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GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
AND
OTHER CONTEMPORARY STUDIES
BY
VERNON LEE
NEW YORK : BRENTANO'S
LONDON : T. FISHER UNWIN
1909
(All rights reserved.}
To
H. G. WELLS
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. GOSPELS OF ANARCHY . . . .II
II. EMERSON AS A TEACHER OF LATTER-DAY
TENDENCIES . . . . 4 1
III. DETERIORATION OF SOUL . . . . J I
IV. TOLSTOI AS A PROPHET . . . . 103
V. TOLSTOI ON ART . . . . . 133
VI. NIETZSCHE AND THE " WILL TO POWER" . 159
VII. PROFESSOR JAMES AND THE " WILL TO BELIEVE" IQI
VIII. ROSNY AND THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL . 233
IX. THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN . . 26l
X. RUSKIN AS A REFORMER .... 299
XI. ON MODERN UTOPIAS : AN OPEN LETTER TO MR.
H. G. WELLS ..... 323
XII. A POSTSCRIPT ON MR. WELLS AND UTOPIAS . 351
9
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
IN such of us as not merely live, but think and feel
what life is and might be, there is enacted an inner
drama full of conflicting emotions, long drawn out
through the years, and, in many cases, never brought
to a conclusion.
It begins with the gradual suspicion, as we pass out
of childish tutelage, that the world is not at all the
definite, arranged, mechanical thing which the doctrine
convenient to our elders and our own optimistic egoism
have led us to expect ; that the causes and results
of actions are by no means so simple as we imagined,
and that good and evil are not so distinctly opposed as
black and white. We guess, we slowly recognise with
difficulty and astonishment, that this well-regulated
structure called the universe or life is a sham con-
structed by human hands ; that the reality is a seething
whirlpool of forces seemingly blind, mainly disorderly
and cruel, and, at the best, utterly indifferent ; a chaos
of which we recognise, with humiliation turning into
cynicism, that our poor self is but a part and a
sample.
Thus we feel. But if we feel long enough, and do
14 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
not get blunted in the process, we are brought gradually,
by additional seeing and feeling, to a totally new view
of things. The chaos becomes ordered, the void a
firmament ; and we recognise with joy and pride that
the universe has made us, and that we, perceiving it,
have made the universe in our turn ; and that therefore
" in la sua volontade e nostra pace."
The following notes display this process of destruc-
tion and reconstruction in one particular type of mind ;
embody, for the benefit of those who constitutionally
tend to think alike, and still more of those who are
constitutionally bound to think otherwise, the silent
discussions on anarchy and law which have arisen in
me as a result of other folks' opinions and my own
experience of life's complexities and deadlocks.
I
The intellectual rebellion and lawlessness of our
contemporaries have been summed up by Mr. Henry
Brewster, in a book too subtle and too cosmopolitan
ever to receive adequate appreciation.
" On the one hand, a revolt against any philosophical
system of unity, which many would call a revolt against
all philosophy, genuine scepticism. Then the denial
that the feeling of obligation can be brought to bear
on any fixed point. . . . Morally, we must content
ourselves with the various injunctions of wisdom and
with distinct, independent ideals. Something beyond
them is, indeed, recognised ; but, whereas we were
accustomed to place it in the obligatory character of
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 15
certain prescriptions, we are now told to understand
it as a perpetual warning against all dogmatism." J
This is, as I have said, the modern formula of
scepticism and revolt. But similar doubts must have
arisen, most certainly, in all kinds of men at all times,
producing worldly wise cynicism in some and religious
distress in others. Such doubts as these have lurked,
one suspects, at the bottom of all transcendentalism.
They are summed up in Emerson's disquieting remark
that saints are sad where philosophers are merely in-
terested, because the first see sin where the second see
only cause and effect. They are implied in a great
deal of religious mysticism, habitually lurking in
esoteric depths of speculation, but penetrating occa-
sionally, mysterious subtle gases, to life's surface, and
there igniting at contact with the active impulses of
men ; whence the ambiguous ethics, the questionable
ways of many sects originally ascetic. Nay, it is quite
conceivable that, if there really existed the thing called
the Secret of the Church which Villiers de 1'Isle Adam's
gambling abbe staked at cards against twenty louis-d'or,
it would be found to be, not that there is no purgatory >
but rather that there is no heaven and hell, no law and
no sin.
Be this as it may, all dogmatic religions have forcibly
repressed such speculations, transcendental or practical,
upon the ways of the universe and of man. And it is
only in our own day, with the habit of each individual
striking out his practice for himself, and with the
scientific recognition that the various religiously
sanctioned codes embody a very rough-and-ready practi-
J "Theories of Anarchy and Law," p. 113,
16 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
cability it is only in our own day that people are
beginning to question the perfection of established
rules of conduct, to discuss the drawbacks of duty and
self-sacrifice, and to speculate upon the possible futility
of all ethical systems, nay, upon the possible vanity of
all ideals and formulas whatever.
But the champions of moral anarchy and intellectual
nihilism have made up for lost time, and the books
I intend discussing in the following notes contain,
systematically or by implication, what one might
call the ethics, the psychology, and the metaphysics
of negation. These doctrines of the school which
denies all schools and all doctrines are, as I hope to
show, not of Mephistophelian origin. The spirit
which denies has arisen, in our days at least, neither
from heartlessness nor from levity. On the contrary,
and little as the apostles of anarchy may suspect
it, it is from greater sensitiveness to the sufferings
of others, and greater respect for intellectual sin-
cerity, that have resulted these doubts of the methods
hitherto devised for diminishing unhappiness and
securing truth. And for this reason, if no other, such
subversive criticism ought to be of the highest use to
,the very notions and tendencies which it attacks : we
want better laws, better formulas, better ideals ; we
want a wiser attitude towards laws, formulas, and ideals
in general ; and this better we shall get only by admit-
ting that we have not already got the best.
Leaving alone the epic feats of the old spirit of
duty, the tragedies of Jeanie Deans and Maggie
Tulliver, the lesser, though not less astonishing,
heroism shown us in some of Mary Wilkins's New
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 17
England stories, we have all of us witnessed the action
of that moral training which thwarted personal pre-
ferences and repugnances, and victoriously silenced
their claims. We have all of us heard of women
(particularly in the times of our mothers and grand-
mothers) refusing the man they loved and marrying
the man of whom their parents approved ; we still
look on, every day, at lives dragged along in hated
companionship ; at talents nay actual vocations
suppressed in deference to family prejudice or conveni-
ence : acts of spiritual mutilation so thorough as often
to minimise their own suffering, changing the current
of life, atrophying organic possibilities in such a way
that the victim's subsequent existence was not actively
unhappy, and not even obviously barren. Such things
still go on all round us. The difference now is that
the minor sacrifices are no longer taken for granted by
all lookers-on ; and the grand, heroic self-immolation
no longer universally applauded. There has arisen (it
began, not without silly accompaniments enough, and
disgusting ones, in the eighteenth century) an active
suspiciousness towards all systematic tampering with
human nature. We have had to recognise all the mis-
chief we have done by always knowing better than thel->(^
mechanical and spiritual forces of the universe ; we are-
getting to believe more and more in the organic, the
constitutional, and the unconscious ; and there is an
American book (by the late Mr. Marsh) on the disas-
trous consequences of cutting down forests, draining
lakes, and generally subverting natural arrangements in
our greed for immediate advantages, which might be
taken, every chapter of it, as an allegorical exhibition
1 8 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
of the views to which many people are tending on the
subject of religious and social discipline.
We have had to recognise, moreover, that a great
deal of all the discipline and self-sacrifice hitherto so
universally recommended has been for the benefit of
individuals, and even classes, who by no means reci-
procated towards their victims ; and we cannot deny
that there is a grain of truth in Nietzsche's contempt for
what he calls the "Ethics of Slaves." And, finally, we
see very plainly that the reasonableness and facility of
thorough-going self-sacrifice is intimately connected
with a belief that such self-sacrifice would be amply com-
pensated in another existence : it was rational to give up
the present for the future ; it is not rational to prefer a
future which is problematic to a present which alone is
quite certain. In this way have all of us who think at
all begun to think differently from our fathers ; indeed,
we feel upon this point even more than we actually
think. We warn people not to give up their possi-
bilities of activity and happiness in deference to the
wishes of others. We almost unconsciously collect
instances of such self-sacrifice as has entailed the damage
of others, instances of the tissues of the social fabric
being insidiously rotted through the destruction of one
of its human cells ; and these instances, alas ! are usually
correct and to the point. We even invent, or applaud
the invention of, other instances which are decidedly
far-fetched : for instance, Mrs. Alving producing her
son's hereditary malady by not acquiescing more
openly in his father's exuberant joy of life ; and Pastor
Rosmer destroying, by his scruples, the resources for
happiness of the less scrupulous Rebecca.
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 19
I have chosen these examples on purpose, for they
have enabled me to give a name to these portions of
the anarchical tendencies of our day : we are, all of us
who look a little around us and feel a little for others,
more or less infected with Ibsenism; conscious or uncon-
scious followers of the Ibsenite gospel which Mr.
Bernard Shaw l preaches with jaunty fanaticism. This
seems, on the whole, a very good thing. Except^
perhaps, in the question of manners, of courtesy,
particularly between the sexes (aesthetic superfluities,
but which help to make life liveable), I feel persuaded
that even the most rabid Ibsenism will be advantageous
in the long run. The more we let nature work for us,
the more we employ our instincts and tendencies, in-
stead of thwarting them, the less will be the waste, the
greater the achievement. But in all similar reactions
against past exaggeration there is apt to be a drawback ;
alongside of a great gain, a certain loss ; and this we
should do our utmost to minimise. The old conception
of duty was warped by the fearful error of thinking that
/human nature is bad ; or, as we moderns would express
\ it, that the instincts of the individual are hostile to the
\community. This was, calmly looked at, monstrous.
But are we not, perhaps, on the brink of a correspond-
ing error, less enormous of course, but large enough to
grow a fine crop of misery ? The error, I mean, o^
taking for granted that human nature is already entirely
good ; that the instincts, desires, nay, interests of the'
individual are necessarily in accordance with the good
1 "The Quintessence of Ibsenism" and implicitly wherever
else Ibsenism is not itself being attacked by G. B. S.
20 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
of the community. The Ibsenian theory is right in saying
that there are lots of people, a majority, even, who had
much better have had their own way. But is the
Ibsenian theory right in supposing that certain other
persons (and there may be strands of such in the best
of us), persons like Captain Alving, or Rebecca West,
or Hedda Gabler, or the Master Builder, would have
become harmless and desirable if no one had interfered
with their self-indulgence, their unscrupulousness, their
inborn love of excitement, or their inborn ^0-mania ?
Surely not. There is not the smallest reason why the
removal of moral stigma and of self-criticising ideals
should reduce these people's peculiar instincts (and
these people, I repeat, are mere types of what is mixed
up in most of us) to moderation.
Nor is moderation the remedy for all evils. There
are in us tendencies to feel and act which survive from
times when the mere preservation of individual and of
race was desirable quite unconditionally ; but which,
in our altered conditions, require not moderating, but
actually replacing by something more discriminating,
less wasteful and mischievous. Vanity, for instance,
covetousness, ferocity, are surely destined to be evolved
away, the useful work they once accomplished being
gradually performed by instincts of more recent growth
which spoil less in the process. Improvement, in the
moral life as in any other, is a matter of transforma-
tion ; if we are to use our instincts, our likings
and dislikings, to carry us from narrower circles of life
to wider ones, we must work unceasingly at recon-
stituting those likings and dislikings themselves.
Now, the evolution by which our ego has become less
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 21
incompatible with its neighbours has taken place, largely,
by the mechanism of ideals and duties, of attaching to
certain acts an odium sufficient to counterbalance their
attraction, till it has become more and more difficult
to enjoy oneself thoroughly at other folks* cost. And
tm's Ibsenites are apt to forget.
Ibsenites ask whether it was not horrible that
Claudio should be put to death because Isabella stickled
about chastity ; that an innocent Effie Deans should
be hanged because Jeanie had cut-and-dried ideas of!
veracity ; that Brutus's son should die because his
father was so rigidly law-abiding. But it would have
been far more horrible for the world at large if people
had always been ready to sacrifice chastity, veracity,
or legality to family feelings ; indeed, could such have
been the case, the world, or at least humankind, would
probably have gone to pieces before Claudio, or Effie,
or the son of Brutus had been born. Cut-and-dried
notions of conduct are probably exactly commensurate
with moral slackness. We do not require to deter
people from what they do not want to do, nor to
reward them for what they would do unrewarded.
The very difficulty of acting spontaneously in any
given way demands the formation of more or Jess un-
reasoning habits ; the difficulty of forming desirable
habits demands the coercive force of public opinion ;
and the insufficient power of mere opinion necessitates
that appeal to brute force which is involved in all
application of the law. The oversight of Ibsenian
anarchists (whatever Ibsen's individual views on the
subject) is that of imagining that duties, ideals, laws
can be judged by examining their action in the
22 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
individual case ; for their use, their evolutional raison
d'etre, is only for the general run.
The champions of the Will of the Ego, whether
t represented by bluff Bernard Shaw or by ambiguous
Maurice Barres, 1 start from the supposition that because
>j the individual is a concrete existence, while the species
is obviously an abstraction, the will of the individual
can alone be a reality, and the will of the species must
be a figment. They completely forget that there is
not one concrete individual, but an infinite number
of concrete individuals, and that what governs the
world is, therefore, the roughly averaged will of all these
concrete individuals. The single individual may will
to live as hard as he can, will to expand, assimilate,
reproduce, cultivate his moi, or anything else besides ;
but the accomplishment of that Will of his nay, the
bare existence of himself and his Will depends entirely
upon the Will of the species. Without the permission
of that abstract entity which he considers a figment,
the concrete and only really real individual would never
have realised his individual existence at all. This is
not saying that his own will is not to react against the
will of the species ; for the will of the species is merely
the averaged will of its component individuals, and as
the individual will alters, so must the averaged will
differ. The opinions and ideals and institutions of the
present and the future are unconsciously, and in some
cases consciously, modified, however infinitesimally, by
the reactions of every living man and woman ; and the
1 "L'Ennemi des Lois," "Le Jardin de Berenice," " Un Homme
Libre."
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 23
more universal this atomic individual modification, the
higher the civilisation, the greater the bulk of happiness
attained and attainable. Meanwhile ideals, command-
ments, institutions are, each for its own time, so many
roads, high roads, if not royal roads, to the maximum
of good behaviour possible in any given condition.
Without them, people would have to carry their
virtuous potentialities through bogs and briars, where
most of them would remain sticking. Succeeding
generations, knowing more of the soil and employing
more accurate measurements, making, moreover, free
use of blasting powder, may build shorter and easier
roads, along which fewer persons will die ; roads also
in a greater variety of directions, that every one may
get near his real destination. And the more each
individual keeps his eyes open to the inconveniences
and dangers of the existing roads to righteousness, and
airs his criticisms thereof, the better : for the majority,
which is as slow as the individual is quick, is not likely
to destroy the old thoroughfares before having made
itself new ones. The Ibsenite anarchists are right in
reminding us that there is really nothing holy in such
a road ; for holiness is a quality, not of institutions,
but of character, and a man can be equally holy along
a new road as along an old one ; alas ! as holy along
a wrong road as along a right one. But we, on the
other hand, must remind the Ibsenites that new or old,
right or wrong, such high roads are high roads to the
advantage not always of the single individual at any
given moment, but of the majority at most times, or,
at least, of the majority composed of the most typical
individuals.
24 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
II
After our doubts regarding the validity of the ideals
and institutions to which society expects each individual
voluntarily to conform, come doubts, even more neces-
sary and natural, concerning the majesty of the methods
by which society enforces its preference on such indivi-
duals as fail to conform spontaneously thereunto.
Such doubts as these are by no means due to the
growth of sympathy only, to what is called, and some-
times really is, mere sentimental weakness. Together
with disbelief in a theologically appointed universe, we
have witnessed the growth of respect both for fact and
for logic ; and, as a consequence, we no longer regard
the infringement of a human law as the rebellion to the
will of God. We have replaced the notion of sin by
the notion of crime ; and the particular act which we
happen to call a crime is no longer, in our eyes, a
detached and spontaneously generated fact in a single
individual character, but the result of a dozen converg-
ing causes, of which this individual character may be
only one, while the constitution of surrounding society
is sure to be another of the determinants. We re-
cognise also that while, on the one hand, the capacity
for committing certain acts intolerable to the majority
does not imply utter worthlessness in many other
directions ; on the other hand, the thorough-going
perversity which renders an individual criminal an
unmitigated evil to his fellow-creatures involves con-
stitutional and irresistible tendencies which are incom-
patible with any notion of responsibility. All this
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 25
comes to saying that the coercion and punishment of
offenders has become a question not of morality, but
of police ; that it has ceased to be a sort of holy sacri-
fice to God, and grown to be a rough-and-ready way
of getting rid of a nuisance. And this has altered our
feelings from the self-complacency of a priest to the
humiliation of an unwilling scavenger. We are getting
a little ashamed of the power to imprison, bully, outlaw,
destroy either life or life's possibilities, which constitutes
the secular arm of all theoretic morality.
Is such a feeling mistaken ? Surely only inasmuch
as it would turn a desirable possibility for the future
into an unmanageable actuality in the present. For,
however much we may admit that bodily violence, and
the kind of discipline dependent thereupon, are neces-
sary in the present, and will be necessary for longer
than we dare foresee in the future, we must open our
eyes to the fact that all progress represents a constant
diminution thereof. Similarly we must be careful that\ (
all our methods (even the methods including autho-
ritativeness and violence) shall tend to the eventual
disappearance of violence towards human beings and
authoritativeness towards adults ; violence remaining
our necessary method with brutes and authoritativeness
with children, but even in these relations diminishing,
to the utmost. For violence, and the discipline
founded on violence (as distinguished from self-discipline
sprung from intelligence and adaptability) means not
merely suffering, but wastefulness worse than suffering,
because it entails it : waste of the possibilities of adapta-
tion in him who exerts it, as well as of constitutional
improvement in him who suffers from it. Waste above
26 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
all of the Reality, the reality which must be slightly
different in every individual case, reality containing the
possibilities of new arrangements and new faculties ;
reality which we cruelly disregard whenever we treat
individual cases as merely typical, whenever we act on
the one half of a case containing similarity, and neglect
the other half of the case containing difference. Such
wastefulness of method is necessary just in proportion
as we are deficient in the power of seeing, feeling,
sympathising, discriminating ; deficient in the power of
selecting, preferring, and postponing. Violence over
body and over mind ; violence against the will of
others ; violence against fact : these represent the
friction in the imperfect machinery of life ; and pro-
gress is but the substitution of human mechanism more
and more delicate and solid, through which the move-
ment is ever greater, the friction ever less.
Meanwhile, do we possess a human mechanism as
good as it might be? Tolstoi, Ibsen, the author of
the very suggestive dialogues on Anarchy and Law,
even egoistic decadents like Maurice Barres, the whole
heterogeneous crusade of doubt and rebellion, are
doing good work in showing that we have not ; in
forcing us to consider what proportions of subtlety
and clumsiness, of movement and of friction, of utility
and waste, are represented by the system of coercion
and punishment accepted in our days. And such an
examination will surely prove that in this matter we
have developed our ingenuity less (sometimes atrophied
it), and proceeded with far greater hurry and sloven-
liness than with any of the other products of civilisation.
Try and imagine where building, agriculture, manu-
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 27
facture, any of the most common crafts would be, had
it been carried on throughout the centuries as we still
carry on the moralisation of mankind ; if stone, brick,
soil, manure, raw material, let alone the physical and
chemical laws, had been treated in the rough-and-ready
manner in which we treat human thought and impulse !
But the fact is that we have required food, clothing,
and shelter so bitterly hitherto, that all our best intelli-
gence and energy have gone to diminish wastefulness
in their production ; and no time has remained, no
power of discrimination, for making the best of intel-
lectual and moral qualities. Indeed, we have dealt,
and we deal only, with the bad moral qualities of man-
kind ; those that can be seen in spare five minutes and
with a rushlight ; nay, those which are stumbled over fifajbjL
in the dark and kicked into corners. We may hope
for improvement almost in proportion as we recognise
that punishment is the expression not of responsibility
towards heaven on the part of the malefactor, but of
incapacity and hurry on the part of those whom the
malefactor damages. For here even as in the question
of duties and ideals, what we are suffering from is lack
of discrimination, paucity of methods, insufficiency of
formulas ; and what we want is not less law, but more
law : law which will suit the particular case which is a
reality and has results, not merely the general run, I
which is an abstraction and takes care of itself.
Ill
Out of these various doubts about standards of con-
duct and social arrangements there arises gradually
28 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
a central core of doubt, to which the others can be
logically reduced ; the doubt, namely, whether the
individuality is not cramped, enfeebled, rendered unfit
for life, by obedience to any kind of abstraction, to
anything save its own individual tendencies. Oddly
enough, the psychological theory had in this matter
preceded the thorough-going practical application ; and
the implicit principles of subsequent anarchical views
were expressed by the earliest and least read of anarchist
writers, Max Stirner (Kaspar Schmidt), 1 who died so
long ago as 1856.
Max Stirner builds up his s_ystem for his hatred of
system is expressed in elaborately systematic form
upon the notion that the Geist, the intellect which forms
conceptions, is a colossal cheat for ever robbing the
individual of its due, and marring life by imaginary
obstacles ; a wicked sort of Archimago, whose phantas-
magoria, duly, ideal, vocation, aim, law, formula, can be
described only by the untranslatable German word
Spuk, a decidedly undignified haunting by bogies.
Against this kingdom of delusion the human individual
der Einzige has been, since the beginning of time,
slowly and painfully fighting his way ; never attaining
to any kind of freedom, but merely exchanging one
form of slavery for another, slavery to the religious
delusion for slavery to the metaphysic delusion, slavery
to divine right for slavery to civic liberty ; slavery to
dogma, commandment, heaven and hell, for slavery to
sentiment, humanity, progress ; all equally mere words,
conceits, figments, by which the wretched individual
1 " Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum."
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 29
has allowed himself to be coerced and martyrised : the
wretched individual who alone is a reality.
This is the darkest, if not the deepest, pit of anar-
chical thought ; and through its mazes Stirner drags
us round and round for as long a time as Kant requires
for his Categories, or the Mediaeval Monk for the
imitation of Christ both of which, by the way, are
good examples of Spuk. But even as Dante clambered
out of hell by continuing the way he had come down,
so we also can emerge from Stirner's negations by
pursuing the arguments which had led into them.
And, having got to the individual as the only and
original reality, we can work our way back to those
subsidiary and contingent realities, the individual's
duties, ideals, and institutions.
There is nothing real, says Stirner, but the various
conditions of the individual ; the rest is delusion,
Spuk. But if only the ego is real, how can anything
else interfere with it? If such abstractions and fig-
ments as God, State, Family, Morality (or whatever
the name of the particular bogy), can cramp, cabin,
maim our individuality ; then, since our individuality
alone has reality, these various delusions must be
a part of our individuality. Free yourselves, says
Stirner, from your own ideas. But our ideas, whether
spontaneously generated in ourselves or assimilated
from others, must, in order to have real powers such
as we attribute to them, be a part of ourself : and if
we sacrifice any other part of ourself to those ideas, it
is a proof that they, and not the sacrificed part, must
be, at that particular conjunction of circumstances,
the dominant part of our ego. Stirner's psychology
30 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
admits love for individuals as a determinant of action ;
and similarly regard for the reciprocity of self-interest.
But is not love for mankind, however vague the man-
kind, and regard for principle, however abstract the
principle, quite as much a real active power of our
nature ? If Stirner is made uncomfortable, as he says,
by the frown on the face of his beloved, and "kisses
the frown away " to rid himself of his discomfort ;
why, so are other egos less numerous, but not less real
made uncomfortable by the look of pain in men and
women whom they do not care for, nay, by the mere
knowledge that men and women, even animals, whom
they have never seen, are suffering, or are likely to
suffer : and, in certain egos rarest, but most effica-
ciously real there will arise an impulse yes, some-
thing so irresistibly real as a constitutional impulse to
sacrifice everything for the sake of diminishing that
unseen, that possible suffering : suffering present in
hospitals, in factories, in slums, in prisons, or future
suffering in hell.
And similarly there are egos which are made as
wretched by the neglect of some civic or religious duty
as Stirner could possibly be by skipping a meal or losing
a night's sleep. It is quite a different question whether
such ideas as these, ideas whose coercive power reveals
them an integral part of the ego, happen or not to coin-
cide with the courses most desirable for the total
welfare either of one single ego or of a great number
of egos. The point at issue is whether or not such
active factors in life can be treated as separate from life
itself ; it is a different question similarly whether any
more egoistic preference, say for alcohol or gambling,
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 31
happens in the long run to tally with *the ego's ad-
vantage. Stirner, indeed, entrenches himself behind
the notion that wherever there exists any kind of over-
mastering desire, need, or idea, the ego ceases to exist.
But, as a psychological fact, at any given moment of
reality, some desire, need, or idea, or group of desires,
needs, or ideas, must inevitably be having the mastery,
otherwise impulse would disappear and action of all
kinds cease. For the ego which refuses to be dominated
by any particular idea or any particular desire, be it
externalised as humanity, duty, or merely tobacco or
bottle, is an ego dominated by some other idea or desire,
by the idea or desire that it ought to be free from such
domination in particular, or from all conscious domina-
tion in general. But as to an ego which, at any given
moment, is otherwise than dominated by some feeling,
impulse, or thought, that kind of ego is, oddly enough,
exactly the thing which Stirner is waging war against
an abstraction, a nonentity, a figment of logic, of which
we have no practical experience. Yes, indeed, nothing
but the ego is efficient ; since, to be efficient, everything
else must have been absorbed into or must impinge
upon it.
This anarchical psychology of Stirner's (and some-
thing similar, however unformulated, exists in the mind
also of Maurice Barres and of Bernard Shaw) brings
home to me how much we stand in need of a new
science of will, thought, and emotion ; or, rather, of
the practical application of such a science of the soul
as recent years have already given us. It would put
us equally above the new-fangled theories of freeing the
ego by abolishing ideals and habits, and above the old-
32 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
fashioned notions of thwarting the ego in the name of
morality. For it would show that the ego is not the
separate momentary impulse, but the organic hierarchy
of united and graduated impulses ; a unity which being
evolved by contact with similar unities, can be made
as harmonious with them as the mere separate impulses,
referring to mere partial and momentary relations, are
likely to be the reverse. This being understood, we
shall seek less for the outer discipline, the constraining
of the individual by society, than for the inner discip-
line, the subordination of the individual's lesser and
,. also less durable motives to the greater and more
durable. We shall, once we have really conceived this
organic unity of the individual, desist from our waste-
ful and cruel attempts to reduce all men to one pattern,
to extract from all the same kind of service. But in
such healthy development of the ego, in such organic,
inner discipline, the conscious reference to standards,
the conscious desire for harmony, will be an indispen-
sable means. Duties and ideals will again be valued
above all things ; not, indeed, as intellectual formulas,
but as factors of habitual emotional conditions. For
the chief value of duty or ideal is the capacity fostered
thereby of being dutiful, of acting in accordance with
an ideal. Among the great gifts for which we must
thank the theological systems of the past, the Puritan
element in every creed, the most valuable are not the
' 'tables of permissions and prohibitions, always variable,
and still very rough and ready. The splendid work
of Puritanism is the training, nay, the conception, of
a real individuality, the habit of self-dominion, of post-
poning, foregoing the immediate, momentary and
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 33
temporal for the sake of a distant, permanent, and, in-
asmuch as intellectually recognised, spiritual something.
The moral value or Jeanie Deans is not in her con-
viction that under no circumstances must a lie be told
(although her conviction was correct in 999 cases out
of 1,000), but in her incapacity of telling a lie so long
as she was convinced against it. Puritanism is psycho-
logically right in its implicit recognition of the supe-
riority of the habitual condition of feeling over the
transient impulse. For what I habitually wish to be I
represents, or ought to represent, the bulk of my nature
and organisation more really than what at a given
moment I actually am. If individualism is to triumph,
if any good is to come (and it doubtless will) out ot
contemporary anarchic theories of the ego, it will be
by an increase rather than a diminution of the healthy
Puritan element. It is, after all, the Puritans in
temper who have done all successful rebellion against
items of Puritan codes ; whereas the egoist of the
modern type is, nine times out of ten, the sort of
person who tolerates evil for want of the self-discipline
and consistency necessary to stop it.
IV
After the psychology of anarchy comes its meta-
physics, or, I would almost say, its theology. Theology,
because, not satisfied with appealing to our reason, it
meddles with the instincts which seek for the quality
we call divine, and for the emotions that quality
awakens ; and theology also, because it occasionally
3
34
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
'
even suggests the making of new gods, the creation
of a strange metaphorical Olympus. Like all other
theology, it is esoteric and exoteric ; it has its treatises
of highest metaphysical subtlety ; and its little popular
catechisms, quite full of explicit absurdities. Such a
catechism as this was made up by the late J. A.
Symonds out of the opinions, or what he took to be
the opinions, of Walt Whitman. It is the declaration
,jfc fof the equal rights and equal dignity of all the parts of
man's nature ; and implicity therefore of the foolish-
ness of all the hierarchies which various creeds and
various systems of ethics have set up in the soul and
the life of mankind. It is characteristically different
in tone from the anarchical utterances of the egotistic
decadent Barres and the metaphysical Nihilist Stirner ;
it is eminently Anglo-Saxon in a sort of unconscious
optimistic cant. Its subversiveness consists in an
attempt to set things right ; but it does so, not by
pleading that nothing is evil, but rather by insisting
that everything is good. The democratic view, as it
is called, of Whitman, as expounded by Symonds,
consists in asserting that all things are equally divine.
Now if you start with identifying divine with
divinely ordained, and identify the Divinity with the
bare fact of existence, then all things are certainly
portions of the Divinity, and, in so far, divine. But
if all things are in this sense divine, then divine ceases
to be a quality which evokes any sense of preference ;
then divine is no longer an expression commensurate
with esteem, still less legitimately productive of
emotional satisfaction ; if all things are divine, why
then some may be divine and honourable and others
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 35
divine and dishonourable. There is something akin
in this anarchic theology to the juggling with the word
value of Karl Marx and his followers. It is the
acceptance of the emotional quality of a word after
emptying out the meaning which had produced it.
Good, noble, divine ; a hierarchy of words denoting
such qualities as we think especially desirable ; denot-
ing the fuller possession of that which we esteem most
highly in ourselves, be it strength or beauty, moral
or intellectual helpfulness; words which awaken
in our mind the sense of approval, of respect, and
finally of reverence and wonder. Perform a little
sleight-of-hand, and shuffle divinity with God, God
with Nature, Nature with Being, and you contrive
to awaken that emotion of rareness, superiority,
wonderfulness, in connection with . . . with what ?
O irony of self-delusion ! with everything equally.
This subversion of all appreciation is the furthest
possible from being, as Whitman seems to have
imagined, and as Symonds reiterates, a highly scientific
thought. For science teaches us that all life, and
especially the life we human beings call progress, is
not a mere affirmation, so to speak, of mere passive
being, of " what is is " but a selection and rejec-
tion, the perpetual assertion of fitness against unfitness,
a constant making of inequality. To our feelings,
and to our mind (unless it become a word without
intellectual and emotional meaning) the divine is the
supremely desirable. According to our condition
that desirable has inevitably shifted quarters, but it has
always been, and must always be, the exceptional, the
exceptional which becomes, perhaps, by dint of our
3 6
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
seeking it, the rule ; our desires being set free to
seek something new, some other rare thing which we
would fain make common. And in this way our
spiritual progress has consisted, most probably, in the
gradual relegation to the obscure, half-conscious,
automatic side of our nature of instincts and functions
which have once been uppermost ; in the gradual
raising of the level of the desirable, the contemplated,
above the necessities of the moment and the body,
above the interest of the ego. There is no place for
democracy a la Whitman in the soul ; its law is co-
ordination, subordination, hierarchy.
The " Theories of Anarchy and Law," of Mr.
H. B. Brewster, is unknown to the public just in propor-
tion, I should say, to its merits. It takes no ordinary
reader to appreciate its subtlety of analysis and boldness
of hypothesis. And the marvellous impartiality which
sees every side of every argument equally, and refrains
from all judgment, is positively distressing even to
the most admiring reader, who seeks in vain for
something to attack or to espouse, who gropes, blinded
by excess of light, for the unclutchable personality of
the author. Behind which of the speakers of these
dialogues shall we look for him ? At which moment
does he shift from the one side to the other ? Is Mr.
Brewster on the whole for or against intellectual and
ethical Nihilism ? Be this as it may, the book is on
the whole a perfect gospel of anarchy, because, in
the first place, the anarchical opinions, although they
represent only one quarter of the doctrines represented,
are those we are least accustomed to and consequently
most impressed by ; and because, in the second place,
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 37
the very impartiality, the refusal to decide, to
commend and condemn, leaves an impression of the
utter vanity of all formula and all system.
It is, therefore, only as an expression of anarchic
tendencies that I wish, in this connection, to mention
' f I ^r
the book. And principally because it affords, in the
most remarkable form, the key-note of what I should
call the transcendental theology of anarchy. I use
the word theology once more advisedly. For Mr.
Brewster has separated from the various practical
and speculative items which held it in solution, and
distilled into the subtlest essence, a transcendental
principle which lurks, however unperceived, in all
anarchic writings, a transcendental equivalent of the
old Persian and Manichean dualism. At the end
of all the doubts, doubts about ideals, duties, institu-
tions, formulas, whether they are good or evil, arises
the final doubt : have we a right to prefer good to
evil ? Does the universe live only in the being
of God ; does the universe not live equally in the
being of Satan ? The pessimistic philosophers of
our century have accustomed us to conceive of forces
in creation which are irreconcileable with benevolence.
The later Darwinism is training us to perceive that
in the process of evolution there is, alongside of the
selection of the fittest, the rendering even unfitter '
of the initially unfit, degenerative tendencies as well ' ,
as tendencies to adaptation. We have had to admit
that destruction is a factor in all construction. The '
doubt arises, may not destruction be just as great a
power as construction ? Not as its servant, but as its
rival, its equal. Are we not Pharisees in condemning
38 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
all persons and instincts unsuitable, forsooth, to the
purposes of our race and civilisation, when those
persons and instincts are as much realities as any
others ? Are we not Philistines in condemning all
views of life which do not square with our particular
intellectual organisation ? Is not what we call evil
a reality, and does chaos perhaps not exist as truly
as order ? Shall we not recognise the great dualism ?
By no means. We are so constituted that evil
cannot please nor chaos satisfy us ; and our consti-
tution must be, for us, the law of the universe.
For we conceive the universe only in terms of our
own existence, and the qualities we attribute to it
are only modes of our own feeling. All we can
be sure of about good and evil, chaos and order, is
that they are conceptions of ours. Are they concep-
tions, and it so, to what extent corresponding, of
anything else ? We cannot tell. What we call forces
of destruction and disorder are such to us ; nay, they
are forces perhaps only to us ; it is only through our
own aversion that we know of destruction and disorder
at all. The origin of all such doubts, and their
solution also, lies in the nature of the doubter. In
the little world which our faculties, our spiritual and
practical needs, as well as our bodily senses, have
created for us out of the infinite unknown universe,
it is our human instincts which decide, as they have
determined, everything. And among the ideas they
have set on foot they decide for good against evil,
for order against chaos.
