First and Last Things
by
H. G. Wells
Part 3 out of 3
military organization only, has it become possible to conceive of peace.
This violence was a necessary phase in human and indeed in all animal
development. Among low types of men and animals it seems an inevitable
condition of the vigour of the species and the beauty of life. The more
vital and various individual must lead and prevail, leave progeny and
make the major contribution to the synthesis of the race; the weaker
individual must take a subservient place and leave no offspring. That
means in practice that the former must directly or indirectly kill the
latter until some mitigated but equally effectual substitute for that
killing is invented. That duel disappears from life, the fight of the
beasts for food and the fight of the bulls for the cows, only by virtue
of its replacement by new forms of competition. With the development of
primitive war we have such a replacement. The competition becomes a
competition to serve and rule in the group, the stronger take the
leadership and the larger share of life, and the weaker co-operate in
subordination, they waive and compromise the conflict and use their
conjoint strength against a common rival.
Competition is a necessary condition of progressive life. I do not know
if so far I have made that belief sufficiently clear in these
confessions. Perhaps in my anxiety to convey my idea of a human
synthesis I have not sufficiently insisted upon the part played by
competition in that synthesis. But the implications of the view that I
have set forth are fairly plain. Every individual, I have stated, is an
experiment for the synthesis of the species, and upon that idea my
system of conduct so far as it is a system is built. Manifestly the
individual's function is either self-development, service and
reproduction, or failure and an end.
With moral and intellectual development the desire to serve and
participate in a collective purpose arises to control the blind and
passionate impulse to survival and reproduction that the struggle for
life has given us, but it does not abolish the fact of selection, of
competition. I contemplate no end of competition. But for competition
that is passionate, egoistic and limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful,
I desire to see competition that is controlled and fair-minded and
devoted, men and women doing their utmost with themselves and making
their utmost contribution to the specific accumulation, but in the end
content to abide by a verdict.
The whole development of civilization, it seems to me, consists in the
development of adequate tests of survival and of an intellectual and
moral atmosphere about those tests so that they shall be neither cruel
nor wasteful. If the test is not to be 'are you strong enough to kill
everyone you do not like?' that will only be because it will ask still
more comprehensively and with regard to a multitude of qualities other
than brute killing power, 'are you adding worthily to the synthesis by
existence and survival?'
I am very clear in my mind on this perpetual need of competition. I
admit that upon that turns the practicability of all the great series of
organizing schemes that are called Socialism. The Socialist scheme must
show a system in which predominance and reproduction are correlated with
the quality and amount of an individual's social contribution, and so
far I acknowledge it is only in the most general terms that this can be
claimed as done. We Socialists have to work out all these questions far
more thoroughly than we have done hitherto. We owe that to our movement
and the world.
It is no adequate answer to our antagonists to say, indeed it is a mere
tu quoque to say, that the existing system does not present such a
correlation, that it puts a premium on secretiveness and self-seeking
and a discount on many most necessary forms of social service. That is a
mere temporary argument for a delay in judgment.
The whole history of humanity seems to me to present a spectacle of this
organizing specialization of competition, this replacement of the
indiscriminate and collectively blind struggle for life by an organized
and collectively intelligent development of life. We see a secular
replacement of brute conflict by the law, a secular replacement of
indiscriminate brute lust by marriage and sexual taboos, and now with
the development of Socialistic ideas and methods, the steady replacement
of blind industrial competition by public economic organization. And
moreover there is going on a great educational process bringing a
greater and greater proportion of the minds of the community into
relations of understanding and interchange.
Just as this process of organization proceeds, the violent and chaotic
conflict of individuals and presently of groups of individuals
disappears, personal violence, private war, cut-throat competition,
local war, each in turn is replaced by a more efficient and more
economical method of survival, a method of survival giving constantly
and selecting always more accurately a finer type of survivor.
I might compare the social synthesis to crystals growing out of a fluid
matrix. It is where the growing order of the crystals has as yet not
spread that the old resource to destruction and violent personal or
associated acts remains.
But this metaphor of crystals is a very inadequate one, because crystals
have no will in themselves; nor do crystals, having failed to grow in
some particular form, presently modify that form more or less and try
again. I see the organizing of forces, not simply law and police which
are indeed paid mercenaries from the region of violence, but legislation
and literature, teaching and tradition, organized religion, getting
themselves and the social structure together, year after year and age
after age, halting, failing, breaking up in order to try again. And it
seems to me that the amount of lawlessness and crime, the amount of
waste and futility, the amount of war and war possibility and war danger
in the world are just the measure of the present inadequacy of the
world's system of collective organization to the purpose before them.
It follows from this very directly that only one thing can end war on
the earth and that is a subtle mental development, an idea, the
development of the idea of the world commonweal in the collective mind.
The only real method of abolishing war is to perceive it, to realize it,
to express it, to think it out and think about it, to make all the world
understand its significance, and to clear and preserve its significant
functions. In human affairs to understand an evil is to abolish it; it
is the only way to abolish any evil that arises out of the untutored
nature of man. Which brings me back here again to my already repeated
persuasion, that in expressing things, rendering things to each other,
discussing our differences, clearing up the metaphysical conceptions
upon which differences are discussed, and in a phrase evolving the
collective mind, lies not only the cures of war and poverty but the
general form of all a man's duty and the essential work of mankind.
3.19. MODERN WAR.
In our contemporary world, in our particular phase, military and naval
organization loom up, colossal and unprecedent facts. They have the
effect of an overhanging disaster that grows every year more tremendous,
every year in more sinister contrast with the increasing securities and
tolerations of the everyday life. It is impossible to imagine now what a
great war in Europe would be like; the change in material and method has
been so profound since the last cycle of wars ended with the downfall of
the Third Napoleon. But there can be little or no doubt that it would
involve a destruction of property and industrial and social
disorganization of the most monstrous dimensions. No man, I think, can
mark the limits of the destruction of a great European conflict were it
to occur at the present time; and the near advent of practicable flying
machines opens a whole new world of frightful possibilities.
For my own part I can imagine that a collision between such powers as
Great Britain, Germany or America, might very well involve nearly every
other power in the world, might shatter the whole fabric of credit upon
which our present system of economics rests and put back the orderly
progress of social construction for a vast interval of time. One figures
great towns red with destruction while giant airships darken the sky,
one pictures the crash of mighty ironclads, the bursting of tremendous
shells fired from beyond the range of sight into unprotected cities. One
thinks of congested ways swarming with desperate fighters, of torrents
of fugitives and of battles gone out of the control of their generals
into unappeasable slaughter. There is a vision of interrupted
communications, of wrecked food trains and sunken food ships, of vast
masses of people thrown out of employment and darkly tumultuous in the
streets, of famine and famine-driven rioters. What modern population
will stand a famine? For the first time in the history of warfare the
rear of the victor, the rear of the fighting line becomes insecure,
assailable by flying machines and subject to unprecedented and
unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these
new conditions may not release in the soul of man. A conspiracy of
adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no
effectual guarantee that it could not occur.
But in spite of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good
than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the
last half century. I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is
lethargy. It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be
brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to public
education and to a thousand interferences with their private
self-seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera was necessary before men
could be brought to consent to public sanitation, so perhaps the dread
of foreign violence is an unavoidable spur in an age of chaotic
industrial production in order that men may be brought to subserve the
growth of a State whose purpose might otherwise be too high for them to
understand. Men must be forced to care for fleets and armies until they
have learnt to value cities and self development and a beautiful social
life.
The real danger of modern war lies not in the disciplined power of the
fighting machine but in the undisciplined forces in the collective mind
that may set that machine in motion. It is not that our guns and ships
are marvellously good, but that our press and political organizations
are haphazard growths entirely inferior to them. If this present phase
of civilization should end in a debacle, if presently humanity finds
itself beginning again at a lower level of organization, it will not be
because we have developed these enormous powers of destruction but
because we have failed to develop adequate powers of control for them
and collective determination. This panoply of war waits as the test of
our progress towards the realization of that collective mind which I
hold must ultimately direct the evolution of our specific being. It is
here to measure our incoherence and error, and in the measure of those
defects to refer us back to our studies.
Just as we understand does war become needless.
But I do not think that war and military organization will so much
disappear as change its nature as the years advance. I think that the
phase of universal military service we seem to be approaching is one
through which the mass of mankind may have to pass, learning something
that can be learnt in no other way, that the uniforms and flags, the
conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and
devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion and universal
responsibility, will remain a permanent acquisition, though the last
ammunition has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic display that
welcomed the coming of the ultimate Peace.
3.20. OF ABSTINENCES AND DISCIPLINES.
From these large issues of conduct, let me come now to more intimate
things, to one's self control, the regulation of one's personal life.
And first about abstinences and disciplines.
I have already confessed (Chapter 2.6) that my nature is one that
dislikes abstinences and is wearied by and wary of excess.
