as clean as spring flowers,
219 and order him to cut it off. It never seems to strike these people that
220 the lesson of lice in the slums is the wrongness of slums, not the
221 wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the least of it, a rooted thing. Its
222 enemy (like the other insects and oriental armies of whom we have spoken)
223 sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, it is only by eternal institutions
224 like hair that we can test passing institutions like empires. If a house
225 is so built as to knock a man’s head off when he enters it, it is built
226 wrong.
227 The mob can never rebel unless it is conservative, at least enough to have
228 conserved some reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful thought in all
229 our anarchy, that most of the ancient blows struck for freedom would not
230 be struck at all to-day, because of the obscuration of the clean, popular
231 customs from which they came. The insult that brought down the hammer of
232 Wat Tyler might now be called a medical examination. That which Virginius
233 loathed and avenged as foul slavery might now be praised as free love. The
234 cruel taunt of Foulon, “Let them eat grass,” might now be represented as
235 the dying cry of an idealistic vegetarian. Those great scissors of science
236 that would snip off the curls of the poor little school children are
237 ceaselessly snapping closer and closer to cut off all the corners and
238 fringes of the arts and honors of the poor. Soon they will be twisting
239 necks to suit clean collars, and hacking feet to fit new boots. It never
240 seems to strike them that the body is more than raiment; that the Sabbath
241 was made for man; that all institutions shall be judged and damned by
242 whether they have fitted the normal flesh and spirit. It is the test of
243 political sanity to keep your head. It is the test of artistic sanity to
244 keep your hair on.
245 Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all
246 these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over
247 again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl’s hair. That
248 I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a
249 good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those
250 adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race.
251 If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords
252 and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must
253 go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire
254 to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she
255 should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not
256 have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she
257 should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free
258 mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not
259 be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property;
260 because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a
261 revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just
262 watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and
263 altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the
264 kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She
265 is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway
266 and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs
267 of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.
THREE NOTES
157 (Texto do capítulo)
I. ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE
160 Not wishing to overload this long essay with too many parentheses, apart
161 from its thesis of progress and precedent, I append here three notes on
162 points of detail that may possibly be misunderstood.
163 The first refers to the female controversy. It may seem to many that I
164 dismiss too curtly the contention that all women should have votes, even
165 if most women do not desire them. It is constantly said in this connection
166 that males have received the vote (the agricultural laborers for instance)
167 when only a minority of them were in favor of it. Mr. Galsworthy, one of
168 the few fine fighting intellects of our time, has talked this language in
169 the “Nation.” Now, broadly, I have only to answer here, as everywhere in
170 this book, that history is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be
171 reconsidered and even retraced. If we really forced General Elections upon
172 free laborers who definitely disliked General Elections, then it was a
173 thoroughly undemocratic thing to do; if we are democrats we ought to undo
174 it. We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to
175 give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more valuable than
176 the democracy it declares.
177 But this analogy is false, for a plain and particular reason. Many
178 voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless
179 men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded
180 it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could
181 you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dignity by
182 being part of a political mob. If he did not care about a vote it was
183 solely because he did not know about a vote; he did not understand the
184 word any better than Bimetallism. His opposition, if it existed, was
185 merely negative. His indifference to a vote was really indifference.
186 But the female sentiment against the franchise, whatever its size, is
187 positive. It is not negative; it is by no means indifferent. Such women as
188 are opposed to the change regard it (rightly or wrongly) as unfeminine.
189 That is, as insulting certain affirmative traditions to which they are
190 attached. You may think such a view prejudiced; but I violently deny that
191 any democrat has a right to override such prejudices, if they are popular
192 and positive. Thus he would not have a right to make millions of Moslems
193 vote with a cross if they had a prejudice in favor of voting with a
194 crescent. Unless this is admitted, democracy is a farce we need scarcely
195 keep up. If it is admitted, the Suffragists have not merely to awaken an
196 indifferent, but to convert a hostile majority.
197 ---
II. ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION
163 On re-reading my protest, which I honestly think much needed, against our
164 heathen idolatry of mere ablution, I see that it may possibly be misread.
165 I hasten to say that I think washing a most important thing to be taught
166 both to rich and poor. I do not attack the positive but the relative
167 position of soap. Let it be insisted on even as much as now; but let other
168 things be insisted on much more. I am even ready to admit that cleanliness
169 is next to godliness; but the moderns will not even admit godliness to be
170 next to cleanliness. In their talk about Thomas Becket and such saints and
171 heroes they make soap more important than soul; they reject godliness
172 whenever it is not cleanliness. If we resent this about remote saints and
173 heroes, we should resent it more about the many saints and heroes of the
174 slums, whose unclean hands cleanse the world. Dirt is evil chiefly as
175 evidence of sloth; but the fact remains that the classes that wash most
176 are those that work least. Concerning these, the practical course is
177 simple; soap should be urged on them and advertised as what it is—a
178 luxury. With regard to the poor also the practical course is not hard to
179 harmonize with our thesis. If we want to give poor people soap we must set
180 out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich
181 enough to be clean, then emphatically we must do what we did with the
182 saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.
183 ---
III. ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP
166 I have not dealt with any details touching distributed ownership, or its
167 possibility in England, for the reason stated in the text. This book deals
168 with what is wrong, wrong in our root of argument and effort. This wrong
169 is, I say, that we will go forward because we dare not go back. Thus the
170 Socialist says that property is already concentrated into Trusts and
171 Stores: the only hope is to concentrate it further in the State. I say the
172 only hope is to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent and return; the only
173 step forward is the step backward.
174 But in connection with this distribution I have laid myself open to
175 another potential mistake. In speaking of a sweeping redistribution, I
176 speak of decision in the aim, not necessarily of abruptness in the means.
177 It is not at all too late to restore an approximately rational state of
178 English possessions without any mere confiscation. A policy of buying out
179 landlordism, steadily adopted in England as it has already been adopted in
180 Ireland (notably in Mr. Wyndham’s wise and fruitful Act), would in a very
181 short time release the lower end of the see-saw and make the whole plank
182 swing more level. The objection to this course is not at all that it would
183 not do, only that it will not be done. If we leave things as they are,
184 there will almost certainly be a crash of confiscation. If we hesitate, we
185 shall soon have to hurry. But if we start doing it quickly we have still
186 time to do it slowly.
187 This point, however, is not essential to my book. All I have to urge
188 between these two boards is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and that
189 I dislike Socialism because it will (according to Socialists) be so like
190 that shop. It is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not object to
191 Socialism because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it will
192 leave it so horribly the same.