These discussions on anarchy and law, these
GOSPELS OF ANARCHY 39
struggles between what we have and what we want,
should give a result more practically important than
even the most important application in practice ; for,
in our life, a habit of feeling and thinking, an attitude,
is of wider influence than a rule of conduct. The
attempt to verify our moral compass, the deliberate
readiness to do so, might result in the safest kind
of spiritual peace. For, to be able to see in all that
we call bad, wrong, false, the cause and effect, the
immense naturalness and inevitableness, its place in
the universe as distinguished from its place in our
own liking or convenience ; to be able to face fact
as fact, as something transcending all momentary
convenience or pleasantness ; yet at the same time
to preserve our human preferences, to exercise our
human selection all the more rigidly because we know
that it is our selection, reality offering more, but
we accepting only what we choose ; such a double
attitude would surely be the best. It would be the
only attitude thoroughly true, just, kind, and really
practical, giving us peace and dignity and energy for
struggle without hoodwinking or arrogance. It would
&F+
be more respectful both to our own nature, and to the \ &F+Q&
nature which transcends ours, to recognise that what j&rCtA*/
mankind wants it wants because it is mankind ; and
to leave off claiming from the universe conformity to,
human ideals and methods.
The sense of this (however vague) has been
furthered by occasional fortunate conditions of civili-
sation, and it is, most probably, constitutional in
certain happily balanced natures. It is what gives
the high serenity to men of the stamp of Plato and
40 GOSPELS OF ANARCHY
Goethe and Browning ; they can touch everything,
discuss everything, understand the reason of every-
thing, yet remain with preferences unaltered. Perhaps
we may all some day attain, by employing equally
our tendencies to doubt and our tendencies to believe,
to such a fearless, yet modest, recognition of what is,
and also of what we wish it to be.
EMERSON AS A TEACHER OF
LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES
EMERSON AS A TEACHER OF LATTER-
DAY TENDENCIES
I
IN the following notes upon Emerson no attempt
has been made to assign him his place in the
kingdom of thought and expression, either by tracing
his spiritual generations and kinships, or by comparing
him quality by quality so much more or less of
intuition, logic, synthesis and analysis with the
thinkers who seem measurable in the same scales.
Still less, to account for the peculiarities of the work
by the peculiarities of the man, of his nation and times.
The relation I should wish to set forth is that
between Emerson's writings, and one of their readers
myself. For the relation between writer and reader,
where such really exists, implies the originating of
ideas and states of feeling such as did not exist in
either reader or writer taken singly, the latent pecu-
liarities of the one being vitalised and altered by the
fruitful contact of the other. The thought, the feeling
thus generated may be far from uncommon, and may
be shortlived and comparatively barren ; but it is an
organic particle of that vast, fluctuating mass of spiritual
life whence all thought and all feeling arise, and with-
44 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
out which the most creative minds could not create,
or, could they create, would be creative to no purpose.
This action and reaction, give and take, between
reader and writer is worthy of attention quite apart
from the value of the ideas which it may have brought
forth. It would afford another demonstration of the
relativeness of all judgment, of the incompleteness of
all definite views, and it would constitute an additional
lesson, very wholesome for our conceit and impatience,
on the poverty and faultiness of each individual's
contribution to truth, as compared with the excellence
of the unindividual mass of thought made up of such
contributions.
As regards Emerson, I am aware of his exceptional
influence in maturing my thought. And it is my
impression that in return for the partial change he has
thus effected since only partial changes are valuable,
implying by their partiality the presence of some
original tendencies I have been able to alter some
of his main ideas in a way such as to render them
more fruitful : clearing them of certain sterilising
excrescences, and grafting them on to the living
thought of our days. My reader, in his turn, will
alter and prune and graft my alterations, or cast them
aside as useless, or useless at least to himself.
But be this as it may, my notes will be valuable in
showing one of the ways in which reader and writer
unite to form a something new. For it will be visible
in them that Emerson helped me first by arousing
considerable antagonism, and that the reaction against
his antagonistic peculiarities so helped to clear my
own ideas, that I grew eventually able to approach him
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 45
with impartiality, to separate deliberately what dis-
figured him in my eyes ; and, having put aside these
disfiguring portions, to enter his presence in a mood
worthy of making me receive the inestimable gifts of
his soul.
II
Emerson, like Ruskin, like Tolstoi, belongs to the
category, once numerous, now daily diminishing in
number, of mystics and symbolists. Their method
is innate in him, if we may call method that which
implies the absence rather than the presence of
intellectual discipline : truth is perceived by flashes,
in luminous points amid the darkness, without any
attempt to work it out, to shed the light of one opinion
upon the neighbouring opinion, to obtain a continuity
of solid, illuminated ground.
He openly deprecates any attempts at consecutiveness,
he warns mankind against wanting to do that which
cannot be done without the wanting, against wishing to
be or to have what they are not or have not already.
He is the apostle of spontaneity ; in his consuming
passion for reality he confounds the deliberate with the
artificial, and the artificial with the futile. The benefit
of Emerson's advice on this head depends on the
recognition that there are some things we can never do,
some things we can never have or be namely, all
those of whose nature there is not in ourselves already
a germ, a possibility. The danger of Emerson's advice
consists in making us believe that the _ctual is the
0tential, that what we are not we cannot become, that
46 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
what we have not yet got we may never obtain.
There will be a distinct gain in spontaneity, which
spontaneity means success, and a diminution of the
kind of effort which means only failure, despair, or,
worst of all, the wasting, the spoiling of what is
valuable. There will be a much smaller number of
shams, and a greater proportion of satisfactory
products ; which means an increase of happiness and
what conduces thereto. But, on the other hand, there
will be a waste of potentialities, of the things that might
have been ; and therewith a great loss in completeness,
thoroughness, balance, and in all things intellectual,
of lucidity and efficacy for application to practice.
The world will not be in thorough working order,
since working order implies co-ordination, co-operation,
compromise. Things will be comparatively spasmodic,
and, in a measure, sterile. This absence of lucidity,
this sporadic, sterile tendency, is visible in Emerson
himself; it is the drawback of his doctrine, of his practice
of spontaneity.
Yet it is doubtful whether it is not better thus
better that the exaggerations and shortcomings should
be corrected by Emerson's readers than forestalled by
Emerson himself. It is possible that with men of this
mystic-symbolical temper the greater lucidity and
practical applicability (since practice is based on reality,
and reality can be attained only by being lucid) might
fail to compensate for the diminution in suggestiveness
and directness. The prophetically enounced thought
works its way deeper, perhaps, into the mind of the
hearer, when it is such as does not graze off the surface.
It sets the mind a-thinking (when itself thinkable)
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 47
more than the carefully argued thesis. So it is well
worth while to let the prophet babble occasional
nonsense, talk, like the earliest Christians and the
Irvingites, in gibberish tongues, for the sake of the
great words of inspiration which drop, ever and anon,
from his superhuman lips.
But connection in our ideas, the quality of being
thought out, is valuable for more than itself. The
act of bringing our ideas into mutual dependence
shows us also which of them are worthless : the union
of a fallacy with a truth, even if it produce no
immediate jar, can produce but a vicious consequence.
We begin to doubt of our premiss on seeing its unten-
able conclusions or side-issues. Here, then, comes
in the danger of the intellectual methods of Emerson,
of all prophetic, clairvoyant, as distinguished from
prosaically logical, thinkers. These men can throw out
a falsehood or mere faulty approximation to truth,
without being warned of what they are doing. Nay,
worse, they can hit upon a truth without that truth
destroying its corresponding error. In this system
(or absence thereof) of isolating ideas, everything is
safe the good and the bad can rest at peace ; the
good does not inconvenience the bad, nor the bad
inconvenience the good. The thinker is never called
upon to make a choice among his thoughts, he may
keep them all. Hence it is that these clairvoyant
thinkers give us so much of truth swimming in so
much of falsehood, or vice versa. Hence, worst of
all, that they will be so serenely unconscious of the
practical dangers of their teachings. The metaphysical
Schoolmen of the Middle Ages kept up the standard
48 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
of thinking and living ; while the mystics, their
superiors in mind and in feeling, very frequently
debased it exceedingly.
And, moreover, this resting satisfied with one's
spontaneous intentions, as distinguished from all
attempts to connect and correct them, this habit of
never comparing one's conceptions of things with each
other must result in a virtual refusal to examine either
facts or other men's views. No sense of intellectual
responsibility can be generated by modes of thought so
casual and disconnected. The thinker keeps his ideas
apart, so they never clash ; he keeps them separate also
from their own consequences, from the thought of
others, from the inconvenient testimony of reality. He
clears all around him ; and soon comes to be the only
mind, the only thought in the universe : the universe
becomes the image of his views of it ; and all save the
intellect ceases to exist.
It is most curious to observe how Emerson, whose
exquisite moral and aesthetic sensibility is revealed in a
thousand fragmentary utterances, uproots all human
sympathies and preferences in laying out his stony
garden of the intellect, but leaves them everywhere
about, to bloom delightfully little unnoticed heaps or
earth's weeds in those fine concentric paths and beds
of intellectual spar and gravel. Thus, in the famous
essay on " Friendship," that most extraordinary
revelation of a passionate personality, he affects to
consider the friend as a mere intellectual excitement
(all is over, he tells us, once curiosity is satisfied) ; and
even in placing his austere bounds to such intellectual
voluptuousness, he speaks only of his own self-respect,
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 49
his own spiritual temperance, and the results of indul-
gence, or refraining upon his own soul, with never
a reference to the feelings, the poor soft heart of the
other party. Learn to check your fancies in friend-
ship, to refrain from your friend, to do without ; learn
to expect no reciprocity. Why ? Lest in your hurry
you may engage another's permanent affection where
you cannot give your own ? lest in your habit of
constant spiritual union you become selfish, exacting,
or, in your desire for reciprocation, you grow unable
to give save where you receive ? For not one of these
reasons. No ; merely because of the risk to your
intellectual independence, your intellectual integrity
and security. One would think, were it not for the
evidence of a hundred scattered utterances of most
delicate lovingkindness, that Emerson was a fierce intel-
lectual egoist like Abelard, writing just such letters to
Heloise, answering her prayer for one gentle word
with chapters of theology, in the suppressed savageness
of a mediaeval ascetic, who sees with disgust something
that has once inflamed his senses but never touched
his heart.
And similarly he mentions pain, not as a horror
whose existence all around we must for ever struggle
against a horror the thought of which, as existing
in others, is almost as bad as its reality in ourselves
but as a possible factor in producing the man of pure
intellect the jus t um et tenacem propositi virum.
For Emerson is perpetually repeating that all life
is in the intellect nay, all reality. Hence a possibility
of interest only in cause and effect in the why things
^ not the how things should be. Hence all matters
4
50 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
being referable only to Intellect, Intellect or rather,
an intellect corresponding to his own is evidently
God. And hence a perpetual worship, sometimes
slightly savouring of Moloch's, of a Godhead which,
in its apparent indifference to evil and suffering, is
indeed but the mist-magnified shadow of Emerson's
own Olympian mind.
All things, therefore, are the symbol of Divinity, the
forms in which the Creative force chooses, Proteus-like,
to mask. And for this reason nature, all that is and
can be, is noble.
But Emerson is meanwhile the sport of a delusion :
he conceives that what is taking place within himself is
happening also without. He is watching his own
mind, shadowed on the outer world, passing from
object to object ; and he fancies that this vague and
magnified himself must be God. Thus the divinity
for Emerson the divinity passing into and through all
things is not the power by virtue of which things are,
but in reality the power by virtue of which he per-
ceives their existence. For Emerson, though often
insisting on the part played by the perceiving mind in
all matters of perception, refuses to consider that in the
same way as the structure of the eye, which makes a
straight stick seem crooked in the water, so also the
quality and condition of the mind which perceives
nature, is a fact inside nature, and not outside it. If
Emerson had any habits of systematic thought, he
could not avoid taking notice of this fact ; he would
be obliged, once having suspected their nature, to
examine methodically his own mental operations. But
being unhampered by any system, he can afford to look
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 51
away from any fact which might disturb him ; and so,
at the convenient moment, when it would have become
clear that thought cannot any more than the senses can
handle absolute reality, he looks away from himself,
and looks in the direction of what he calls God. Here,
by no metaphysical sleight of hand, but by merely
dropping the subject and picking it up elsewhere, he
has momentarily got rid of the identity between the
universal mind and his own. This intellect, self-created
and all-creating, is now no longer the mind of Emer-
son, moulding matter into so many disguises for itself :
it is the mind of the world. And who could deny that
the mind of the world, in so far as mind of the
world, might sport with matter, or call it up as
a mere phantom out of nothingness ? The purely
intellectual man, impatient of all that is not intel-
lect, revolting from the thought that anything save
intellect can have reality, does thus attribute his own
temper to the Godhead the Godhead with whom he
fancies that, in following any chain of cause and effect,
he must be united and identified.
Therefore [attempting to systematise what Emerson
has thrown out in separate statements] the divinity,
inasmuch as the mere magnified reflexion of the indi-
vidual intellect, is necessarily what that individual
interest happens to be : that which makes or perceives
all cause and effect. And so it comes to pass that
cause and effect, being made by the mind identical with
God, and hence by God Himself, become the Godlike ;
and the Godlike, Emerson has been accustomed to
think, is the same as the holy, the virtuous. In short,
all that is is right, not as Pope imagined, because it was
52 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
necessarily made to be right, but merely because to be
right is the same as to be, because something else has been
before and conditioned it. " It is dislocation and
detachment from the life of God," we read in the Essay
on the poet, " that makes things ugly ; and the poet
who reattaches things to nature and the whole re-
attaching even artificial things and revelations of nature
to nature by a deeper insight disposes very easily of
disagreeable facts." This, extended into less pithy
language, means merely that all is right so long as it is
understood ; and that the scientific thinker, whom
Emerson misnames Poet, being able to demonstrate
that even such things as most shock our constitution
are yet the inevitable results of certain other things, can
give us the satisfaction of seeing cause and effect and
thereby set our minds at rest about such " disagreeable
facts" as it foolishly feels annoyed at. Whatever is,
being cause and effect, is an emanation of the divinity,
who is also cause and effect. And, as Emerson has
been brought up to connect morality with what other
men call God (meaning thereby any of a variety of
things, but not cause and effect), Emerson perceives
that cause and effect must be moral. " Since every-
thing in nature," he says, " answers to a moral power,
if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is
because the corresponding faculty in the observer is
not yet active " that is to say that the " brute and
dark " phenomenon is not yet disposed of as cause and
effect. Thus to the connecting, reasoning mind, cause
and effect having become divine, came actually to mean
morality. The evil fact is comfortably settled once we
have recognised its origin, and pain and death, disease
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 53
and degradation, may link hands with whatever is fair
and noble here below, and revolve mystically round
the Divinity and the divine human being in a rhythm
of causation and logic, making soul-music of is and
was !
Nay, further for it is easier sometimes for the
intellect to endure evil than that which, being the
reverse of intellect, is more antagonistic to it
Emerson formulates what has been blunderingly put
into practice by Whitman, and condenses into a few
mystical words what Whitman extends into grotesque
rhapsodies of mixed beauty and dirt. " All the facts
of the animal economy," says Emerson, " sex, nutri-
ment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the
passage of the world into the soul of man."
But the soul of man, not being, as Emerson takes
for granted, exclusively devoted to logic, will not
receive into itself with equanimity some of the sym-
bolical items. The soul of man protests against the
contact of foulness and baseness, injustice and pain,
however much legitimated by logic. The soul will
not be satisfied with a divinity that governs mere
cause and effect it requires a moral, an aesthetic
rule.
In this fashion does the most cunning reader of the
mind's strange palimpsest forget for the time being
some of the mind's most striking rubrics. This
delicate expert in exquisite nature leaves out of his
reckoning some of nature's most essential qualities. He
overlooks in his main philosophy what is the burden
of all his detail teaching namely, that we require for
our spiritual satisfaction much more than the mere
54 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
apprehension of cause and effect ; that, besides the
wish to understand why things are, there is in us the
more imperious want to make things as they should be.
He puts aside what elsewhere he perpetually postulates,
that, even as we have physical senses which are dis-
gusted by certain tastes and smells, despite all explana-
tions of their chemical reasons, so likewise we have
spiritual instincts which, despite all possible explanations
of how and why, will always be revolted by whatever
is unjust, cruel, ugly, or gross. There is in us the
logical faculty which reduces all things to cause and
effect, making them all equally important or unim-
portant, according as the mind which perceives is keen
or languid. But there are also the aesthetic and moral
faculties which are essentially selecting, preferring, and
which arrange all things in a long scale whose bottom
means abhorrence or contempt, and whose top the
fervidest love and admiration. These and these only
are qualifying activities ; the mere logical intellect can
only recognise and connect, it cannot judge. It is not,
thanks to the intellect, that anything, that " sex,
gestation, nutriment," &c., can be made high or low
according as it is, or is not, viewed in connection with
the scheme of creation ; since the intellect knows
neither high nor low. If a subject can seem now gross
and now pure, now trivial and now dignified, it is
because our qualifying functions, moral or aesthetic,
recognise the superior desirableness or rareness of the
intellectual perception as distinguished from the bodily
one ; because they have decided that if there is
enough and too much of the contemplation of some
matters by the brute, there is not enough of this
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 55
contemplation by the scientific man or the moralist.
And who tells us that the man of science or the
moralist is nobler than the brute ? Not the instinct of
mere causal relation, but the instinct which says : " I
want more of this, less of that " ; the instinct which
brings things into relation, not with what Emerson
worships as God, but with what Emerson is for ever
overlooking Man.
The fact is that Emerson, in his process of forgetting
everything that is not mind, has forgotten human
nature ; in his supposed union with God he has left
Man in the lurch. His grave optimism is founded on
a disregard for man's existence ; when he is talking
about man, with the marvellous intuition so oddly at
variance with his theoretic onesidedness, he is often
pessimistic enough.
Having perceived that all things proceed with logical
correctness, and having identified his own perception
of cause and effect with the creative act, Emerson has
judged that all that is, is right. Thus in the uni-
verse where God and Emerson strange mystic dual-
ism ! sit alone, willing and understanding, under-
standing and willing. But introduce into this universe
man, and the aspect of matters changes. Those things
which affect Emerson and God as right that is
to say, as being affect man sometimes as agreeable,
sometimes as disagreeable ; sometimes as beautiful,
sometimes as atrocious. The current of intelligent
approbation between the Universal Mind and the
Mind of Emerson is interrupted now and then
by a sudden movement of this new agent, man,
standing, as it were, half-way movements meaning
56 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
joy, admiration, pain, horror, despair. Why so ?
Simply because this new agent, man, perceives things
according to a new standard, the standard of his own
preservation and happiness. Right and wrong mean
no longer intelligible and unintelligible ; they mean
that which makes for man's interests or against them.
An aesthetic and ethical standard evolves, by which it
is quite impossible to continue considering all things as
equal, merely because they are equally willed by God ;
that is to say, speaking objectively and without mystical
metaphor, because they can be equally understood by
Emerson. Instead of the cause, man asks after the
effect ; and that things are and must be merely results,
in certain cases, in rendering things more odious in his
eyes. Hence, with the appearance of man, the scheme
of pure optimism falls to the ground ; and Emerson,
systematic in one matter, and obeying an unerring
instinct, does all he can to keep man out of the way ;
Man, be it understood, in so far as he is more than a
mere fragment of the Universal Mind, a mere molecule
of causal perception. We hear, therefore, of pain and
sorrow only as we might hear of hot or cold ; and of
justice and injustice rather as intellectual questions
virtually openness, or the reverse, to conviction.
Attempts at reform that is to say, at diminishing or
equalising the human burden of woes are treated as
intellectual experiments, movements interesting in
their symmetrical equilibrium with other movements.
All is quite regular and lucid, hence right and
noble ; and thus a great lid of intellectual optimism
descends to silence the unrest and dissatisfaction
of man.
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 57
III
The Nemesis comes. Its name is Unreality, and this
should have been the title, and not Experience, of
Emerson's most wonderful essay. The punishment, or
rather (since I do not, like Emerson, believe in a
neatly adjusting Providence) the inevitable result of
reducing all things to their merely intellectual aspect,
is that, ever and anon, the man who has so reduced
them will awake to the sense of reduction to nothing-
ness. For intellectual relations exist only in our
thought. This is merely a mode of grouping, which
we apply to them without affecting their actual exist-
ence ; and hence it is that the man who shall have
viewed things merely in such relations must, sooner or
later, feel the lack of reality. For Emerson, when
Emerson dogmatises, the individual is nothing, the
type everything ; and similarly, the separate, sensible
moment, yesterday, to-morrow, to-day, is nothing, and
the balance struck between them is the important.
Thus optimism is saved ; injustice and pain are lost
to sight in a disproportionate abstraction. But reality
recoups itself; for in reality there happens to exist
only the individual, the moment existing independent
and outside ourselves. And so, in the intervals of
speculation, when the man re-becomes a man and
compares his emotions with those of his neighbours,
Emerson discovers that in his search for reality in
thought he has lost it in fact. A passage in that essay
on Experience reads curiously like the confession of
some great neoplatonician thaumaturge returning to
58 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
earth after making himself an abstract creature, and
finding that all things elude his clutch :
" What opium is instilled into all disaster ! It
shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at
last no rough and rasping friction, but the most
slippery, sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.
. . . There are moods in which we court suffering,
in the hope that there, at least, we shall find reality,
strange peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out
to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing
grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and
never introduces me into the reality, for contact with
which we would even pay the costly price of sons
and lovers."
Such a sense of unreality must come to all of us at
certain times of our spiritual life, particularly during
the years when we slowly replace with the experience
of ourselves the borrowed or ready-made notions of
life which had to do duty in our > youth. But it is
a phase ; and in learning that all things are evanescent,
a healthy human being learns also that this condition
of soul is the most evanescent itself : a state of trance
from which the least rough shock or warm breath will
rouse us. But Emerson would have us think that this
condition of semi-paralysis in all save the logical faculty
is the normal and permanent matter ; probably because
he is taking for granted the possibility of extirpating
from our natures everything besides this merely logical
perception. It is grotesque, and in a measure pathetic,
to read after this Emerson's denunciation of the fatalism
involved in a materialistic explanation of the mind's
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 59
peculiarities " given such an embryo, such a history
must follow. On this platform one lives in a sty of
sensualism and would soon come to suicide" Yet what
suicide could be compared to the courting of pain
and loss of the beloved for the sake of the rough and
rasping friction of reality ? And in another passage
we are led to question whether, as in the case of
Quietism, the transcendental platform might not
easily be transformed into a sty of sensualism as bad as
any which Emerson could attribute to materialistic
influence. " Saints are sad, because they behold sin
(even when they speculate) from the point of view
of the conscience, and not of the intellect a con-
fusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought, is a
diminution or loss ; seen from the conscience or will,
it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it shade, absence
of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as
essence, essential evil. . . ." For whence should come
conscience, this odd Puritan interloper, in a world
which is full, every nook and cranny, of the universal
creative essence, of the Supreme Cause and Effect,
knowing neither good nor evil in a world full of
what Emerson calls God, and void, utterly void, of the
sentient and suffering individual, concrete man ? But
Emerson is, fortunately, no real systematic thinker,
and is, essentially, a Puritan, full of the sound morality
of Mosaic law, and morality formulating as God's will
the practical interests of man. So we hear no more
about the reasons which allow philosophers to differ
from saints in not looking sadly at evil. And, on the
contrary, among all the qualities metamorphosed into
essences, and all the adjectives transfigured and enthroned
60 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
as metaphysical entities, each with its crown of stars
or of city walls, its attributes in hand and under foot
we find, foremost truthfulness, chastity and justice.
Nay, by one of those bold but adorable contradictions
which save the soul of transcendentalists and mystics
from the hell of indifference we are especially informed,
in the curious essay called the Over Soul y that the soul
of man, that inlet of the universal mind, is filled with
the tide of the universe's divine life more particularly
when it perceives justice or conceives heroism.
This mysticism, this determination to reduce all
things to intellect, this violent clutching at the cause
behind phenomena, gives Emerson, like Ruskin, a
certain mediaeval character, not usually to be met
nowadays, save among theological writers : he is
related to the Abbot Joachim, to Abelard, to the
compilers of herbals and bestiaries ; he has a quaint
look, quaint and delightful, of being a belated brother
of Sir Thomas Browne or Burton of the Anatomy.
Montaigne (the man he so ardently admires) might
as well never have existed for him ; and the other
masters of inductive thought Locke, Voltaire, Hume,
the eighteenth century with its strong level vision, its
materialisation of Nature, its enthroning of man
have passed without affecting him. Modern science he
distinctly turns away from ; he has a hankering after
visionaries and allegorical expounders, even the
trashiest. The names of Jacob Boehm and of
Swedenborg are perpetually returning to him ; he
believes Jesus to have been a mortal man, but he might
easily grant some transcendant quality to Apollonius of
Tyana. He tends to find a symbol in everything, a
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 61
mysterious " Open, sesame ! " He cannot be satisfied
with a thing meaning only its poor self, serving its
obvious purpose. Every analogy is to him an actual
causal connection, every metaphor which his fancy
perceives a sort of sign-manual of God. He has, to
the highest degree, the symbolic superstition. For
him the world exists by virtue of certain formulas,
which are not so much shorthand generalisations of
man as actual creative spells of God : system, dualism,
the principle of opposites and compensation, and sex.
There must be a mysterious equilibrium everywhere
an evil for every good, a good for every evil, an
answer for every question, a satisfaction for every
craving, a loss for every gain, a bitter for every sweet,
a female for every male. And do what you will you
cannot alter things, since, by such a mysterious law, as
matter displaced on one side must reappear on the
other, so also the happiness given to Tom must be
taken from Harry. That the nature of one thing or
case being different from that of another there will
be a corresponding difference of rule and action, never
occurs to Emerson. He strips all things into a sort of
unqualified, non-existent nakedness, and then calls it
unity and identity.
And yet, despite all this, Emerson remains one of
the thinkers who can do most for us moderns ; whose
teachings, if put into practice, could carry us through
the greatest number of temptations and dangers. It
is with Emerson's writings as with the sacred books
of ancient times : we must separate what is due to
imperfect knowledge, to superstitious habits of mind,
and consequently mischievous, or worthless and deci-
62 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
duous, from that which is due to some great intuition
of truth, some special energy of soul, such as is given
to exceptional races, or moments or individuals im-
mortal gifts whose usefulness will never suffer a change.
And, as we find in all such writings, bibles of all
nations, sacred and profane, so also in Emerson this
worthless, changing, deciduous part has received its
excessive importance from the very vital and immortal
part which it has served to deface ; thus in Plato and
St. Paul, the " Imitation of Christ ; " and, among the
prophets of to-day, in Ruskin and Tolstoi.
The vital, vitalising intuition in Emerson is a dual-
ism, closely connected : the intuition of the worthless-
ness of unreality for our happiness and progress ; and
the intuition of the supreme power, for our happiness
and progress, of that portion which we call soul.
Such intuitions are rarely new. Antiquity knew these
of Emerson, as India knew those of Christ and his
mediaeval followers ; but they are born afresh, as it
were, with new vigour and efficacy, in a new mind ;
and, at each new incarnation they are obliged, alas,
to assume the foolish costume and habits nay, the
very maladies which belong to thought at the
moment of the new birth. In the case of Emerson,
the intuition of the supreme value of reality, and of
the soul's most marvellous powers of expansion and
adaptation, of its unique capacity for embracing all
things in the acts of comprehension, imagination,
and sympathy these vital thoughts were defined,
hampered and compressed, by a cheap transcendental-
ism : the metaphysics of Germany adulterated by the
shoddy science, the cheap mysticism of America. And
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 63
the divine strength of his mind may seem, at first
sight, to have been employed merely in carrying the
weight, in filling up the forms, of the threadbare
garments of Dr. Faust, and the tinsel garments of
some Jess philosophic wizard. Let us strip them off ;
and we shall see the Titan beneath.
We have seen how Emerson has got himself a
pocket religion by making the human soul consub-
stantial and co-extensive with God, and the life of
the soul identical with the perception of cause and
effect, so that, while Jehovah says, " I Am," Emerson
fulfils his spiritual duties by repeating, in various forms
of words, " Thou art." Also, how, in his dread of
materialism and hedonism, he has attempted to measure
phenomena of sensation, emotion, and aesthetic per-
ception by a mechanism for registering cause and effect
which is as unfit to register their quality as a pair of
scales is unfit to measure the degree of heat, or a
barometer the intensity of the colour blue. Similarly,
we shall find that the same spiritualistic bias has led
Emerson to repeat, very often, the stale Stoical sayings
of the self-sufHcingness of the mind, the unimportance
of circumstance, the indifference to momentary pain
and pleasure.
The soul, indeed, can be trained to considerable
indifference : it can be rendered obtuse to pain and
pleasure, to impressions and affections ; religious as-
ceticism has always boasted, in the words of Moliere's
Orgon : " Et je verrais mourir frere, enfans, mere et
femme, que je m'en soucierais tout comme de cela ! "
But such indifference means, not uniting ourself
closer with Nature and the Infinite, but cutting loose
64 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
from them on one whole side. The human creature,
no longer enjoying, no longer sympathising, no longer
loving, would hold on to the universe only by his
reason. The wind would blow, trees rustle, waters
murmur, hills be blue and fields green, and people
around be beautiful, brilliant or kind, sorrowing or
clinging, without his being any the wiser. Nay, the
wiser, if it be wisdom merely to know the necessities
and sequences of things without knowing the things
themselves ; but neither the happier nor the more
conducive to others' happiness. It would be good
practice for dying, as, indeed, Roman Stoicism was the
school where men learned to escape from tyranny by
suicide of body and soul. Such Stoicism is the folly
of philosophers, the cowardice of heroes, the blasphemy
of those who, believing in gods, reject their good gifts
for fear of their bad ; it is afraid of the universe, and
tries to look at it, as Perseus at the head of Medusa,
only in the reflected image. This excess of intel-
lectualism, thinking to limit all wants to those of the
logical intellect, would defeat its own end ; for what
should the intellect contemplate and discuss, if all
were reduced to abstractions, if things existed only
as ideas, if the moment, the individual, the sensation,
the emotion, ceased to be ?
IV
Such dogmas as these cannot form the basis of
Emerson's teachings, much as he tries to deduce the
one from the other, any more than the dogmas of
celestial caprice and barbarity, of the Fall, the bloody
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 65
Atonement and eternal Hell could be the rational
foundation for the religion of mercy and love of
Francis of Assisi. There is, fortunately for the world,
a higher logic, guessing at the relations between
dogmas and facts, which works divine havoc in the
smaller logic connecting one theory with another ; the
soul frees itself from the tyranny of lies by stealthy
self-contradiction. The logical consequences of Emer-
son's intellectual pantheism would be to deny (what
man, according to the Hebrews, never learned from
the great I Am) the distinction of good and evil ; to
accept only the bare fact of existence, of emanation
from the All-powerful. Why, therefore, preach heroism
and the search for truth ? Why struggle against
unreality, hypocrisy, appearances ? Why denounce
the waste of effort, the dealing in words, supineness,
vanity, and all the tissues of wine and of dreams ?
In reality because, however unconsciously to himself,
Emerson was judging them worthless by the purely
human instinct of affinity for certain qualities, and
repulsion for certain others, by the purely utilitarian
intuition of what is desirable or undesirable for man
and man's race. And because the main energy of his
mind, his originality and inspiration, consisted in an
instinctive craving, despite the mere intellectual satis-
faction in cause and effect, after a life more large, more
varied, more transferable from object to object, from
mind to mind : a true life of the soul, which includes
the life of the sensations and emotions, which is based
on realities, and which implies happiness.
For it is this which renders Emerson's writings so
efficacious in one's life, so charged with vital principle ;
5
66 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
this which, entering into our torpid thought, fertilises it,
makes it expand, alter, and bear fruit. No writer can
have a greater influence in certain lives, yet no writer,
surely, was ever more chary of criticisms and rules of
conduct, of what, in most cases, makes the moralist.
Indeed you might sometimes think he had never lived,
never felt, made choice, acted, nay existed among real
individuals (for all the passionate hints of the chapters
on love and on friendship) but only among such
abstractions of mankind as his own representative
men ; among ideals of human beings not to be touched,
but to be criticised. The human efficacy of Emerson's
teachings lies in his constant insistence upon the
necessity of widening existence by increased contact
with reality on all sides, and of such reality being
apprehended by the mind, the sympathies, the imagina-
tion, as well as by the senses. For the narrowest life
is the one into which there enter the fewest ideas
the animal's, the child's, the savage's life of the mere
sensation, the mere moment ; and the next narrowest
is the base man's life of the mere ego, the appetites of
to-day projected into to-morrow, the appetites of
others employed to gratify his own. Unselfishness is
a widening of ourselves by giving equal rank to the
pleasures and rights of others that is to say, to what
is after all an intellectual conception, an idea to us, not
a thing we can taste or touch. Justice, mercy, truth
those great abstractions covering the greater happiness
of the greater number, and to which nobler men and
women must sacrifice good for themselves and their
neighbours justice, mercy, truth, are more than ever
intellectual existences, transcending our sensation and
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 67
experience. And the logical, the aesthetic appreciations
which unite us to the world beyond man, which add to
our own the life we understand in all phenomena, the
life which we love in some of them, are still more
obviously an enlarging of ourselves through the
enlarging of our mind. For the mind embraces all,
while the body can hold but little. Hence a constant
regard for our possibilities from the intellectual stand-
point, a constant preference of the life of the soul, life
in all times and places, over the life, limited by moment
and place, of the body ; an insistence upon the life
which unites us to all things instead of enclosing us
within ourselves. Such a view of existence must be to
the highest degree vitalising and fruitful. This would
not be the case were Emerson the mere ordinary
intellectual man, submitting to the intellect only the
things which are obviously of the intellect, and leaving
to the appetites, to the emotions, to the vanities all the
rest. For Emerson gives unto Caesar only the copper
penny, and claims for God the kingdom of the earth.
Emerson asks not what the mind can make of books,
art, and its other notorious belongings ; but what the
mind can make of life as a whole : of love, friendship,
practical efforts, political struggles, domestic arrange-
ments of everything. To him the real life is that of
the soul : the life, so to speak, at headquarters, to
which all other subordinate lives do but bring their
necessary tribute of well-being, of experience, of
sensation, of facts. He knows that there is in the
noblest creatures a sort of uppermost consciousness to
which all lower ones lead ; which is as homogeneous as
they are heterogeneous, as persistent as they are fleet-
68 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
ing ; in which our sensations, actions, affections are
multiplied tenfold by those of other men, of other
times and places ; and where, in an endless chain of
pattern, everything is connected with something else,
everything transmuted into something different.