I do not feel that it is right to suppress altogether any part of one's
being. In itself abstinence seems to me a refusal to experience, and
that, upon the lines of thought I follow, is to say that abstinence for
its own sake is evil. But for an end all abstinences are permissible,
and if the kinetic type of believer finds both his individual and his
associated efficiency enhanced by a systematic discipline, if he is
convinced that he must specialize because of the discursiveness of his
motives, because there is something he wants to do or be so good that
the rest of them may very well be suppressed for its sake, then he must
suppress. But the virtue is in what he gets done and not in what he does
not do. Reasonable fear is a sound reason for abstinence, as when a man
has a passion like a lightly sleeping maniac that the slightest
indulgence will arouse. Then he must needs adopt heroic abstinence, and
even more so must he take to preventive restraint if he sees any motive
becoming unruly and urgent and troublesome. Fear is a sound reason for
abstinence and so is love. Many who have sensitive imaginations nowadays
very properly abstain from meat because of butchery. And it is often
needful, out of love and brotherhood, to abstain from things harmless to
oneself because they are inconveniently alluring to others linked to us.
The moderate drinker who sits at table sipping his wine in the sight of
one he knows to be a potential dipsomaniac is at best an unloving fool.
But mere abstinence and the doing of barren toilsome unrewarding things
for the sake of the toil, is a perversion of one's impulses. There is
neither honour nor virtue nor good in that.
I do not believe in negative virtues. I think the ideas of them arise
out of the system of metaphysical errors I have roughly analyzed in my
first Book, out of the inherent tendency of the mind to make the
relative absolute and to convert quantitative into qualitative
differences. Our minds fall very readily under the spell of such
unmitigated words as Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay,
absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact
is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is
dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has a
tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts. It was
blindness to that which set men stoning the woman taken in adultery.
They forgot what they were made of. This stupidity, this unreasonable
idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and
exclusions, with partial suicides and secret shames. But we are born
impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang
from any saint's decay, and the chastity of a monk or nun is but
introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these conditions
and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our confusions,
gather such constructive experience, as we may.
There is a mass of real superstition upon these points, a belief in a
magic purity, in magic personalities who can say:--
My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure,
and wonderful clairvoyant innocents like the young man in Mr. Kipling's
"Finest Story in the World."
There is a lurking disposition to believe, even among those who lead the
normal type of life, that the abstinent and chastely celibate are
exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The wildest claims are made.
But indeed it is true for all who can see the facts of life simply and
plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, various creature and can
draw his strength from a hundred varieties of nourishment. He has
physiological idiosyncrasies too that are indifferent to biological
classifications and moral generalities. It is not true that his
absorbent vessels begin their task as children begin the guessing game,
by asking, "Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?" He responds to
stimulation and recuperates after the exhaustion of his response, and
his being is singularly careless whether the stimulation comes as a drug
or stimulant, or as anger or music or noble appeals.
Most people speak of drugs in the spirit of that admirable firm of
soap-boilers which assures its customers that the soap they make
"contains no chemicals." Drugs are supposed to be a mystic diabolical
class of substance, remote from and contrasting in their nature with all
other things. So they banish a tonic from the house and stuff their
children with manufactured cereals and chocolate creams. The drunken
helot of this system of absurdities is the Christian Scientist who
denies healing only to those who have studied pathology, and declares
that anything whatever put into a bottle and labelled with directions
for its use by a doctor is thereby damnable and damned. But indeed all
drugs and all the things of life have their uses and dangers, and there
is no wholesale truth to excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness
in these matters. Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless
artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are
matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish to make anything that is
stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely
to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a need that it may become
painful to check or control. The moral rule of my standards is
irregularity. If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue
of sins by asking: "are you a man of regular life?" And I would charge
my penitent to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving
irregularity; to fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork
and beans or give up smoking or spend a month with publicans and
sinners. Right conduct for the common unspecialized man lies delicately
adjusted between defect and excess as a watch is adjusted and adjustable
between fast and slow. We none of us altogether and always keep the
balance or are altogether safe from losing it. We swing, balancing and
adjusting, along our path. Life is that, and abstinence is for the most
part a mere evasion of life.
3.21. ON FORGETTING, AND THE NEED OF PRAYER, READING, DISCUSSION AND
WORSHIP.
One aspect of life I had very much in mind when I planned those Samurai
disciplines of mine. It was forgetting.
We forget.
Even after we have found Salvation, we have to keep hold of Salvation;
believing, we must continue to believe. We cannot always be at a high
level of noble emotion. We have clambered on the ship of Faith and found
our place and work aboard, and even while we are busied upon it, behold
we are back and drowning in the sea of chaotic things.
Every religious body, every religious teacher, has appreciated this
difficulty and the need there is of reminders and renewals. Faith needs
restatement and revival as the body needs food. And since the Believer
is to seek much experience and be a judge of less or more in many
things, it is particularly necessary that he should keep hold upon a
living Faith.
How may he best do this?
I think we may state it as a general duty that he must do whatever he
can to keep his faith constantly alive. But beyond that, what a man must
do depends almost entirely upon his own intellectual character. Many
people of a regular type of mind can refresh themselves by some
recurrent duty, by repeating a daily prayer, by daily reading or
re-reading some devotional book. With others constant repetition leads
to a mental and spiritual deadening, until beautiful phrases become
unmeaning, eloquent statements inane and ridiculous,--matter for parody.
All who can, I think, should pray and should read and re-read what they
have found spiritually helpful, and if they know of others of kindred
dispositions and can organize these exercises, they should do so.
Collective worship again is a necessity for many Believers. For many,
the public religious services of this or that form of Christianity
supply an atmosphere rich in the essential quality of religion and
abounding in phrases about the religious life, mellow from the use of
centuries and almost immediately applicable. It seems to me that if one
can do so, one should participate in such public worship and habituate
oneself to read back into it that collective purpose and conscience it
once embodied.
Very much is to be said for the ceremony of Holy Communion or the Mass,
for those whom accident or scruples do not debar. I do not think your
modern liberal thinkers quite appreciate the finer aspects of this, the
one universal service of the Christian Church. Some of them are set
forth very finely by a man who has been something of a martyr for
conscience' sake, and is for me a hero as well as a friend, in a world
not rich in heroes, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his book, "The Meaning
of the Mass."
With others again, Faith can be most animated by writing, by confession,
by discussion, by talk with friends or antagonists.
One or other or all of these things the Believer must do, for the mind
is a living and moving process, and the thing that lies inert in it is
presently covered up by new interests and lost. If you make a sort of
King Log of your faith, presently something else will be sitting upon
it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving, King de facto of your
soul, directing it back to anarchy.
For many types that, however, is exactly what happens with public
worship. They DO get a King Log in ceremony. And if you deliberately
overcome and suppress your perception of and repugnance to the
perfunctoriness of religion in nine-tenths of the worshippers about you,
you may be destroying at the same time your own intellectual and moral
sensitiveness. But I am not suggesting that you should force yourself to
take part in public worship against your perceptions, but only that if
it helps you to worship you should not hesitate to do so.
We deal here with a real need that is not to be fettered by any general
prescription. I have one Cambridge friend who finds nothing so uplifting
in the world as the atmosphere of the afternoon service in the choir of
King's College Chapel, and another, a very great and distinguished and
theologically sceptical woman, who accustomed herself for some time to
hear from a distant corner the evening service in St. Paul's Cathedral
and who would go great distances to do that.
Many people find an exaltation and broadening of the mind in mountain
scenery and the starry heavens and the wide arc of the sea; and as I
have already said, it was part of the disciplines of these Samurai of
mine that yearly they should go apart for at least a week of solitary
wandering and meditation in lonely and desolate places. Music again is a
frequent means of release from the narrow life as it closes about us.
One man I know makes an anthology into which he copies to re-read any
passage that stirs and revives in him the sense of broad issues. Others
again seem able to refresh their nobility of outlook in the atmosphere
of an intense personal love.
Some of us seem to forget almost as if it were an essential part of
ourselves. Such a man as myself, irritable, easily fatigued and bored,
versatile, sensuous, curious, and a little greedy for experience, is
perpetually losing touch with his faith, so that indeed I sometimes turn
over these pages that I have written and come upon my declarations and
confessions with a sense of alien surprise.
It may be, I say, that for some of us forgetting is the normal process,
that one has to believe and forget and blunder and learn something and
regret and suffer and so come again to belief much as we have to eat and
grow hungry and eat again. What these others can get in their temples
we, after our own manner, must distil through sleepless and lonely
nights, from unavoidable humiliations, from the smarting of bruised
shins.
3.22. DEMOCRACY AND ARISTOCRACY.
And now having dealt with the general form of a man's duty and with his
duty to himself, let me come to his attitude to his individual
fellow-men.
The broad principles determining that attitude are involved in things
already written in this book. The belief in a collective being gathering
experience and developing will, to which every life is subordinated,
renders the cruder conception of aristocracy, the idea of a select life
going on amidst a majority of trivial and contemptible persons who "do
not exist," untenable. It abolishes contempt. Indeed to believe at all
in a comprehensive purpose in things is to abandon that attitude and all
the habits and acts that imply it. But a belief in universal
significance does not altogether preclude a belief in an aristocratic
method of progress, in the idea of the subordination of a number of
individuals to others who can utilize their lives and help and
contributory achievements in the general purpose. To a certain extent,
indeed, this last conception is almost inevitable. We must needs so
think of ourselves in relation to plants and animals, and I see no
reason why we should not think so of our relations to other men. There
are clearly great differences in the capacity and range of experience of
man and man and in their power of using and rendering their experiences
for the racial synthesis. Vigorous persons do look naturally for help
and service to persons of less initiative, and we are all more or less
capable of admiration and hero-worship and pleased to help and give
ourselves to those we feel to be finer or better or completer or more
forceful and leaderly than ourselves. This is natural and inevitable
aristocracy.
For that reason it is not to be organized. We organize things that are
not inevitable, but this is clearly a complex matter of accident and
personalities for which there can be no general rule. All organized
aristocracy is manifestly begotten by that fallacy of classification my
Metaphysical book set itself to expose. Its effect is, and has been in
all cases, to mask natural aristocracy, to draw the lines by wholesale
and wrong, to bolster up weak and ineffectual persons in false positions
and to fetter or hamper strong and vigorous people. The false aristocrat
is a figure of pride and claims, a consumer followed by dupes. He is
proudly secretive, pretending to aims beyond the common understanding.
The true aristocrat is known rather than knows; he makes and serves. He
exacts no deference. He is urgent to makes others share what he knows
and wants and achieves. He does not think of others as his but as the
End's.
There is a base democracy just as there is a base aristocracy, the
swaggering, aggressive disposition of the vulgar soul that admits
neither of superiors nor leaders. Its true name is insubordination. It
resents rules and refinements, delicacies, differences and organization.
It dreams that its leaders are its delegates. It takes refuge from all
superiority, all special knowledge, in a phantom ideal, the People, the
sublime and wonderful People. "You can fool some of the people all the
time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the
people all the time," expresses I think quite the quintessence of this
mystical faith, this faith in which men take refuge from the demand for
order, discipline and conscious light. In England it has never been of
any great account, but in America the vulgar individualist's
self-protective exaltation of an idealized Common Man has worked and is
working infinite mischief.
In politics the crude democratic faith leads directly to the submission
of every question, however subtle and special its issues may be, to a
popular vote. The community is regarded as a consultative committee of
profoundly wise, alert and well-informed Common Men. Since the common
man is, as Gustave le Bon has pointed out, a gregarious animal,
collectively rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty and shallow, the
practical outcome of political democracy in all large communities under
modern conditions is to put power into the hands of rich newspaper
proprietors, advertising producers and the energetic wealthy generally
who are best able to flood the collective mind freely with the
suggestions on which it acts.
But democracy has acquired a better meaning than its first crude
intentions--there never was a theory started yet in the human mind that
did not beget a finer offspring than itself--and the secondary meaning
brings it at last into entire accordance with the subtler conception of
aristocracy. The test of this quintessential democracy is neither a
passionate insistence upon voting and the majority rule, nor an arrogant
bearing towards those who are one's betters in this aspect or that, but
fellowship. The true democrat and the true aristocrat meet and are one
in feeling themselves parts of one synthesis under one purpose and one
scheme. Both realize that self-concealment is the last evil, both make
frankness and veracity the basis of their intercourse. The general
rightness of living for you and others and for others and you is to
understand them to the best of your ability and to make them all, to the
utmost limits of your capacity of expression and their understanding and
sympathy, participators in your act and thought.
3.23. ON DEBTS OF HONOUR.
My ethical disposition is all against punctilio and I set no greater
value on unblemished honour than I do on purity. I never yet met a man
who talked proudly of his honour who did not end by cheating or trying
to cheat me, nor a code of honour that did not impress me as a
conspiracy against the common welfare and purpose in life. There is
honour among thieves, and I think it might well end there as an
obligation in conduct. The soldier who risks a life he owes to his army
in a duel upon some silly matter of personal pride is no better to me
than the clerk who gambles with the money in his master's till. When I
was a boy I once paid a debt of honour, and it is one of the things I am
most ashamed of. I had played cards into debt and I still remember
burningly how I went flushed and shrill-voiced to my mother and got the
money she could so ill afford to give me. I would not pay such a debt of
honour now. If I were to wake up one morning owing big sums that I had
staked overnight I would set to work at once by every means in my power
to evade and repudiate that obligation. Such money as I have I owe under
our present system to wife and sons and my work and the world, and I see
no valid reason why I should hand it over to Smith because he and I have
played the fool and rascal and gambled. Better by far to accept that
fact and be for my own part published fool and rascal.
I have never been able to understand the sentimental spectacle of sons
toiling dreadfully and wasting themselves upon mere money-making to save
the secret of a father's peculations and the "honour of the family," or
men conspiring to weave a wide and mischievous net of lies to save the
"honour" of a woman. In the conventional drama the preservation of the
honour of a woman seems an adequate excuse for nearly any offence short
of murder; the preservation that is to say of the appearance of
something that is already gone. Here it is that I do definitely part
company with the false aristocrat who is by nature and intent a humbug
and fabricator of sham attitudes, and ally myself with democracy. Fact,
valiantly faced, is of more value than any reputation. The false
aristocrat is robed to the chin and unwashed beneath, the true goes
stark as Apollo. The false is ridiculous with undignified insistence
upon his dignity; the true says like God, "I am that I am."
3.24. THE IDEA OF JUSTICE.
One word has so far played a very little part in this book, and that is
the word Justice.
Those who have read the opening book on Metaphysics will perhaps see
that this is a necessary corollary of the system of thought developed
therein. In my philosophy, with its insistence upon uniqueness and
marginal differences and the provisional nature of numbers and classes,
there is little scope for that blind-folded lady with the balances,
seeking always exact equivalents. Nowhere in my system of thought is
there work for the idea of Rights and the conception of conscientious
litigious-spirited people exactly observing nicely defined
relationships.
You will note, for example, that I base my Socialism on the idea of a
collective development and not on the "right" of every man to his own
labour, or his "right" to work, or his "right" to subsistence. All these
ideas of "rights" and of a social "contract" however implicit are merely
conventional ways of looking at things, conventions that have arisen in
the mercantile phase of human development.
Laws and rights, like common terms in speech, are provisional things,
conveniences for taking hold of a number of cases that would otherwise
be unmanageable. The appeal to Justice is a necessarily inadequate
attempt to de-individualize a case, to eliminate the self's biassed
attitude. I have declared that it is my wilful belief that everything
that exists is significant and necessary. The idea of Justice seems to
me a defective, quantitative application of the spirit of that belief to
men and women. In every case you try and discover and act upon a
plausible equity that must necessarily be based on arbitrary
assumptions.
There is no equity in the universe, in the various spectacle outside our
minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever
engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard,
against finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed
in the balance and found wanting.
So, as the recognition of this has grown, Justice has been tempered with
Mercy, which indeed is no more than an attempt to equalize things by
making the factors of the very defect that is condemned, its
condonation. The modern mind fluctuates uncertainly somewhere between
these extremes, now harsh and now ineffectual.
To me there seems no validity in these quasi-absolute standards.
A man seeks and obeys standards of equity simply to economize his moral
effort, not because there is anything true or sublime about justice, but
because he knows he is too egoistic and weak-minded and obsessed to do
any perfect thing at all, because he cannot trust himself with his own
transitory emotions unless he trains himself beforehand to observe a
predetermined rule. There is scarcely an eventuality in life that
without the help of these generalizations would not exceed the average
man's intellectual power and moral energy, just as there is scarcely an
idea or an emotion that can be conveyed without the use of faulty and
defective common names. Justice and Mercy are indeed not ultimately
different in their nature from such other conventions as the rules of a
game, the rules of etiquette, forms of address, cab tariffs and
standards of all sorts. They are mere organizations of relationship
either to economize thought or else to facilitate mutual understanding
and codify common action. Modesty and self-submission, love and service
are, in the right system of my beliefs, far more fundamental rightnesses
and duties.
We are not mercantile and litigious units such as making Justice our
social basis would imply, we are not select responsible persons mixed
with and tending weak irresponsible wrong persons such as the notion of
Mercy suggests, we are parts of one being and body, each unique yet
sharing a common nature and a variety of imperfections and working
together (albeit more or less darkly and ignorantly) for a common end.
We are strong and weak together and in one brotherhood. The weak have no
essential rights against the strong, nor the strong against the weak.
The world does not exist for our weaknesses but our strength. And the
real justification of democracy lies in the fact that none of us are
altogether strong nor altogether weak; for everyone there is an aspect
wherein he is seen to be weak; for everyone there is a strength though
it may be only a little peculiar strength or an undeveloped
potentiality. The unconverted man uses his strength egotistically,
emphasizes himself harshly against the man who is weak where he is
strong, and hates and conceals his own weakness. The Believer, in the
measure of his belief, respects and seeks to understand the different
strength of others and to use his own distinctive power with and not
against his fellow men, in the common service of that synthesis to which
each one of them is ultimately as necessary as he.