Therefore all the things which constitute our ordinary
daily consciousness, Emerson examines ; asking of
what use they may be in this great uppermost con-
sciousness or existence ; accepting and rejecting in
accordance with this standard. Hence he is charac-
terised and takes rank of nobility, mainly by a constant
scrutinising, unflinching elimination of unrealities, of
activities and habits which bring only wear and tear
and produce neither truth nor good nor beauty. A
great part of his philosophy consists in the separation
of futile efforts from fruitful ; another, in showing
how much more we may gain by letting things act for
us than by squirming our souls out in unnecessary
action. He teaches that it is not by the books which
we read, the men whom we speak to, the stones and
tree-trunks which we pull about, that we are increasing
our life, still less by the money we amass or the
complications we establish ; but only by as much of
the books as we understand, of the men as we love, of
the talk as we wisely consider, of the materialities
we combine to give us health, more peace, and more
power of being realities. In fact, it is only by as much
as is vital and fertilised in our life that our life is
improved. This great purveyor of realities wherewith
to nourish our highest life is for ever warning us
against the adulteration of things intellectual and moral,
teaching us to separate the stones from the bread, to
OF LATTER-DAY TENDENCIES 69
throw away the husks and the rind. He is no hater of
tradition, even of convention ; because he recognises
that both of them may contain a portion of life. But
once that life has left the tradition and convention he
has no patience but sweeps them away, be they called
by the solemnest names of virtue and honour. Hence
his deep sympathy, idealist and transcendentalist as he
is, despiser of the gross and lover of the spiritual, with
the terre a terre scepticism of Montaigne ; for that scep-
ticism is one of the most potent agents for the removal
of rubbishy spurious fact and spurious thought.
Hence his admiration also for the coarse practicality of
Napoleon, because that also means reality, real energy,
sweeping away the unreal, the inert.
Those who should deliberately follow Emerson's
counsels, omitting from their lives not merely what
he directly advises should be omitted, but also what
his whole system logically leads us to reject, would be
surprised to find how much space they had left them-
selves, how much energy for the real life, the life of
enjoyment and utility. For half of our life is spent,
if not in struggling with trash, with the unreality
others have burdened us with, as education, so called,
religion, sociabilities, false necessities and ideals ; then
in actually doing the unreal : reading books we do not
understand, seeing people we do not like, doing acts
which lead to nothing, or to the reverse of their inten-
tion. All great teaching, of the sort which is, so to
say, prophetic and sacred, helps us to a wider life in
other men, other fields and times. Half of it helps us
to do so by trying to understand and love others ; the
other half, and Emerson's teaching is among it, by
70 EMERSON AS A TEACHER
bidding us understand and reduce to reasonableness
ourselves. This vital energy in Emerson's teaching is,
I think, given free play only if we liberate it from
notions which belonged not to Emerson's mind, but to
his intellectual surroundings. His transcendentalism,
horrified at science and despising utility, arises, in
great measure, from the old metaphysical and theologi-
cal habit of regarding the soul as a ready-made, separate
entity, come, Heaven knows whence, utterly unconnected
with the things among which it alights, and struggling
perpetually to be rid of them and return somehow to
its unknown place of origin. Had Emerson suspected,
as we have reason to suspect, that the soul is born of
the soil, its fibre the fibre of every plant and animal,
its breath the breath of every wind, its shape the space
left vacant by other shapes, he would not have been
obliged to arrange a purely intellectual transcendental
habitation for this supposed exile from another sphere.
And his intuition of a possible universal life would have
been strengthened, not damaged, by the knowledge
that our soul is moulded into its form nay, takes its
very quality, from surrounding circumstances ; and the
probability, therefore, that between the soul and its
surroundings there will be a growing relation and
harmony, as of product and producer, concave and
convex.
DETERIORATION OF SOUL
DETERIORATION OF SOUL
" r "T'HE author of the now famous volumes on
A Degeneracy is himself a Degenerate " ; we have
all of us heard, and nearly all of us passed, that
obvious criticism on Max Nordau. Eccentricity,
Suspiciousness of Evil, Egotism, Idles .F/#j,Obsession by
the Thought of Impurity, Lack of Human Sympathy,
Confusion of Categories, Unbridled Violence of Hatred,
Indiscriminate Destructiveness ; he has taught us to
recognise all these as the stigmata of degeneracy ', and we
have recognised them all in himself. As a result, and
following his own method towards every contemporary
writer, from Tolstoi to Zola, from Ruskin to Ibsen,
and from Whitman to Rossetti, we may be tempted to
destroy Max Nordau's books as pestilent rubbish, and
forget his theories as insane ravings. But it is better
that Nordau's absurdities and furies should serve rather
as a deterrent than an example ; that our abhorrence of
his ways should teach the discrimination and justice of
which he is incapable ; and, if we wish to be more
reasonable than he, that we should examine and
profit by what reasonableness there may be even in
him.
As regards myself, I find that Nordau's book has
inspired me with a salutary terror, not merely of De-
73
74 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
generacy (though he is right in teaching us to be afraid
of that), but of the deterioration of the soul's faculties
and habits, which is the inevitable result of all intellec-
tual injustice. And it is because Nordau himself is so
striking an example of such deterioration, that I am
anxious to discuss the chief facts and conclusions of his
book, and to suggest certain other facts and conclusions,
which, taken together, may make us appreciate the
dangers we all run, if not of mental and moral de-
generacy, at all events of mental and moral debase-
ment.
1
The new school of intellectual and moral pathology,
besides assigning a physiological reason to a large
amount of moral and mental imperfection, has put
forward a hypothesis, according to which the immoral
or idiotic person of mature age and modern times is
the equivalent, through arrested growth or atavism, of
the child or of the normal adult of more barbarous
periods. This hypothesis is probably very crude on
the biological plane, but it seems uncommonly correct
and exceedingly suggestive on the moral one. Spiritual
imperfection may be due, as I propose showing, to
causes other than bodily ; and the criminal or anti-social
person need not resemble in other points either a child
or a savage. But the pathological psychologists, from
Maudsley and Moreau to Lombroso and Nordau, have
done excellent service in pointing out that criminal
instincts and anti-social behaviour are closely connected
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 75
with disease, immaturity or barbarism ; and that, con-
trary to the picturesque views of decadent poets and of
the readers of police reports, there is nothing either
refined or heroic, or in fact anything save excessively
vulgar, in uncleanness and bloodthirstiness. It is very
good for all of us, especially in our salad days, to
learn that as regards evil, rarity does not constitute
distinction ; that perverted instincts are universal
among gaol-birds and maniacs ; that insensibility
to the feelings of others is a frequent forerunner
of imbecility, and excessive egotism a common result
of visceral disturbances. Such coincidences, even
where merely coincidences, are due to a great
practical truth, which the school of moral patho-
logy has put in the clearest light, to wit : that all
instincts or forms of instinct detrimental to the social
good, are, in a sense, deciduous and sterile ; that the
world is perfectly right in considering weakness of will,
unchastity of thought and word, egotism and vanity as
a contagious danger to the community ; that religion
and philosophy have been clairvoyant in announcing
that human liberty can be attained only by controlling
desire and enlarging sympathy ; that, in short, the
Kingdom of Heaven on Earth will be the Kingdom off
the Spirit.
This much has been formulated, made clear through
analysis and example, by the new science of the soul's
death and disease ; the sober works of Maudsley, of
Ribot, Richet, and of Janet, the extravagant though
sometimes luminous books of Lombroso, particularly
the two volumes of Nordau, are full of invaluable prac-
tical suggestiveness. Unluckily the general usefulness
76 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
of the science has been diminished, it seems to me, by
the tendency of the more sober among mental patho-
logists to limit their observations and theories to cases
of thorough-paced madness, perversity, imbecility, or
criminality ; and the practical lessons have been largely
neutralised by the eccentric hypothesis of Lombroso
and Nordau, who have separated spiritual degeneracy
from spiritual deterioration, and confined it to well-
defined categories of individuals. For Professor
Lombroso, as everyone is aware, has developed into an
elaborate system the notion of some of the earlier
students of mental pathology, that special abilities are
due to a disturbance of the normal psychic balance, and
are therefore accompanied by intellectual or moral un-
soundness ; in other words that talent is a morbid
production like madness or criminality, accompanied
invariably by some of their stigmata, and different
from either only by the accident of being, on the whole,
more useful than detrimental to the community. And
' <; . Professor Nordau, while explicitly rejecting Lombroso's
X theory of the affinity between talent, madness, and
criminality, has yet put forward the notion, and illus-
y-TN trated it by endless example and analysis, that during
the last forty years there has been degeneracy invariably
manifested among literary, artistic, and philosophic
workers ; while, during this period, intellectual and
moral health has become the exclusive property of men
of science and of mediocrities.
These theories, whether, as with Lombroso, they
accept the man of talent as a fortunate nuisance ; or,
as with Nordau, reject him (when a contemporary)
as a dangerous attraction, these theories are not
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 77
merely scientifically questionable, but also (and this
is what I wish to deal with) practically dangerous,
because they seem to limit spiritual degeneracy to
exceptionally inferior or exceptionally superior cate-
gories of individuals, and to reassure, quite unreasonably,
the mediocre mass of mankind. According to them the
immense majority need never take any thought for its
psychic healthiness ; all it need do is to follow its
instincts, and either to profit as much (according to
Lombroso) or to suffer as little (according to Nordau)
as it possibly can by the useful or noxious peculiarities
of degenerates. Such are the practical conclusions
derivable from the too exclusive attention given by
even the soberer mental pathologists to criminals and
lunatics ; still more from the identification by Lombroso
and Nordau, of genius and degeneracy.
But fortunately these one-sided views, these eccentric
hypotheses, have been illustrated by an enormous array
of facts, and these facts, whether brought forward
by Lombroso or Nordau, whether exhibited in great
scientific handbooks like those of Maudsley and Ribot,
or huddled together in shilling dreadfuls like Cuiller's
Frontieres de la Folie, these facts carry their own
suggestion, to wit, that the stigmata of spiritual
degeneracy are confined neither to criminals, lunatics,
nor persons of unusual ability ; and that the average
man, the dull and decent Philistine, is equally in danger
of becoming an obstacle to human improvement,
a centre of moral and intellectual deterioration.
Apart from the suspicion that celebrities may have
been assimilated to criminals and lunatics, because like
them they have become public property, and, therefore,
78 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
the corpus vile for pathological examination and
demonstration the study of the facts accumulated
by mental pathologists, even the facts brought forward
to prove the very reverse by Lombroso and Nordau,
must suggest very strange thoughts to any honest
and intelligent, although obscure and respectable,
reader. The anecdotes snipped out of biographical
dictionaries by Lombroso, and the analysis of symptoms
implacably carried out by Nordau, must remind the
honest Philistine of other biographical details, of other
strings of peculiarities, with which he has not become
acquainted in books ; they must become connected and
compared in his memory with stories, words, gestures,
expressions of face, states of feeling, which have never
fallen, which can never fall, into the hands of men
of science. Little by little, many things which, on the
printed page, expressed in those barbarous technical
terms, had affected the reader only as so much far-fetched
specialism, assume an uncomfortable air of familiarity ;
until at last, if he have courage to put two and two
together, he must be startled, perhaps overcome, by
the recognition that his neighbours, friends, family,
himself, resemble Lombroso's and Nordau's degenerates
in other things than genius.
I cast no doubts on the existence of thorough-paced
degenerates, some in prisons, some in asylums, some
walking abroad, with or without talents, and more
often without than with ; all scientific evidence
proves that they are common, and that many of them
are hopelessly incurable and through and through
diseased. But when scientific evidence is accumulated
in even greater bulk, is put before us irrespective of any
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 79
special hypothesis like Lombroso's or Nordau's, and
when it is, moreover, brought into relation with our
previous experience of life and of men, we should learn,
I think, that it is dangerous to draw a hard-and-fast
line between ourselves and any of our fellow creatures,
even when we may be obliged, for sheer self-defence,
to shut some of them up and chastise them. To make
such a crude distinction does as much harm to us,
who account ourselves sane, as to these whom we
brand and pen up together as degenerate. For it not
only vitiates our sense of likeness and unlikeness,
diminishes our sympathy and justice, and wastes all
that is sane and profitable, even in unsound and
noxious creatures ; but it makes light of that know-
ledge of our present imperfection, of our possible
deterioration and possible improvement, which should
result from all study of the soul and the soul's diseases
and dangers.
II
Degeneracy: I would willingly get rid of this
detestable word, leave it to mad doctors or criminalo-
gists ; and, indeed, degeneracy, save as a cause, ought
to be replaced in our thought by imperfection, since
that alone is of practical consequence. But, in the
study of this imperfection, in the search for its causes,
we must come, first and foremost, to something which,
for want of a better word, we must needs call
degeneracy ; to the result, in a minor degree, of
processes which lead, on a larger scale, to disease,
madness, sterility, and death. In the continuous
8o DETERIORATION OF SOUL
and arduous adaptation of mankind to its surroundings,
there is, apparently, something which stands to the
gradual improvement as the friction of a machine
stands to its movements : the machinery is constantly
being repaired, the friction is constantly being dimin-
ished, but so far it exists, and it still represents, though
in ever smaller degree, an impediment and a partial de-
struction. This kind of friction is what specialists
call degeneracy. It is a form of imperfection ; it is the
result of imperfection, and it results in imperfection.
We may roughly divide it into two kinds, sociological
and biological ; the first is left unconsidered by
t Lombroso and Nordau ; the second is limited, or
apparently limited, to separate categories of persons.
: In this disregard of sociological deterioration, in this
limitation of biological deterioration, lies to my mind
the fundamental mistake of both Lombroso and Nordau,
a mistake which is rectified by the very facts adduced
in support of their one-sided views.
The kind of deterioration which I have called
sociological may be illustrated presently by an analysis
of some of Nordau's own failings, their probable
cause and their possible results. The other, the
biological, by which I mean the deterioration
accompanied by physical causes or co-results, forms
the subject of Nordau's two volumes, and requires,
I think, to be recognised as obtaining, not merely
in the individuals stigmatised as degenerates, but in
the whole of mankind of which they are, after all,
but a production.
For the whole of mankind may be partially
unsound, although the average of mankind may be
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 81
absolutely sound. The average or abstract totality
of mankind is probably sound, because the imper-
fections of adaptation, the inability to meet the
requirements of life, the hereditary, individual, or
acquired biological taints are undoubtedly slight in
most individuals (otherwise the individual, let alone
the race, would not be there), and because the unsound
portion of one individual is worked for and protected
by the sound portions of other individuals ; nay,
because in every individual, save the lunatic, the
incurable or the criminal, the sound qualities supply
the deficiencies of the unsound. But the individuals
composing mankind are probably all, or nearly all,
imperfect or liable to become imperfect in some detail,
infinitesimal, or perceptible, of their organism ; were
this not the case the existence of thorough-paced
degeneracy, as of downright physical disease, would
scarcely be conceivable ; and the contagion of
degeneracy, as well as the contagion of disease,
would constitute no danger. Why should this be ?
The reason seems to me very simple : So far as we
know the world's history or present condition, we
cannot be certain of any human creature living in
circumstances, material or social, to which he was,
or is, perfectly adjusted ; nay, leading a life which
was not, in one way or another, too difficult for his
organism, what we call, either on the bodily or the
spiritual plane, unwholesome ; and this imperfection
of relations between the individual and his mode of
existence would necessarily prevent his leaving behind
him physical or spiritual off-spring, human bodies,
souls, habits, notions, which were otherwise than
6
82 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
imperfect also ; imperfection dwindling for ever,
but present always, and always liable to momentary
increase. There is probably no one who inherits an
absolutely flawless bodily constitution, or who leads
a perfectly healthy bodily life ; but the soul is as
delicate as the body, and the soul's life as difficult
to adjust ; nay, the soul's health has more chances
against it, since it depends in the first instance on the
health of the body. Yet there are very few persons
who are as thoughtful for their soul and its organs,
as for their teeth, hair, eyes, lungs, or digestion ; and
Meanwhile the spiritual reacts on the bodily and the
bodily on the spiritual. Our thoughts and feelings
are vitiated by the imperfection of our bodily functions ;
but this imperfection of our bodily functions is nine
times out of ten the result of some spiritual imper-
fection, some lack of forethought, self-control, or
comprehension in ourselves or our parents. Thus,
even with regard to material well-being, there is no
fact more important than that of our constant danger
of intellectual and moral deterioration.
Ill
It is the chief merit of Nordau's book that his
facts and analyses are likely to bring home this danger
to the reader, to suggest very shrewd personal suspicions
and comparisons to everybody. And it is the chief
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 83
fault of Nordau's book (for who cares for his literary
and artistic criticisms?) that his mania for limiting
degeneracy to the second half of the nineteenth century
and to the writers, artists and non-scientific thinkers ;
^~Vv
thereof, confines the causes of degeneracy to merely
physiological disturbances, and diverts the attention t^lXc
from what I should call sociological causes of deterio- ,
ration, namely, the undue pressure on the individual
of social habits, routines, and institutions. Such
sociological straining and warping of the soul has,
of course, always existed, and presumably more in the
barbarous Past than in the only semibarbarous Present.
Now, as Professor Nordau wishes to persuade us that\
the spiritual degeneracy of our age is unique and=
unprecedented, he has not only to close his eyes to\
all the unwholesomeness which previous centuries
displayed in their literature, or hid or half-hid in
their religious and social habits ; but also to refuse
to discuss any causes of unwholesomeness which other
centuries have evidently shared with our own. Since,
however, we have fortunately no theory to blind us,
we may leave Professor Nordau to expatiate on
the detrimental effects on nineteenth-century nerves
of railways and newspapers, telegraphs and telephones,
large towns and colossal discoveries, rapid amassing
of fortunes and rapid altering of beliefs ; and let
us look at a few of the totally different sort of causes
which must always have tended, apart from all
physiological degeneracy, to deteriorate a certain
proportion of individual souls.
The individual soul, perhaps owing to its dependence
on the individual body, is rarely congenitally sound
84 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
in every part ; and, even where no rudimentary
morbidness can be detected, it is never gifted with
the very highest powers of every description ; so that
it is forced, inevitably, to supply its deficiencies from
the abundance of other individual souls, from that
stored-up abundance of all times and countries which
we call civilisation. Apart from this common fund,
accumulated by the united efforts of all men, by the
special efforts of special men, and by the almost
mechanical action of the great principle of " Compound
for sins you have a mind to by damning those you're
not inclined to " apart from civilisation, there is not
much logic, patience, self-restraint, gentleness or
purity in the isolated individual ; certainly not enough
to make him endurable, let alone useful. Separate the
individual, even the individual having no spiritual
taint analogous to consumption or gout, isolate him
from the social surroundings, the principles and
prejudices, the fortunate compromises due to the
rivalry of so much barbarism and wrongheadedness,
set him opposite something quite new, or something
about which he may talk or act quite freely ; and
note the brute's acts and words ! Nay, note the man
when he has a class or nation to back him ; and listen,
for instance, to the logic, the humane speech of the
individual considered as Conservative, or Socialist, or
Protestant, or Catholic, or Atheist ! Egotism^ megalo-
mania ? Why they are kept down in the normal
individual only by the tendency to egotism and
megalomania of his neighbours ; if small children are
egotists and megalomaniacs, it is because they have
been protected, so far, from other children. For the
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 85
rest, egotism and megalomania are perpetually bursting
out on all sides. Listen to the ordinary, intelligent,
educated man, to the superior professional man even,
when off his profession. Is not his cocksureness
about things outside his own walk, his contempt of'
arts and modes of life unlike his own, his interest in
his house, his wine, his horse, his business, very
nearly maniacal ? Listen, on the other hand, to nations
(for nations are unrestrained by shame before each
other, and consider such restraint as mean-spirited)
are they not maniacs ? and is not the respective national
pride of the Englishman, Frenchman, German, Italian,
the purest megalomania in guise of patriotism ? Is
not every nation, in its hopes and claims, its boasting
and blustering, no better than King Picrochole awaiting
the Coming of the Coqcigrues ?
If, then, classes, professions, nationalities, lose their
attributes of logic, justice, and gentleness, nay, of
crassest good sense, whenever they are isolated from
other professions, classes, nationalities, or set up in
mere hostility opposite to them, how much more will
not be lost by the poor individual, when, by some
new or faulty adjustment, he is isolated from his
fellow individuals, set up as their enemy or their
leader ? These things may be largely inevitable,
but they are atrociously sad, and we may well stop
to consider some instances thereof. Has neither
Lombroso nor Nordau, glibly analysing the degeneracy
of men of talent, ever considered what men not of talent
would become if subjected to years of neglect, injustice,
outrage, and then, perhaps, to years of most fulsome
adulation ? For, after all, that is what it comes to :
86 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
a process, not deliberate certainly, and for the time
being quite inevitable, by which mankind calls forth
all the worst qualities in those who are its benefactors,
fosters their arrogance, injustice, violence, and folly ;
turns them into fanatics (I had first written lunatics)
who tear and trample everything, and help the world in
the making of fresh fanatics. Who is most responsible
for Wagner's pamphlets, for Zola's Mes Haines y for
all that most degenerate literature, the literature of
blind self-assertion ? Nay, is not the most marvellous
production since Renaissance humanistic warfare,
Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies, due to the
astonishing criticisms of another man of genius, of
Ruskin, himself the victim of the absurd attacks on
Turner and pre-Raphaelitism ? Alas, of the energies
which we poor human beings can so little afford to
spare, how much do we not, by the fatality of stupidity
and injustice, waste in the detestable self-assertion
and self-defence of genius, in the production of more
injustice and exaggeration, itself fruitful of exaggeration
and injustice !
But wrong adjustment between the individual and
the mass, need not attain the pitch of actual ill-
treatment, in order to produce very decided deteriora-
tion, what Nordau sees as degeneracy, of soul. All
mental productivity, like all material, tends to en-
cumber us with obsolete plant and rubbish. There
is no system, no routine, no facilitation to learning
or doing any particular thing, which does not become
more or less of a nuisance, a mechanism for the spoiling
of something. All trades, professions, administrations
nay, schools of thought show it us daily : a man
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 87
loses much of his elasticity of mind by such means,
although that loss is more than compensated, most
often, by the storage of results and the saving of time. , /;
But a man, as Emerson says, is himself a method ;
every individual must pay for the advantage of being :
one. And this becomes the case more and more
markedly as the man's method is more complex, more
special, more different from the method of other men.
As a mere question of time and opportunity, every
special study tends to exclude external influence and
correction, to diminish the healthy reaction and re-
adjustment of all things, that is to say, to make the
specialist unconscious of the fine proportion between
the world and his work, his fellow-men and himself.
Nay, all self-expression creates a facility which easily
turns to exaggeration, absurdity, self-caricature. Men
cannot perceive all facts and think all thoughts at
once ; developing their own ideas, those ideas cease
to be duly controlled by the thousand million other
ideas in the universe ; one explanation covers every-
thing, one fact answers all questions, one kind of
physic cures all ills ; and we get very near the region
of fads and idees fixes. This tendency is very much
increased by the result of another insufficiency of
human nature : mankind is extremely limited, as yet,
not merely in its power of doing, and thinking, but - ' '
m its power of sympathising. The desire for pro-
minence, for recognition, very often unjustly refused,
pits men against each other, while the inability or
unwillingness to share material or social advantages
forces every member of the same profession into
rivalry with the other : hence a tendency, which pure
88 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
devotion to truth or beauty can overcome only very
slowly, a tendency to regard one's own contribution
to science or art, as supplanting those of one's pre-
decessors or neighbours ; and a consequent loss of the
faculty of comparing facts and theories, of selecting
and correcting, of judging attainment impersonally
and equitably ; a very notable diminution in the
efficiency of the individual soul.
This phenomenon becomes most obvious when it
is accentuated by that neglect or persecution of which
I have spoken as producing and reproducing such a
fine crop of apparent monomaniacs. The conscious-
ness of exceptional talents, especially when those talents
are unnoticed or disputed by others, carries combative
natures out of the domain of good sense and decorum,
the almost automatic good sense and decorum
of those who are comfortable ; and a man of parts
requires to be an unusually good keeper of himself,
since he soon ceases to be the ward of the majority.
The sense of being able to do what most others cannot,
needs to be corrected by an appreciation of what has
to be done and can be done only by others, such as
is very rare as yet in our half-grown humanity ; and
when there is no such corrective, the ego becomes
isolated in his own eyes, and assumes to himself an
importance utterly out of proportion to the reality.
Hence suspicion, irreverence, animosity towards
others ; and that refusal to unite one's thoughts with
the thoughts of other men, that refusal of what might
be called (most literally and worthily) the marriage of
true minds, which dooms so much of the world's best
talent to sterility.
v
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 89
IV
Sterility ; or at least production of rubbish, of
something which is not intellectually vital. For we
do not sufficiently realise how small a share of our
spider's web of thought, embracing and subdividing
the universe, is either really spun by ourselves or spun
out of the stuff secreted by our own mind ; how much
the thought of the individual requires to be helped out
by a common thought, or to draw from a common fund
the sound material for its web. Hence in all cases
where certain kinds of thinking have been sporadic,
the thinkers of the particular kind must be thrown
quite excessively on their own resources, and must
quickly exhaust them. They will become imperfect
because isolated thinkers ; and their very imperfection
will increase their isolation, by depriving them of an
internal standard of soundness of thought which might
replace the external one. We notice this in the
middle ages : while the artists, theologians, and jurists,
the men whose activity is incorporated with that
of others, keep their heads very securely on their
shoulders, and their notions in sane reference to exist-
ing knowledge, we find outside these intellectual guilds,
as soon as we get to the sporadic thinkers who deal
with natural science or high philosophy, the eccentricity
and pretentiousness of quackery. These isolated
thinkers Joachim of Flora, Raymond Lulle, Cardan,
Paracelsus, are made giddy by their own height above
others, by the void they feel around them : they get
to think themselves paragons, possessors of universal
90 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
knowledge and power, prophets and sole spiritual
legislators. And in the neglected fields of thought
which correspond to what natural science and non-
theological philosophy were in the middle ages, we,
too, have our sporadic thinkers, half seers and half
nostrum vendors, Carlyle, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, and
others ; men whose splendid achievements are due
to their own genius, while their blunders and exag-
gerations are largely caused by the stupidity of their
neighbours.
It is the same with moral standards as with in-
tellectual ones ; here again it is unnecessary to
postulate physiological degeneracy as an explana-
tion of mischievous theory and theoretically based
action, new fangled or revived from former days.
Every society undoubtedly contains a proportion of
individuals who are morally less developed than the
average, particularly than the average ought to be,
and in whom the imperfection takes the form of in-
difference or rebellion towards the rules of conduct
received by the majority. But is there not likewise
another contingent of morally inferior persons whose
inferiority, being of the sluggish, passive, as distin-
guished from the impulsive, kind, manifests itself on
the contrary in servile acquiescence to the decisions of
the majority, in automatic mimicry of the majority's
proceedings ? And is the one class, which rebels
against what may be good in our moral and social
institutions, really more mischievous than the other,
which clings heavily to what may be bad ? For, after
all, moral precepts, and particularly the habitual, prac-
tical, unspoken adaptations thereof, represent the worse
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 91
as well as the better portion of our very mixed man-
kind. And there are several kinds of outlaws ; those
who are too bad completely to imitate their neigh-
bours, those who are too good, and those, again,
I am tempted to think, who are comparatively free
either to conform or not to conform, not from any
superiority or inferiority, but from lack of imitative-
ness, lack of sense of congruity, partial independence
of position, or absorbing interest in other matters :
a class of apparent sceptics or indifFerents, which keeps
the others from excess, which often holds the casting
vote ; and to which most individuals, superior or
inferior in their main characteristics, may belong by
some isolated habit or notion. These three classes
of nonconformity may be easily distinguished wherever
men and women gather together for the promulgation
of schemes of life, modes of thought, and forms of art
which the majority dislikes or despises, from the
Theatre Libre to the Society for Psychical Research,
and from the revivals of ritualists or evangelists to the
meetings of socialists or anarchists. Looked at from
the merely intellectual point of view, the meeting of
these three classes, associated merely by the fact of
elimination from a larger class, explains why eccentri-
city, faddism, even positive monomania, always forms
a fringe to every centre of new and independent
thought ; even as the fact of individual isolation has
explained, I think, the fringe of mysticism and fanati-
cism which surrounds the soundest thought of very
solitary individual thinkers. As regards moral atmo-
sphere and even practical habits, this inevitable herding
together of outlawed persons, as of outlawed thoughts,
92 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
whatever the reason of this outlawry, explains the
chief dangers of all revolutionary movements, as it
explains the main degradations of highly independent
characters. In any sort of revolution the highest and
the lowest are always thrust together ; the purest
patriot and reformer is apt to find himself the associate
of fanatics and criminals, rick burners and bomb
throwers, for the mere reason that the powers that be,
finding all disturbance equally distressing, have set
their face against subversive ideas, as well as against
deeds of violence. Nay, the community of persecution
almost infallibly warps the judgment of even the
noblest thinker ; the awful strain of opposition, the
lamentable dreariness of isolation, make him come
in contact with, even lean against, the men and things
he resembles least, because he is cut off from the
men and things that he resembles most. And as
with men, so with thoughts. The rational contempt
for creeds and regulations which are foolish and
harmful, drags with it, in most cases, the irrational
contempt for creeds and regulations which are wise
and useful ; we know, all of us who have had free-
thinking or revolutionary grandfathers and grand-
mothers, that the waywardness and lawlessness of
notion of a man like Shelley need not have been the
result of any biological peculiarity ; and that, if they
were to any extent deteriorations, they were not
necessarily what Nordau calls stigmata of degeneracy.
Indeed, we need only search our own souls for the
queer comradeship of outlawed thought. And are we
not made more lenient towards the vapourings of
neo-mystics, the egotism and depravity of decadents,
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 93
the uncleanness of realists, by knowing that Professor
Nordau would like, if he could, to set up a Holy
Office and an Index Expurgatorius, and to commit
to the flames the books, to the maison de sante the
bodies, of all the writers whom, in the name of an
immutable and officially consecrated psychological
science, he has condemned as degenerate ?
But the great undefinable thing which we call
civilisation progresses despite all friction, makes im-
provement daily greater despite drawbacks, diminishes
year by year the proportion of evil involved in its good.
Spiritual degeneracy, deterioration of the man and of
his thought, is still going on lustily all round, like the
physical degeneracy of which it is sometimes the result,
and sometimes the cause. National and class separa-
tion, professional routine and limitation, social rivalry,
isolation of the exceptional individual and consequent
self-assertion ; herding together of various kinds of
nonconformity and consequent pollution of the superior
eccentric by the inferior ; all these maladjustments
these lesser of two evils which are yet evils in them-
selves are filling the world with damaged thought
and feeling which beget in their turn feeling and thought
more damaged still. Despite all this, the maladjustments '
are diminishing, the inevitable evils growing less evil.
And in one thing particularly, perhaps because our
commercial society weighs lightly on mere opinion,
perhaps also (let us hope) because our growing good
94 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
sense recognises good sense wherever it finds it in one
thing may we watch a constant diminution of intel-
lectual damage : there is less of the particular kind of
friction called intolerance.
Cocksureness, infallibility, readiness to defend the
universe from our private adversaries, is ceasing to be
identified with honesty, sincerity, magnanimity ; it is
beginning to skulk and mask itself in garments of
tolerance and reasonable scepticism. The ardour of
reformation is at length, thank Heaven, beginning to
turn a little upon ourselves, our ideas and associates ;
or to restrain at least its readiness to clear the world of
other people's faults and errors. That things are really
moving in this direction is proved, I think, by our
general astonishment at Professor Nordau's book.
His absolute self-confidence, his unsuspecting readiness
to apply his own standards and judge all men and
things on his own responsibility, his prophetic violence
of vituperation and fury of destruction, his outspoken
willingness to undertake the saving of society ; all
these are things which would scarcely have surprised us
in the not very far-off days when Ruskin was writing
Modern Painters and Karl Marx On Capital; they
were the accompaniment of the highest philosophic
discrimination a century ago, as we can verify by
re-reading our Voltaire, Rousseau, or Diderot. But
now, thank Heaven again, they surprise us beyond
measure in a populariser of scientific notions, and even
lead to the suspicion that Professor Nordau may belong
to his own vast tribe of degenerates. I do not think,
therefore, that unless the world become socialistically
organised, and the care of men's souls become once
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 95
more a matter of state-jobbery, I do not think we need
be really alarmed at the prospect of a committee of
spiritual public safety, examining all literature, and art
and philosophy, and, by an efficient organisation of
lay-confraternities, lay-inquisitions, and lay-excommu-
nications, sweeping off the face of the earth all heretics
guilty of offending the ways of Nature or Nordau.
People will remember that improvement, as well as
deterioration, is often found disagreeable and danger-
ous ; they will reflect that Nature herself is the greatest
of all innovators ; they may even be morbid enough
(in Nordau's opinion) to think with profit on the
symbol of the Son of God crucified between thieves,
while the High Priest and Pilate sit at meat with the
very best people. So we need waste no more words
against the proposed new Inquisition.
But Professor Nordau's book, as I have tried to
suggest throughout these criticisms, should furnish us
nevertheless with food for exceedingly salutary and
needful thought ; and this as much through its short-
comings as its merits, its practical absurdities as its
scientific wisdom.
We are all of us liable to becoming if not degenerate,
then at least undesirable : faulty, poor of stuff, and
scant of measure in the very things we most insist
upon ; and we all require, in our families, friends,
neighbours, but first and foremost in ourselves, to keep
a sharp look-out, to fight against these faultinesses and
shortcomings. It is difficult to guess whether, in free-
ing ourselves from the many enervations of the
confessional, we have or have not lost something which
made, in other ways, for spiritual health. At any rate
96 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
no one can deny that indifference to the soul's hygiene
is one of the drawbacks of our present accidental,
helter-skelter, unintelligent form of individualism. No
one goes nowadays to the doctor for a spiritual
diagnosis, and perhaps it is better there should be no
such doctor to go to ; but no one even asks his friend
metaphorically to feel his pulse or look at his tongue,
or has a friend to whom either pulse or tongue, in the
spiritual order, could reveal anything ; nobody knows
anything about the symptoms of his soul's health or
disease, or supposes anything to be of the nature of
such symptoms. Hence most of us all of us who
have received no strong religious bias prepare to go
through life on the supposition that we are sound
because we are we ; what we feel in ourselves we take
to be normal ; our preferences and aversions seem the
only possible ones under the circumstances, simply and
merely because we know of no others and institute no
comparisons. Meanwhile and here comes in the
great utility of books like Nordau's, including a large
proportion of Nordau's own book it is just as likely
as not that we may be developing, in our innermost
self, tendencies and habits destructive, if not to others
directly, then indirectly through the impairing of our
own physical and spiritual efficiency ; we may be allow-
ing ourselves to become, through the pressure of ex-
ternal circumstances, semi-maniacs and semi-criminals,
where we might, had we known, have remained
sane and harmless. Nay, the general opinion on this
subject, so far as there is any, tends to consider it
safest that we should go on blindly among dangers of
this sort, and avoid madness by not knowing which
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 97
way madness lies. It is of course possible that the
knowledge of danger may create panic ; that the read-
ing ofbooks like Nordau's may lead to egotistic self-
analysis, scared self-diagnosis, and in a measure,
perhaps, self-suggestion of avoidable peculiarities. But,
after all, how many of us have not already suffered in
ignorance, tortured and damaged ourselves, as Renan
did in his childhood with the notion of simony, and
Bunyan with the possibility of sin against the Holy
Ghost ; merely to return, because of our ignorance, to
the same bad ways we have been torturing ourselves
about. Surely it is not merely more safe, but in the
long run more comfortable, for the spiritual valetudi-
narian to know once for all what he had better do and
better avoid, what forms of infection he is likely to
catch, what kinds of strain he is least able to endure,
what rules of exercise and diet he must observe ; what,
in the domain of the soul, are, to all men or to him
individually, tonics or poisons.