3.25. OF LOVE AND JUSTICE.
Now here the friend who has read the first draft of this book falls into
something like a dispute with me. She does not, I think, like this
dismissal of Justice from a primary place in my scheme of conduct.
"Justice," she asserts, "is an instinctive craving very nearly akin to
the physical craving for equilibrium. Its social importance corresponds.
It seeks to keep the individual's claims in such a position as to
conflict as little as possible with those of others. Justice is the root
instinct of all social feeling, of all feeling which does not take
account of whether we like or dislike individuals, it is the feeling of
an orderly position of our Ego towards others, merely considered AS
others, and of all the Egos merely AS Egos towards each other. LOVE
cannot be felt towards others AS others. Love is the expression of
individual suitability and preference, its positive existence in some
cases implies its absolute negation in others. Hence Love can never be
the essential and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity for
the instinct of abstract justice which takes no account of preferences
or aversions. And here I may say that all application of the word LOVE
to unknown, distant creatures, to mere OTHERS, is a perversion and a
wasting of the word love, which, taking its origin in sexual and
parental preference, always implies a preference of one object to the
other. To love everybody is simply not to love at all. And it is JUST
BECAUSE of the passionate preference instinctively felt for some
individuals, that mankind requires the self-regarding and
self-respecting passion of justice."
Now this is not altogether contradictory of what I hold. I disagree that
because love necessarily expresses itself in preference, selecting this
rather than that, that it follows necessarily that its absolute negation
is implied in the non-selected cases. A man may go into the world as a
child goes into a garden and gathers its hands full of the flowers that
please it best and then desists, but only because its hands are full and
not because it is at an end of the flowers that it can find delight in.
So the man finds at last his memory and apprehensions glutted. It is not
that he could not love those others. And I dispute that to love
everybody is not to love at all. To love two people is surely to love
more than to love just one person, and so by way of three and four to a
very large number. But if it is put that love must be a preference
because of the mental limitations that forbid us to apprehend and
understand more than a few of the multitudinous lovables of life, then I
agree. For all the individuals and things and cases for which we have
inadequate time and energy, we need a wholesale method--justice. That is
exactly what I have said in the previous section.
3.26. THE WEAKNESS OF IMMATURITY.
One is apt to write and talk of strong and weak as though some were
always strong, some always weak. But that is quite a misleading version
of life. Apart from the fact that everyone is fluctuatingly strong and
fluctuatingly weak, and weak and strong according to the quality we
judge them by, we have to remember that we are all developing and
learning and changing, gaining strength and at last losing it, from the
cradle to the grave. We are all, to borrow the old scholastic term,
pupil-teachers of Life; the term is none the less appropriate because
the pupil-teacher taught badly and learnt under difficulties.
It may seem to be a crowning feat of platitude to write that "we have to
remember" this, but it is overlooked in a whole mass of legal, social
and economic literature. Those extraordinary imaginary cases as between
a man A and a man B who start level, on a desert island or elsewhere,
and work or do not work, or save or do not save, become the basis of
immense schemes of just arrangement which soar up confidently and
serenely regardless of the fact that never did anything like that equal
start occur; that from the beginning there were family groups and old
heads and young heads, help, guidance and sacrifice, and those who had
learnt and those who had still to learn, jumbled together in confused
transactions. Deals, tradings and so forth are entirely secondary
aspects of these primaries, and the attempt to get an idea of abstract
relationship by beginning upon a secondary issue is the fatal pervading
fallacy in all these regions of thought. At the present moment the
average age of the world is I suppose about 21 or 22, the normal death
somewhen about 44 or 45, that is to say nearly half the world is "under
age," green, inexperienced, demanding help, easily misled and put in the
wrong and betrayed. Yet the younger moiety, if we do indeed assume
life's object is a collective synthesis, is more important than the
older, and every older person bound to be something of a guardian to the
younger. It follows directly from the fundamental beliefs I have assumed
that we are missing the most important aspects of life if we are not
directly or indirectly serving the young, helping them individually or
collectively. Just in the measure that one's living falls away from
that, do we fall away from life into a mere futility of existence, and
approach the state, the extraordinary and wonderful middle state of (for
example) those extinct and entirely damned old gentlemen one sees and
hears eating and sleeping in every comfortable London club.
That constructive synthetic purpose which I have made the ruling idea in
my scheme of conduct may be indeed completely restated in another form,
a form I adopted for a book I wrote some years ago called "Mankind in
the Making." In this I pointed out that "Life is a tissue of births";
"and if the whole of life is an evolving succession of births, then not
only must a man in his individual capacity (physically as parent,
doctor, food dealer, food carrier, home builder, protector; or mentally
as teacher, news dealer, author, preacher) contribute to births and
growths and the fine future of mankind, but the collective aspects of
man, his social and political organizations must also be, in the
essence, organizations that more or less profitably and more or less
intentionally set themselves towards this end. They are finally
concerned with the birth, and with the sound development towards still
better births, of human lives, just as every implement in the toolshed
of a seedsman's nursery, even the hoe and the roller, is concerned
finally with the seeding and with the sound development towards still
better seeding of plants. The private and personal motive of the
seedsman in procuring and using these tools may be avarice, ambition, a
religious belief in the saving efficacy of nursery keeping or a simple
passion for bettering flowers, that does not affect the definite final
purpose of his outfit of tools.
And just as we might judge completely and criticize and improve that
outfit from an attentive study of the welfare of plants, and with an
entire disregard of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective
human enterprises from the standpoint of an attentive study of human
births and development. ANY COLLECTIVE HUMAN ENTERPRISE, INSTITUTION,
MOVEMENT, PARTY OR STATE, IS TO BE JUDGED AS A WHOLE AND COMPLETELY, AS
IT CONDUCES MORE OR LESS TO WHOLESOME AND HOPEFUL BIRTHS, AND ACCORDING
TO THE QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE ADVANCE DUE TO ITS INFLUENCE MADE BY
EACH GENERATION OF CITIZENS BORN UNDER ITS INFLUENCE TOWARDS A HIGHER
AND AMPLER STANDARD OF LIFE."
And individual conduct, quite as much as collective affairs, comes under
the same test. We are guides and school builders, helpers and influences
every hour of our lives, and by that standard we can and must judge all
our ways of living.
3.27. POSSIBILITY OF A NEW ETIQUETTE.
These two ideas, firstly the pupil-teacher parental idea and secondly
the democratic idea (that is to say the idea of an equal ultimate
significance), the second correcting any tendency in the first to
pedagogic arrogance and tactful concealments, do I think give, when
taken together, the general attitude a right-living man will take to his
individual fellow creature. They play against each other, providing
elements of contradiction and determining a balanced course. It seems to
me to follow necessarily from my fundamental beliefs that the Believer
will tend to be and want to be and seek to be friendly to, and
interested in, all sorts of people, and truthful and helpful and hating
concealment. To be that with any approach to perfection demands an
intricate and difficult effort, introspection to the hilt of one's
power, a saving natural gift; one has to avoid pedantry, aggression,
brutality, amiable tiresomeness--there are pitfalls on every side. The
more one thinks about other people the more interesting and pleasing
they are; I am all for kindly gossip and knowing things about them, and
all against the silly and limiting hardness of soul that will not look
into one's fellows nor go out to them. The use and justification of most
literature, of fiction, verse, history, biography, is that it lets us
into understandings and the suggestion of human possibilities. The
general purpose of intercourse is to get as close as one can to the
realities of the people one meets, and to give oneself to them just so
far as possible.
From that I think there arises naturally a newer etiquette that would
set aside many of the rigidities of procedure that keep people apart
to-day. There is a fading prejudice against asking personal questions,
against talking about oneself or one's immediate personal interests,
against discussing religion and politics and any such keenly felt
matter. No doubt it is necessary at times to protect oneself against
clumsy and stupid familiarities, against noisy and inattentive egotists,
against intriguers and liars, but only in the last resort do such
breaches of patience seem justifiable to me; for the most part our
traditions of speech and intercourse altogether overdo separations, the
preservation of distances and protective devices in general.
3.28. SEX.
So far I have ignored the immense importance of Sex in our lives and for
the most part kept the discussion so generalized as to apply impartially
to women and men. But now I have reached a point when this great
boundary line between two halves of the world and the intense and
intimate personal problems that play across it must be faced.
For not only must we bend our general activities and our intellectual
life to the conception of a human synthesis, but out of our bodies and
emotional possibilities we have to make the new world bodily and
emotionally. To the test of that we have to bring all sorts of questions
that agitate us to-day, the social and political equality and personal
freedom of women, the differing code of honour for the sexes, the
controls and limitations to set upon love and desire. If, for example,
it is for the good of the species that a whole half of its individuals
should be specialized and subordinated to the physical sexual life, as
in certain phases of human development women have tended to be, then
certainly we must do nothing to prevent that. We have set aside the
conception of Justice as in any sense a countervailing idea to that of
the synthetic process.
And it is well to remember that for the whole of sexual conduct there is
quite conceivably no general simple rule. It is quite possible that, as
Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illuminating "Nature of
Man," we are dealing with an irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We
have passions that do not insist upon their physiological end, desires
that may be prematurely vivid in childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old
needs of the ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the man,
emotions that jar with physical impulses, inexplicable pains and
diseases. And not only have we to remember that we are dealing with
disharmonies that may at the very best be only patched together, but we
are dealing with matters in which the element of idiosyncrasy is
essential, insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any rule we
make, unless we are to take types and indeed whole classes of
personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit only for
suppression and restraint. And on the mental side we are further
perplexed by the extraordinary suggestibility of human beings. In sexual
matters there seems to me--and I think I share a general ignorance
here--to be no directing instinct at all, but only an instinct to do
something generally sexual; there are almost equally powerful desires to
do right and not to act under compulsion. The specific forms of conduct
imposed upon these instincts and desires depend upon a vast confusion of
suggestions, institutions, conventions, ways of putting things. We are
dealing therefore with problems ineradicably complex, varying endlessly
in their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to
think that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is in
terms of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the play,
autobiography or biography of the frankest sort. But such
generalizations as I can make I will.
To me it seems manifest that sexual matters may be discussed generally
in at least three permissible and valid ways, of which the consideration
of the world as a system of births and education is only the dominant
chief. There is next the question of the physical health and beauty of
the community and how far sexual rules and customs affect that, and
thirdly the question of the mental and moral atmosphere in which sexual
conventions and laws must necessarily be an important factor. It is
alleged that probably in the case of men, and certainly in the case of
women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary phase in existence; that
without it there is an incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a
real wilting and failure of energy and vitality and the development of
morbid states. And for most of us half the friendships and intimacies
from which we derive the daily interest and sustaining force in our
lives, draw mysterious elements from sexual attraction, and depend and
hesitate upon our conception of the liberties and limits we must give to
that force.
3.29. THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.
The individual attitudes of men to women and of women to men are
necessarily determined to a large extent by certain general ideas of
relationship, by institutions and conventions. One of the most important
and debatable of these is whether we are to consider and treat women as
citizens and fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men and
grouped in positions of at least material dependence to individual men.
Our decision in that direction will affect all our conduct from the
larger matters down to the smallest points of deportment; it will affect
even our manner of address and determine whether when we speak to a
woman we shall be as frank and unaffected as with a man or touched with
a faint suggestion of the reserves of a cat which does not wish to be
suspected of wanting to steal the milk.
Now so far as that goes it follows almost necessarily from my views upon
aristocracy and democracy that I declare for the conventional equality
of women, that is to say for the determination to make neither sex nor
any sexual characteristic a standard of superiority or inferiority, for
the view that a woman is a person as important and necessary, as much to
be consulted, and entitled to as much freedom of action as a man. I
admit that this decision is a choice into which temperament enters, that
I cannot produce compelling reasons why anyone else should adopt my
view. I can produce considerations in support of my view, that is all.
But they are so implicit in all that has gone before that I will not
trouble to detail them here.
The conception of equality and fellowship between men and women is an
idea at least as old as Plato and one that has recurred wherever
civilization has reached a phase in which men and women were
sufficiently released from militant and economic urgency to talk and
read and think. But it has never yet been, at least in the historical
period and in any but isolated social groups, a working structural idea.
The working structural idea is the Patriarchal Family in which the woman
is inferior and submits herself and is subordinated to the man, the head
of the family.
We live in a constantly changing development and modification of that
tradition. It is well to bring that factor of constant change into mind
at the outset of this discussion and to keep it there. To forget it, and
it is commonly forgotten, is to falsify every issue. Marriage and the
Family are perennially fluctuating institutions, and probably scarcely
anything in modern life is changing so much; they are in their legal
constitution or their moral and emotional quality profoundly different
things from what they were a hundred years ago. A woman who marries
nowadays marries, if one may put it quantitatively, far less than she
did even half a century ago; the married woman's property act, for
example, has revolutionized the economic relationship; her husband has
lost his right to assault her and he cannot even compel her to cohabit
with him if she refuses to do so. Legal separations and divorces have
come to modify the quality and logical consequences of the bond. The
rights of parent over the child have been even more completely
qualified. The State has come in as protector and educator of the
children, taking over personal powers and responsibilities that have
been essential to the family institution ever since the dawn of history.
It inserts itself more and more between child and parent. It invades
what were once the most sacred intimacies, and the Salvation Army is now
promoting legislation to invade those overcrowded homes in which
children (it is estimated to the number of thirty or forty thousand) are
living as I write, daily witnesses of their mother's prostitution or in
constant danger of incestuous attack from drunken fathers and brothers.
And finally as another indication of profound differences, births were
almost universally accidental a hundred years ago; they are now in an
increasing number of families controlled and deliberate acts of will. In
every one of their relations do Marriage and the Family change and
continue to change.
But the inherent defectiveness of the human mind which my metaphysical
book sets itself to analyze, does lead it constantly to speak of
Marriage and the Family as things as fixed and unalterable as, let us
say, the characteristics of oxygen. One is asked, Do you believe in
Marriage and the Family? as if it was a case of either having or not
having some definite thing. Socialists are accused of being "against the
Family," as if it were not the case that Socialists, Individualists,
high Anglicans and Roman Catholics are ALL against Marriage and the
Family as these institutions exist at the present time. But once we have
realized the absurdity of this absolute treatment, then it should become
clear that with it goes most of the fabric of right and wrong, and
nearly all those arbitrary standards by which we classify people into
moral and immoral. Those last words are used when as a matter of fact we
mean either conforming or failing to conform to changing laws and
developing institutional customs we may or may not consider right or
wrong. Their use imparts a flavour of essential wrong-doing and
obliquity into acts and relations that may be in many cases no more than
social indiscipline, which may be even conceivably a courageous act of
defiance to an obsolescent limitation. Such, until a little while ago,
was a man's cohabitation with his deceased wife's sister. This, which
was scandalous yesterday, is now a legally honourable relationship,
albeit I believe still regarded by the high Anglican as incestuous
wickedness.
Now I will not deal here with the institutional changes that are
involved in that general scheme of progress called Socialism. I have
discussed the relation of Socialism to Marriage and the Family quite
fully in my "New Worlds for Old" ("New Worlds for Old" (A. Constable and
Co., 1908).) and to that I must refer the reader. Therein he will see
how the economic freedom and independent citizenship of women, and
indeed also the welfare of the whole next generation, hang on the idea
of endowing motherhood, and he will find too how much of the nature of
the marriage contract is outside the scope of Socialist proposals
altogether.
Apart from the broad proposals of Socialism, as a matter of personal
conviction quite outside the scope of Socialism altogether, I am
persuaded of the need of much greater facilities of divorce than exist
at present, divorce on the score of mutual consent, of faithlessness, of
simple cruelty, of insanity, habitual vice or the prolonged imprisonment
of either party. And this being so I find it impossible to condemn on
any ground, except that it is "breaking ranks" and making a confusion,
those who by anticipating such wide facilities as I propose have sinned
by existing standards. How far and in what manner such breaking of ranks
is to be condoned I will presently discuss. But it is clear it is an
offence of a different nature from actions one believes to be in
themselves and apart from the law reprehensible things.
But my scepticisms about the current legal institutions and customary
code are not exhausted by these modifications I have suggested. I
believe firmly in some sort of marriage, that is to say an open
declaration of the existence of sexual relations between a man and a
woman, because I am averse to all unnecessary secrecies and because the
existence of these peculiarly intimate relationships affects everybody
about the persons concerned. It is ridiculous to say as some do that
sexual relations between two people affect no one but themselves unless
a child is born. They do, because they tend to break down barriers and
set up a peculiar emotional partnership. It is a partnership that kept
secret may work as anti-socially as a secret business partnership or a
secret preferential railway tariff. And I believe too in the general
social desirability of the family group, the normal group of father,
mother and children, and in the extreme efficacy in the normal human
being of the blood link and pride link between parent and child in
securing loving care and upbringing for the child. But this clear
adhesion to Marriage and to the Family grouping about mother and father
does not close the door to a large series of exceptional cases which our
existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.
For example, monogamy in general seems to me to be clearly indicated (as
doctors say) by the fact that there are not several women in the world
for every man, but quite as clearly does it seem necessary to recognize
that the fact that there are (or were in 1901) 21,436,107 females to
20,172,984 males in our British community seems to condemn our present
rigorous insistence upon monogamy, unless feminine celibacy has its own
delights. But, as I have said, it is now largely believed that the
sexual life of a woman is more important to her than his sexual life to
a man and less easily ignored.