All these possibilities and probabilities are most
usefully brought before us in Professor Nordau's
analyses of degeneracy in general, and even in those
criticisms of living authors which, however far-fetched
and unjust in their particular application, are neverthe-
less correct as accounts of the more subtle and latent
forms of spiritual disease. On the other hand,
Professor Nordau, if we analyse his most glaring faults,
is a good warning of what we might all come to if
we did not resist the deteriorating effects of social
mechanisms, the tendency to produce apparent degene-
racy inherent in most of our social difficulties and
discomforts, and in many of our facilitations and
7
98 DETERIORATION OF SOUL
advantages. For Professor Nordau is the type of the
specialist, highly valuable in his own speciality, but
AjJuGbk*- acquiring in its exercise a faith in his own infallibility,
blindness to all qualities save those treated by his
own study or required for its prosecution, which allow
him to approach all other fields without perception of
their requirements and his incompetence ; the very
adaptation of thought to his own line preventing his
understanding the different thought of others. While,
to make the typical warning complete, his own rash-
ness and injustice rousing against him all the thoughtless,
unscrupulous combativeness of others, surrounds him
with what appears a world of imbecility and wickedness,
against which he feels justified in venting all his own
least intelligent brutality. Until, to those who can
resist the contagion of absurdity and injustice, Nordau
becomes, as I have said, a typical warning, filling one
with a holy terror (" Alios age incitatos alios age
rabidos ") of being run away with by any idea however
excellent, of letting one's self be fuddled or made
uproarious by the very best intellectual wine.
One word more. The reader will lay down Nordau's
volume, and perhaps my criticism thereof, with a vague
notion that whatever may be the truth about degene-
racy, the Philistine (and we are all Philistines in most
of our capacities) is safe, neither dangerous nor in
danger. Now this, in the name and in the face of all
the Philistines of Creation, is what I desire to protest
against. In the first place, as I have just remarked,
every man and woman is in some things a Philistine,
born of Philistines and brought up in the air of Philistia.
In the second place, the Philistine, taken as an indiv?-
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 99
dual, is far from necessarily wholesome or social, as
distinguished from anti-social and morbid. His un-
genial defects (taking genial in the psychologist's sense
as well as the other) are none the less dangerous because
they are shared by ten thousand others more or less
like himself; nor are his anti-social ways, his habits
of vanity, lust, rapacity, and sloth less detrimental
because they are confined within the limits of laws and
customs which he himself has made or levelled up to.
He is not a degenerate, very likely ; but he is an
imperfect being, and every one pays for his imperfec-
tions. Are religious bigotry, social snobbishness,
official corruption, industrial grabbingness, tolerated
vice, parental and conjugal tyranny, due to exceptional
degenerate individuals or to the normal mass ? What
if the standard, the norm is low ? Nay, are not degene-
rates themselves due to the normals' wretched in-
efficiency ? Does not the selfishness and shortsighted-
ness of the normal mass foster every form of cussedness,
exaggeration, fanaticism, that is to say, wrong individual
attitude, either by its assistance or the opposition ?
Inquire into cases of infraction of social laws : have
those who infringe them been dealt with wisely ? are
the laws they break (however foolishly and selfishly)
unselfish, allwise laws, particularly framed in view to -
their happiness? In a word, does society not pro- -f
duce its own degenerates and criminals, even as theJW^f*- A
body produces its own diseases, or at least fosters L/.^ tjtj^
them ?
This is no anti-social tirade ; neither anarchy nor
egotism is my special form of degeneracy. The
individual, it seems to me, becomes weak and limited
ioo DETERIORATION OF SOUL
in proportion as he is isolated and self-centred. But
we must not count too much upon the soundness of
the majority, nor imagine that it is necessarily more
complete than the individual. All class prejudice, half
of what we call national feeling, is merely accumu-
lated and inveterate spiritual degeneracy ; and so far
from the majority being able, in such matters, to pro-
tect the individual, it is only the individual, the
eccentric, nonconforming, rebellious individual, who
can, in the long run, save the majority. We are
always, and always have been (pace Professor Nordau),
surrounded by causes of degeneracy, and perhaps the
one we need most guard against nowadays is the notion
that society can relieve the individual from his spiritual
difficulties and defend him from his spiritual dangers.
Most dangers are not the same to all individuals, but
bigotry and fanaticism are dangers to every individual ;
and to the community, they are greater dangers than
morbid peculiarities of a less spreading kind. The
worst kind of spiritual degeneracy is surely that which
is gregarious, and which, for that reason, is unsuspect-
ing of its own existence. To combat it we require to
hear every one, to allow every variety of human being
to express itself ; we require to compare opinion with
opinion, to correct bias by bias, to level exaggeration
by exaggeration, to taste of all that we may select in
everything. For the rule of life is selection ; not merely
of us by nature and fate, but by us of fate and nature.
Our souls are beset by dangerous tendencies, notions,
and examples : let every individual, therefore, scrutinise
and select among the tendencies and notions of others ;
scrutinise and select more carefully still among the
DETERIORATION OF SOUL 101
tendencies and notions he may find in himself. Against
degeneracy of soul there is, after all, but one sweeping
remedy : the determination to alter continually for the
better ; the determination to become, rather than to
remain, absolutely sane.
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ASCETICISM
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ASCETICISM
IN his religious and philosophical writings, Count
Tolstoi would seem to represent the prophetic
temperament in such incarnation as is likely to become
the commonest, indeed perhaps the only possible, one
in the near future. For, in the gradual disruption of
dogmatic creeds, the man born to the prophetic quality
and function tends more and more to be a heretic and
an anarchist ; to practise an exegesis backed by no
authority ; and to benefit or harass mankind, to exhibit
to mankind the spectacle of prophecy, more and more
obviously without any inspiration save the unquestioned
one of his own individual constitution. The Prophet,
being a type of humanity, represents certain impulses
for good and evil existing in numbers of his fellow-
creatures, is in fact a specimen of a human force of the
universe ; and he not only displays in crudest isolation
special tendencies making for life's greater fruitfulness
or sterility, but also directs the scathing light of almost
monomaniacal perception on matters which the average
routine of existence neglects to our disadvantage. The
Prophet is useful as a teacher ; but still more useful
105
io6 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
as a lesson. It is in this double capacity that the
following marginal notes may help to put to use the
prophet, not the artist, Tolstoi.
" To the man perverted by the false doctrines of the
century, it seems," &c., &c.
This form of words, perpetually recurring through-
out Tolstoi's didactic writings, acquaints us with one
of the chief drawbacks of the prophetic mind : an in-
capacity so utter of conceiving any views different
from his own, that they appear monstrous not merely
in their results but also in their origin. " Perverse,"
" False," a kind of devil's spawn in vacuo. Now, the
wonderful tenacity of false doctrines and perverse
attitudes would suggest, to such as are not prophets,
that there may be something to be said in their favour ;
that such falseness and perverseness may be an inevitable
nay, a necessary stage of something else ; that it
is, in some fashion, in league with the ways of things.
The theologians of the past could postulate Original
Sin or the Fundamental Abominableness of Matter ;
but one might expect that the prophets of our own
day, Stirner and Nietzsche, quite as much as Tolstoi,
would have forfeited this logical advantage and desisted
from judging all things as if they had been intended
to please just them. Not a bit ; the prophetic tem-
perament has remained unchanged ; and all prophets-
prophets of cynicism, quite as much as prophets of
asceticism display the same alacrity in seating them-
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 107
selves down ad dexteram Domini, or, indeed, on the
throne off which the Lord has been hustled as some
sort of idol. What unhesitating rapidity they display,
those great nostrum-mongers, not merely in defining
the world's contents and making plans for its complete
overhauling, but in packing off everything which does
not suit them to the bottomless pit ! Mankind, in the
mean while, like some half-hearted follower of Savon-
arola, shoves the false and -perverse doctrines not into the
destroying flames, but merely into the dust-heap, whence
they are incontinently extracted, for exclusive use, by
another Prophet or another School of Prophecy. Let
no one take these remarks for the raillery of scepticism :
the thorough-paced sceptic of modern days (my ingeni-
ous friend H. B. Brewster, for instance) is just as much
carried away by the spirit of prophecy as the dogmatists
whom he scoffs at. I am speaking as a mere looker-
on, vaguely conscious that, since they all exist, these
various excessive views must each answer to some
aspect of reality ; vaguely regretting, also, that we,
less specially gifted creatures, should waste so much of
the scant time given us for the application of truth in
sorting the litter of exaggerations and the rubbish of
anathema with which the great One-sided Ones
encumber the earth.
The heap of valuable and worthless things con-
stituted by Tolstoi's philosophical and moral writings
is the better worth our sorting that, in trying to under-
stand this latest addition to the literature of prophetic
asceticism, we shall be learning to understand, perhaps
to select and profit by, some other ascetic doctrines, of
so ancient an origin and such habitual repetition that
io8 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
we have almost ceased to look either for their psycho-
logical reason or for their practical application.
II
" Like the penitent thief, I knew that I was unhappy,
that I suffered, and that all the human beings around me
were suffering and feeling themselves unhappy . . . and,
even as the penitent thief (nailed to his cross) saw
coming towards him the horrid darkness of death . . .
so I saw the same prospect open before me."
The words I have italicised contain the main postu-
late of all pessimism, and of nearly all asceticism,
religious as well as philosophical, Buddhist and Stoical,
of Schopenhauer as much as of the " Imitation." The
pessimist is unhappy : therefore every one else is ; he
sees no meaning in life save that of his ascetic formula :
therefore there is none ; he is afraid of death : therefore
fear of death is in every breast. And this gratuitous
classification of all mankind under one's own headings
is justified by the additional generalisation, that those
who imagine themselves to feel or think differently are
perverted by false doctrine or sunk in beastlike in-
difference.
Ill
After this follows logically the second postulate of
such as think, or rather of such as are constituted, like
Tolstoi :
" Why had I not earlier put in practice this doctrine
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 109
which gives me happiness ? The answer is very simple:
Because I did not know the truth"
At first sight, it seems strange that the creator of
such marvellously living beings as Natacha, Peter
Besukoff, Princess Mary, Anna Karenine, Oblonsky
or Levine should not have been able to think, what
he so clearly felt and showed in them, that human
beings do not seek happiness but obey instincts, and that
the greatest mass of probable happiness in front has
little attractive power save when it coincides with the
vis a tergo^ the forward push of cravings, tendencies
and habits. One might imagine that in Tolstoi the
novelist's conception was so concrete and individual,
the novelist's genius so automatic and unreasoning, as
to reduce the powers of analysis and generalisation to
almost childish insignificance. Be this as it may, this
greatest painter of human character, able to copy with
faultless precision the soul's actual workings, seems
not to know the rudiments of the soul's physiology or
mechanics, on which those workings depend. It never
seems to enter his head that, if this " knowledge," this
paramount doctrine of such direct application and in-
fallible virtue, has remained hidden, obscured, for near
nineteen hundred years, there must have been, in man-
kind, but a very faint need for a remedy so near at
hand ; nor that this inefficacy in so long a past argues
but small immediate result in the present ; those self-
same interests which hid or distorted this doctrine of
salvation showing, by their tenacity, that it is absurd
to expect them to yield and disappear of a sudden and
as by miracle. But the fact is that Tolstoi, much as
he would disclaim it, not only admits of miracle, but
no TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
bases all his hope upon it. His own experience is of
a miraculous kind, simply because, to his own powers
of observation, the thing which really happened, the
way it happened, is necessarily hidden. Tolstoi's con-
version is one of those of which all religious autobio-
graphy is full, and of which Professor William James
has put together so fine a volume of specimens. At
a given moment in a man's life, either after a period
of religious stress or with apparent total suddenness,
something takes place in the soul : the doubts, scruples,
fears, despair, vanish ; and in their place is a new set
of hopes, a new vital certainty, or (as the doctor in
Ibsen's play would call it) a new " Vital Lie." What
is it that actually happened ? The souls liable to such
complete change and renovation, sudden or gradual,
are those least likely to be able to tell us. For the
concentration of one kind of feeling, the un familiarity
of the elements formerly latent and now dominant, the
very completeness of former despair and present joy,
make him who experiences such a conversion incapable
of observing, and perhaps of conceiving, its real
nature.
The conversion of Tolstoi is not a sudden one ; but
it is characterised by the mono-ideism of such phe-
nomena. The intensity and exclusiveness of his long
and suicidal broodings did not leave in his soul that
lucid, disinterested half which can understand and
intelligently record : there was but one self at work,
one self floundering in nightmare and suddenly lifted
to beatific relief. Tolstoi fails to notice what strikes
every spectator from the first namely, that in his least
regenerate days, his most carnal and perversely
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET in
thinking days, he dealt preferably with characters
unknown to previous novelists, Peter, Andre, Levine,
men haunted already by the very thought which was to
overshadow his own mind, the eternal query : " Why
live, since one must die ? " That such should have
been his heroes shows that he knew more of asceticism
than other novelists perhaps capable of creating his
other characters say, Wronsky or Nicholas RostofF.
This, evidently, never strikes Tolstoi himself. Still
less, of course, does it occur to him that the importance,
taken in his mind by that recurring " Why ? " let alone
the fact of its having, in the midst of prosperity,
driven him to the verge of suicide, shows that he was
constitutionally destined to concentrate on this problem ;
or, briefly, that the value of his conversion depended
on his passionate need of it : the remedy was com-
mensurate with the evil, and both were in himself,
inborn.
This Tolstoi could not see. And, failing to guess
that his was a very special and rare case, he attributed
his own spiritual drama to the rest of mankind. A
large number of his neighbours were visibly discon-
tented and unhappy ; a larger still he chose to consider
as being so : well, then, their discontent and their
unhappiness were due to the same causes as his own.
They might, indeed, explain it by poverty, illness,
cramped activities, thwarted passions, by anything or
everything they chose ; that, Tolstoi assured them,
was but delusion, and the real matter with them was
what had been the matter with himself.
For in all prophetic persons there is a sadly comic
side, reminding one of those valetudinarians who press
ii2 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
the pills or waters which have relieved their liver or
their spleen on all the people of their neighbourhood
with damaged heart, brain or marrow nay, with poor
bruised or broken limbs. Moreover, in the spiritual
example, the recalcitrance of supposed fellow-sufferers,
their clinging to their own diagnosis, especially their
making light of their own ills, is instantly set down
as a sure sign that all sensation and all judgment have
been perverted by the very malady they refuse to own
up to. But, worst off of any, those who, in the face
of the universal, infallible and painless panacea, actually
maintain that, for the present at least, they have no
ailments of any kind, that they are (shameless or
deluded wretches !) sound in mind and limb ! As to
those, well, all Tolstoi can say is that, just in proportion
to their contentment with life, they are already dead
and done for ; galvanised corpses, set on end to gibber
and to poison others with their putrescence.
IV
Let us continue our analysis of Tolstoi's postulates ;
which, at the same time, is an examination of the
modes of thought characteristic of the ascetic attitude
and the prophetic temperament.
" Every human being lives in the name of some
particular principle ; and this principle, in whose name
he lives in that given fashion, is no other thing than
his religion."
The identification holds good only when the
principle in question happens to be of the sort we all
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 113
mean by " religious." If we accepted Tolstoi's state-
ment without this rider, which makes it tautological,
we should be obliged, like H. B. Brewster in his
" Ame Pdienne" to identify a man's religion, his
God, with his dominant impulse or combination
of impulses ; and the most profane and wicked
lives might thus be led, as Hoffmann imagines
the operatic Don Juan's, in the name of the principle,
let us say, of Leporello's catalogues. The vital
principle of most men's lives has been given its right
name only by Nietzsche ; it is " My Inclination."
But it is not of such principles as these that Tolstoi is
speaking ; and any other principle of life, any principle
conscious, formulated and dominating all other im-
pulses and habits, any principle which can be called
a religion, exists only in a minority of cases, at least
in the sense of constant intellectual reference and
constant moral incentive.
"Life is an aspiration after happiness; the aspiration
after happiness is life."
This is psychologically false. In reality life is
that is, exclusively consists of no more this than any
other very frequent item of consciousness ; life being,
to a large extent, absorption in various concerns or
interests to the positive exclusion of all " aspiration
after happiness." Nor is there any reason why such
" aspiration after happiness " should be more frequent ;
for, in the majority of cases, happiness itself is secured,
8
H4 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
and best secured, without any conscious straining after
it. Happiness is secured, and with it life's furtherance
for the individual and race, in that manner which
Tolstoi, unable to deny its existence, condemns before-
hand with the absurd epithet of " animal " ; secured
by the play of clashing or coordinated impulses, which,
so far from being more particularly animal, may happen
to be impulses of the highest moral or aesthetic or
constructive or intellectual sort.
All pessimism, all asceticism, is founded upon the
supposition of what Tolstoi calls the " illusory thirst
for enjoyment." Now, however numerous the cases
where enjoyment proves impossible or mischievous,
the continued existence of the human race shows
that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, neither the
enjoyment nor the thirst for it is illusory, but, on the
contrary, a genuine advantage, making subsequent
enjoyment not less, but more, possible by perfecting
the sensibilities. The healthy activity of the whole
individual, with its inevitable hierarchy of im-
pulses, both secures pleasure and iforestalls cloying,
and, by its inclusion of intellectual and sympathetic
interests, its subordination of others to these, it
diminishes conflict with fellow-beings quite as
effectually as does Tolstoi's Renunciation. And here
let me say that there is surely something mean in
this reciprocal renunciation, resulting in the cessation
of struggle and disappointment. Such renunciation is
often needful in our imperfect individual case : our
eye gives us offence, and we cast it from us> But such
rough-and-ready, such wasteful, destructive methods
are surely not admissible in a philosophy of life, in a
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 115
counsel of perfection ! The universal, as distinguished
from the individual, rule for greater happiness is not
self-diminution but assimilation, expansion, the non-
ego becoming, in imagination and feelings, an integral
part of the ego. Asceticism preaches voluntary im-
poverishment : my neighbours cease to steal because
I possess nothing ; I cease to covet, because they
possess nothing ; 'tis Epictetus's safety after the thieves
had carried away his brass lamp. But the law of
human life is barter : asking freely and giving fully ;
mutual enriching through each other's superfluity.
Asceticism refuses to admit this law ; for all asceticism
moves in the logical circle of pain as cause and effect.
VI
" Men, like all other living creatures, are forced by
the conditions of life to live forever at one another's
expense, devouring one another literally or meta-
phorically. And man, in so far as gifted with reason,
cannot blink the fact that every material advantage is
obtained by one creature only at the expense of some
other creature."
A series of quite gratuitous biological and eco-
nomical assumptions, which are made more intelligible
by a statement in another place that " the workman
who wears out his body and hastens his death is giving
that body as food to others."
Now, in all these premises, Tolstoi omits one half of
the fact namely, that, in the majority of cases, a
human being, while giving himself, gets, or has got,
n6 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
something from others. Taking by no means implies
stealing, nor is benefiting by one s fellows the same thing
as preying on them. The workman is not breaking
down his health and hastening his death any faster
while working for others than while working for him-
self, except from occasional reasons quite independent
of whom the work is to benefit most. He is not
breaking down his health or hastening his own death
more than if he were committing excesses of other
kinds for his own sole satisfaction ; and, except through
the accidental or incidental misarrangement of the world,
he is not breaking down his health or hastening on death
at all y but rather the reverse. The detriment to the
individual is due to excess as regards himself, not in
the least to profitableness to others. The increase of
the world's material and spiritual wealth depends upon
activity ; but activity, when not excessive, is an
integration, not a disintegration, of individual life.
The world is carried on upon the principle of barter
and compensation ; and, even in such low forms of
life as those where animals or savages actually
prey upon each other, the one who feeds upon
his victim to-day is bound to be fed upon, as an
individual or a class, to-morrow : the lion ends off as
the sustenance of vultures, jackals and insects. But
Tolstoi, for reasons we shall presently grasp and can
already guess at, chooses to consider that all profiting
by the existence of others represents an unwilling or a
voluntary sacrifice. When it is voluntary, he calls it
love ; and here again comes a gratuitous assumption.
Let us look at this question of Love and of Sacrifice,
for it is important and one upon which ordinary
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 117
thought (though luckily not e very-day practice !) is in
considerable confusion. Alongside of the sentence
about the workman destroying himself for the benefit
of others, is another example of what Tolstoi chooses
to consider as self-sacrifice : the mother suckling her
baby. He could not have come by a better refutation
of his own theory ; for it is plain that the mother is
giving life to her child, but it is also plain that her
bodily health and her happiness gain by this supposed
sacrifice, which is, in reality, an organic advantage.
From such an example, however, Tolstoi concludes
that " love is really worthy of that name only when it
is the sacrifice of self." In one sense, this is quite
undeniable ; but that sense is not Tolstoi's. For
love is preference ; and love leads to self-sacrifice, that
is to say, to sacrifice of greater or smaller advan-
tages nay, even of health, power or life simply
because all preference of one particular thing or group
of things leads to sacrifice of other things or groups of
things, whether that preference be socially beneficial
(which we call " unselfish ") or socially detrimental
(which we call " selfish "), whether it happen to
be duty, ambition, hatred, vanity, lust ; whether
it be the love of Cordelia or the love of Francesca ;
though, of course, the measure of every preference
(since -preference implies alternative) is not the measure
more especially of love, and still less is it love's
chief characteristic. The characteristic, the typical,
fact of love must be sought for in that from which the
highest love has, by analogy, borrowed its name, and
perhaps, very literally, taken its origin : the union of
two creatures who take joy in producing a third. The
u8 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
analogous process takes place in the spiritual domain :
we give our thought, our fancy, our will, in union with
the external world or with the will, the thought or
fancy of others ; and in so doing create new forms, new
ideas, new modes of feeling, nay, new selves.
But at the bottom of the Tolstoian conception of
love (which is only the usual ascetic one) is the
old, savage notion of sacrifice : of a universe so evil
that all happiness must be discounted in misery
" I did but taste a little honey with the end of the
rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die ! "
The implacable gods, the atrocious Cosmos, the
Ogre Fee-Faw-Fum at the top of every Bean
Stalk, insist on increasing suffering through every
apparent alleviation or apparent enjoyment. It is
worth while, especially in the face of a thinker
like Tolstoi, to disentangle the notion of giving from
the notion of giving up ; to separate the notion of
renunciation, as a choice between two positive or
negative desiderata, from the notion of renunciation, as
mere refusal of good and acceptance of evil. The
really fruitful act of giving oneself, one's strength,
attention, thought or feeling, is not a loss, but the
fulfilling of an organic need as essential as that of
material or spiritual assimilation ; it is, in fact, the
inevitable sequel of real assimilation. If the sacrifice
of something is often implied in this, it is merely the
sacrifice by alternative, the preference of one need or
desire or pleasure over another. Such preference as
this is a principle of order in the moral realm : the
fulness of life means, ipso facto, the constant checking
of the less important by the more important ; it means
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 119
moderation because it means alternative, selection,
subordination and hierarchy of the impulses in which
life consists. The vanity of the pursuit of pleasure,
of which Tolstoi, like every moralist, makes (and
rightly, perhaps) so much capital, results from the
absence of such a complex hierarchy of impulse : the
larger part of the pleasure-seeker is sacrificed to a
momentary desire, and that omitted bulk of his nature
either upsets the satisfaction aimed at, or leaves the
unruly desire to languish in isolation.
But Tolstoi, like all ascetics, seeks his remedy not
in moderation, not in the development of other
impulses, not in fact in the enriching of the individual
life, but in its impoverishment. Moral Good is,
according to him, that condition where man pursues
nothing for its own sake or his own ends, and nothing
for the interest and pleasure of the pursuit ; but only
for the sake of another human being, or of a vague
sense of duty personified as God. Tolstoi's ideal
of life is, like his notion of love, an ideal of diminu-
tion, of sacrifice ; and it seems likely that, even as
in the ritual of primeval man, the ascetic conception
of sacrifice as such, of sacrifice as loss, impoverishment,
mutilation, is very closely connected with the fear
of death ; sacrifice being, however inexplicitly, a
commutation, a partial, symbolical or vicarious death,
instead of a total and positive one.
VII
In the case of Tolstoi, there is the repeated and
unqualified expression of the constant thought, the
120 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
constant fear, of Death. Already, in his pseudo-
autobiography, we find the following funeral oration
on the old housekeeper Natalia Savichna :
" She accomplished the best and greatest act of the
life of this world : dying without regret and without
fear."
Now, this fear, whose absence thus seems a rare
form of holiness, is, in a sense, a misconception, a mis-
conception revealing the fundamental complexion of
all asceticism. Let us examine it. Life and Death
form together one of those false antitheses which have
been pointed out by that subtle analyst, Gabriel
Tarde. Life and Death are opposed in position ;
but not, so to speak, in the ground which they cover
or the facts they respectively include. Because what
is alive cannot also be dead, and what is dead cannot
also be alive ^ we have, in our slovenly fashion, grown
accustomed to think of the fact of being alive and
the fact of being dead as of equal importance, intensity
and extension. We overlook the real antithesis, which
is between death and birth ^ the two -points without magni-
tude between which extends life. Moreover, we have
confused death with the process of dying, often
accompanied by illness or preceded by decay, which
is a portion, sometimes a considerable portion, of the
processes of life. Nor is this all. The immense
part played in our life by the death of others gives
the notion of dying a frightful duration in our con-
sciousness, and makes us think, by analogy, that our
own death also is a wide blot or oil spot in our life.
Hence death, which, being the limit of life, exists
in reality outside it, becomes, so far as it is thought
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 121
about and feared, a most important and terrible part
of life.
Life is consciousness ; and, except in consciousness,
death is nothing ; it becomes, in consciousness, griet
or terror. But grief and terror are realities. Of
course ; since it is thanks to them that death, or rather
the notion of death, has come to poison so much of
life. Heaven forbid I should argue that either
philosophy or religion can ever abolish grief or fear,
abolish the agony of departing, the agony of being
left behind. Loss is loss, and parting is parting, a
fact, a horror, which nothing can efface. But let us
not add to these the dread either of life or of death,
deeply, indissolubly entangled as they become. And
if philosophy represent any higher truth, and religion
any higher utility, let them strive to diminish
this hideous tangle, to hold our thoughts and
feelings asunder ; make us see things as they are,
and make them, so far as our attitude toward them
goes, a little more what they should be. Life, our
own and that of our beloved, is good in proportion
as it is safe and complete, as it is untouched by the
chance, the fact, but worst of all, the fear, of death.
And all healthy life tends to cast forth from itself the
vain and paralysing thought of its own end.
VIII
We have seen that the prophetic temper is charac-
terised by a tendency to mono-ideism, and that mono-
ideism invariably tends to jealousy of all that it
122 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
excludes. One of Tolstoi's most characteristic pieces
of such mono-ideistic jealousy, is his elaborate cata-
logue of sinful indulgences ; of what, especially, he
puts under the rubric " intoxication," including therein,
as venial or mortal sin, the intoxication not merely
by wine, tobacco or fleshly love, but by art, literature,
" gestures and sounds," and even bicycling. The
exaggeration is so gross that one fails at first to
conceive how it could come about in a mind as
originally excellent, and a life as many-sided, as
Tolstoi's. But the explanation, furnished by com-
parison with the raptures of earlier mystics, appears
to be that the ascetic has his own form of intoxication.
Here is Tolstoi's account of his state of beatitude
after his conversion has been consummated :
" All that seems evil to me does so merely because
I believe in myself and not in God ; and as, from
this life where it is so easy to do His will, since His will
is mine, I can fall nowhere except into Him, what I
possess is complete joy and good. And all I could
write would fail to express what I feel"
Let us consider these seemingly simple statements.
It is so easy for Tolstoi to do God's will ! God's
will is, after all, only Tolstoi's ; Tolstoi can fall only into
God ! Is this presumptuous certainty of righteousness,
this identification of the individual impulse and the
moral law, this unmixed and ineffable joy, anything
save an intoxication of a more insidious, but scarcely
less unwholesome, kind ? Taking in the full meaning
of such words as these, one wonders whether there
will ever arise -a new habit of spiritual cleanness, of
intellectual chastity, making men question and reject
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 123
emotional self-indulgence like this, which sullies the
reason and sterilises the will. One doubts it. For,
from century to century, mankind may be watched
yielding, even as to lower kinds of self-indulgence,
to the subtle and high-flown temptation of mysticism.
This temptation consists in attributing to an emotional
state of our own (the state of Nietzsche's Zarathustra,
as much as the state of Kipling's poor old Lama) the
name and the importance of a generalised objective
fact ; nay, of the greatest and most solemn of facts
which man has thus generalised : the Will of God,
the Nature of Things.
The very recurrence of such a process of spiritual
intoxication implies, it may be said, a recurrent need
of it. Yes ; but a need which results from other needs
being neglected. Between the cravings which produce
science, art, laws nay, food and progeny and the
mystical craving such as this of Tolstoi there is a
fundamental difference : they are fruitful, and it is
barren.
And this word " barren " suggests another of the
drawbacks of asceticism. In its exclusiveness, its
mono-ideism, its readiness to condemn all save itself,
asceticism tends to waste much of the moral resources
(so cruelly needed !) of ordinary mortals, and, on
the other hand, to get its moral gifts rejected by
those who require them most ; its teaching is shelved
as dead letter, or, at best, counsel of perfection.
Renounce the world, preaches Tolstoi ; despise,
cease to relish, such of the world's work, of the body's
functions, as cannot be relinquished ; let nothing
touch you for its own sake or your own ; eradicate
i2 4 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
self from your thoughts and feelings, and replace
it by your neighbour, by mankind, by that impersonal
personification of ideals which is Tolstoi's notion of
God.
" If such be saintliness, chivalrousness, sentiment,"
answers the rest of mankind silently to itself, " by
all means keep it on a shelf out of the way of ordinary
life. Truthfulness, justice, chastity, mercy, are clearly
quite unsuitable to the increase of wealth and the
rearing of families ; and is it not the saints and
prophets, Tolstoi for instance, who tell us so ? "
Now, as a matter of fact, to what save daily life
can ideals, sentiment, saintliness, be profitably applied ?
Truthfulness, honesty, justice, chastity, mercy, are
nothing but correctives of this world's ways ; and
it is only as such correctives that, save for the
aesthetic pleasure of a divinity, they can ever be wanted.
Unworldliness must be cultivated because our interests
are legitimately worldly.
But holiness and heroism, precious because they are
useful, have been considered as precious apart from
use. Saints and heroes have been cultivated like rare
and wonderful flowers, incapable of ever turning into
fruit for food and seed. And, as a result of such
isolation and sterility, mankind has come to be divided
as we see it in Buddhism, in Christian monasticism
and less crassly elsewhere into the church and the
world : those who accept life and sin, and those who
kill the body, or all the body stands for, in order to
perfect the soul. Like every other ascetic, Tolstoi,
in preaching his doctrine of renunciation, is uncon-
sciously giving in to the vicious automatism which
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 125
sunders the natural man from the saint, and which
discourages all application of higher feelings to
ordinary existence on the score that ordinary existence
can never be composed of higher feelings only. And
in so far Tolstoi merely increases the modern tendency
to question the efficacy of all moral teaching, to doubt
the wholesomeness of sentiment and to consider ideals
of conduct either as a mere symptom, an epiphenomenon^
a fly on the axletree of progress, or (and human illogi-
calness reconciles both indictments) as a mischievous
interference with the automatic ways of natural selec-
tion. It would instead be more philosophical to
consider the continued recurrence of such ascetic
or idealising tendencies as a proof of their utility,
despite all drawbacks, in helping on the practical
existence of mankind. But ascetics have treated their
especial soul-medicine or soul-food as the one panacea ;
and mankind (as prone to exaggeration as the prophets
themselves) has developed a tendency to consider
the dealers in panaceas as quacks or the victims of
quacks.
IX
The foregoing notes have attempted to set forth
some of the chief peculiarities of the ascetic view of
life, and of the prophetic temperament, as we may
study them united in the person of Tolstoi. We have
taken stock of the pessimistic basis of asceticism,
its rejection of moderation, equilibrium of function,
and such moral improvements as rest upon them, in
opposition to wholesale renunciation ; its passion for
126 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
sacrifice and its preoccupation with death ; finally,
its tendency to a divorce between spirituality and
life. In a similar manner, we have had occasion to
verify the isolated and one-sided attitude of the born
prophet ; his attribution of his own moods and needs
to the rest of the world, and his jealousy of, nay,
hostility towards, every other mode of being ; his
incapacity for assimilating the ideas of others, for
meeting them half-way and, of course, for feeling any
correction or check to his own notions ; briefly, his
mono-ideism, and his mixture (odd, but so explicable)
of complete self-belief and utter scepticism of received
opinion.
And, having set these studies so far before the
reader, I can forestall his question, and shall endeavour
to answer it : as I have had to answer it for myself
in the course of my reading of Tolstoi, to account
for our instinctive sympathy with the seemingly use-
less teachings of asceticism.
This usefulness, these uses, result from the same
peculiarities as the faults and the drawbacks. Isolation
and mono-ideism give the ascetic and the prophet an
extraordinary freedom of view, wherever his own
definite attitude and limited idea are not concerned.
Unconscious of those sympathising and imitative im-
pulses which compact other individuals with their
fellows ; untouched by any of the temptations which
make others blink and compromise ; inattentive to
any other man's views and, therefore, perfectly
sceptical towards them ; and harassed, moreover,
through and through, by organic dissatisfaction and
unrest, this thinker, alone with his own thoughts and
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 127
feelings (his Eagle and his Serpent, like Nietzsche's
Zarathustra) is the most ruthless of critics and de-
stroyers. Every ascetic is, in essence, an anarchist
and a nihilist, a " sayer of * No ' " to the accepted life
of the world in the words (more significant than he,
perhaps, knew) of James Hinton, a " Law Breaker " ;
since the only law he believes in is the law of his own
exceptional and isolated way of being. Hence he
sees, as no laughing sceptic ever can, through every
exaggeration, every " vital lie " save his own. The
dominant and recurrent thought of all ascetics, from
Buddhism and Ecclesiastes, through Stoicism and
Christian Mysticism to the smallest modern revivalist,
is vanity the emptiness, non-existence, of everything
save their own narrow wishes, needs and habits. Now,
this attitude of mind corresponds to a great deal that
really exists : in the happy-go-lucky, lazy, yet hurried,
processes of life, there is quite an enormous amount
which is dead letter, perfunctory, wasteful and mis-
chievous ; results of imperfect evolution, like those
useless organs, those imperfect adaptations, which,
according to the ingenious paradox of Dr. MetchnikofF,
account for all disease, all vice and suffering, but which
an instinct of social safety or individual laziness goes
on admiring, as the Bridgewater writers admired the
" harmonious designs of Nature." On to all such
perfunctory, dead letter, all such lying things, all
such imperfect adaptations and mischievous survivals,
the ascetic, the prophet, the marvellous anarchist,
Tolstoi, directs his ruthless clear-sightedness. We
all know his chapters on luxury, on the pseudo-work
of the so-called intellectual classes, on the pseudo-
128 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
morality of official religion, on so many of the idle
activities which give us our daily bread or our daily
ration of self-satisfaction. His immense and weari-
some volume on art remains as a most useful memento
vivere or memento morl to all of us who talk glibly
of the holiness of beauty and its social mission. " The
Kreutzer Sonata " probably aroused universal hostility
less by its morbid and unchaste (monkish !) kind of
chastity, than by its terribly true criticism of so much
corruption and enervation hidden secure in the sacred
mysteries of marriage and family life. And the
writings on War are but the more moving and more
explicit development of the remark of Tarde's, that,
if the Past had not left us engines and institutions
for warfare, the reciprocal destruction of national life
and wealth would certainly never have originated in
times as comparatively rational as ours. These and
similar attacks on various forms of our smug moral
callousness or vainglorious moral barbarism, are summed
up in a thought which recurs throughout Tolstoi's
works, beginning with his great novels :
" All this comes about, thanks solely to that social
and administrative machinery whose business it is to
subdivide the responsibility for evil done, in such
fashion that no one should feel to what extent these
acts are contrary to his nature. . . . It is sufficient if
a man free himself for an instant from this tangled net,
in order to see the things which are contrary to his
nature"
That is exactly what Tolstoi does for us. His
unsociable and sceptical temper, his constitutional fault-
finding, allow him to see, and to show us, one of the
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 129
chief drawbacks (for every moral machinery, every
human or cosmic arrangement has its drawback) of
that normal automatic living from impulse to impulse,
or, if you choose, from hand to mouth, which secures
the continuance and improvement of the race, and, on
the whole, the tolerable happiness of the individual.
The question " Why ? " " To what purpose ? " which
becomes, in the case of some of Tolstoi's heroes and
in his own, misery and paralysis when applied to the
totality of existence itself, is salutary when we apply it
every now and then to the detail of life. For it is
then no longer : " What is the use of my being alive ? "
but the wholly different query : " Why, being alive,
being what I am and wishing in a given way, am I
nevertheless acting in this other way, which is incon-
sistent with my general life, personality and wishes ? "
Yes ; there is need of such occasional scattering ot
our best-established habits and most necessary shams
and shibboleths. Nietzsche is right in asking for a
constant " revaluing of all standards of value." Only
what Nietzsche did not guess, and the world does not
recognise such has been the mission not of Epicureans
and Cynics (falling in, as they do, with everyday
habits), but of the far more ruthless, because more
mono-ideistic and more unpractical, destructiveness of
the prophets of asceticism.
Moreover, apart from its constant criticism of moral
routine and its indefatigable exposure of perfunctori-
ness and hypocrisy, apart from its negative merit in
demolishing so many cherished vital lies, and making
the individual soul stand without shelter from the
lightnings and the whirlwinds of the spiritual heavens ;
9
130 TOLSTOI AS PROPHET
apart from its great functions of destruction (bringing,
in Christ's words, " not peace, but a sword "), all pro-
gress owes a deep debt to asceticism of every denomi-
nation. For asceticism has given success to unworldli-
ness, and made modesty and scrupulousness illustrious.
The adoration of the saint, the triumphant enshrining
of his poor bones, has been a salutary practice ; since,
even if that saint's virtues were mistaken, it was the
desire for virtue, for acceptableness in God's eyes,
which made him glorious in the eyes of men. It has
been a help to progress that sanctity could compensate
for poverty and weakness nay, that poverty and
weakness should have their disgrace removed ; and
more particularly in times when poverty was as often
the result of one's neighbour's unscrupulousness as of
one's own lack of initiative ; and weakness was better
for others than being a ruffian.
The school which has arisen in violent antagonism
to ascetic self-denial, that of Nietzsche and the " Will
to Power," bred, as it is, in times of comparative
liberty and safety for the individual, has overlooked
the fact that, in the past, a handful of stupid roughs,
or the caprice of a delirious crowned degenerate, could
in ten minutes destroy the results of years and years
of industry, ingenuity, self-command, in fact, of every
combination of intellectual, moral and physical effi-
ciency. In such a past, and it is still at our door
(I write within a week of the suppression of the
St. Petersburg rising) the saint is the necessary
corrective, in mankind's judgment, for the atrocious
success of the violent man or the intriguer. And, so
long as we continue abetting success which is obtained
TOLSTOI AS PROPHET 131
to the detriment of others, so long shall we require
the worship of the saint as such. Asceticism is the
inevitable outcome, because it is the natural corrective,
of moral callousness. And, so long as the market
and the home are no better than they are, we shall
require to retire now and again into a church built,
if not of stone, then of reverent thoughts in com-
memoration of some just, and gentle and austere man.
Nay, we shall require to feel at times the impulse to
self-chastisement, self-abasement and self-mutilation, so
long as our daily life remains as thoughtless, mean,
grasping and bestial as it often is.
And herein lies the secret of Tolstoi, as of all
ascetics and prophets : of his exaggerations, his ab-
surdities, his let us call them by their rightful name
ravings ; and of our listening, and feeling that we are
right in listening, to them.
The destructiveness of asceticism is blind and
excessive ; it behoves our spiritual activity and disci-
pline to make use of this dangerous moral force, as of
any of the other forces of nature, bidding it work for
our benefit and not to our hurt. But, even while we
remain unable to direct it to our purposes, this dis-
ruptive energy of asceticism and prophecy is one of
the necessary purifiers of our stagnating souls. It
is good to be asked, " To what purpose ? " by a Tolstoi,
although our answer may differ so widely from the
one he preaches.
TOLSTOI ON ART
TOLSTOI ON ART
LEO TOLSTOI'S recent volume on Art closes
significantly the series of his arraignments of
what we have been pleased to call civilisation. Like
all his later works, whether treatise or play or novel
or parable, this volume on art shows Tolstoi in his
character of lay prophet, with all its powers and all
its weaknesses. For it would seem we notice it in
two other great lay prophets, Carlyle and Ruskin
that the gift of seeing through the accepted falsehoods
of the present, and foretelling the improbable realities
of the future, can arise only in creatures too far
overpowered by their own magnificent nature to under-
stand other men's ways of being and thinking ; in
minds so bent upon how things should be as to lose
sight of how things are and how things came to be.
While Carlyle, embodying his passionate instincts in
historical narrative, was moderated at least by his
knowledge of the past and of the consequent origin
and necessity of the present ; while Ruskin, accepting
the whole moral and religious training of his times,
was in so far in touch with his contemporaries ; Tolstoi
has broken equally with everything, if ever he had
really much to break with. Destitute of all historic
sense, impervious to any form of science, and accepting
135
136 TOLSTOI ON ART
the Gospel only as the nominal text for a religion
of his own making, he has become incapable of ad-
mitting more than one side to any question, more
than one solution to any difficulty, more than one
factor in any phenomenon. He is destitute of all
sense of cause and effect, all acquiescence in necessity,
and all real trustfulness in the ways of the universe.
For him most things are wrong, wholly, utterly wrong ;
their wrongness has never originated in any right, and
never will be transformed into right until well, until
mankind be converted to Tolstoi's theory and practice.
Economic and domestic arrangements, laws, politics,
religion, all wrong ; and now, art also.
Unreasonableness like this is contagious, and Tolstoi's
criticisms have often been dismissed as utterly wrong-
headed. But we should not forego the benefits which
the prophetic gift can bring us, if only we know how
to extract them. We should endeavour to eliminate
the hallucinations which usually accompany such
penetrating moral insight, and to apply some of this
vast spiritual energy with more discrimination than
was compatible with its violent and almost tragic
production. The use of a genius like Tolstoi's is to
show us in what particulars human institutions,
habits, and thoughts are morally wrong ; it is for us
to find out what his very prophet's onesidedness pre-
vents his doing the rational explanation of this
wrongness.
With regard to art, Tolstoi's opinion of its moral
wrongness can be analysed into two very separate and
independent views. Art, as practised and conceived
in our times, is immoral, according to Tolstoi, first :
TOLSTOI ON ART 137
because it fails to accomplish its only legitimate mission
of directly increasing the instincts of justice, pity, and
self-renunciation ; and secondly : because any mission,
good or bad, which it does fulfil is limited to a very
small fraction of mankind. In other words, according
to Tolstoi, art is a useless, often a corrupting, luxury ;
and a luxury of that minority which already enjoys
more luxuries than are compatible with the material
welfare of the rest of the world and with its own
spiritual advantage.
The two propositions must be taken separately for
examination in the light of certain sciences which, alas,
Tolstoi condemns outright as themselves useless,
mendacious, and corrupting. Now this condemnation
by Tolstoi of all science, this misconception of the
very nature of science, will help us to a rapid
understanding of one half of his condemnation of art
its condemnation as morally useless. There is not
enough justice or sympathy, not enough purity,
endurance, or self-renunciation in the world that
is the gospel Tolstoi has to preach ; and, with prophetic
onesidedness, he condemns everything which does
not directly and obviously increase these virtues. So
long as it is neither unjust nor cruel nor rapacious nor
impure, it matters nothing to Tolstoi whether life be
varied or monotonous, elastic and adaptive or narrow
and unadaptive, lucid or dull, enterprising or stagnant,
complete or mutilated, pleasant or devoid of pleasure ;
it never occurs to him that in the great organic give-
and-take, those very qualities which he so exclusively
desires depend for their existence on the fulness and
energy of every side of human existence. Tolstoi wants
138 TOLSTOI ON ART
virtue, and only virtue, dominant, exclusive ; and he
thinks that virtue can be got independent of every-
thing else, perfect and instantaneous. Hence he
naturally disdains mere intellectual activity, and mis-
understands the object of all science.
" The important and suitable object of human
science," he writes explicitly, " ought not to be the
learning of those things which happen to be interesting :
but the learning of the manner in which we should
direct our lives : the learning of those religious, moral,
and social truths without which all our so-called
knowledge of nature must be either useless or fatal."
Hence, practically, no science ; for Tolstoi's definition
of a moral or social truth is not a moral or social
fact or generalisation, but simply a precept for con-
duct ; truth, in his special vocabulary, means no longer
the faithful presentation of what is, but unflinching
insistence on what ought to be. As with science, so
with art.
" The religious consciousness of our time consists,
speaking generally, in the recognition that our
happiness, material and spiritual, individual and
collective, momentary and permanent, consists in the
brotherhood of all men, in our union for a life in
common . . . and those works of art only should be
esteemed and encouraged which grow out of the
religion of our day, whereas all works of art contrary
to this religion should be condemned, and all the rest
of art treated with indifference."
Like science, therefore, art is set by Tolstoi to
enforce virtue, not, as he orders science, by precepts,
but by embodying and communicating such emotion
TOLSTOI ON ART 139
as conduces directly to greater morality ; no reference
being made, in this case either, to the fact that virtue
cannot long exist save in a many-sided, energetic, and
harmonious life, of which the impulse to art, like the
impulse to science, is an essential element. On these
principles, " art," continues Tolstoi, " should always
be valued according to its contents," that is to say,
according to the definite moral example which it
exhibits, or the definite moral emotion chiefly pity,
of course which it awakens. The practical result
is the banishing, as no longer consonant with our
moral purposes, of nearly all the art of former times,
including Antiquity and the Middle Ages ; and the
absolute condemnation of more than two-thirds of
all modern art, including not merely Wagner, Im-
pressionism, Symbolism, Pre-Raphaelitism, but all
Tolstoi's earlier work " Anna Karenina " and " War
and Peace " nearly all of Goethe's, and, after minute
examination, even the " Ninth Symphony." There
remain, besides the Gospels, the more obviously
moralising works of Victor Hugo and of Dickens,
<c Uncle Tom's Cabin," and whatever painting,
sculpture, and music may be discovered having a moral
purpose as definite and unmistakable as these.
This statement is crude, and Tolstoi's plea, judging
from it, would seem to be mere fanatical dogmatism.
But this is far from being the case : Tolstoi is learned
and is subtle, and twists facts powerfully to suit his
views. Tolstoi has read, or caused to be examined for
his benefit, almost everything that ever has been
written on the nature and aims of art ; and, in a
chapter where profound lack of sympathy is thinly
140 TOLSTOI ON ART
disguised as intellectual impartiality, he has reviewed
and dismissed every theory of art which differs from
his own. The science of aesthetics, necessarily de-
pendent as it is upon psychology, sociology, and
anthropology, all as yet imperfect, is in a backward
state ; and an immense proportion of the " philosophy
of art " is either pure metaphysics, scornful of concrete
fact, or mere polemic founded on the practice of one
school or period. This backward state of aesthetics
has rendered it, from Plato to Spencer, and from
Ruskin to Whistler, the happy hunting ground of
every philosopher lacking the experience of art, and of
every art connoisseur lacking, the habit of philosophy ;
and has given Tolstoi the immense advantage of
finding not merely a marvellous amount of foolish
utterance to scoff at, but, what is more to his purpose,
a mutual contradiction between all the main theories.
All philosophers, Tolstoi is able to tell us, have
insisted on the extreme nobility of art, and a great
many have dogmatised about beauty being art's special
object ; but there is not one single intelligible account
of beauty, and there are three or four conflicting main
definitions of art ; a proof that, as Tolstoi has so often
proclaimed, all science and all philosophy are worthless,
and that art can have no legitimate object save the
moral one which he assigns to it. But it happens
that even nowadays the psychological and historical
treatment of aesthetics is beginning to put order and
lucidity into the subject, and to reconcile while it
explains the conflict in all previous views. It is in
the light of such science, however much despised by
Tolstoi, that we shall attempt to show that art, like
TOLSTOI ON ART 141
science itself, like philosophy, like every great healthy
human activity, has a right to live and a duty to fulfil,
quite apart from any help it may contribute to the
enforcement of a moralist's teachings.
o
It is necessary to premise that, like nearly every
other writer on aesthetics, Tolstoi has needlessly
complicated the question by considering literature as
the type of all other art. Now it is clear that literature,
although in one capacity an art as much as music or
painting, is at the same time, and in varying degree,
a mode of merely imparting opinion or stirring up
emotion, the instrument, not merely of the artist,
but of the thinker, the historian, the preacher, and the
pleader. This being the case, it is unfair to judge
the question of art by the whole practice of literature ;
it is necessary, on the contrary, so long as we are
dealing with aesthetics, to consider only those sides
of literature in which it resembles the other, more
purely artistic, more typical arts. Putting literature
therefore aside, on account of the multiplicity of its
appeals to human interest, we shall find that, roughly
speaking, while philosophers have given to art one
of two large functions, imitation or expression and
practical craftsmen have inclined to judge of art as
if its chief function were either invention or execution,
newness of construction or dexterity of handling the
immense majority of art-loving mankind, including
the philosophers and the artists in their merely human
capacity, have accepted or rejected, cherished or
neglected, single works of art, exactly in proportion
as these works gave them the particular kind of
pleasure connected with the word beauty. The
142 TOLSTOI ON ART
meaning of this word beauty it is difficult, and,
in the present backward state of aesthetic science,
perhaps impossible, to define. It implies a relation
between certain visible or audible phenomena (and
in literature certain still more complex purely mental
phenomena) and the spectator or listener ; and the
exact nature of these visible or audible phenomena,
which we objectify in the word form, differs from art
to art, from style to style, and from individual work
to individual work, there existing practically endless
numbers of ways of being beautiful that is to say,
of producing in the human being the very specific
emotion aroused by what we call beauty. What may
be this common character of all these different so-called
beautiful visual or audible forms or patterns, is
evidently a question of psychological and, in part, of
physiological science ; and, different as are the modes
of action of different arts and different styles of art,
and deficient as is at present our analysis and obser-
vation of the modes of influence of any of them, we
may yet affirm with confidence that the progress of
science will one day explain that particular relation
between certain visible and audible forms and the
human being which is brought about by what we call
beauty, as a relation involving, whatever its particular
kind, a general momentary advantage to the vital,
nervous, mental, and bodily conditions, and accom-
panied, as all beneficent conscious phenomena are,
by the condition called pleasure.
To recapitulate : the quality called beauty, recognised
in the most various kinds and styles of art, marks the
awakening of a specific sort of pleasure, at present
TOLSTOI ON ART 143
neither analysable nor explicable, but which, like all
the other varieties of pleasure, can be instantly
identified, though not described, by any one who has
experienced it. But although it is this quality of
beauty ', this specific pleasurable emotion connected with
the word beautiful^ which practically decides the
eventual acceptance or rejection of a work of art,
yet the theories connecting art with imitation and
expression, with invention and execution, represent also
a large and important side of the question. For
history and anthropology point clearly to the fact that
art very rarely originates from a conscious desire for
beauty, but that it arises out of the practical require-
ments, material or spiritual building, weaving, pottery,
dress, war, and ritual of mankind, and out of a
superabundance of the great primary instincts of
imitation and expression, of construction, invention,
and manipulation. These instincts, which are explicable
only as immediate reactions of the human organism
upon its surroundings, have been carried by natural
selection to an intensity so considerable as often (in
the case of children, for instance) to surpass all
practical requirements, so that they have to vent
themselves in that gratuitous exercise which has
suggested to Mr. Spencer (as it had done to Schiller)
the notion that art was the result of special play instincts.
Play instincts, as such, there are probably none ; but
it is certain that all art has arisen from the activity
whether utilitarian or aimless of the tendencies to
imitate, to express, to invent, to construct, to manipu-
late, and to perform. But what differentiates art from
the mere practical or aimless exercise of these impulses
144 TOLSTOI ON ART
is the fact that, in its case, these impulses have
been controlled by that totally different and specific
instinct which demands that, useful or useless, the
forms presented to the mind through the eye and
the ear should possess the absolutely peculiar quality
of beauty. That which has caused the imitation of an
object or the expression of an emotion to be respected
after the utility thereof has vanished or the impulse to
imitate or express has died out ; that which has caused
the shape of a building, the pattern of a stuff or a
pot, the movements of a dance, the picture of an
object, to be desired for their own sake, is the peculiar
kind of pleasure which the quite unpractical, quite dis-
interested contemplation of the object or pattern or
representation or game has been able to produce by
virtue of its beauty. The instinct for beauty is not,
in all probability, one of the creative faculties of man.
It does not set people working, it does not drive them
to construct, to imitate, or to express, any more than
the moral instinct sets people wishing and acting, or
the logical instinct sets them reasoning. It is, even
more typically than the moral and logical instincts, a
categorical imperative , which imperiously decides whether
given forms are to be tolerated, cherished, or avoided.
In thus recognising that the instinct for beauty is
not a creative but a regulative impulse of mankind,
modern psychology, so far from diminishing its
importance, increases it enormously and explains it.
For the very fact that the instincts of expression and
imitation, of construction, invention, manipulation,
and performance, have in all their most practical
applications (in building, clothing, fabrics of all sorts,
TOLSTOI ON ART 145
and every kind of ritual) been so constantly interfered
with, and in their play capacity (save in children) been
so utterly captured, by an instinct so merely regulative
as the instinct for beauty, proves, to any one accustomed
to modern scientific thought, that this mysterious,
unaccountable, apparently useless pleasure arising from
certain form relations which we call beautiful must
eventually be explained and accounted for by some
deep-seated vital utility to the mind and the nervous
system of the human race. Therefore we would
answer, not to Count Tolstoi, for whom all scientific
explanations are mere lumber, but to those readers
of Tolstoi whom his arguments may have shaken, first :
that the apparent conflict in aesthetic theory represents
only the various factors of a complex problem ; and
secondly : that the constant return to the belief that
art's eventual aim is to produce beauty, and even the
very mystery which at present surrounds this indefin-
able and as yet inexplicable quality, go to prove that,
in a world different from the monotonous ascetic,
unorganic world conceived by Tolstoi, in a world of
life the most complex, overflowing and organic not
merely negative moral virtue, but physical beauty, as
much as intellectual lucidity, is required, and, by the
nature of things, will eternally be required and
produced.
But Tolstoi's plea against art is double, and we have
so far disposed, even in our own eyes, of only one
of its halves. Even if the theory were right, the
practice would remain wrong, and could not be set
right by any amount of arguing. For, however
beneficial the enjoyment of beauty, the benefit must
10
146 TOLSTOI ON ART
be confined to the cases where the beauty is actually
enjoyed ; and, however desirable a function art may
fulfil in human existence, the function is limited to the
lives into which art does actually enter. Now beauty,
Tolstoi points out, even supposing it to exist, requires,
in nine-tenths of all art, a special training before it is
so much as perceived ; and moreover, art of any kind,
appreciated or not appreciated, does not (he says)
come near the existence of the immense majority of
mankind, roughly speaking, of all the classes who
work with their hands. On the one hand, there are
galleries, exhibitions, and concerts where works or art
are displayed and performed which can give pleasure
only after elaborate initiation ; on the other hand, there
are millions of human beings who never come near a
gallery, an exhibition, or a concert room, because they
have neither the money nor the leisure to enter it.
This being the case and Tolstoi seems to us irrefutably
right in this matter so far at least as he is speaking of
actualities, and not of what is abstractly true or possible
it is mere nonsense and cant to talk of the usefulness
of art to mankind as a whole ; and the only sincere
statement is that of the cynical and immoral persons
who calmly admit that art is one of the many luxuries
of the rich and leisured minority, and is maintained for
their sole enjoyment (according to Tolstoi's economics)
by the labour of the poor and overworked majority.
In attempting to answer this second plea against art,
we must again premise that we can do so only with the
aid of those psychological and historical sciences which
Tolstoi disdains like all others, and in the light more
particularly of that same critical knowledge of art
TOLSTOI ON ART 147
which he denounces as a chief source of perversion in
these matters. Let us begin with the question of the
necessity of training before artistic beauty can be
enjoyed, and with Tolstoi's implied corollary that
beauty which is not spontaneously recognised cannot
really respond to any deep-seated or indeed genuine
demand of human nature. One of Tolstoi's chief
instances in point is that of the modern school of im-
pressionist painters. He describes, without any exag-
geration, the hopeless mental confusion of an educated
person on first being introduced to a collection of
impressionist pictures. We can all of us remember
similar remarks on dozens of similar occasions, and,
if our memory is good, and we do not happen to have
been brought up in impressionist studios from our
infancy, we can probably also remember having said or
thought the very same things ourselves : the objects
represented are in most cases not recognised, the
drawing and perspective seem utterly wrong, and the
effects of colour and light the result of something near
akin to lunacy.
Tolstoi's description is perfectly accurate, but his
deductions are unwarrantable, for what he has not seen
is that impressionist painters represent the most
advanced section of a school of painting which has
broken with all past tradition and which is avowedly
seeking to represent effects of perspective, or colour,
and of light which have never been attempted before,
and to do so in reference to subjects casually chosen
pieces of landscape, for instance which have hitherto
been disdained, and in disregard of all the established
tenets of symmetrical composition. Now the most
148 TOLSTOI ON ART
advanced art of any age, like the most advanced
thought of any age, is really not for the period which
produces it, but for the next, whether that next come
within two years or within twenty or a hundred years ;
and the art of a class, like the mode of dress and speech
of a class, takes time to descend to the classes below.
From the nature of things no novelty can arise save in
a comparatively small circle, originally in the small
circle of an artistic school, or even in the mind of one
individual artist. We cannot feel the beauty of an
artistic form which we do not really see, any more
than we can feel the cogency of an argument we do
not really follow ; and the act of perception is not any
simpler or more rapid or spontaneous than the act of
intellectual apprehension. We do not see an unfamiliar
pattern, we do not hear an unusual combination of
sounds, with the rapidity and completeness given by
habit and by expectation. The enjoyment of the
quality called beauty is the enjoyment of a certain set
of visible or audible relations, and these relations are
by no means taken in immediately. The emotion of
aesthetic pleasure can take place only when any given
kind of artistic form has been assimilated by the mind ;
and the possibility, the mode, of assimilation is handed
on by imitation from the more prepared individual
to the less prepared ; while, on the other hand, each
new form, like each new thought, is assimilated in
proportion as it resembles an already familiar one.
Every new work of art, nay, every form of which a
whole work of art consists, is different from all its
predecessors, at least in its combinations ; it is a new
individual, which we get to know at first by what it
TOLSTOI ON ART 149
has in common with previous individuals of the same
class. The new picture or poem or song, which we
see or read or hear for the first time, represents a
mental, aesthetic, emotional step made by us ; it means
an alteration, great or small, of attitude, like that
produced by a new logical proposition, even if the new
picture or poem or song be as closely connected with
a previous one as a new proposition of Euclid is with
earlier propositions. To expect a person totally un-
familiar with all similar art to comprehend, to see, let
alone to enjoy, an impressionist picture, is like expect-
ing a person, who is familiar with nothing beyond a
rule-of-three sum, to follow some new problem of the
higher mathematics.
Such facts and principles as these have never occurred
to Tolstoi. He has never conceived the human
faculties as being in a state of constant alteration and
evolution ; he does not recognise that what we find
established and apparently spontaneous in the present
has been brought about by the adjustments and the
efforts of the past ; and he mistakes for innate tenden-
cies what in reality are the result of long unconscious
or conscious training. " The majority of men," he
says, ' ' has always understood all that we consider as
the highest art : the book of Genesis, the parables of
the Gospels, and the various popular legends, stories,
and songs." No doubt, the "majority of men" has
understood them in those countries and times in which
they happen to have been familiar. But would the
opening chapters of Genesis be more comprehensible
to a person brought up entirely out of touch with
Christianity or Judaism than the Prologue in Heaven
150 TOLSTOI ON ART
of " Faust " ? Would the intricate forms and special
allusions of the north-country ballad, of the Tuscan
lyric or the Spanish song, be more intelligible to a
person totally unacquainted with anything of the kind
than " Sister Helen," or a " Sonnet from the Portu-
guese," or Verlaine's " Clair de Lune " ? What Tolstoi
mistakes for a naturally, inevitably intelligible and en-
joyable character in art is in reality an affinity, a resem-
blance, with forms of art already familiar. We are now
beginning to see in what way all artistic enjoyment can
require a degree of previous training, and yet be, to all
appearance, absolutely spontaneous. For just as a
capacity to appreciate the new grows insensibly out of
familiarity with the old, so also does a new form of art,
under normal conditions, grow out of an old form by
a series of alterations very gentle and easy to follow,
although their extremes may represent styles of art as
utterly unlike as the music of Wagner and the music
of Mozart, or may be as far apart as the pointed
architecture of the thirteenth century and the round-
arched architecture of the fifth, from which it un-
doubtedly sprang ; a process which we can realise if
we remember that although Latin is no longer intelli-
gible to an uneducated Frenchman or Italian, yet there
could never have been a moment of non-comprehen-
sion during the centuries which evolved the modern
languages from the ancient one.
But mere gradual evolution would not be sufficient
to explain the insensible training which has made the
appreciation of various artistic forms apparently spon-
taneous. The art, whatever it might be, was not only
absolutely continuous, but widely diffused. We must
TOLSTOI ON ART 151
here remember what we before pointed out, that the
desire for beauty is a regulative function, and that it
imposes its preferences upon the expressive and imitative
impulses, the activities of invention, construction, and
execution which mankind displays for practical purposes
or as a mere pastime. Hence, in times which are
normal, any artistic form is found and all art-history
is there to prove it not merely in those very con-
spicuous and developed branches which we think of
more particularly as art^ but in every form of cognate
craft. The language and the allusions employed by
even so learned and artificial a poet as Dante were the
language and allusions of the least cultivated of his
contemporaries, to the extent of making his poem the
favourite reading of artisans and peasants. The forms,
the modelling, the anatomy, the essential ways of being
of line and surface in Greek sculpture can be recognised,
to a greater or less degree, in the commonest Greek
pottery, bronze work, cheap domestic ornaments, and
so forth ; the very special forms, so difficult to imitate,
and even to grasp after much study, of what we call
Gothic, appear in the very humblest building, in every
chair, table, embroidery, or piece of iron-work of the
later Middle Ages ; while the modulations and rhythms,
and in great part the harmonies, of every past form
of music have always been common to the most humble
and to the highest categories of the art : the lower, like
the more provincial branches of art, according to the
law of imitation we have before alluded to, being always
just a little behind the work of the creative masters in
the highest branches and in the greatest centres. This
universal diffusion of a given fashion in art fashion
J52 TOLSTOI ON ART
in dress is perhaps the only modern representative of
this state of things explains how a whole population
could be, so to speak, constantly in presence of any
given style of art, and able gradually to appreciate its
variations without any apparent previous training.
The mediaeval artisan was as able to appreciate the
most far-fetched and subtle of all forms of art, the
Gothic and for the same reason as the modern
Japanese of the lower class is able to appreciate pecu-
liarities of perspective, of form, and of execution which
strike even the educated European as exotic, and which
cannot be enjoyed by him without some special
study.
This, as we have remarked, is the state of affairs in
normal times ; for we must be careful to underline this
qualification. Tolstoi, with his deficient historical
sense, and his tendency to believe in an unvarying
typical man (more or less represented by the Russian
peasant of to-day), has not recognised the prevalence
of this normal condition throughout the past, nor, of
course, the reasons through which, as Mr. Ruskin
taught some forty years ago, this normal condition has
become more and more exceptional in the present. It
is, however, easy to understand why our century, with
its quite unparalleled rapidity and complexity of change,
must differ in this respect from all others. As regards
the continuity of artistic development, there have been
and still are two notable causes of disturbance : the
opening up of foreign civilisations and the importation
of exotic kinds of art (like that of Japan), and the
archaeological revival of the art of the past, for instance,
the Greek and the Gothic. From these have resulted
TOLSTOI ON ART 153
both an impulse of imitation and an effort after novelty,
the latter due both to facility of new combinations and
to resistance against foreign or historical influence.
Now an art which, like that of Burne-Jones or of
Whistler, is half archaeological or half exotic, cannot
possibly be appreciated without some degree of famili-
arity with the Mediaeval or the Japanese art from
which it has partly sprung ; while, on the other hand,
an art like that of Manet, Monnet, and Rodin has
evidently been pushed into excessive novelty by a violent
revulsion from the officially accepted forms and methods
of the painting and sculpture of the Renaissance and
of Antiquity.
There is in the art of this century a degree of in-
dividualism, an amount of archaeological and exotic
research, an obvious desire for novelty at any price,
which renders it less organic, less natural, than the art
of past times. The result is that its appreciation is no
longer attainable by the unconscious training which is
conferred by familiarity with previous art, and demands
special initiation through critical study. Among our
contemporaries it is a matter of everyday experience
to find persons extremely appreciative of Greek or
Gothic art who yet, like Mr. Ruskin, can see absolutely
nothing in the art of modern France ; while there are
practical artists who can see absolutely nothing save
archaic quaintness in the art of Antiquity and of the
Renaissance ; to such an extent are the perception and
enjoyment of one kind of form impeded by the habit
and preoccupation of another. Such being the case
with the artistic classes themselves, how much more
must it be the case with the general public ! And from
154 TOLSTOI ON ART
this general public we are obliged in our century to
exclude completely the enormous majority of mankind
Tolstoi has not exaggerated matters in saying that
barely one man in a hundred comes nowadays within
reach of art, appreciated or unappreciated. For here
we find ourselves in presence of the other and far
greater difference which separates the aesthetic conditions
of our century from those of every previous one.
The industrial and economic changes accompanying
the development of machinery have virtually, as Mr.
Ruskin pointed out, put an end for the moment to all
that handicraft which formed the fringe of the artistic
activity of the past, and which kept the less favoured
classes in such contact with the artistic forms of their
time and country that, for instance, the pottery and
brass-work of the humbler classes of Greece, and the
wood-work and textile fabrics of the poorest citizens of
the Middle Ages, let alone every kind of domestic
architecture, afforded sufficient preparation for the
greatest art of temples and cathedrals : a daily, hourly
preparation, embodying in many cases actual mechanical
familiarity. Nowadays, on the contrary, objects of
utility, machine-made, and no longer expressive of any
preferences, are either totally without aesthetic quality,
or embody, in a perfunctory and imperfect manner, the
superficial and changing aesthetic fashions of a very
small minority. Nor is this all. The extreme rapidity
of scientific discovery and mechanical invention, the
growing desire for technical education and hygienic
advantage, the race for material comfort and the
struggles for intellectual and social equality in fact,
the whole immense movement of our times, both
TOLSTOI ON ART 155
for good and for evil have steadily tended to
make art less and less a reality even in the lives of
the leisured classes, and have resulted in virtually
effacing all vestige of it from the lives of working
men.
Art, therefore, we may concede to Tolstoi, is in our
days largely artificial, often unwholesome, always dif-
ficult of appreciation, and, above all, a luxury. Violent
and even fanatical as are Tolstoi's words on this
subject, they hardly exaggerate the present wrongness
of things.
But we hope to have suggested in the course of these
criticisms that the present condition of art does not
justify Tolstoi's proposal that in the future art should
be reduced to being a mere adjunct of ethical education,
or, failing that, should be banished from the world as
futile or degrading. In pointing out, as we have done,
the imperious nature of that desire for beauty which
normally regulates all the practical constructive energies
of mankind, and subdues to its purposes all human
impulses to imitation and expression, imposing a how
entirely separate and sui generis; and in clearing up
that confusion among conflicting aesthetic theories of
which Tolstoi has taken such advantage, we have
brought home, we hope, to the reader the presumption
that an instinct so special and so powerful must play
some very important part in the bodily and mental
harmony of man. Further, while indicating the natural
mechanism by which, under normal circumstances, the
appreciation and enjoyment of artistic forms have kept
pace with their changes, and familiarity with the various
kinds of beauty in the humblest and commonest objects
156 TOLSTOI ON ART
of utility has rendered spontaneous the perception of
the same kinds of beauty in their higher, more complex,
and less utilitarian developments, we have shown that
this special and imperious aesthetic craving has created
its own natural and universal modes of satisfaction.
We have seen that art, considered as the production of
beautiful objects or arrangements, has been sponta-
neously produced, spontaneously enjoyed, and univer-
sally diffused, in one or other of its categories, through-
out the whole of the past ; and, having taken notice of
the disturbing influences which have interrupted this
normal condition of things in the present, we have
shown reason to expect a return thereunto in the future.
The wrong condition of things with regard to art is the
result of other wrong conditions, intellectual, social,
and economic, inevitable in a period of excessive, com-
plex, and, so to speak, compound, change ; and as these
wrong conditions cannot fail to right themselves, the
adjustment of the question of art will follow as the
result of other adjustments. In what precise manner
this may take place it would be presumptuous to fore-
cast ; but this much may be affirmed, that the ascetic
subordination of art to ethical teaching will play no
part in it. Imperfect, and even in some ways intolerable
to our moral sense, as is the present condition of art,
as Tolstoi has victoriously demonstrated, let those
among us whom it offends reflect that even under such
evident wrong conditions it is not mere selfishness to
preserve the art of the past and foster the art of
the present for the benefit of a more just and whole-
some, a more developed and more traditionally normal,
future. Moreover art, like science and like practical
TOLSTOI ON ART 157
well-being, will in the long run take care oi itself;
because, despite Tolstoi's statement to the contrary,
art, like morality itself, is necessary to mankind's full
and harmonious life.
NIETZSCHE AND THE "WILL TO
POWER "
NIETZSCHE AND THE "WILL TO POWER"
I
THE fact that Friedrich Nietzsche, when released
from life at only fifty-six, had already survived
his reasonable soul by nearly eleven years, disposes
of his philosophy with miraculous satisfactoriness for
some of his opponents. But it is liable to make
those feel almost abashed who do not relish such cheap
irony on the part of Fate.
I wish to make it plain, therefore, that, though
the final catastrophe of this great mind appears to
me to have had constitutional causes and preliminary
symptoms which affected the doomed man's manner
of being and therefore of thinking, yet it is my
conviction that the psychological interest and moral
importance of what, following his own example, I
venture to designate as " the Case of Nietzsche "
would have been quite as real, though less vulgarly
obvious, had it never been rounded off by so frightful
a logico-dramatic coincidence. If, therefore, I proceed
to deal with Nietzsche's philosophy as the expression
of spiritual and bodily unhealthiness, let it be under-
stood that I am referring only to the kind of madness
ii
161
162 NIETZSCHE AND
which Nietzsche's Wise Man prayed for "Give
me, ye Powers, madness, that I may believe in
myself! " and not at all to the miserable obliter-
ation of mind with which an atrocious and stupid
destiny was preparing to answer that prayer. For
it is with this " madness that he might believe
in himself" that I intend to deal in the following
pages.