It is true also on the former side that for the great majority of people
one knows personally, any sort of household but a monogamous one
conjures up painful and unpleasant visions. The ordinary civilized woman
and the ordinary civilized man are alike obsessed with the idea of
meeting and possessing one peculiar intimate person, one special
exclusive lover who is their very own, and a third person of either sex
cannot be associated with that couple without an intolerable sense of
privacy and confidence and possession destroyed. It is difficult to
imagine a second wife in a home who would not be and feel herself to be
a rather excluded and inferior person. But that does not abolish the
possibility that there are exceptional people somewhere capable of, to
coin a phrase, triangular mutuality, and I do not see why we should
either forbid or treat with bitterness or hostility a grouping we may
consider so inadvisable or so unworkable as never to be adopted, if
three people of their own free will desire it.
The peculiar defects of the human mind when they approach these
questions of sex are reinforced by passions peculiar to the topic, and
it is perhaps advisable to point out that to discuss these possibilities
is not the same thing as to urge the married reader to take unto himself
or herself a second partner or a series of additional partners. We are
trained from the nursery to become secretive, muddle-headed and
vehemently conclusive upon sexual matters, until at last the editors of
magazines blush at the very phrase and long to put a petticoat over the
page that bears it. Yet our rebellious natures insist on being
interested by it. It seems to me that to judge these large questions
from the personal point of view, to insist upon the whole world without
exception living exactly in the manner that suits oneself or accords
with one's emotional imagination and the forms of delicacy in which one
has been trained, is not the proper way to deal with them. I want as a
sane social organizer to get just as many contented and law-abiding
citizens as possible; I do not want to force people who would otherwise
be useful citizens into rebellion, concealments and the dark and furtive
ways of vice, because they may not love and marry as their temperaments
command, and so I want to make the meshes of the law as wide as
possible. But the common man will not understand this yet, and seeks to
make the meshes just as small as his own private case demands.
Then marriage, to resume my main discussion, does not necessarily mean
cohabitation. All women who desire children do not want to be entrusted
with their upbringing. Some women are sexual and philoprogenitive
without being sedulously maternal, and some are maternal without much or
any sexual passion. There are men and women in the world now, great
allies, fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor want to live
constantly together. It is at least conceivable that there are women
who, while desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great careers for
the work of maternity, women again who would be happiest managing and
rearing children in manless households that they might even share with
other women friends, and men to correspond with these who do not wish to
live in a household with wife and children. I submit, these temperaments
exist and have a right to exist in their own way. But one must recognize
that the possibility of these departures from the normal type of
household opens up other possibilities. The polygamy that is degrading
or absurd under one roof assumes a different appearance when one
considers it from the point of view of people whose habits of life do
not centre upon an isolated home.
All the relations I have glanced at above do as a matter of fact exist
to-day, but shamefully and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an
unmerited and unnecessary ignominy. The punishment for bigamy seems to
me insane in its severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to the
common seducer. Better ruin a score of women, says the law, than marry
two. I do not see why in these matters there should not be much ampler
freedom than there is, and this being so I can hardly be expected to
condemn with any moral fervour or exclude from my society those who have
seen fit to behave by what I believe may be the standards of A.D. 2000
instead of by the standards of 1850. These are offences, so far as they
are offences, on an altogether different footing from murder, or
exacting usury, or the sweating of children, or cruelty, or transmitting
diseases, or unveracity, or commercial or intellectual or physical
prostitution, or any such essentially grave anti-social deeds. We must
distinguish between sins on the one hand and mere errors of judgment and
differences of taste from ourselves. To draw up harsh laws, to practise
exclusions against everyone who does not see fit to duplicate one's own
blameless home life, is to waste a number of courageous and exceptional
persons in every generation, to drive many of them into a forced
alliance with real crime and embittered rebellion against custom and the
law.
3.30. CONDUCT IN RELATION TO THE THING THAT IS.
But the reader must keep clear in his mind the distinction between
conduct that is right or permissible in itself and conduct that becomes
either inadvisable or mischievous and wrong because of the circumstances
about it. There is no harm under ordinary conditions in asking a boy
with a pleasant voice to sing a song in the night, but the case is
altered altogether if you have reason to suppose that a Red Indian is
lying in wait a hundred yards off, holding a loaded rifle and ready to
fire at the voice. It is a valid objection to many actions that I do not
think objectionable in themselves, that to do them will discharge a
loaded prejudice into the heart of my friend--or even into my own. I
belong to the world and my work, and I must not lightly throw my time,
my power, my influence away. For a splendid thing any risk or any
defiance may be justifiable, but is it a sufficiently splendid thing? So
far as he possibly can a man must conform to common prejudices,
prevalent customs and all laws, whatever his estimate of them may be.
But he must at the same time to his utmost to change what he thinks to
be wrong.
And I think that conformity must be honest conformity. There is no more
anti-social act than secret breaches, and only some very urgent and
exceptional occasion justifies even the unveracity of silence about the
thing done. If your personal convictions bring you to a breach, let it
be an open breach, let there be no misrepresentation of attitudes, no
meanness, no deception of honourable friends. Of course an open breach
need not be an ostentatious breach; to do what is right to yourself
without fraud or concealment is one thing, to make a challenge and
aggression quite another. Your friends may understand and sympathize and
condone, but it does not lie upon you to force them to identify
themselves with your act and situation. But better too much openness
than too little. Squalid intrigue was the shadow of the old intolerably
narrow order; it is a shadow we want to illuminate out of existence.
Secrets will be contraband in the new time.
And if it chances to you to feel called upon to make a breach with the
institution or custom or prejudice that is, remember that doing so is
your own affair. You are going to take risks and specialize as an
experiment. You must not expect other people about you to share the
consequences of your dash forward. You must not drag in confidants and
secondaries. You must fight your little battle in front on your own
responsibility, unsupported--and take the consequences without repining.
3.31. CONDUCT TOWARDS TRANSGRESSORS.
So far as breaches of the prohibitions and laws of marriage go, to me it
seems they are to be tolerated by us in others just in the measure that,
within the limits set by discretion, they are frank and truthful and
animated by spontaneous passion and pervaded by the quality of beauty. I
hate the vulgar sexual intriguer, man or woman, and the smart and
shallow atmosphere of unloving lust and vanity about the type as I hate
few kinds of human life; I would as lief have a polecat in my home as
this sort of person; and every sort of prostitute except the victim of
utter necessity I despise, even though marriage be the fee. But honest
lovers should be I think a charge and pleasure for us. We must judge
each pair as we can.
One thing renders a sexual relationship incurably offensive to others
and altogether wrong, and that is cruelty. But who can define cruelty?
How far is the leaving of a third person to count as cruelty? There
again I hesitate to judge. To love and not be loved is a fate for which
it seems no one can be blamed; to lose love and to change one's loving
belongs to a subtle interplay beyond analysis or control, but to be
deceived or mocked or deliberately robbed of love, that at any rate is
an abominable wrong.
In all these matters I perceive a general rule is in itself a possible
instrument of cruelty. I set down what I can in the way of general
principles, but it all leaves off far short of the point of application.
Every case among those we know I think we moderns must judge for
ourselves. Where there is doubt, there I hold must be charity. And with
regard to strangers, manifestly our duty is to avoid inquisitorial and
uncharitable acts.
This is as true of financial and economic misconduct as of sexual
misconduct, of ways of living that are socially harmful and of political
faith. We are dealing with people in a maladjusted world to whom
absolute right living is practically impossible, because there are no
absolutely right institutions and no simple choice of good or evil, and
we have to balance merits and defects in every case.
Some people are manifestly and essentially base and self-seeking and
regardless of the happiness and welfare of their fellows, some in
business affairs and politics as others in love. Some wrong-doers again
are evidently so through heedlessness, through weakness, timidity or
haste. We have to judge and deal with each sort upon no clear issue, but
upon impressions they have given us of their spirit and purpose. We owe
it to them and ourselves not to judge too rashly or too harshly, but for
all that we are obliged to judge and take sides, to avoid the malignant
and exclude them from further opportunity, to help and champion the
cheated and the betrayed, to forgive and aid the repentant blunderer and
by mercy to save the lesser sinner from desperate alliance with the
greater. That is the broad rule, and it is as much as we have to go upon
until the individual case comes before us.
BOOK THE FOURTH.
SOME PERSONAL THINGS.
4.1. PERSONAL LOVE AND LIFE.
It has been most convenient to discuss all that might be generalized
about conduct first, to put in the common background, the vistas and
atmosphere of the scene. But a man's relations are of two orders, and
these questions of rule and principle are over and about and round more
vivid and immediate interests. A man is not simply a relationship
between his individual self and the race, society, the world and God's
Purpose. Close about him are persons, friends and enemies and lovers and
beloved people. He desires them, lusts after them, craves their
affection, needs their presence, abhors them, hates and desires to limit
and suppress them. This is for most of us the flesh and blood of life.
We go through the noble scene of the world neither alone, nor alone with
God, nor serving an undistinguishable multitude, but in a company of
individualized people.