The soundest and, therefore, the most living and
fertile part of a philosopher's work is, perhaps, that
which makes him not unlike, but like, his fellows ;
nay, the possibility of being assimilated by the future is,
in many cases, in direct proportion to the fact of
having been assimilated from the past. But my
object, in the present study, has not been the extract-
ing of what I consider the most valuable productions
of Nietzsche's extraordinary mind ; all the various
" selections, philosophies and quintessences " of Nietz-
sche are amply sufficient in their unintentional mis-
representation of him as a typically sane, sound and
socially normal thinker. My object has been, on the
contrary, to collect into a synthetic group (the synthesis
representing Nietzsche's individual temperament) those
peculiarities which differentiate him from nearly all
other equally great thinkers ; peculiarities which
bring him into conflict, not merely, as he gloried in
feeling, with the mental habits of hypocrites, Philis-
tines and decadents, but with the modes of thinking
and feeling indispensable for the continuance of the
human race, and therefore deeply ingrained in the
human race's composition. I desire, in short, to see
what was at the bottom of Nietzsche's characteristic
THE "WILL TO POWER" 163
views of life, in order to judge whether life is likely
to cultivate or to weed out this type of philosophy
and this type of philosopher.
II
" There is no Will to Existence," says Zarathustra ;
*' for what does not yet exist, cannot will ; and, as
to that which does exist, how could it possibly will to
exist ? "
Besides a combination of a truism (" that which
does not exist, cannot will ") with an entirely unproven
assumption (" that which does exist cannot will to
exist "), we have here a confusion between an abstract
metaphorical statement and an individual concrete
fact. Philosophically speaking, no one has ever
attributed to the individual human being dominant,
unfailing desire for continued existence, so that its
denial cannot be the core of Zarathustra's supreme
discovery ; and we must look for that in the denial
of that metaphorical Will under which the genius
of Schopenhauer adumbrated the great generalisations
of modern^Jbiology. The necessity of growing, re-) *"**WLj*t*
producing, varying, adapting, of surviving at any
price, this, and this only, can be called the Will
to Existence. But this is an abstraction, an allegory,
though a perfectly fitting one, and the Will to Exis- ^^fjj
tence can be postulated, and has been postulated, only
of that abstract and allegorical entity, the Species.
For this Will to Existence Nietzsche, in probably
conscious contradiction to his discarded master, Schopen-
-.
164 NIETZSCHE AND
hauer, tries therefore to substitute a Will to Power ;
and the form of speech renders such a substitution
superficially possible ; Will is will, and you need
only write "Power" after effacing "Existence."
But this operation is a delusion or a piece of trickery,
an attempt at exchanging things which do not belong
to the same category. Looking at that abstraction
called " the Species," and expressing our generalisa-
tions about it under the metaphorical form of Will,
we are struck immediately by the utter indifference
manifested by the Species to any such relation as is
implied by the word " Power " ; and by the meta-
phorical readiness which the Species displays, on the
contrary, for proceedings absolutely negatived by
the word " Power " : a readiness to alter, to dwindle,
to lie low, to degenerate, to submit to any tyranny,
privation or parasitic condition, or even to self-mutila-
tion rather than allow itself to die. Indeed, the
survival through self-effacement, as distinguished from
self-assertion (and power implies self-assertion), is so
frequent an occurrence in the life of Species, that I
cannot read Nietzsche's description of the methods
towards survival attributed by him to primitive
Christian communities, without thinking of some
naturalist's account of a sort of animal which, after
living in decent independence on land or in water,
has got itself imprisoned, by the ruthless Will to
Existence, in the diseased body of some more powerful
kind of creature. So that, if Zarathustra meant to
replace Schopenhauer's great Will, the Will to Exis-
tence, tingling (as we seem to feel it) throughout the
universe, by his more " vornehm " Will to Power, he
THE "WILL TO POWER" 165
must take back his remark ; for Nature cares nothing
for his new scale of values.
Nor is this all. The Will to Power may and does
exist as an individual phenomenon. But (and here we
begin our real examination of Nietzsche's views in
reference to that very " Life," which he thought he so
aristocratically accepted), whatever exists in the indi-
vidual is, speaking metaphorically, yet very correctly,
subject to the Will of the Species ; and the Will of
the Species is, as we have seen, the mere Will to
.Existence. Like any other peculiarity, the Will to ;
Power develops so long as it conduces to survival,
and atrophies to the extent to which it becomes a
danger. The individual who possesses it either
flourishes and hands it on to his descendants and
his imitators, or comes to grief and carries the
quality which has ruined him into helplessness or
annihilation.
Thus the Will to Existence, of which, as of all
other divinities, the exclusive pride of Nietzsche would
not brook the reality, shows itself to be a god of
most ruthless practicality ; and every other kind of
volition, every instinct, habit or tendency of living
creatures, all the demiurgi, Olympian or subterranean,
radiantly conscious or obscurely and blindly teeming,
can hold their sway only at its inexorable behest.
Translated into prosaic literalness, the question may
therefore be stated as follows : Does the predominance
of self-consciousness and the assertion of the ego,
which, taken together, constitute Nietzsche's Will
to Power, offer such advantages to the human race
as to have fostered this Will to Power to an exorbitant
i66 NIETZSCHE AND
degree in the past, or as to foster it, so far as we can
foresee, to still completer supremacy in the future ?
We may get an approximate answer to this question
in the course of examining some of the mental and
emotional tendencies and habits which Nietzsche con-
demns in mankind, as the unworthy rivals to the
Will to Power, and perhaps arrive at some conclusion
by subsequently glancing also at the position which
Nietzsche takes up towards life as a whole, that is to
say, towards that Will to Existence of which he so
rudely denies the existence.
Til
First and foremost among the opponents to the
Will to Power is what we may roughly sum up as
Duty. Conspicuous among the prophecies of Zara-
thustra are those concerning the great Lion from
out of the desert, who fights and destroys the great
Dragon whose wings are inscribed with command-
ments. " Thou Shalt " is the name of the great
Dragon, but the spirit of the Lion says, " I Will."
While busy demolishing the Free Will of Christian
and of Kantian ethics, Nietzsche had himself made
a superb demonstration of the fundamental identity of
that Lion "I Will " and that Dragon "Thou Shalt" ;
or, rather, he had shown that neither the Lion nor the
Dragon had any kind of real existence. But, taken
upon the plane of the illusion inevitable in our feeling,
such a seeming division and opposition between the
inner and the outer Will can and must be recognised ;
THE "WILL TO POWER" 167
and Nietzsche could legitimately split up the Chimaera,
Free Will, into the solitary, rebellious Lion and the
.obsequious, philistine Dragon. But, if we are to
discuss not the metaphysics of Free Will, but the
phenomenon of apparent alternative as manifest in
experience, the question of Thou Shalt and / Will takes
a different aspect.
There is more than a rough and ready practicality
("pour encourager les autres" like Voltaire's court
martial on Admiral Byng) in the legal limitation of
responsibility to such individuals as are neither idiots
nor maniacs. For, as the appearance of volition exists
only in the face of two conceivable modes of action,
which imply consciousness, there can be no will, no
choice, in cases where the instincts have the blind,
automatic action of reflexes. There is, therefore, a
greater appearance of volition in obeying a law and
conforming to a standard than in acting under
the undivided pressure of a habit or an appetite.
Nietzsche was thoroughly aware of all this, and had,
moreover, the proud and combative and self-centred
man's excessive and un philosophical scorn for any-
thing like habits, blind instincts and reflexes. He
therefore formulated (I was going to write : " he was
therefore obliged to formulate," but these are words
he never would have admitted with reference to
himself) something opposed to obscure instinctive
preferences, but opposed also to all categorical im-
peratives : an individual standard and law (including
pretended subversion of all previous standards and
laws), a private categorical imperative so rigid that
slavery, degradation, Dantesque dung-ponds of igno-
i68 NIETZSCHE AND
miny, were the ineluctable punishment of their non-
recognition ; let alone, of course, a fine preliminary
bout of Zarathustrian philosophising on them " with the
hammer."
Thus Nietzsche was never able to carry his indivi-
dualism (as his predecessor Stirner had done) to its
logical conclusion of anarchy inside as well as outside
the individual. He committed the inconsequence (to
which we owe some of his most beautiful and perhaps
immortal sentences) of preaching the most rigorous
hierarchy, and hierarchic commanding and obeying,
within the soul of the lawbreaker himself. I call this
an inconsequence, and hope to demonstrate that it
was one ; fruitful, moreover, like many of the inconse-
quences of one-sided thinkers. Nietzsche, of course,
asserted that this regime of categorical imperatives was
the outcome, solely, of the individual himself ; and
that the Zarathustrian person (to say nothing of the
eventually coming " Uber-Mensch ") went through
this noviciate of purifications, professed this rule of
vigils and chastenings (so singular in a theoretic
opponent of asceticism), for the simple gratification
of his own fine gentleman's taste. But, if we look
at facts, this superlative Zarathustrian " good form "
(for as such this moral Beau Brummel gives it us) is,
like every other kind of good form, a product for
which no isolated individuality could suffice, and for
which no pressure of merely individual preference
could originally account. It is essentially an historical,
sociological product. Intent upon his own moral
posturings and gestures (in which the old Stoical
mantle, and even sundry Christian academic properties,
THE "WILL TO POWER" 169
were unconsciously made use of), Nietzsche found it
convenient to take for granted the ready-made Zara-
thustrian individual, attitudes, gestures, good taste
and all ; and therefore averted his glance from the
genesis and evolution thereof. For, in that genesis
and evolution of Zarathustra's " good taste," the
principal part had been played throughout the centu-
ries by that which Nietzsche most furiously disliked
(reserving it to explain only the Socratic, Christian,
Kantian, or other unclean spirits) namely, the race
at large, the instincts, claims and habits of the majority
of human beings so utterly offensive to Nietzsche's
sense of smell and somewhat queasy stomach. And,
in a way, Nietzsche actually placed himself in the
impossibility of denying such villainous origin,
which a thoroughpaced anarchic thinker like Stirner
would have made short work of, together with
formulas, standards, and good taste of any kind.
Nietzsche, as was inevitable in one who frankly
objected to gods of all sorts because, " if there were
gods, how could he have endured not being one of
them," Nietzsche, filling up his own horizon, had
pretty well sent Nature (and the Will to Existence)
to the Coventry of the Lucretian gods, and very
rarely referred to her or it. But the possession of
the finest taste unfortunately requires, not merely
recognition, but a standard ; and thus the isolated
superfine individual was betrayed into calling on
Nature's testimony to the correctness of his moral
attitude and manner. " All the audacity, the fineness
and keenness that have ever existed," he writes, " all
the masterly certainty and dancelike spirit, have
170
NIETZSCHE AND
developed themselves, thanks to the tyranny of such
self-imposed law (Willkur-Gesetze\ and it is by no
means improbable that just this, and not a system of
Iaissez-a/ler y is nature and natural" Nietzsche did
not know how large a door he was opening in this
second part of the sentence : a door, a gate, through
which what should sweep in but that deposed, rejected,
utterly banished Will to Existence ? For, if the
individual has not grown as a mere random jumble
of uncoordinated instincts, this is explained by his not
existing as an isolated individual, companionless, in
vacuo. Man is, more or less, a composite and orderly
whole because he is an integral part of a whole which
can be only composite and orderly. Naturalness,
which Nietzsche invoked as a final condemnation of
spiritual anarchy, is merely a word for suitability
to the ways of other things, adaptation to that great
abstract whole which allows insubordinate doings
A
neither in single individuals nor in single instincts.
The law-to-himself of the finer human being is the
expression of a more perfect and well-nigh automatic
adaptation to the hierarchy outside. Nay, far below
the sphere of such ethical good form, we find concentric
circles of inner coordination, without which we could
not move, stand, digest or grow, let alone perceive,
feel, think or will. But if there did not exist, if there
had not existed for aeons, creatures more or less
similar around us, if the universe had cared to produce
only isolated higher individuals, or Super-Men, would
there have been a need for such a complex form of
life ; a need for reactions, so intricate and so sub-
ordinate to one another ; a need for perception, will
THE "WILL TO POWER" 171
or thought ; an opening, so to speak, for such super-
fine moral manners ?
IV
After the great Dragon, Duty, let us pass on to the
consideration of what Nietzsche regards as the vilest
of all small moral worms : Humility. The word
" worm " is appropriate ; for Nietzsche derives its
origin from the practical wisdom of rolling up and
shamming death in order to avoid a second crushing.
Granted, as is very possible, that such is its real
genealogy, there comes the question, why Nature (for
even Nietzsche has unwillingly to admit that there is
Nature) should have preserved this particular ditch-\Ucvc-
begotten little virtue ? The answer is, simply, that Itctt
o x / '
Humility happens to afford an excellent corrective for
a particular optical illusion to which the human being,
Mensch or Uber-Mensch, is condemned (with danger
to his comfort and even his existence), by a trifling
peculiarity of his constitution. I am alluding, of course,
to the fact that we, all of us, happen to be enclosed
in our own skin, and are therefore aware of our own
existence in a more direct, intimate and forcible manner
than of the existence of others. Those others, mean-
while, similarly enclosed, are afflicted by the selfsame
unevenness of perception : the inside, namely, oneself,
is thoroughly visible, audible, intelligible and im-
perative ; the outside, or not-oneself, becomes an
accessory or background, and tends perpetually to .
vanish altogether. The virtue or vice of Humility
serves to reverse, in part, this natural, but by no means
UA/MT
172
NIETZSCHE AND
Vj{,-
objectively correct, perspective ; and thereby tends to
diminish the wear and tear, nay, the sometimes fatal
accidents, which it must otherwise occasion. The fact
of being what house-agents call " self-containing,"
makes us, each and all, the most important thing we
can conceive. Humility whispers that, on the contrary,
we are very probably by far the most unimportant
thing in all the universe, and thereby halves our natural
pretensions to something nearer our objective bulk
and power. In this manner it enables us to find room
to stand in, to thread our way among those too-too
solid ghosts, our fellow men, to exchange place, to
move, to expand even in short, to live. This is the
service, rendered by Humility, and this is why
iTumility has been fostered by the racial Will to Ex-
istence, by the great demiurgus, Life, who shuts his eyes
to baseness of origin and primaeval worm- wriggling ;
Life, well aware that, if the haughty genealogist went
far enough in his researches, he would find wrigglings
of some kind, and animals less aristocratic than
worms, in the first chapter of the most distinguished
family histories.
The reason why Life can be less squeamish than
Nietzsche, and yet, somehow, maintain a certain
aesthetic dignity and have as grand an air as any
Zarathustra brandishing his Will to Power, is that
Life possesses the secret of great transmutations,
transfigurations, of which Nietzsche gradually lost the
very conception. After Humility, Compassion is, in
his eyes, the vilest and most vicious of Christian
virtues. Sickness, weakness, says Nietzsche, requires
only one thing to be cleared away. That depends,
THE "WILL TO POWER" 173
common sense has answered for centuries, in fact for'
seons, how sick the sick, how weak the weak. It isi
the strength of the weak man, the healthiness of the
organs still free from disease, to which Compassion
addresses itself, and which, with help and time, effects
survival and recovery. Nay, what we look upon as
symptoms of disease, or as faintings and failings of
weakness, are frequently, in the moral order as well
as the bodily, adaptations to a difficult crisis, diminished
claims, nay, even inverted instincts, fostered by the great
Will to Existence. Take the " Imitation of Christ,"
that almost complete, perhaps because almost posthu-
mous, manifesto of the millenarian and ascetic and
self-humiliating sides of Christianity. To us, particu-
larly to us when in health and prosperity, it may have
a taste which is mawkish, a taste of physic, if not of
poison ; but for centuries it was, and in individual
cases (till wisdom and gentleness invent a better
compound) it still remains a pain-killer, a sleeping
draught which has saved from death or from madness.
Christianity as defined by Nietzsche that is to say,
Christianity in its most questionable and perishable
aspect constituted, after all, only one of the many
modus vivendi which the race made for itself at various
stages of its difficult existence : regimens of brutality
and narrow-mindedness or of self-suppression and
mystic stultification, Spartan, early Aryan, early
Hebraic, Buddhist, Christian all representing a
mutilation or a narcotising of some one of the soul's
possibilities ; each of them furnishing, in its turn,
a balance of desirable effects over effects undesirable or
actually pernicious. Looked at dispassionately, there
'74
NIETZSCHE AND
is no grosser falsehood in the notion that the individual
ego is necessarily sinful, than in the notion that the
individual tribe or cast or race is necessarily impeccable ;
nor is it more lop-sided to give unto others what would
be best employed by oneself, than to take away from
others what might best be employed by them. Indeed,
one may ask oneself whether Tolstoi, let us say, is really
less of a human being, if he is really more warped and
maimed, more of a cripple and a monster than well,
than Nietzsche.
Let us leave the ground of human duty and virtue,
and pass on, " Beyond Good and Evil," to that which
Nietzsche considered the only real one : the ground
of human greatness. What did Nietzsche make of
the Human Work ? The work, which is the test and
the reason of Carlyle's Hero and of Kenan's Prospero-
Sage, had no intrinsic interest in Nietzsche's eyes, no
place in his philosophy. Its importance for him was
merely as an expression of what he very erroneously
took it to be, the outcome of an individual tempera-
ment, the manifestation of a Will to Power. Now,
Nietzsche did not really want any Will to Power
except his own, and he had a positively morbid dislike
to coming in contact with other people's temperament.
It is understating the case to say that nineteen out of
every twenty references he makes to the work of other
men are expressions of aversion, contempt or disgust :
and it is no mere coincidence that his ideal, Zara-
thustra, in all we are told about his life, preaches,
4
THE "WILL TO POWER" 175
reviles, laughs, dances, nay, even lets himself once
or twice be lured into the deadly sin of pity, but on no
single occasion extracts pleasure or profit from any
other human being or any human being's work. The
assimilation of other men's greatness, the enriching
oneself by appreciation, is never mentioned as part
of the processes of growth of the great man, of the
Super-Man. His relations, when not of scorn and
destruction, are entirely confined to his own solitary
person ; he develops merely by wrestling with himself
and by expressing himself ; he remains (even if multi-
plied to a possible race of Super-Men) not merely j
isolated and solitary, but virtually alone in the universe ; ; ^*cc IJL+*
a colossal Michelangelesque figure, with immense
sinews and rather academic draperies, filling up a
narrow background entirely devoid of vegetation,
houses, or any incident except two or three symbolical
animals ; he stands or, as Nietzsche represents him, he
dances, in a dignified manner though a dreary one ;
and, when he is not inveighing against the sickening
peculiarities of the human race he has turned his
back upon, he is engaged in the one act for which
he specially exists. The Super-Man says " ' Yes ' to
life." But, before inquiring into the precise nature
of this " 'Yes ' to life," let us forestall all possibility
of its being mistaken for any kind of philosophic or
poetical act of contemplation of life's loveliness or
mystery. The more so that we shall incidentally
gain some further, and some terribly significant,
insight into the temperament with which Nietzsche
himself had to face life. Here is his " genesis "
of the Vita Contem'plativa :
1 76 NIETZSCHE AND
" In primitive times, the individual, conscious of
his own strength, is busy translating his feelings and
thoughts (Vorstellungen) into acts, as in hunting,
robbing, aggression, ill-usage and murder, without
counting such fainter imitations of such proceedings as
he finds tolerated within his own community." (Here
I must open a parenthesis to remark upon the utter
overlooking by Nietzsche of an activity which must
necessarily have been enormously developed in primitive
times, the activity of invention and manual dexterity.)
" But if his vigour diminish," proceeds Nietzsche in
his account of the primaeval man, " if he feel tired
or sick or depressed or glutted, and therefore momen-
n, tarily delivered of desire, then he becomes a compara-
' tively better, that is to say, more harmless, creature.
It is in this condition that he becomes a thinker and a
reader of the future. But his thoughts, all the products
of his mind, must necessarily reflect his momentary
condition, that is to say, the beginning of cowardice
and fatigue, the diminished importance in his feelings
of activity and enjoyment." Let us examine this
statement. Nietzsche identifies, quite unwarrantably,
the normal satisfaction of appetite with queasy and
languid indigestion : according to him, the Berserker
at rest must be the sick Berserker. Nietzsche has no
recognition of the obvious fact that, in the healthy
creature, the satisfaction of a want does not in the
least mean the exhaustion of an energy (he sophistically
or perhaps merely characteristically, autobiographically,
identifies desire for objects with desire for action), and
that, shelter, food, the first necessaries once obtained,
this energy will be at liberty, will go into other things,
THE "WILL TO POWER' 177
useful inventions, mechanical work, and, those having
given their result, into the superfluous pleasantness of
play, art and thought. Nietzsche is even guilty of
self-contradiction. He certainly seems to consider
activity as due to a desire for asserting power ; yet he
supposes activity to flag with the satisfaction of definite
material wants. However this be, he entirely ignores the
fact of the transmission to another employment of what-
ever energy is liberated by the cessation of a want, a
fact which is at the root of human history, and explains
all the successive complexities of human activity, bodily
and mental. But having established the origin of the
Vita Confemplativa, of thought, imagination, all the
higher powers, in the slackness and nausea of the
savage weary of violence and sick with surfeit, " Pudenda
origo ! " he has the audacity to exclaim at his own
libellous account ! Having done this, he continues
his attack on the life of the spirit by asserting that
men of genius poison normal life by their demand
for exceptional moments. " In the same manner," he
says, "as we see savages exterminating themselves
by the use of alcohol, so mankind as a whole and in
its more important qualities (im ganzen und grosser?) has
been slowly but thoroughly corrupted by the spiritual
alcoholics of intoxicating feelings, and by the craving
therefor. Who knows ? Perhaps mankind will even
be exterminated thereby."
Thought, sympathetic perception, inventive calcu-
lation, imaginative and aesthetic joy, all that spiritual
activity which enriches life, enabling it to bring forth
more, demanding less weariness and waste, substituting
enjoyment which can be shared for enjoyment which
12
178 NIETZSCHE AND
must be fought for all this an alcoholic unfitting
mankind to live ! Alas, alas ! How deep must be
the disease which thus converts his fellow-creature's
best food into mere poison for this wretched Nietzsche's
nerves ! " Pudenda origo ! " one may, indeed, exclaim,
not of the spiritual life, but of this man's view of it.
We can now understand what Nietzsche's " saying
* Yes ' to life " implies, and how it comes to be the
culmination of a creed whose basis, as Nietzsche has
told us, is " a certain pleasure in saying ' No.' '
VI
According to Nietzsche's belief, under the rubric
of the " Eternal Return," every item and every
concatenation of items of the universe's existence is
bound to repeat itself in cycles of absolutely precise
similarity. By this doctrine, therefore, Nietzsche is
enabled (however unconsciously) to withdraw the one
ideal and the one consolation which he had apparently
conceded to the weakness of all philosophers : the
Super-Man and his " Yes " will indeed come, have
indeed come, an infinity of times and already ; but the
Super-Man and his " Yes " also pass, have passed,
must pass, and be succeeded by a Da Capo, eternal
like his comings and goings, of everything that is not
Super-Man and not " 'Yes' to life." This cosmic fact,
as Nietzsche affects to consider it, implies necessarily
a return of all those things which the Super-Man
appeared to have cleared away ; indeed, the eight days'
illness which the discovery of the Eternal Return cost
THE "WILL TO POWER" 179
Zarathustra is very clearly referred to that almost Super-
Man's recognition of the return infinitely repeated
of the meanness of spirit, the sympathy and desire for
sympathy, the pity and humility, all the slave's-morality
of that plebeian civilisation which offended the
aristocratic Nietzsche by its stuffiness and evil smell.
And it is this next to intolerable fact, it is this revolting
habit on the part of " Life," to which, above all else,
the famous " Yes " of the Super-Man is to be addressed
with singing and dancing. The " ' Yes ' to life,"
therefore, implies, quite consonantly with all we know
of Nietzsche's tendencies, a " No " not merely to all
human hope and consolation, but a violent " No " to
the assenting Super-Man's preferences and wishes. In
fact, by an unexpected turn, we find that the " tendency
to say 'No,'" the '" deliberate ruthlessness " which
Nietzsche had attributed to the original thinker, has
presented us, at the hands of the denouncer of all
asceticism and pessimism, with but a new variety of
the doctrine of renunciation.
" Not merely," says Nietzsche, " to endure the
inevitable, still less to hide it from ourselves . . . but*
to love it." The thought has never, perhaps, been put
in a more striking form ; but the thought is old, and *
it has seen an enormous amount of service, because it
has been on occasions, a very consoling one. It runs
through all Stoical literature, descending from the
strained but magnificent reasonableness of Epictetus
and Aurelius down to a denial of evil, like that of
American Faith-Healers ; it takes another form, but
remains essentially the same, in the Christian notion of
Providence and Resignation, in all the paraphrases of
i8o
NIETZSCHE AND
Dante's " In la sua voluntade e nostra 'pace ; " it re-
appears as Goethe's " Entbehren sollst du" and has even
quite recently been dished up, a judicious mixture of
Pagan and Christian, by that exquisite concocter of not
very fresh moral and poetic dainties, M. Maeterlinck.
And the ubiquitousness, the tenacity, of this doctrine
is surely explicable by its belonging, most probably,
to a category for which Ibsen has coined a name, to its
being, although in the highest and most philosophical
sense, a " vital lie " ; one of those human inventions
for making life's occasional difficulties seem easier :
a drug, a tonic, a stimulant or a sedative ; not by any
means a poison, but very far from being wholesome
daily bread. Every form of the doctrine of renuncia-
tion, of saying " Yes " to that which naturally provokes
a " No," has undoubtedly done great service, and still
must do, to mankind ; making the human being, if
not more fruitful, at all events (upon the whole) less
weedy, less parasitic and, in so far, less wasteful of
his neighbour's time and his neighbour's strength.
But it seems to have the drawback of every lie,
even of vital lies, the drawback, crudely, of not cor-
responding with facts. The facts are that combina-
tions do occur which are dangerous to human life and
power, and that pain and the revolt against pain have
evolved themselves because they diminish the frequency
of such evil combinations.
Sensitiveness to pain and abhorrence thereof are
necessary ; and, if they require occasional overcoming,
it is merely to guard against some greater or more
universal evil. It is right, therefore, despite Nietzsche,
that there should be pity for others ; and right, even
THE "WILL TO POWER" 181
more, despite the Stoics, that there should be pity for
ourselves. In the real " ' Yes ' to life " (not Zara-
thustra's sham one) there must even be implied a "No,"
instinctive, passionate, even more than reasoned, against
such of life's items as are hostile to its completeness
and duration.
By all means, therefore, let us play a game of skill
and patience with Destiny ;- turn Fate's moves into
gains when we can, and learn from our losses to play
better in the future. But let us guard against the
temptation, subtle and strong to our inertness and to
our vanity, of thinking, or pretending to think, that we
always gain. Making the best of things is intelligent
and dignified, it is, above all, practical ; but beyond
this begins the uncouth folly of depreciating advan-
tages which we must forego or denying reverses which
we have to sustain. To say systematically " Yes " to
the evils of life would not only break the fruitful
continuity of similarity and sympathy, but mar the
individual's energy, and jumble the individual's
instincts. It would be a poor beginning for a Super-
Man to start with sensibilities so complacent, or
illusions so complete, that other men's poison should
become his natural meat ; and it would condemn him,
in the long run, to receive of the life he thus stupidly
accepted only the poisonous refuse. 'Tis a poor result
of moralising to affirm that black is white, loss no loss,
suffering no suffering ; one feels it in all Stoicism from
Epictetus down to Maeterlinck, and in all religious
mysticism which insists on the goodness of a humanly
good God. And if, following Nietzsche's example,
we lay ruthlessly analytic hands upon the latest expres-
182 NIETZSCHE AND
sion of this venerable and indisputable piece of con-
ventional morality, we shall find in the Zarathustrian
precept, of " not merely enduring, but loving the
inevitable," something worse than the mere weakness
and insincerity which are at the bottom of all the other
embodiments of this particular " vital lie." For, as
the really difficult attitude towards life would be the
simple, straightforward one of seeing it lucidly and
feeling normally towards it, of hating its evil in pro-
portion as we cherish its good, of continuing in our
consciousness the great work of selection with a
resolute "No" as well as a resolute "Yes"; as this
would evidently be the attitude requiring perhaps
almost superhuman strength and displaying almost
superhuman dignity, there comes to be an element
of positive vulgarity in the swagger of Zarathustra,
shouting his " Yes " to the eternally recurring cycle
of the universe's intolerable evils. Nay, worse than
this ; is there not in these Zarathustrian antics of
" laughter and dancing " in the face of the most
desolating of all nightmare conceptions of the universe,
and in this ugly misapplication of the high and happy
word " love " to the object of hatred, is there not
in all this famous "Yes," a virtual "No" to every-
thing natural, sane in spirit, nay, healthy in body ?
VII
Can this be the great gift for which Nietzsche is
evermore preparing us ? Is it in favour of this that
we are told to destroy all long-established systems and
THE "WILL TO POWER
183
valuations? for this that we are to purify the world
and our souls by ruthlessness, by " deliberate cruelty "
towards others and ourselves ? for this that the hills
are to be levelled and the valleys raised up by methods
not of engineering but of earthquake ? Not in reality.
For, more than in any other philosopher, we. become
aware that there is in Nietzsche's mind something
round which his system has grown, but which is far
more essential and vital to him than his system : some-
thing continually alluded to, constantly immanent,
round which he perpetually hovers, into which he
frequently plunges, on whose bank he erects meta-
physical edifices, lets off fireworks of epigrams, sets
holocausts ablaze and sings magnificent dithyrambs ;
but which remains undefined, a vague //. Such an
ineffable central mystery exists in the thought of many
philosophers, and perhaps of all mystics (for Nietzsche
is a mystic) ; a whirlpool explaining everything, but
never itself explained ; called, as the case may be,
" Higher Law," " Truth," " Good," sometimes merely
" Nature," and, in the remoter Past, most frequently
called by the name of " God." It is one of Nietzsche's
finest and profoundest achievements that he has, once
or twice, called this transcending // by a new, surpris-
ing and, methinks, a correct name, " My Taste."
In Nietzsche's case, indeed, more perhaps than in
that of any other philosopher, the living nucleus of all
his teaching is not a thought, but an emotional con-
dition, organic and permanent. Under all the argu-
ments which have grown out of it, under all the facts
and theories attracted to it like iron filings to a magnet,
out of the refuse of old and the mess of new doctrines,
184 NIETZSCHE AND
there is, if we look carefully enough, a chronic irrita-
tion and throbbing : " I dislike," " I hate," " I am
made uncomfortable," " I am incompatible," " I want
.to get rid," "I want to destroy," "I want to be alone,"
" I want room for my soreness and swelling." The
hypertrophied, hypersensitive ego, which cannot endure
the contact of life, the presence of others and other
things ; the sick ego, in its feverish shiftings and
feverish all-overishness, capable of convulsive efforts
passing the powers of health, incapable at the same
time of the most normal and every-day endurance ;
such is, I think, the living core of Nietzsche's doctrines.
And the various transcending messages he feels that he
must bring, the great efforts of destruction and re-
construction he must accomplish, everything in short
which he feels to be superhuman in himself, are merely
the delusive birth-throes, they are the massive, yet
pervading pain of a soul which distorts and magnifies
all things to the measure of its discomfort. We have
seen how his " Will to Power," remaining consciously
such, fails to metamorphose itself into those desires for
the not-ego, into that striving after the external-to-
oneself, into that thinking and feeling of the outside
world, which is the process of exteriorisation of the
subject into the object, normal and necessary in every
healthy soul. We have seen similarly how, despite his
extraordinary genius, the vastness of the universe and
its complexity and vigour of life entirely escaped
Nietzsche, until the world shrank to being little more
for him than an inert, almost counterfeit, stage filled
up by his own imaginary size and strength ; the co-
operation of every kind of existence, the give and take
THE "WILL TO POWER" 185
of past and present, the ceaseless act of assimilation
and reproduction, and their culmination in the
immortally living human work, all this accessory,
organic, endless and endless complex activity becoming
replaced in his mind by the puny deed of volition of a
mere individual Super-Man. Nay, we have seen how
he gravely asserted that this microscopic human detail
could actually accept with a pompous " Yes " the
inevitable course of life universal, of which he, his
thought and volition, are but as the minutest bubble
of froth ; and we have seen also how this supposed
" ' Yes ' to life " is in reality, and more than in any of
the old ascetic doctrines, a " No " to the most strongly
organised preferences and repulsions of the normal
soul.
For Nietzsche, through the purely intellectual and
often inherited parts of whose work we can trace the
thread of that autobiographical philosophy he so
greatly prized, gave with unerring truth the formula
of his temperament. " A pleasure in saying * No,' a
certain deliberate ruthlessness." The " No," a " No "
of his whole unhappy organism, exists not merely in
this element of destructiveness ; but even more subtly
and characteristically in that sense of almost bodily
disgust (Eke I) which the contact of his fellow-men, of
their thoughts and feelings, arouses in him, with
significant metaphors of " lack of air " and " filthy
smell." Even more than that titillation of tearing and
breaking perpetually in Nietzsche's fingers, there is
the unmistakable evidence of disease in this constant
spiritual nausea in Nietzsche's mouth. The two
together mean that this man, so splendidly endowed
i86
NIETZSCHE AND
; in intellect, was so unhappily constituted as to receive
mainly painful impressions from the totality of his
surroundings. I think I am justified in saying
' " mainly painful impressions," despite the occasional
praise which Nietzsche bestows upon classic literature,
remote Alpine fastnesses, southern clearness and
radiance, and more particularly upon certain music
Bizet's, especially, and (partly from contradictoriness
to the Wagnerians) Mozart's. For such evidences of
pleasure from outer things are not only rare, but they
are never fused into any kind of pervading mood of
gladness, of appreciation and gratitude towards the
outer world. He has, indeed, put into words his
incapacity of feeling anything save the fewest and most
far-between impressions of the goodness of things, and
expressed the mass of discontented, depreciating self-
assertion in which these rare appreciative impressions
were set. For such is the meaning, as indicative of
I Nietzsche's personality, of that famous phrase about
Jr"the glance of the true philosopher, " which rarely]
) admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves."
Let us think what that means ; and, particularly,
what is contained in that boast of rarely loving. And
in this last item, especially, the secret of Nietzsche's
nature is out. One guesses it many times, but perhaps
nowhere in his works is it so strongly suggested as in
a certain beautiful chapter of " Zarathustra." He
shows himself in it surrounded by all the beauty of
life, all the tenderness of life, and by the majestic
fact of life's eternal renovation ; and he shows himself,
at the same time, without the smallest thrill of
emotional recognition, without the faintest sense of
THE "WILL TO POWER" 187
being a part of it, without the faintest longing to merge
himself therein, to take it in, to give himself to it,
without a trace of the universal instinct to assimilate, to
be renovated, to add to it in one's turn. He shows him-
self separate, unmoved, impervious, unaltered, solitary,
sterile. The reason why Nietzsche will always remain
inferior to other thinkers, from Plato and Lucretius to
Spinoza and Schopenhauer, is that, for all his talk of
" loving the inevitable," the man has no experience
of the fact of love. I do not speak of love of human
beings. Not to know that is certainly a lack and
limitation, but there are lacks and limitations far
deeper and graver still than that: not to unite in
thought and feeling with the thought and feeling of
which the world is full ; not to appreciate, not to
admire, not to reverence ; not to unite in joy with
what is lovely, in reverence with what, in man and
nature, is powerful ; nay, not to unite in the fruitful
struggle of hatred with what is hateful.