Here is a system of motives and passions, imperious and powerful, which
follows no broad general rule and in which each man must needs be a
light unto himself upon innumerable issues. I am satisfied that these
personal urgencies are neither to be suppressed nor crudely nor
ruthlessly subordinated to the general issues. Religious and moral
teachers are apt to make this part of life either too detached or too
insignificant. They teach it either as if it did not matter or as if it
ought not to matter. Indeed our individual friends and enemies stand
between us and hide or interpret for us all the larger things. Few of us
can even worship alone. We must feel others, and those not strangers,
kneeling beside us.
I have already spoken under the heading of Beliefs of the part that the
idea of a Mediator has played and can play in the religious life. I have
pointed out how the imagination of men has sought and found in certain
personalities, historical or fictitious, a bridge between the blood-warm
private life and the intolerable spaciousness of right and wrong. The
world is full of such figures and their images, Christ and Mary and the
Saints and all the lesser, dearer gods of heathendom. These things and
the human passion for living leaders and heroes and leagues and
brotherhoods all confess the mediatory role, the mediatory possibilities
of personal love between the individual and the great synthesis of which
he is a part and agent. The great synthesis may become incarnate in
personal love, and personal love lead us directly to universal service.
I write "may" and temper that sentence to the quality of a possibility
alone. This is only true for those who believe, for those who have
faith, whose lives have been unified, who have found Salvation. For
those whose lives are chaotic, personal loves must also be chaotic; this
or that passion, malice, a jesting humour, some physical lust, gratified
vanity, egotistical pride, will rule and limit the relationship and
colour its ultimate futility. But the Believer uses personal love and
sustains himself by personal love. It is his provender, the meat and
drink of his campaign.
4.2. THE NATURE OF LOVE.
It is well perhaps to look a little into the factors that make up Love.
Love does not seem to me to be a simple elemental thing. It is, as I
have already said, one of the vicious tendencies of the human mind to
think that whatever can be given a simple name can be abstracted as a
single something in a state of quintessential purity. I have pointed out
that this is not true of Harmony or Beauty, and that these are synthetic
things. You bring together this which is not beautiful and that which is
not beautiful, and behold! Beauty! So also Love is, I think, a synthetic
thing. One observes this and that, one is interested and stirred;
suddenly the metal fuses, the dry bones live! One loves.
Almost every interest in one's being may be a factor in the love
synthesis. But apart from the overflowing of the parental instinct that
makes all that is fine and delicate and young dear to us and to be
cherished, there are two main factors that bring us into love with our
fellows. There is first the emotional elements in our nature that arise
out of the tribal necessity, out of a fellowship in battle and hunting,
drinking and feasting, out of the needs and excitements and delights of
those occupations; and there is next the intenser narrower desirings and
gratitudes, satisfactions and expectations that come from sexual
intercourse. Now both these factors originate in physical needs and
consummate in material acts, and it is well to remember that this great
growth of love in life roots there, and, it may be, dies when its roots
are altogether cut away.
At its lowest, love is the mere sharing of, or rather the desire to
share, pleasure and excitement, the excitements of conflict or lust or
what not. I think that the desire to partake, the desire to merge one's
individual identity with another's, remains a necessary element in all
personal loves. It is a way out of ourselves, a breaking down of our
individual separation, just as hate is an intensification of that.
Personal love is the narrow and intense form of that breaking down, just
as what I call Salvation is its widest, most extensive form. We cast
aside our reserves, our secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves;
touches that would be intolerable from common people become a mystery of
delight, acts of self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with
symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us is me, which you. Our
imprisoned egoism looks out through this window, forgets its walls, and
is for those brief moments released and universal.
For most of us the strain of primordial sexual emotion in our loves is
very strong. Many men can love only women, many women only men, and some
can scarcely love at all without bodily desire. But the love of
fellowship is a strong one also, and for many, love is most possible and
easy when the thought of physical lovemaking has been banished. Then the
lovers will pursue interests together, will work together or journey
together. So we have the warm fellowships of men for men and women for
women. But even then it may happen that men friends together will talk
of women, and women friends of men. Nevertheless we have also the strong
and altogether sexless glow of those who have fought well together, or
drunk or jested together or hunted a common quarry.
Now it seems to me that the Believer must also be a Lover, that he will
love as much as he can and as many people as he can, and in many moods
and ways. As I have said already, many of those who have taught religion
and morality in the past have been neglectful or unduly jealous of the
intenser personal loves. They have been, to put it by a figure, urgent
upon the road to the ocean. To that they would lead us, though we come
to it shivering, fearful and unprepared, and they grudge it that we
should strip and plunge into the wayside stream. But all streams, all
rivers come from this ocean in the beginning, lead to it in the end.
It is the essential fact of love as I conceive it, that it breaks down
the boundaries of self. That love is most perfect which does most
completely merge its lovers. But no love is altogether perfect, and for
most men and women love is no more than a partial and temporary lowering
of the barriers that keep them apart. With many, the attraction of love
seems always to fall short of what I hold to be its end, it draws people
together in the most momentary of self-forgetfulnesses, and for the rest
seems rather to enhance their egotisms and their difference. They are
secret from one another even in their embraces. There is a sort of love
that is egotistical lust almost regardless of its partner, a sort of
love that is mere fleshless pride and vanity at a white heat. There is
the love-making that springs from sheer boredom, like a man reading a
story-book to fill an hour. These inferior loves seek to accomplish an
agreeable act, or they seek the pursuit or glory of a living possession,
they aim at gratification or excitement or conquest. True love seeks to
be mutual and easy-minded, free of doubts, but these egotistical
mockeries of love have always resentment in them and hatred in them and
a watchful distrust. Jealousy is the measure of self-love in love.
True love is a synthetic thing, an outcome of life, it is not a
universal thing. It is the individualized correlative of Salvation; like
that it is a synthetic consequence of conflicts and confusions. Many
people do not desire or need Salvation, they cannot understand it, much
less achieve it; for them chaotic life suffices. So too, many never,
save for some rare moment of illumination, desire or feel love. Its
happy abandonment, its careless self-giving, these things are mere
foolishness to them. But much has been said and sung of faith and love
alike, and in their confused greed these things also they desire and
parody. So they act worship and make a fine fuss of their devotions. And
also they must have a few half-furtive, half-flaunting fallen
love-triumphs prowling the secret backstreets of their lives, they know
not why.
(In setting this down be it remembered I am doing my best to tell what
is in me because I am trying to put my whole view of life before the
reader without any vital omissions. These are difficult matters to
explain because they have no clear outlines; one lets in a hard light
suddenly upon things that have lurked in warm intimate shadows, dim
inner things engendering motives. I am not only telling quasi-secret
things but exploring them for myself. They are none the less real and
important because they are elusive.)
True love I think is not simply felt but known. Just as Salvation as I
conceive it demands a fine intelligence and mental activity, so love
calls to brain and body alike and all one's powers. There is always
elaborate thinking and dreaming in love. Love will stir imaginations
that have never stirred before.
Love may be, and is for the most part, one-sided. It is the going out
from oneself that is love, and not the accident of its return. It is the
expedition whether it fail or succeed.
But an expedition starves that comes to no port. Love always seeks
mutuality and grows by the sense of responses, or we should love
beautiful inanimate things more passionately than we do. Failing a full
return, it makes the most of an inadequate return. Failing a sustained
return it welcomes a temporary coincidence. Failing a return it finds
support in accepted sacrifices. But it seeks a full return, and the
fulness of life has come only to those who, loving, have met the lover.
I am trying to be as explicit as possible in thus writing about Love.
But the substance in which one works here is emotion that evades
definition, poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than prosaic
statements. Body and the most sublimated ecstasy pass into one another,
exchange themselves and elude every net of words we cast.
I have put out two ideas of unification and self-devotion, extremes upon
a scale one from another; one of these ideas is that devotion to the
Purpose in things I have called Salvation; the other that devotion to
some other most fitting and satisfying individual which is passionate
love, the former extensive as the universe, the latter the intensest
thing in life. These, it seems to me, are the boundary and the living
capital of the empire of life we rule.
All empires need a comprehending boundary, but many have not one capital
but many chief cities, and all have cities and towns and villages beyond
the capital. It is an impoverished capital that has no dependent towns,
and it is a poor love that will not overflow in affection and eager
kindly curiosity and sympathy and the search for fresh mutuality. To
love is to go living radiantly through the world. To love and be loved
is to be fearless of experience and rich in the power to give.
4.3. THE WILL TO LOVE.
Love is a thing to a large extent in its beginnings voluntary and
controllable, and at last quite involuntary. It is so hedged about by
obligations and consequences, real and artificial, that for the most
part I think people are overmuch afraid of it. And also the tradition of
sentiment that suggests its forms and guides it in the world about us,
is far too strongly exclusive. It is not so much when love is glowing as
when it is becoming habitual that it is jealous for itself and others.
Lovers a little exhausting their mutual interest find a fillip in an
alliance against the world. They bury their talent of understanding and
sympathy to return it duly in a clean napkin. They narrow their interest
in life lest the other lover should misunderstand their amplitude as
disloyalty.