But Nietzsche's Super-Man was to say " Yes " to the
whole of life, " to love the inevitable " that which,
as he himself explained, most human beings could
scarcely endure. He was to love rarely ; or more
correctly speaking for those who have the power o
loving must needs love whenever there is occasion, an
the occasion is not rare, but common he was not
love, in the word's real sense, at all.
Haunted, hag-ridden, by the sense of his own sore
and struggling ego, Nietzsche, true to the autobio-
graphical instincts which he discovered in all philosophic
systematising, made life synonymous with that ego's
realisation and assertion. "Give," he wrote in one of
i88 NIETZSCHE AND
his latest and finest works, " Give me, ye Gods,
give me madness ! madness to make me believe at
last in myself." But in this world of intuitive and
imitative action, of reflex-like instincts implanted
inextricably deep below consciousness, there is no need
for special self-belief or self-assertion ; or, rather, self-
belief and self-assertion are bound to exist, to push, to
act, to speak, everywhere and in everything, whether
they be conscious or not : they are implicit in every
desire and every energy. The realisation of one's own
ego is even when it is not the fly's self-realisation on
the coach wheel the most unnecessary epiphenomenon ;
nay, the least fruitful exercise of an idle dilettanteism.
Believe in oneself ! Why is it not enough that we
{ believe in the objects of our love and our hate, in the
1 aims of our impulses and actions ? And does life
depend upon the fiat of individual self-realisation ?
What is this childish trifling about saying " ' Yes ' to
life," about loving the inevitable ? Man, the inevitable
can do without your approval ! And Life has you safe
in its clutches, Life, Death and the madness you
invoked, also.
VIII
Why have we spent so much time which would
have sufficed to collect a volume of sane and useful
sayings out of Nietzsche's work upon the analysis of
his unhappy, morbid and sterile personality ? Partly
because, in the universal and necessary reconsideration
of all our previous habits of belief and standards of
conduct, the imitation of Nietzsche's attitude con-
THE "WILL TO POWER" 189
stitutes a real, though a momentary, danger to some of
us. But partly, also, because the attitude of Nietzsche
suggests in its main characteristics, and helps us to
construct even in some of its details, an attitude towards
the universe of an exactly contrary nature. In analysing
the sham " Yes " which this passionate No-Sayer flung
in the face of the life he had stripped of all living
quality, we may have been led to conceive a more
genuine " Yes " addressed to a more real life. And '
thus we may have come to reverse the prayer of
Nietzsche, and to exclaim, in humility and confidence :
" Give us, ye Gods, Sanity : so that we may believe
in all which is not merely our own self."
PROFESSOR JAMES AND THE "WILL
TO BELIEVE"
PROFESSOR JAMES AND THE "WILL TO
BELIEVE "
THE need to believe. That is the title which, in
my mind, I find I give to these subtle, brilliant,
delicate, violent, and altogether delightful and intoler-
able essays of Professor William James. The " will
to believe," he himself has entitled them and the main
subject they treat of: as a lesser apologist, some
years ago, had called a similar book the " Wish to
Believe."
The wish) the will to believe suggestive enough
titles certainly. But, if I may paraphrase Faust's com-
mentary on St. John : in the beginning, before the wish,
or the will, there was something else ; in the beginning
was the need. The need to believe that is to say, a
given mental constitution, typical like all others, whose
spontaneous and inevitable tendencies have been re-
inforced by such portion of its surroundings as it
found akin to itself. But, at that rate, what about
truth abstract truth ? Surely we all of us want to
get at that. Of course we all do, and each of us
more than every one else. But abstract truth has to
I93
194 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
be sought for by methods, to be sought for, moreover,
in one direction or another ; and these methods and
this direction depend, in things spiritual more
particularly, upon our intimate constitutional habits,
and represent that need to believe, or not to believe,
one sort of thing rather than another ; the need which,
as remarked, must come before the wish or the will.
This is prejudging the question. Yes ; but prejudging
it equitably. For, while postulating on the part of
Professor James a constitutional need to believe, of
which his arguments are mere explanations and excuses,
I admit from the first that a corresponding need not to
believe (that is, not to believe the same as Professor
James), and even a will not to believe, is at the bottom
of the counter-arguments with which I shall endeavour
to oppose him. Indeed, the whole small usefulness
of the following notes depends, in my eyes, on their
embodying a picture of the type of mind which does
not need to believe, to set opposite Professor James's
incidentally drawn portrait of the mind which does
need to believe ; and this for the benefit of that
unbiassed abstract reader who exists only in the average
(and perhaps not even there), and for the better setting
forth of what I hold to be a great and consolatory fact,
to wit, that there are luckily a great variety of human
types, and a good many ways of working out one's
spiritual welfare, of being saved in life, if not after
death.
This being the case, and Professor James's arguments
seeming to me only modernised versions of what has
been alleged ever since the beginning of such con-
troversies, I need make no excuses for the venerable
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 195
staleness of my counter-arguments. For when, as in
this particular case, it is a great Goliath of Science who
comes forward with newly furbished weapons from the
old orthodox armoury, it is no disgrace to the poor
David of Ignorance to fill his sling, not with smooth
pebbles from the brook, but with a handful of rusty
rationalistic shot.
II
There enters, according to Professor James's title
(and I am not, I hope, misunderstanding him in saying
according also to Professor James's ideas), something
into belief besides the evidence and the logical process
of which, according to old-fashioned notions, belief was
exclusively composed. Or rather, belief is the out-
come of something which our dogmatising fathers
who believed exclusively in the intellect (because
they denied that their adversaries had any) allowed
only as an ingredient and factor of variation in error.
A kindlier disposition towards our opponents, and a
more rigorous scrutiny of our own mental processes,
has led us moderns to perceive that logical proof
and ocular demonstration are not much more than
negative powers, and that a stronger motor than they
is needed to set a-going the lazy and much impeded
mechanism of human belief. This is one of the great
achievements of modern mental science ; and its con-
vincing elucidation is one of the finest successes of
Professor James's own splendid work in Psychology.
Belief in the existence of anything is primarily set
afoot by a practical or emotional requirement ; and it
196 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
is only far, far on in intellectual development (and even
there only pushed by pleasurable impulses to ransack
facts or construct theories) that we meet with ideas,
with beliefs, existing for their own sake and born solely
of other ones. But primarily, as I said, we believe in
a thing because we feel in some way that tends towards
it : we set about looking for water not because certain
aspects of the place afford an intellectual persuasion of
its presence, but because we want to drink it ; and the
intellectual element of evidence and logic (disregarded
so long as we are not thirsty) comes in only to direct
or to check this incipient belief, this conception pro-
duced by desire. The psychological theory of belief
was formulated centuries ago (though not by a philo-
sopher), in the adage about wishes being horses. In
the earlier stage belief is indistinguishable from ex-
pectation, and expectation (as we know from infants'
proceedings about food and grown-up people's views
about the duties of others) is merely a conceptional
wish, frequently not merely independent of reality,
but absolutely hostile to it. This is the first stage.
The beggars of the old adage raise their foot into
the stirrup, and up ! but alas, no horses are there
to bestride ! The child eagerly bites into a sweet,
delicious orange, and (forgive my vulgarity) spits out
a very sour lemon. We all of us go to our neigh-
bour clamouring for sympathy and assistance, and find
that our neighbour takes a different view, and has his
own affairs to look after. The result of such experi-
ence, of the beggar's attempt to ride, is a modifica-
tion of the belief which is a kind of desire into the
more complex sort of belief which, as often as not,
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 197
runs counter thereunto. The experience, being usually
disagreeable, is supplemented or replaced, by what
we call logic, which dispenses us from biting into
fruit which may be sour, clamouring for sympathy
which may be refused, and generally, like those
beggars, getting a bad fall off imaginary horses.
Experience and logic, at any rate, modify our concep-
tions ; and such modified conceptions are what we
mean when, in any scientific or practical way, we speak
of belief. Moreover, it is such belief as this upon
which, from a wholesome fear of accidents, we usually
try to base our actions. In this manner does impulse
the impulse, if we may call it so, of prudence
stimulate our lazy minds and, inducing us to modify
our expectations by knowledge, counteract the previous
impulse to believe in the existence of everything we
want.
Such is the platitudinous history of the formation
of belief, in those practical matters where certainty is
necessary and attainable. Now this alteration of
expectation by actuality, this rude elimination of the
element of mere personal desire out of what we call
belief, does most conspicuously not take place in one
of beliePs chief categories, and (by a curious coinci-
dence) in the very category which has usurped the
name without further qualifications. In matters reli-
gious and philosophical (which are so largely the same
under different titles), wishes really do become horses ;
at all events, every beggar contrives to enjoy a ride,
whether on Pegasus or a stickhorse only he himself
is left to judge. We are all of us, either individually
or grouped into creeds and schools, allowed in such
198 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
matters as God, the Soul, Immortality, and all the
transcendent questions, to express our preferences and
our requirements as we should never dare express them
in physics or chemistry, or the most rudimentary
housewife's science. It is no exaggeration to say that
we could not boil an egg without a severe elimination
of the personal element of consideration of wish and
will, and needs of our nature such as is never applied
to religious and philosophical beliefs. This difference
shows, as apologists have often remarked, that belief in
things spiritual conforms to different rules from belief
in things temporal. And therein I agree completely.
But if religious thought can thus dispense with the
kind of certainty required even for the simplest
practical affairs, this must surely be only because no
practical decisions are really based upon it ; because
it is not a means to an end, but an end, even like art,
in itself. The persistence in all views on spiritual
matters, of that element of desire, nay, of every indi-
vidual and momentary feeling which has been elimi-
nated from more material kinds of belief, shows that
such views are useful not as a basis for action, but as
an expression and embodiment of emotional and con-
structive impulses inherent in what we may call the
soul. Such a view is no disparagement to religion ;
if anything, the contrary. There are activities, surely,
which, instead of merely stoking, so to speak, for the
maintenance of themselves and of other activities, are
advantageous to life by increasing and regulating its
complexities ; nay, which perhaps constitute, in the
eyes of a rational human being, life's only worthy end
and object. To despise such activities is the equivalent,
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 199
on the psychologist's part, of a certain kind of political
economy, preaching abstinence from all the good which
wealth can buy for the sake of increasing that wealth
itself, which, apart from its use, can have no meaning.
If, therefore, will can enter into belief, it is only, to
my mind, as an expression of need, of the craving of
this part of our constitution. And in so far as the
needs of different men differ, and the needs of different
historical periods and racial types differ still more, it
is not surprising that while science and the practical
applications thereof have tended to that ever greater
unity which we associate with the notion of objective
truth, the creations of the religious instinct, the expres-
sions of the will not to know, nor to succeed, but to
believe, have been as various as the product of the
aesthetic faculties.
I am not speaking disrespectfully of religious
thought, in saying that it is far less akin to science
than to art, indeed, in its highest manifestation, perhaps
merely a category of the assthetic phenomenon ; for as
I do not agree with Professor James that the assthetic
sensibility is an accident in evolution like the capacity
for sea-sickness, I am not bound (although I have no
will to believe'] to agree with another, non-unitarian
psychologist, that " religion is a malady of the soul."
Indeed, when I come to think of it, it seems as if
I had more sympathy with religious people instead of
less, just because I disbelieve in religion's objective
validity or value : at all events, my sympathies are less
restricted than those of the various religious persons
themselves, High Church, Low Church, Anglican,
Roman, follower of AH and follower of Omar, nay even
200 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
(I fear) of Professor James himself, who lays about him
freely against the excessive demands of Catholics and
Calvinists, the insufficient demands of agnostics in fact
against everybody who is not of his own way of
thinking. If desire, suitability to one's own feelings
(which I take to be the meaning of "moral coherence"),
enters into religious belief ; why then there must enter
into it the temperamental peculiarities and the peculi-
arities of civilisation by which these non-logical de-
mands are differentiated from each other ; and if truth
is to result from it all, why insist that only one view
can be true or rather, why not insist that to himself
each single individual must necessarily be in the right ?
Once admit a will to believe, and the divergences
between, say, the God of the Hebrews (Patriarchs and
Prophets indiscriminately) and the God of Marcus
Aurelius, and the God of Dante, and the God of
Emerson, must be as legitimate and as significant of
truth as the coincidences between them. Neither
should Professor James warn us against going into
excessive detail about the Divinity and admonish us
to be satisfied, so to speak, with the Divinity being
there at all. Professor James, indeed, is satisfied with
God being there, and perhaps being there to satisfy
Professor James ; but that would not at all suffice for
Dante, who wanted a God to apply filthy chastisements
for sins he " did not feel inclined to " ; nor for
Cardinal Newman, who wanted a God to set afoot a
world capable of Original Sin and Redemption ; nor
for the poor old woman who wants a God able to take
pleasure in a twopenny taper.
And why should we sympathise less with all these
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 201
divergent religious needs than with those of Professor
William James ? Only, because we happen to be
nearer his general way of thinking, because we happen
to admire him enormously, while we are indifferent to
the Eternal Punishment of Gluttons (as set forth by
Dante), to Original Sin (as understood by Newman),
and to cheap wax lights (as regarded by the devout
old lady). And here let me say that, unless we con-
sider all religions as equally a nuisance (and perhaps
even if we do so consider them), it would surely be
more consistent, kinder, and therefore better bred,
more wholesome for our own spiritual life, such as it
may be, if we could get to speak and even think
respectfully of the sincere and disinterested elements in
every kind of belief. Agnosticism can afford to be
fairer to Romanism than Protestants can be, fairer to
Calvinism than it is possible for Ritualists, more decent
to each and every honest and beautiful faith than any
other honest and beautiful faith is wont to be. I may
claim even more for the attitude towards various reli-
gious faiths of those who can dispense with any, for
the thorough-paced agnostic. Since, should there really
exist, immanent and hidden in this world of phenomena,
of humanly perceived and interpreted appearances, an
Ens Realissimum in any way resembling the creatures
who worship and burn, turn about, the images they
have made of him, if there be such an One is it not
justifiable to suppose that, having created such various
moral soils and climates and germs, the unknown
First Cause might love to watch the different growths
of soul, and cherish the diversity of his spiritual
garden ?
202 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
III
But these are the scruples of a determinist, whose
individual fate it is to have no will to believe the same
things as Professor James.
He, on the other hand, who does will to believe, has
rather a complicated arrangement to make, which, to
the best of my power, I desire to understand and put
before the reader fairly. There is such is the pith
of the arguments there is of course a non-rational
element existing quite legitimately in belief: the indi-
vidual believer has an individual constitution, and this
has got individual needs, tendencies, impulses, repul-
sions, desires. But and in this but is the whole
morality and philosophy of the business but these
constitutional, hence inevitable, fatal needs, are only
reasons among which the will chooses. And the will,
which makes the choice, is overruled, determined by
none of these inevitable motives, is independent of the
individual constitution ; it promenades its glance,
poising freely in vacua, upon the whole series of in-
evitable tendencies ; and it makes its choice freely.
Hence it would seem that, so far from the Will to
believe being, as I have represented it, a Need to believe ;
the Will to Believe can exist even where there is a
constitutional need NOT to believe. And by this
arrangement we are all responsible for our beliefs, since
we are responsible for our wills or is it our wills
which are responsible for us ? and there is no reason
on earth for being polite towards bigotry or scepticism,
seeing that Cardinal Newman, M. Renan, Professor
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 203
Clifford, and especially Hegel, were perfectly free to
think differently from the remarkably reprehensible
way in which they did.
There is, therefore, a clear space round the will.
It sits somewhere in the midst of motives, seeing them
plainly, but quite safe from their laying hands on it.
This would be a curious position though it has not
seemed an impossible one to most persons for the
Will to enjoy, or rather for the myriads of Wills all
poised in vacua like a spider in the midst of a web
which shouldn't touch him. But the situation becomes
quite different, and the position of the will far less
conspicuous, if we admit with Professor James that
there is no real reason for conceiving the isolated wills
as surrounded by anything continuous in itself ; there
are holes round the wills because there are holes here,
there, and everywhere. The universe is no longer
homogeneous in necessity of action and reaction ; the
universe is honeycombed, nay actually held in solution,
by a foreign something called chance. Even in the
most trivial matters, we may watch the movements of
chance, and verify the absolute freedom of the human
will. Listen to Professor James :
" Do not all the motives that assail us, all the
futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring
equally from the soil of the Past ; and would not
either one of them, whether realised through chance
or through necessity, the moment it was realised, seem
to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most
continuous manner to interdigitate with the pheno-
menon already there." The Past, for instance, has
led Professor James, as he tells us, to the possibility
204 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
of choosing to take one street rather than the other.
He shows us two separate and possible universes, one
in which he has chosen the one street, another in which
he has chosen the other street ; and asks which of the
two is the more rational universe, summing up the
demonstration with the remark : v ' In every outwardly
verifiable and practical respect, a world in which the
alternatives that now actually distract your choice were
decided by pure chance would be by me absolutely
undistinguished from the world in which I now live."
But that is just it. There seems a chance, an alter-
native, wherever we do not see with eyes or with
experience the totality of a process. To me it seems
pure chance that the omelette collapses instead of
swelling, for I do not see what should make it do
either ; but my cook knows and blushes for her
awkwardness. In watching an illness, even to a doctor,
there may seem to be a chance, because the doctor
does not know all that is going on. That a particular
grain of sand should have made straight for Cromwell's
vitals, with the result of killing him, seemed a matter
of chance to Pascal, because it was all happening un-
seen in another man's body ; but had Pascal been
experimenting in his study with grains of sand he
would not have accepted chance as an explanation.
Chance in fact is a name for the residuum, for what
we do not know or do not care about, and in all
speculations there must be, perpetually changing, such
a residuum. Chance will come in wherever we cease
to look or fail to see into a process. It indicates our
ignorance not merely of what will happen, but of what
is happening. There seems no sufficient reason, more-
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 205
over, why, if we admit chance as a condition in the
act of willing, which is one of the most obscure and
entangled mysteries of our nature, one which observa-
tion seems almost unable to arrive at we should not
admit chance also as a condition in the perfectly clear
and well-known phenomena which lie under our eye.
Why should chance not make the water in a boiler
freeze ? Yet, if such a thing occurred, we should
merely jump to the conclusion that some new factor
of change had come in unnoticed by us ; we might
even say that some saint or fairy had been abroad, and
that his preference had upset the ways of the elements.
But we should not invoke chance. Indeed, in my
ignorance of science I have an idea (perhaps mistaken)
that scientific experiments are sometimes made, medical
diagnosis for instance, on the express exclusion of chance :
a substance put into something, a mixture made inside
a pot or inside a human being, and, according to the
results given by the new element, some conclusion
drawn about the previous contents of pot or human
being. But I am ignorant of science, and may be
mistaken ; so I will only draw on literature for con-
firmation, and remark that it seems odd that even Pope
should have refused chance a place in the material
universe and relegated it to the secret operations of
what were called the faculties of the mind :
"And binding Nature fast in Fate,
Left free the Human Will."
This snipping of the web of cause and effect, this
bringing in of independent factors from the back of
2o6 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
beyond, is perhaps a necessary conclusion from the
facts and tendencies of recent science ; of this I am
too ignorant to judge. Connected with the will to
believe, it seems to me (what such a will to believe
surely authorises) a voluntary result of the old, old
theological dilemma of squaring omnipotence and moral
perfection. For, if God is the first cause, God is the
only cause, and the primary cause of every secondary
and successive cause whatsoever. If God made man,
and man made mischief, then primarily that mischief
was of God's making. Nor would there have been
anything at all shocking in this, if the world had
contained only metaphysicians, and religion had min-
istered only to a logical and constructive desire for a
beginning of all things.
But the world was peopled also with persons liable
to molest their neighbours, and with other persons
thus molested ; and religion was also required to
sanction, by a system of prohibitions, of rewards and
of punishment, the practically indispensable craving for
justice. For, by a very natural contradiction, mankind
has always acted as if the individual will were free
enough to be responsible, but determinable enough to
be influenced by threats and promises. Now it would
never have done (as has been formulated by M. Paul
Bourget's determinist villain) for men to answer the
judging divinity by pointing out that he was respon-
sible for the very acts he was about to punish. " Ihr
lasst den Armen schuldig werden " at all events,
such views were safe only in philosophical novels,
like Job and Wilhelm Meister.
Moreover, besides the practical dangers which such
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 207
a view as this might have entailed, there was the
emotional distress it must bring to another class of
persons, who asked of religion not the solution of a
metaphysical riddle, nor the sanction of an ethical
policy, but something perhaps more indispensable than
either, an embodied maximum of sympathy, of help-
fulness, of lovingkindness, of a.11 the beautiful qualities
which mankind showed only in the sample. Some such
dilemma there must have been in every religion which
was more than mere nature worship or less than pure
metaphysics ; and it would be interesting could one
study the various modes of eluding it. The best plan
was clearly to isolate, to prevent the clashing, of con-
ceptions of the divinity so originally incongruous as
the Metaphysical First Cause, the Ethical Judge, and
the emotional Lover of the Soul. Christianity effected
this by the miraculous intervention of human free will
and disobedience. The miracle was, indeed, far from
satisfactory : man's will, separated, in order to be
completely responsible, from all the rest of causation,
was not logically controllable by a categorical impera-
tive, since an imperative, an order, an enforcement, is
inconceivable towards a will which is not conditioned ;
and on the other hand the very freedom of man's will
must have been granted by a First Cause who, if
omnipotent, could have chosen to obviate so terrible
a danger. The solidarity between God and Evil still
existed, the responsibility for Man's and Nature's
wickedness had been merely concealed ; suspicion, nay
certainty of this, growled through every possible form
of disbelief and heresy. But the solidarity had been
reduced to a minimum, the responsibility had been
208 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
relegated to an infinitely distant Past, and the church,
luckily perhaps for mankind, decided that any difficulty
there might remain in the matter was silenced by the
inscrutability of God's ways to man. Thus things
were pacified by the doctrine of Original Sin, which
to the rigorously logical mind of Newman seemed
" almost as certain as that the world exists and as the
existence of God."
In this way it became possible for every man to
cherish a personal divinity, by virtually breaking up
the unity of the monotheistic idea. For in the indi-
vidual conscience the total self-contradictory Godhead
exists, most probably, only in short (and most often
painful) flashes of synthesis ; from which each indivi-
dual nature selects and magnifies those aspects which
answer to its deepest individual wants. A logical God
there no doubt is, a perfectly consistent First Cause,
in the thought of the metaphysician or theologian,
untroubled by questions of sentiment or conduct. The
whole Bible, on the other hand (save Job) and every
other manifestation of Puritanism, past or present,
testifies to the undisturbed subjective reign of a God
of Righteousness, from whom all injustice, however
logically demonstrable, has been passionately purged
away. While, on the other hand, one of the most
blessed sights in life are the glimpses we get of a
Godhead, consubstantial with so many exquisite human
hearts, in the perfection of whose goodness all evil, in
reality or in dogma, is dissolved and neutralised away.
But the total and definite divinity, monstrous in absurd
and wicked contradictions, can never have been clearly
discerned without horror, and has in the practical
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 209
exercise of every creed been invariably broken up or
hidden away. To say this is no disrespect, but quite
the contrary, to the noble though discrepant instincts
fortuitously meeting and clashing in what we have
called religion. And, as regards, on the other hand,
an objective primary Reality, let not anything I have
said be construed into a grotesque judgment concerning
the existence of such a One. If, as all philosophical
progress unites in thinking, and as Kant has made it
so easy for us all to grasp, if it is true that all that we
know we can know only in the terms of our senses and
our organic intellectual necessities, then must the
Objective First Cause remain for ever hopelessly hidden
from our knowledge and our imagination ; and the
God, whatsoever he be, whom we worship, we hope
for or deny, be but an idol of our own making, an
idol the more potent that he is a part of ourselves ;
but an idol in judging of whose qualities and whose
possibilities we are only judging our own thoughts,
and desires, and dreams ; and the Objective Real Cause
might, had he qualities or form, rebuke us as the Spirit
of the Earth did Faust :
" Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht Mir ! "
IV
The cruxes of theology, and theology's ways of
settling them are, as Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has
shown in a small book which is suggestive and charm-
ing, for the most part only the dilemmas and ways
H
210 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
out of them of metaphysics. But the difference
between the thinker bent upon religious edification,
and the thinker of mere rationalistic habits, is that the
latter is not forced to attempt anomalous unifications
in the person of a divinity. Professor James has failed
to see this great advantage of the Agnostic's intellectual
and moral position ; and, being a Unitarian, he declines
to hear of subjective divinities ; he wills to believe in
an objective and substantive Godhead. By construct-
ing an elaborate system of air-tight compartments filled
with Freewill which are connected with, but not pressed
upon by, surrounding causality, he has saved the unity
of the Creator by sacrificing, very explicitly, the unity
of Creation. And in so doing he erroneously imagines
that he has attained the only morally endurable con-
ception of the relations of man with what is not man.
" If," writes Professor James of his opponent, the
determinist, " if all he means is that the badness of
some parts does not prevent his acceptance of a universe
whose other parts give him satisfaction, I welcome him
(it is always Professor James who speaks) as an ally.
He (the determinist) has abandoned the notion of the
whole, which is the essence of deterministic monism,
and views things as a pluralism, just as I do in this
paper."
Not by any means, Professor James ; I can, as a
human being, take exception to any amount of things
in the universe without in the least postulating a
pluralism. The fact of various items being parts of
the same whole, that is to say, being bound to act and
react on one another, does not in the least imply that
the action and reaction in question should be accom-
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 211
panied in any of them by the particular condition of
feeling called pleasure or approval. Indeed, since
pleasure and disapproval do undoubtedly exist, one
might deduce from their existence the very fact that
various items do act and react upon one another ; in
other words that there is an unbroken chain of causa-
tion, a causal whole ; whereas, if the universe were full
of gaps in the sequence, approval and disapproval would
necessarily be by so far diminished. There is, there-
fore, no pluralistic view implied in the recognition that
one tiny piece of the great whole, the portion calling
itself Man, is so constituted, and constituted in virtue
of the nature of the whole, as to feel, to judge the
larger portion in which it is embedded, according to
standards inevitably arising out of its special constitu-
tion and surroundings. In synthesising its piece of
the universe according to its synthetic system, and
dividing that piece of the universe into facts which
delight and facts which revolt its special mode of being,
mankind is so far from breaking up the total unity
that its human synthesis and analysis, its repugnance
and its preference, are themselves traceable to the action
and reaction between itself and the adjacent parts, so to
speak, of that whole ; actions and reactions due, no
doubt, in their turn to the actions and reactions of
infinite other parts which are hidden from the faculties
which the whole has given to that part of itself called
mankind, and given thus limited and determined.
The very essence of determinism is the belief that
man's likings and dislikings, nay, his modalities of
perception and reasoning, are due to the causal chain
of processes which have constituted him, which do
212 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
constitute him man ; man, and not horse, dog, or cat ;
man, and not tree or stone ; man, and not angel,
Demiurgus, or God ; and that, so far as there is a
difference in the determined constitution, in the deter-
minating sequence, man's likings and dislikings and
feelings and thoughts are not shared by horse, dog,
cat, tree, stone, angel, Demiurgus, or God.
Or God. Taking up, therefore, the idol we all
make and alter and endow with that name, I may say
that only thorough-paced determinism can, it seems to
me, really break that wretched solidarity between the
First Cause, postulated by man's reason, and the Prin-
ciple of Good demanded by man's heart. For, how
can we ask of a First Cause, which our reason insists
on as absolutely unconditioned (else it would not be
First Cause at all) participating in the moral instincts
and preferences which are involved in the very nature
of man? And how, on the other hand, can we,
because our reason insists on the existence of a bare
First Cause, and on the existence, moreover, of infinite
realities necessarily hidden from our faculties, which
perceive only what we call phenomena, why should we,
how could we, silence those demands for justice, kind-
ness, harmony, which are an inevitable part of our
constitutions ? We cannot help judging the Universe,
we cannot help judging God, and finding both at fault.
But, if we are reasonable, we cannot help at the same
time recognising that the Universe and the God we are
judging are mere creations of our own faculties ; that
good and evil as we conceive it, or even good and evil
at all, are qualities which exist for certain only rela-
tively to mankind ; that it is only an exuberance of
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 213
an activity better turned to the criticism of ourselves,
which makes us criticise also the creations perhaps
the utterly gratuitous creations of our own human
mind, makes us rage at the ugliness of the picture of
our painting, and sorrow at the cruelty of the idol
we have wrought. As to the great Realities, we
cannot fall foul of them, since we cannot even conceive
them. This is the reconciliation between our reason
and our desires, which can console such of us as admit
the merely subjective nature of what our religious
instincts, harmonious or discordant in their action, are
for ever making us hope and believe.
But the person who wills, or needs to believe, in an
objective First Cause and in an objective intention in
the universe (or in part of the universe), is liable to
think that the morality of man receives its principal
sanction from a similar morality on the part of God.
To Professor James, it would seem, a disbelief in the
second contradicts, or largely invalidates, a belief in
the first. To me, on the contrary, it seems as if the
recognition that we know only our own desires and
fancies about the order of the universe, ought, rather,
to make us give more implicit obedience to what is
evidently the order, the necessity of man's nature.
We find no trace Professor James is the first to admit
it no trace of morality in the proceedings of physical
nature ; he might have added that we find distinct
traces of what would be immorality for us in the
proceedings of our very near animal relatives. What
can this prove save that morality is a necessity, a law
special to man ; and what stronger sanction can
morality obtain than the fact that it is specially neces-
214 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
sary for us ? Suppose, by way of comparison, that we
ask which is the more cogent reason for eating, or
sleeping, or taking a walk, the fact that all our neigh-
bours do as much, and that we are bound to them by
similarity ; or the fact that each of us, individually,
cannot live comfortably without eating, or sleeping, or
taking a walk ? Surely the greater cogency is the
nearer to ourselves. If it were otherwise, we should
be bound to disregard the command, the necessity of
our individual constitution, and imitate our neighbours
not -merely in the points in which there is unanimity
of nature and interest, but also in the points in which
there is discrepancy. Similarly between mankind and
the universe. The moral imperative is an imperative
because man's constitution and circumstances enforce
it ; it is an order which cannot be disobeyed, because
it comes from within. Would the sanction be greater
if the imperative applied also to the universe beyond
man, if the order came from without ? Were such
the case, and did the cogency of an imperative depend
upon the number and the variety of the classes which
obeyed it ; did solidarity with the non-human universe
instead of solidarity inside mankind, and, moreover,
inside the human individual constitution, determine
our actions then we should be bound to set at de-
fiance all our human instincts of righteousness merely
because we recognised that the universe, which is bigger
than mankind, conformed to a standard which is not
that of human rightdoing at all. So far as we can see,
there is a different right and wrong, or perhaps no
right and wrong at all, outside the human being and
human society. Certain philosophers, and particularly
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 215
certain mystics, have seen this plainly, and settled the
question in a strictly logical manner. Our moral
instincts, they have justly perceived, although necessary
to us and to this earthly existence, need have no use
in an existence carried on on different lines. These
instincts may therefore be merely temporary ; and, our
spiritual essence once freed from bodily and social
requirements, it is conceivable that we may shed such
narrowing and distorting prejudices, and get to like
those arrangements of the universe which we now call
evil, quite as well as the others which we now call good ;
or rather, we may give up such earthly provincialisms
as approval and disapproval, and sit quite happily at
the First Cause's right hand, perfectly satisfied with
the mere knowledge of the chain of causality.
This is exceedingly logical. But it is not moral.
Our instincts for good somehow refuse to be satisfied
D
with the assurance that they are temporary and neces-
sary hallucinations, and accordingly we find that such
a solution of the great riddle does not commend itself
to Professor James any more than to that wholesome
and practical, if rather rough and ready, moralist, the
Church, which has never omitted to burn the persons,
or at least the books, of those who advanced this
particular justification of God's ways to man. The
Church and Professor James have felt very strongly
that life would be unendurable without a maximum of
moral feeling on man's part ; and that such a maximum
216 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
requires that man should blindly strive and cry out
for morality, eternally and everywhere. Besides, a
divinity is wanted, not merely to satisfy the logical
and the emotional wants of mankind, but also to
sanction, to enforce morality and, even more, to satisfy
man's moral cravings. Hence a constant juggling with
ideas, juggling whose efficacy depended on the extent
to which mankind was able to close either the eye of
morality or the eye of logic. Original Sin was one
of the dodges which succeeded when the eye of morality
was closed ; when the eye of reason, always a little
short-sighted, was winked, it was possible to arrange
matters by splitting the divine essence into a Father
who did all the bad obscure business of creation, and
a Son filling the centre of vision with the effulgence
of self-sacrifice and redemption ; indeed, I cannot but
think that the more rationalised Christianity of Pro-
fessor James loses incalculably by the reduction to a
minimum of the divinity of Christ. Be this as it
may, the church through all the centuries, and Professor
James through all his volume, have found themselves
perpetually in presence of the old, old dilemma, not
the dilemma of determinism with which Professor
James has dealt explicitly, but the much worse, because
implicit, dilemma of "justifying the Ways of God
to Man."
VI
Professor James's will to believe has taken him into
the thick of it. For, not satisfied with breaking up
the causal connexion of the Universe and filling up
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 217
the gaps with Free Will and Chance, he has felt the
need of reinstating into this discontinuous and parti-
coloured scheme of things a First Cause who shall
satisfy the moral cravings of man.
According to a favourite theological habit, Professor
James sees in these moral cravings an implied promise
that they must be satisfied. Now, satisfaction is un-
doubtedly connected with demand. Only, a demand
does not imply that its satisfaction is actually taking
place, but rather the contrary. We suffer very keenly
from the insufficient morality of the universe. This
is a reason for our trying to increase it by our own
efforts and in our own sphere ; it is not a reason for
supposing that the very cause of our suffering is really
trying to diminish our doing so. Why not believe at
once that there must be a fire hidden somewhere in a
room because we feel ourselves perishing with cold ?
Let us make up a fire ourselves, and all will be set
right.
Right for some persons, but evidently not for others.
What they want is not to be warm, but to feel sure
that the host who has (in their view) invited them to
his house, has disliked the notion of their being cold.
Any increase in Good which Man brings into things
does not satisfy Man's desire that things should be
good apart from him.