Our institutions and social customs seem all to assume a definiteness of
preference, a singleness and a limitation of love, which is not
psychologically justifiable. People do not, I think, fall naturally into
agreement with these assumptions; they train themselves to agreement.
They take refuge from experiences that seem to carry with them the risk
at least of perplexing situations, in a theory of barred possibilities
and locked doors. How far this shy and cultivated irresponsive
lovelessness towards the world at large may not carry with it the
possibility of compensating intensities, I do not know. Quite equally
probable is a starvation of one's emotional nature.
The same reasons that make me decide against mere wanton abstinences
make me hostile to the common convention of emotional indifference to
most of the charming and interesting people one encounters. In pleasing
and being pleased, in the mutual interest, the mutual opening out of
people to one another, is the key of the door to all sweet and mellow
living.
4.4. LOVE AND DEATH.
For he who has faith, death, so far as it is his own death, ceases to
possess any quality of terror. The experiment will be over, the rinsed
beaker returned to its shelf, the crystals gone dissolving down the
waste-pipe; the duster sweeps the bench. But the deaths of those we love
are harder to understand or bear.
It happens that of those very intimate with me I have lost only one, and
that came slowly and elaborately, a long gradual separation wrought by
the accumulation of years and mental decay, but many close friends and
many whom I have counted upon for sympathy and fellowship have passed
out of my world. I miss such a one as Bob Stevenson, that luminous,
extravagant talker, that eager fantastic mind. I miss him whenever I
write. It is less pleasure now to write a story since he will never read
it, much less give me a word of praise for it. And I miss York Powell's
friendly laughter and Henley's exuberant welcome. They made a warmth
that has gone, those men. I can understand why I, with my fumbling
lucidities and explanations, have to finish up presently and go,
expressing as I do the mood of a type and of a time; but not those
radiant presences.
And the gap these men have left, these men with whom after all I only
sat now and again, or wrote to in a cheerful mood or got a letter from
at odd times, gives me some measure of the thing that happens, that may
happen, when the mind that is always near one's thoughts, the person who
moves to one's movement and lights nearly all the common flow of events
about one with the reminder of fellowship and meaning--ceases.
Faith which feeds on personal love must at last prevail over it. If
Faith has any virtue it must have it here when we find ourselves bereft
and isolated, facing a world from which the light has fled leaving it
bleak and strange. We live for experience and the race; these individual
interludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in which we lovers met
and refreshed was but a halt on a journey. When we have loved to the
intensest point we have done our best with each other. To keep to that
image of the inn, we must not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire.
We must go on to new experiences and new adventures. Death comes to part
us and turn us out and set us on the road again.
But the dead stay where we leave them.
I suppose that is the real good in death, that they do stay; that it
makes them immortal for us. Living they were mortal. But now they can
never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change again. They have
finished--for us indeed just as much as themselves. There they sit for
ever, rounded off and bright and done. Beside these clear and certain
memories I have of my dead, my impressions of the living are vague
provisional things.
And since they are gone out of the world and become immortal memories in
me, I feel no need to think of them as in some disembodied and
incomprehensible elsewhere, changed and yet not done. I want actual
immortality for those I love as little as I desire it for myself.
Indeed I dislike the idea that those I have loved are immortal in any
real sense; it conjures up dim uncomfortable drifting phantoms, that
have no kindred with the flesh and blood I knew. I would as soon think
of them trailing after the tides up and down the Channel outside my
window. Bob Stevenson for me is a presence utterly concrete, slouching,
eager, quick-eyed, intimate and profound, carelessly dressed (at
Sandgate he commonly wore a little felt hat that belonged to his son)
and himself, himself, indissoluble matter and spirit, down to the heels
of his boots. I cannot conceive of his as any but a concrete
immortality. If he lives, he lives as I knew him and clothed as I knew
him and with his unalterable voice, in a heaven of daedal flowers or a
hell of ineffectual flame; he lives, dreaming and talking and
explaining, explaining it all very earnestly and preposterously, so I
picture him, into the ear of the amused, incredulous, principal person
in the place.
I have a real hatred for those dreary fools and knaves who would have me
suppose that Henley, that crippled Titan, may conceivably be tapping at
the underside of a mahogany table or scratching stifled incoherence into
a locked slate! Henley tapping!--for the professional purposes of
Sludge! If he found himself among the circumstances of a spiritualist
seance he would, I know, instantly smash the table with that big fist of
his. And as the splinters flew, surely York Powell, out of the dead past
from which he shines on me, would laugh that hearty laugh of his back
into the world again.
Henley is nowhere now except that, red-faced and jolly like an October
sunset, he leans over a gate at Worthing after a long day of picnicking
at Chanctonbury Ring, or sits at his Woking table praising and quoting
"The Admiral Bashville," or blue-shirted and wearing that hat that
Nicholson has painted, is thrust and lugged, laughing and talking aside
in his bath-chair, along the Worthing esplanade...
And Bob Stevenson walks for ever about a garden in Chiswick, talking in
the dusk.
4.5. THE CONSOLATION OF FAILURE.
That parable of the talents I have made such free use of in this book
has one significant defect. It gives but two cases, and three are
possible. There was first the man who buried his talent, and of his
condemnation we are assured. But those others all took their talents and
used them courageously and came back with gain. Was that gain
inevitable? Does courage always ensure us victory? because if that is so
we can all be heroes and valour is the better part of discretion. Alas!
the faith in such magic dies. What of the possible case of the man who
took his two or three talents and invested them as best he could and was
deceived or heedless and lost them, interest and principal together?
There is something harder to face than death, and that is the
realization of failure and misdirected effort and wrong-doing. Faith is
no Open Sesame to right-doing, much less is it the secret of success.
The service of God on earth is no processional triumph. What if one does
wrong so extremely as to condemn one's life, to make oneself part of the
refuse and not of the building? Or what if one is misjudged, or it may
be too pitilessly judged, and one's co-operation despised and the help
one brought becomes a source of weakness? Or suppose that the fine
scheme one made lies shattered or wrecked by one's own act, or through
some hidden blemish one's offering is rejected and flung back and one is
thrust out?
So in the end it may be you or I will find we have been anvil and not
hammer in the Purpose of God.
Then indeed will come the time for Faith, for the last word of Faith, to
say still steadfastly, disgraced or dying, defeated or discredited, that
all is well:--
"This and not that was my appointed work, and this I had to be."
4.6. THE LAST CONFESSION.
So these broken confessions and statements of mood and attitude come to
an end.
But at this end, since I have, I perceive, run a little into a pietistic
strain, I must repeat again how provisional and personal I know all
these things to be. I began by disavowing ultimates. My beliefs, my
dogmas, my rules, they are made for my campaigning needs, like the
knapsack and water-bottle of a Cockney soldier invading some stupendous
mountain gorge. About him are fastnesses and splendours, torrents and
cataracts, glaciers and untrodden snows. He comes tramping on heel-worn
boots and ragged socks. Beauties and blue mysteries shine upon him and
appeal to him, the enigma of beauty smiling the faint strange smile of
Leonardo's Mona Lisa. He sees a light on the grass like music; and the
blossom on the trees against the sky brings him near weeping. Such
things come to him, give themselves to him. I do not know why he should
not in response fling his shabby gear aside and behave like a god; I
only know that he does not do so. His grunt of appreciation is absurd,
his speech goes like a crippled thing--and withal, and partly by virtue
of the knapsack and water-bottle, he is conqueror of the valley. The
valley is his for the taking.
There is a duality in life that I cannot express except by such images
as this, a duality so that we are at once absurd and full of sublimity,
and most absurd when we are most anxious to render the real splendours
that pervade us. This duplicity in life seems to me at times
ineradicable, at times like the confusing of something essentially
simple, like the duplication when one looks through a doubly refracting
medium. You think in this latter mood that you have only to turn the
crystal of Iceland spar about in order to have the whole thing plain.
But you never get it plain. I have been doing my halting utmost to get
down sincerely and simply my vision of life and duty. I have permitted
myself no defensive restraints; I have shamelessly written my starkest,
and it is plain to me that a smile that is not mine plays over my most
urgent passages. There is a rebellious rippling of the grotesque under
our utmost tragedy and gravity. One's martialled phrases grimace as one
turns, and wink at the reader. None the less they signify. Do you note
how in this that I have written, such a word as Believer will begin to
wear a capital letter and give itself solemn ridiculous airs? It does
not matter. It carries its message for all that necessary superficial
absurdity.
Thought has made me shameless. It does not matter at last at all if one
is a little harsh or indelicate or ridiculous if that also is in the
mystery of things.
Behind everything I perceive the smile that makes all effort and
discipline temporary, all the stress and pain of life endurable. In the
last resort I do not care whether I am seated on a throne or drunk or
dying in a gutter. I follow my leading. In the ultimate I know, though I
cannot prove my knowledge in any way whatever, that everything is right
and all things mine.
THE END.
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