Hence another argument. No longer that we are
mistaken in making such a fuss about good and evil,
but rather, that the very fuss we make will, in
some sort, oblige the First Cause to reveal how very,
very much more good there is in the universe than we
ever guessed. This argument is, like all the other
218 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
arguments (and my counter-arguments), as old as the
hills. But Professor James has contrived to put it
into a form most modern and most scientific, alas !
although to my mind not very cogent. Since, of all
devices for putting me in conceit with a First Cause,
the one least likely is that of representing the First
Cause as a Vivisector. For it is upon the description
of the agonies and the terror of a poor dog in the
process, as Professor James consolingly puts it, of
" performing a function incalculably higher than that
which prosperous canine life admits of," that is based
the argument in question : if mankind could only
understand as much more of the universe and the
purposes of the Creator as the physiologist's assistant
understands of the uses of vivisection than the vivi-
sected dog, then surely mankind might be expected (as
the dog would be) to " religiously acquiesce " in being,
so to speak, vivisected by the divinity. This argument
has seen so much service in various theological forms,
that it must evidently afford satisfaction to a large
number of persons with a will to believe sufficient to
overcome certain repugnances. But there are other
persons to whom vivisection, even of dogs, is not a
subject for " religious acquiescence " ; to whom the
very wickedest imaginable act would be to hide from
the creature thus immolated any reason which might
justify, any good which might counterbalance, its
unmitigated anguish. For if there are minds so con-
stituted as to require deism for their moral well-being,
even deism garnished with such analogies, there are
certainly many others (and perhaps even among really
pious believers) who either break loose from any deistic
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 219
creed, as from a species of Moloch worship, or remain
within its pale, suffering frightful doubts or stultifying
their reason, merely because they have got enslaved to
the logical demand for some original cause of all
things. Why has Omnipotence allowed us to develop
moral instincts which necessarily condemn some of
Omnipotence's conspicuous proceedings ? Why given
us reason enough to see only the evil, and withheld the
extra amount which would have revealed the eventual
good ? Surely one-half of religiously-constituted men
and women have suffered from this thought, whether
expressed in symbols of original sin and redemption
through innocent blood, or awakened quite unmeta-
phorically by the individual cruelties of Fate. For
there are worse things to think of than even the
Brockton murderer (to whom Professor James perhaps
unnecessarily introduces us), and which stick more in
one's throat, mine at least, than any human act of
meanness and brutality. Cast your eye over the circle
of your own acquaintance and you will understand
what I mean : cases where two creatures are separated
by death at the moment of a tardy, sighed-for union ;
worse, cases where a creature, who has never had any
gladness in life, sees its poor little candle of happiness
snuffed out in a few months, or weeks, with the life of
a wife or husband ; cases where we are abashed at the
bare thought of offering condolence, and which exist at
every moment and in every street. Is the thought of
such things as these made more supportable by the
belief that the Creator might have made them seem less
bad if only he had cared ?
To such of us as feel in this manner, a universe
220 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
whence the First Cause has been banished, like the
gods of Lucretius, seems a thing almost too good to be
true. And some of us, assuredly, have felt a new lease
of moral life accompanying the gradual or sudden
recognition that all we know of good and of evil is con-
fined to man ; that we are spiritually akin only to our
own kind ; and that the ambiguous divinity, who has
tortured us with good instincts and evil examples, is
but a Frankenstein's Monster of our own making.
VII
But to those who have suffered from them, such
thoughts are too painful almost to bear recalling ; the
recollection thereof, like that of Dante's forest, renews
the horror.
So let us turn to the more human side of this
controversy, which, viewed in a kindly spirit, is not
without its pleasant humours. For on few occasions
does the ingenuous self-importance of mankind show
out more than when mankind sets about making its
graven images. The practical activities of life, and the
scientific ones, are hampered by material facts and
intellectual necessities often foreign to the individual ;
and even artistic creation, one of man's freest activities,
is, after all, limited by questions of school and fashion,
of teachers and of public. But each individual is
working for himself solely and solitarily, expressing
only his own wants and likings, when busy about the
idol labelled God.
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 221
Talk of monotheism, forsooth ! Why there are as
many gods as there are believers, and even more, for
each believer may make himself a whole Olympus full
in a lifetime, each god, of course, being, turn about,
the true one. Take, for instance, the matter of liking
and disliking, or rather of disliking, for in most people
personality shows more in that. We all of us proceed
on the assumption that God cannot like what we
dislike, nor dislike what we like ; and if we all agree
that he cannot possibly like evil, it is simply because
evil admits of as many specifications as there are
persons to do the specifying. I personally cannot
believe that God can like vivisection ; but Professor
James, as we have seen, has compared God to a person
engaged in that pursuit ; on the other hand, it is plain
that Professor James thinks that God cannot bear
people who think like M. Renan, who, in his turn (as
regards irony and indulgence rightly) perhaps surmised
that God thought very much like himself. Meanwhile
Mr. Ruskin, not without show of reason, thought God
cjuld not possibly like St. Peters ; Galileo, a religious
savant, that God could not like the Ptolemaic System ;
Origen, and other early Christians catalogued in
Flaubert's Temptations of St. Anthony, that God could
not possibly like Sex ; some other early Christians (and
later transcendental philosophers) that God could still
less possibly like a Material Universe. And meanwhile,
among these conflicting statements, the one thing at all
demonstrably certain is the existence of St. Peters,
the Ptolemaic System, Sex, the Material Universe,
and all the rest ; and the one thing logically pre-
sumable is that since they do exist, the cause of all
222 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
existence must have been somehow mixed up in their
existing. . . .
I have said that people's religious views are even
more determined (for I am fatally incapable of believing
in a free will to believe] by their dislikings than by their
likings. Dislike is a stronger feeling, as a rule, than
liking ; it is also one which suffers much more from
need of sympathy (since the thing you like is in a way
company), and, therefore, cries out for some one to
share it. Moreover, there may be a degree of truth in
the statement of certain pessimistic philosophers, that
owing to some mysterious internal arrangement, mental
or bodily, dislike or as some people call it, dis-
approval, reprobation gives a maximum of activity
with a minimum of work, in other words, pleasure ;
gives you a sort of comfortable feeling of something to
push against, and generally enlarges the happy flow of
the vital spirits. I do not wish to be responsible for
this notion ; personally I am always trying to believe
that I do not like disliking, and even if my practice
bear it out, I feel I well, I am bound to use the word
I dislike the theory of the pleasantness of disliking.
Let me therefore appeal to the authority of Professor
James, and thereby also end this digression on what we
expect from our graven images, by resorting to what
Professor James apparently expects from the one which
he worships :
" When, . . ." he writes, " we believe that a God is
there, and that he is one of the claimants . . . the
strenuous mood awakens at the sound. It saith among
the trumpets ha ! ha ! it smelleth the battle afar off ;
the thunder of the captains and the shouting. Its blood
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 223
is up ; and cruelty to lesser claims , so far from being a
deterrent element , does but add to the stern joy with which
it leaps to answer to the greater"
This is tremendous ; and the passage I have italicised
inspires me with fear of what may, some day, befall
certain persons mentioned in previous pages of the
volume. I feel reassured, however, on reflecting that
M. Renan and Professor Clifford, and especially Hegel,
are safely gathered to their fathers ; that there are
neither Alexandrian libraries to burn nor witches (or,
rather, the latter would be salaried as mediums) ; and
that Jacobin clubs, if they arise nowadays, are sure
to guillotine at once so great a man of science as
Professor James at the instigation of some nostrum-
dealing Marat.
The God in whom Professor James wills to believe
himself, and also wills that his neighbours should do
alike, is, as the above quotation has suggested to the
reader, essentially a Man of War. Now it is no good,
even for a divinity, to be a Man of War in time of
peace. Peace, therefore, is not at all what Professor
James looks forward to (indeed, he more than once
symbolises it as a tea-table presided over by Mr.
Herbert Spencer), but rather a universe which shall be
a happy hunting-ground for good and active men,
presided over by a good and active God, with a certain
amount of wickedness and misery preserved in it on
purpose. And here is really Professor James's solution,
not so much reasoned and explicit, but constitutional
and implied, of the existence of evil. It becomes good
as a necessary condition of the exercise of goodness.
" Not the absence of vice," he exclaims, " but Vice
224 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
there, and Virtue holding it by the throat, seems the
ideal human state " ; and this being the case, it becomes
plain that a perfectly good omnipotence could not have
created mankind less sinful than it is. Indeed, all
possible objections are forestalled by this conclusive
view. For if one objected, that holding anything by
the throat is but a low-class employment for Virtue,
and that pleasure in cruelty to lesser claims smacks of
our childish desire to be the detective who may lie and
cheat in order to circumvent cheats and liars, or even
of our ancestors' taste for fine avengers a la Titus
Andronicus ; if one suggested that a more amiable ideal
was set before us by Jesus Christ, a very little reflection
would prove that this was futile : that too much
amiability would weaken the moral muscle, and that in
the ideal state the breed of villains, as in hunting
counties the breed of foxes, must be considered as
sacred .
So much for Evil in the form of Vice. Professor
James goes further in his justification of the First
Cause. If vice is required for the sake of keeping
mankind actively virtuous, a certain amount of misery
is quite as necessary to enable mankind to feel happi-
ness. For
" Regarded as a stable finality, every outward good
(and Professor James, by specifying innocence^ also adds
every inner grace) becomes a mere weariness to the
flesh. It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for
its goodness to be fully felt as such. Nay, more than
occasionally lost. No one knows the worth of
innocence till he knows it is gone for ever." And
so on.
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 225
That is conclusive. But if, therefore, this is the
best of all possible universes, and its being bad is
just a part of its goodness, why then there is no
problem of evil at all, and there was no need for a
will to believe in Chance, in Free Will, in ultimate
justice on the human pattern, and in the Divinity
being a kindly Vivisector. The best of all possible
First Causes must evidently have created the best of
all possible universes ; and we might, without more
ado, have rested in the optimism of Dr. Pangloss, as
set forth by Voltaire in his Candide.
VIII
But that immortal handbook of philosophy contains
another saying which suits me and those who will
not to believe, better ; a saying less cosmic, no doubt,
but easier to understand and act upon. " Tous les
evenements sont enchaines dans le meilleur des mondes
possible ; car enfin, si vous n'aviez pas etc chasse d'un
beau chateau a grands coups de pied, &c., &c. . . .
Cela est bien dit, repondit Candide ; mats il faut cul-
tiver notre jar din."
Now, in the first place, it seems to me that the
Panglossian theology, where he has adopted it, has
betrayed Professor James into a statement which is
damaging to the fruitful garden of human nature ;
when, in order to explain away the presence of misery
in the world, he has insisted that without it we should
cease to perceive happiness. But I have studied modern
psychology in the splendid work of quite a different
'5
226 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
Professor, William James (also of Harvard however,
and who has collaborated in all the finest part of
the present volume with his namesake), and can
therefore state theoretically, what for the rest I should
have always expected, that no one believes any longer
in the old notions of necessary relativity between
items of cognition ; and that hot is hot, smooth is
smooth, pleasant is pleasant, owing to direct relations
between outer objects and ourselves, and would be
so if cold, and rough, and disagreeable had remained
in mente dei. And thus the normal human being
requires no set-off to happiness, since he is so com-
pounded that the mere ordinary variations in himself
and his surroundings afford the variety necessary for
it to be conscious. Hunger and satisfaction, sleep
and waking, exercise and rest, alternate with each
other in a rhythm of change and repetition requiring
no stimulus of starvation or insomnia or ennui ; even
as the never-ending alternations of day and night,
seasons and places, the never-ending changefulness
of charm in material beauty and in the things of the
intellect and the sentiment, require no irrelevance
of hideousness, or wickedness, or unintelligibility
(though such is furnished us in plenty !) to make us
keenly enjoy them. Nay, health itself, which seems
a relative conception, is a very positive reality, letting
us know its presence by the joyousness and energy
in which the very thought of disease is utterly for-
gotten. The powers of the universe have indeed,
alas, given mankind hard things to suffer ; but let
us do them justice : they have not made that
suffering a condition of happiness, like Professor
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 227
James's Creator (and Created ?) of restless and biases
mortals.
Thus much of the little garden which the experi-
enced hero of Voltaire urged us to cultivate : the
garden of strictly human capacities, human morality,
human logic, human sense of beauty and fitness, all
bounded by the faculties of man ; nay, perhaps all
contained within man's limited faculties, and created
by them : for who can tell what wilderness of Realities
may lie beyond, of wilderness or even of not being ?
I do not mean by this that we should check the
passionate desire and speculation about that beyond.
Indeed, the mirages which mankind sees beyond the
flaming bounds of space and time are, in my opinion,
as much an integral part of the human enclosure
whence they are projected as the images thrown out
by a magic lantern belong in reality to the room where
they seem not to be, rather than to the stage across
which they appear to move. Nay, among the things
in this garden, wherein we are thus fatally enclosed,
let us cherish as among the choicest some of these
same/tf/<z morgana sights which it projects on to the
inane beyond. Our ideas of an order of the universe,
when such ideas are the result of mankind's wish for
harmony and justice, are, after all, a kind of reality,
a reality to the faculties which produce them ; and
the divine figures, radiant in triumph, or ineffably
touching in sorrow, who have heightened the joy
and softened the suffering of the ages that are gone,
have not only been the finest realities to those who
believed in their objective existence, but ought, were
we modest and wise, to remain among the most real
228 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
existences for the feeling of those who, like me,
believe them to be but subjective creations. And
in the falling to pieces of the old creeds, and the
extrication therefrom of the various possible modes
of conceiving a union of the spirit of man with the
universe, Professor James has surely forgotten the
best.
He dismisses as immoral such union as consists of
a mere knowledge of God by his ways, and decides
in favour of a union with God by co-operation with
his intentions, by the conforming of our action to his
wish. But besides these modes of unification, there
remains another, which can be traced in the
sentiment, if not in the dogma, of most of the creeds
of the past, and in the instincts of many agnostics of
the present, in the utterances of all great poets,
believing or unbelieving, in the forefront of whom,
with his hymn to the Sun, stands Francis of Assisi.
I am speaking of the unification by love. By love,
not as submission, but as enjoyment. There is a stage
of consciousness which Professor James apparently omits
in his list, or confuses with one of the other stages :
the stage not of perception, nor of cognition, nor of
volition, but of a consummation which seems the result,
and teleologically speaking, the rational end of the
never-ceasing flux of action from without and reaction
from within. One may say of it, with Goethe's
Chorus Mysticus, " hier wirds Ereignis " ; but it is the
attainable, not the unattainable, which is accomplished.
Sensitiveness, cognition, volition, action ; is there not
in this incessant circling chain an omitted link called
satisfaction ? For satisfaction, to which all human
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 229
states tend (however balked in so doing), is in its
turn the great replenisher of the various activities
which subserve it. Can we grasp the universe, make
it ours, assimilate as much of it as possib le, in a fashion
more complete than when we enjoy the universe, love
it, make use of the universe joyfully ? Nay, is it not
this state of consummation, of satisfaction, of identifi-
cation of man's wants and nature's possibilities, the
only state in which the old problem of evil is solved,
is banished and forgotten?
Not all that we know of the universe and the
universe's ways conduces to this. Far from it. But
what do cognition, volition, action, strive after save
diminishing to the utmost our occasion of coming in
contact with such of the ways of the universe as offend
us ? Perception, thought, decision, are all of them
combined in an effort, which becomes ceaselessly more
complex, to avoid pain and obtain pleasure, to forego
the smaller pleasure for the sake of the larger, to
avoid the greater pain by taking counsel of the smaller.
All these activities tend, as I have said, to a state
of harmony with our surroundings, a state of
appreciation, of love of the happiness we feel.
And this state is just the one in which it becomes
easiest to believe that what we call Evil may be merely
what is unsuitable to us, and what, once eliminated
from our neighbourhood, may find some proper sphere
elsewhere, and become good to organisms different from
ours. It is this kind of religious feeling which, in
Antiquity and the Middle Ages, gave birth to art,
man's one successful attempt to extract only good from
the universe. And it is, very likely, in the short
230 PROFESSOR JAMES AND
spells of such feeling that mankind has recovered
strength sufficient to endure, to hope, and to
strive.
VIII
This also is a matter of individual constitution and
habit. Those who require such a way of looking
at life, inevitably will to believe in its possibility, and
thereby realise it ; for in matters of feeling, even if
in no others, wishes are really horses and we all may
ride.
And herewith I return to my starting-point, to
wit, that the chief use of such speculations as these
of Professor James's, and the use, I trust also, of
my answers thereto, is to make us acquainted with
various and equally desirable types of mind, each with
its uses and drawbacks.
Is it possible for these different types of mind ever
fully to understand the nature, the habits of each
other ? Will it be possible, for instance, for Professor
James to realise that the writer of these notes is one
of his warmest admirers ? And is it then possible
for me, while marshalling my counter-arguments,
to remember the hundred points of agreement, the
hundred luminous suggestions with which Professor
James's essays have delighted me ?
Alas, perhaps not. Of all things in the world,
thorough perception of one's neighbour's existence
is, on the whole, the most difficult. But in proportion
to the difficulty should be the effort. Particularly
on the part of those who, like myself, will to believe
THE "WILL TO BELIEVE" 231
that man's highest work is the realisation of a human
ideal ; and that the only Godhead which can make
binding laws for man, is the divinity consubstantiate
with his best self, and shaped in the glorified image
of those he loves most.
ROSNY AND THE
FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL
ROSNY AND THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL
NOVEL
SHALL we ever obtain this truth which all novelists
seem striving after, or have we ever obtained it
truth, subjective truth even, such as we find it, for
instance, in Rousseau's " Confessions," or in cer-
tain veiled autobiographies, like " Werther " and
" Adolphe " ?
A hundred reasons prevent the novelist from work-
ing with absolute fidelity to life ; and reluctance to
abuse confidence, to hurt the feelings of his models,
is the least important of these reasons. The strongest
reason is that reality is reality, defies presentation by
its complexity ; that a mutilated, isolated, arranged
reality, with cause and effect freely upset, is no reality
at all ; moreover, that it is doubtful whether any one
save a professional novelist would give a thank you for
real reality in a novel. Reality is valuable to us only
as the raw material for something very different ; the
artistic sense alters it into patterns, the logical faculty
reduces it to ideas. Except for individual action, the
individual case, which is the only reality ', has no final I /xq/
importance.
235
236
ROSNY AND
But the novelist continues to delude himself; he
piques himself upon the quality he cannot get. Most
novelists (and the more deliberately realistic the worse)
treat human life and character by a system of scientific
fictions, deliberately simplifying phenomena till they
become abstractions, diagrams ; they pretend to ex-
plain as the result of a single factor of grossly ex-
aggerated importance what must have been the result
of a dozen or a hundred factors. So, the real action
copied from life is made the centre of a circle of
unrealities.
Again, most novelists practise realism by explaining
the unknown in one real personage by the known in
another real personage, most commonly their own self.
They fuse together two creatures of the same category,
and think that two half organisms must necessarily
make one whole, forgetting, alas ! that you can unite
only such parts as complete each other, but not such
others as are either duplicates or substitutes ; producing
by such arrangements sirens and minotaurs, creatures
who could not have assimilated with a bird's gizzard or
a ruminant's stomach the food which must have passed
through a human gullet or set in motion human limbs.
At best they patch up centaurs, decorative animals who
can trot and caper, because the artist paints them
trotting and capering, but who have two stomachs
and two pairs of lungs, those of the man and those
of the horse, a reduplication which natural selection
and Dr. Weissmann's "Law of Panmixia" render
improbable.
Is this exaggeration? Scarcely. Is not a Pere
Goriot, for instance, an agglomeration of the parental
I '.
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 237
quality of at least a dozen parents, something analogous v
to the creature on the Shield of Sicily and the Isle of I /
Man, made of three legs without a head or arms ? ; :
The day will perhaps come when biological psychology
and the study of individual cases, when, above all, a
scientific habit of mind, will accustom us to the notion
that an individual cannot be anything except himself ;
that if a real Tom were fused with a real Dick, and
* 9 9 j
both with a real Harry, there would be an end to the AA-4^
three realities without the birth of a fourth one. We
may then learn, perhaps, how real people are made up
of various strands ; the necessary fashion in which
grandfather Falstaff reacts on great-grandfather Hamlet ;
and how maternal grandmother Clarissa Harlowe is
modified or neutralised by paternal grandmother Becky
Sharp ; nay, what colour of hair and skin, what voice
and gait, what physiological affinities and repulsions
the various living puppets of the world's stage can
have.
Meanwhile, the psychological novelist traffics in
people's ignorance, and men like Bourget and Maupas-
sant manufacture individuals and types much as our
earliest ancestors made up bird-women, bull-men, and
that magnificent human document, the bronze chimasra
of Arezzo. r
Luckily, there are still novelists without .scientific
pretensions, without mania for reality ; or, shall we
say, luckily there is among novelists a certain
amount of intuition, of that synthetic and sympathetic
creation which is genius. I will not even speak of
Tolstoi. Far lesser men, like Bjornsen and Rosny,
have given us work which is intuitive and genial.
238 ROSNY AND
They do not make up a complete skeleton for sale
out of odd bones picked out of the heap (I knew such
a skeleton once, the property of a painter ; it had
French legs and the skull and spine of a Dutchman).
They tell us about creatures not objectively real, but
not subjectively unreal, who have come to exist by a
spontaneous stratification of impressions, in the trans-
muting heat of liking and disliking ; creatures who
have life because born of the life, the preferences and
aversions, the passionate hope and hostility of the
author.
For the rest, should we regret the novelist's in-
capacity to compass reality ? Surely not. No book,
only experience, could teach us to know the individual.
Indeed, there is no individual to know ; since what we
take for one is merely the impression made on ourselves
by the ever-shrouded, mysterious selves of other folk.
The novel cannot teach us to know the individual.
But it can teach us certain general very general
facts about classes and the surroundings of classes. It
can teach us the influences to which individuals are
subjected, whether of bodily crisis or of social position.
Thus, all children cut their teeth and crawl on the
floor ; all girls gradually evolve into women ; all
people change ; all people have material wants, social
ideals, national peculiarities. What if we might have
known all this without the novelist's pseudo-realities ?
We should not have found it out so efficiently, so
universally ; we should have known these things piece-
meal, superficially, always alike too late in the day, for
want of something to make it worth our while of
something to catch our attention and enlist our
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 239
sympathies. Now, the novelist makes it worth our
while. By interesting us in the unreal creatures,
children of his wishes or diagrams of his analysis, he
accustoms us to take interest in the living mysteries
who walk, act, and suffer all round us. And when
he is a great novelist not an analyst, not a copyist
of the actual, but a sympathetic artist, a passionate
lover of the human creature he can do infinitely
more : he can people our fancy with living phantoms
whom we love, he can enrich our life by the strange
power called charm.
II
I doubt whether Rosny will ever be popular, despite
the force and the thoroughly human warmth of his
genius. He is full of arduousness, of splendid qualities
which take energy and intelligence to enjoy, mixed
with unimportant defects which require even more
energy and intelligence to overlook ; for, after all,
is there not an art of appreciation, like an art of
living, which consists in making the most of what is
fruitful and pleasant, and disregarding what is tire-
some and to no purpose? There are not many
good readers (though there be many subtle critics)
in the world ; but, to such good readers as there
are, Rosny, like Browning, will give much in return
for much.
Speaking of Browning, Rosny always reminds me a
little of Browning's Grammarian ; there is in him
a combination or discord between rare distinction,
amounting to exquisiteness sometimes, and a certain
240 ROSNY AND
denseness and pedantry, which we feel sure that Gram-
marian had also, going to be buried on the top of his
rock, untidy, unkempt, having walked past much of
the sweetness and beauty of life, nay, stumbled over it,
in his absorption over the enclitic Si.
Rosny possesses what among living French novelists
is rather unique than rare sincerity ; he wishes to
please himself, he does not make himself up for sale.
Sincerity ; and hence the highest kind of distinction
personal preference. He does not cast about him for
subjects which have not yet been treated ; he does not
seek for the exotic in the wares of the Far East or in
the Parisian dust-heap. His singular originality the
new views of life, the new kind of characters (his
charming class of nature-lovers, men with intuition and
sympathy for clouds, plants, beasts) which he gives us
are due to the fact of his being a human individuality,
full of individual likings and dislikings, long before
he is a writer. Before setting about rather arduously
describing, analysing, making things live again, he
knows perfectly well that he cares for them in them-
selves, that they seem to him full of intrinsic impor-
tance. One feels sure, in dealing with Rosny, that he
would have liked to read about the things he likes to
write about ; that they are for him what savages and
virgin forests are to his little friend in " 1'Imperieuse
Bonte," what storms and seas are to the doctor in
" Renouveau," what the poor abortions are to the
divinely kind women in that strange book of his on
charity. Rosny's distinction of nature, his real aristo-
cratic quality (as opposed to the odd impotencies and
depravities which other French novelists cherish as
.
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 241
signs of superiority !) is also shown in that love for
cleanness and strength which underlies his surgeon's,
nay, his sick nurse's tenderness towards disease and
suffering. He sees that strength alone can be divine ;
not, as a brutal misunderstanding of Darwinism is for
ever telling us, because strength can crush weakness ;
but because, on the contrary, only through strength
can weakness be compensated, neutralised, reclaimed.
To the strong, the wise, the rich shall be given, because
by them alone can more be given in return. The full \
personal life, according to Rosny, is the life which
transcends mere personal wants and interests, or, rather,^/
whose wants and interests are those also of others.
The little story called " Daniel Valgraive," though
by no means among Rosny's most satisfactory work,
is extremely significant of his temper and tendencies.
It is a story of a man's victorious struggle with
creeping death ; death which is stealthily invading all
his nobler part, trying to beat his soul back to the
microscopic central ego, trying to canalise his last
vigour into mere bitterness and envy. Valgraive is
victorious. In him " la fatalite du bien " is irresistible,
and death loses its sting. He lives, to the last moment
of his life, in community with the life universal ; and,
instead of being extinguished before the bodily dis-
solution, his soul survives yet awhile, in the impulse of
happiness it has given, in the love it has left.
Rosny has given us the reverse case in the painful
and over-elaborate study called " Le Termite." Noel
Servaise, destroyed piecemeal by bodily pain, is narrow-
ing closer and closer ; his tortured nerves perceive other
folk only as obstacles and enemies, the world as a vague,
16
242 ROSNY AND
dreadful antagonist. Each time that the crisis of his
malady is over, that the bodily agony is staved off for
a time by liberation from the constantly re-forming
calculus, the man becomes capable, to an extent at least,
of liberation from his hideous self. Liberated, if only
in the possibility of selfish love, of sensitiveness to the
kindlier aspects of Nature, he knows joy, which is a
union, however humble, with what is not his own
wretched ego. One guesses that he may, if time be
given, become almost capable of love. Or will the
calculus, inexorably gathered together in his flesh, turn
him back in agony on himself? This hero of the
" Termite " is the outcast of Nature, the creature who
should never have been ; the creature born of the selfish-
ness of others, of the shortcomings of our civilisation ;
the creature who deserves all the patience and under-
standing and tenderness of those who, unlike himself,
can have patience and understanding and tenderness.
Of Rosny, further. The pedantic element shows
itself, like nearly all intellectual and moral defects, in a
lack of harmony between the writer and his subject ;
between the observer and the world ; in a disproportion
a separateness between the individual ego and the
myriad multifold egos all round the besetting sin of
the whole French school of novelists, beginning with
Balzac. Hence he lacks that sense of the mystery of
other folk, nay, almost of the mystery of oneself,
which makes the very greatest novelists so respectfully
delicate in their handling of the human soul, even the
cynical Stendhal, the jocular Thackeray ; and which
distinguishes so immeasurably the two greatest novelists
of our age Browning and Tolstoi. Rosny thinks
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 243
that he can penetrate into a human creature as he
could penetrate, with knife and microscope, into a
plant or a dead limb. He does not feel that the
reality of another can never be coextensive, much less
consubstantial, with any formula, or definition, or
description ; since our formulas, definitions, and
descriptions are limited and conditioned by our
individual experience and nature. The world is so
vast, and every human soul so immense (the human
soul which is, who knows ? perhaps the close-packed
soul stuff of a thousand ancestors), that whenever we
paint, nay, see any portion thereof in minutest detail,
we do so at the price of a monstrously disproportionate
picture or vision ; the flea's proboscis becomes that of
an elephant, while the table or chair hard by becomes,
by comparison, mere toy-box furniture. And Rosny,
with unsuspecting awkwardness, calmly dismembering
human life, does often present us with such microscope
nightmares. I am thinking of portions of the other-
wise splendid a Indomptee," but particularly of that
gruesome book " Le Termite." I do not blame him
in the, least for deliberately analysing physical pain and
its moral miseries. Such an analysis is, of course,
atrociously painful to the reader ; but is it not fair that
we should be pained sometimes, in order to learn what
pain others are feeling ? And is it not as well that we
should realise the wretched ruin of so many lives,
considering that we have it in our power very often
similarly to ruin the life of our neighbours, our children,
and of the unborn generations ? The moral object is
surely legitimate. What I object to in Rosny and,
for the matter of that, in nearly all novelists of the
244 ROSNY AND
French analytic school is that the psychological method
is faulty. All these accounts of pain, greater or less,
lack one of pain's most essential features its evanes-
cence ; as, for the matter of that, all analysis of life
lacks life's chief characteristic change, instability.
Rosny's hero probably did not realise the agonies of
his crisis, once those agonies were over, in anything
like the way in which we are made to realise them ;
for there is in literature a power of fixing impression,
making it uniform and uniformly continuous, causing,
as it were, the water which would run off in its natural
channels to return for ever and ever by the artificial
mechanism of a fountain. And this, the chief fault of
Rosny, is the fault, of course, of less sincere and less
genial writers, like Huysmans. In the case of Rosny's
Noel Servaise, life, however honeycombed by suffering,
was not composed solely thereof ; however huge a
minute, nay, a second, of pain, the painless minutes must
take up a certain room ; they are not eliminated by life,
as they are eliminated by literary craft. If the novelist
is to magnify, and all literature must magnify, it is not
fair to magnify only one kind of life's many tissues.
But the analytical Frenchman and, alas ! this great
and delightful Rosny, worse almost than any screw
and screw at their lenses, magnify till the image en-
larges to bursting, and begins, luckily for the operator,
to swim in mist.
This tendency is what makes much of the odiousness
of French novelists' treatment of female characters ;
they are not all cads, they are often merely literary
pedants. Certainly, of all modern Frenchmen, Rosny is
the most respectful, the most tender and serious in his
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 245
attitude to women. The young doctoress, Nell Horn,
above all, Eve, in the " Bilateral," are among the finest
and most charming women in all fiction. They are
charming, they are such as we see them, as a result of
Rosny's painting ; but the process of painting, so long
as it goes on, is often such as one can barely watch
without anger. Take that Eve in the " Bilateral."
Rosny gives us the material, he puts into our posses-
sion the sympathetic spell which makes her live, live
with extraordinary fulness and charm of life ; but at
the same time he gives an account of her which is false,
and which we banish at once into the limbo of the un-
lifelike. This charming young girl, under all her
emancipated ideas, is but a new-born woman awaking
to her woman's cravings for love and motherhood ;
overcome sometimes by joy, sometimes by sadness, she
knows not why, wondering vaguely she knows not at
what. But she cannot, for all her familiarity with
free-spoken men and pseudo-scientific books, she can-
not, in her young entireness, be conscious of the mean-
ing of it all ; she cannot, however well she knows the
names, realise, in her Jack of all experience of life and
change, understand such things as phases and crises*
Now Rosny, perpetually harping on such matters,
perpetually offering us his explanation of Eve's feel-
ings, turns the poor girl into a sort of walking
physiologico-psychologic demonstration ; we see not)
merely what the girl sees of herself, but her poor,
innermost nature laid bare by the kind but intolerably
blundering hands of a pedant. In his immortal
Natacha, Tolstoi has given us the case of a girl
situated much like Eve ; she also is traversing a
246 ROSNY AND
crisis. We know it, but she does not ; because Tolstoi
respectfully refrains from telling us in the girl's presence
the secrets which she cannot yet comprehend. For
surely there is one thing which youth cannot know,
which only experience can teach : that youth is a period
of stress, that experience will come, that life is but
phase, change, and the manifestation of hidden forces.
There is, perhaps, a dash of pedantry there is
certainly the usual French seeking after literary
novelty, apart from real interest, in Rosny's strange
descriptions of nature. One is worried at familiar
sights being described in obscure terms of chemistry
or botany ; one resents, in this case also, quite simple
things, seen every day with the corner of the eye,
being elaborated into marvellous enigmatic visions,
which strain one's sight and intelligence. But for all
this Rosny does give one, like no other modern,
impressions of the splendour and mystery mingled in
everyday things. Nay, the very unintelligibility of the
phraseology of those names of acids and minerals and
astronomic and botanic details reproduce some of the
unintelligible impressions which make the wonderfulness
of certain skies, certain night effects, tangles of vegeta-
tion, weirdnesses of town rubbish and factory outlines,
Aladdin's palaces, built up we know not of what,
labyrinths and galaxies composed of unguessable
material. In this, as in his sympathy for profoundly
intuitive natures, nay, with the life of dumb creatures,
of plants, and of seas and skies, Rosny seems to free
us from the weariness of those tiresome, workaday
formulas by which mankind, as it has reduced the
material world into a kind of Army and Navy Stores
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 247
for its feeding and housing, has reduced its own
thoughts and feelings to little better than a catalogue
of the world's qualities as seen by the haberdasher
and the caterer ; nothing left for other creatures, for
the germs which live invisible in everything, or for
the angels who guide the storms and the stars.
Ill
Of course, Balzac was not the root of what I should
call the psychological and literary nuisance in the
novel : the looking at life as a subject for analysis and
description, instead of analysing and describing such
parts of life as had been found interesting or fascinat-
ing in the process of living.
It was not his example which made the modern
French novel go the way it has gone ; his example
would never have affected the Russians or the
English. If Balzac has unduly influenced his country-
men, and influenced them by his faults even more
than by his great qualities, it is surely because
those faults were inherent in the French literary type
of our century faults due to the very strength of
literary energy, the very richness of intellectual per-
ception by which modern France has differed from its
more practical, more sentimental, and, at all events,
duller and more tongue-tied neighbours.
Balzac's method for it became a method, and one
universally imitated consisted in writing about human
beings, not according to the manner in which they, or
the image of them, had affected him ; but according
248 ROSNY AND
to the manner in which they would present a most
definite diagram, at best a most picturesque outline.
He describes not characters with one exaggerated
peculiarity, but one exaggerated, isolated peculiarity
with a human person, a vague puppet, sometimes
barely more than a name and a physical presentment
Hulot, Grandet, Pons, Rastignac attached to it. As
the medical boarder in the Pension Vauquer, n&e de
Conflan, says of him, the Pere Goriot is nothing but
the Bump of Philoprogenitiveness. The rest of the
brain, one might say, has been cut away. Now the
real way in which the excessive preponderance of one
portion of a character manifests itself is by subordinat-
ing, silencing, pushing into a corner, sending to sleep
the other portion ; but, for all this to happen, those
other portions must exist. To begin with, every
human being possesses, besides his more individual
character, a sort of average character as human being,
inherited from his ancestors and acquired from his
neighbours ; the psychological life of the one-sided
person, of the monomaniac, consists in the gradual
victory over this character (and over everything in
himself to which it is attached), or in the gradual
enslaving thereof in the service of that one faculty.
Balzac's fault is to disregard or hide this uneven battle
within the individual, and substitute for it the mere
outer fight with other folk and with circumstances ;
hence, instead of the life of a human being, we get a
sociological diagram of forces and resistances. In
order to realise this fact, one should compare Balzac
with another novelist, but belonging to the human,
non-analytic, non-literary sort, namely Thackeray, in his
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 249
treatment of one-sided character. Take Colonel New-
come. He, too, might have been described as a bosse de
la faternite rather than a whole human being. But in
him paternal fondness is connected with a half dozen
cognate qualities. It goes over into tenderness towards
all young and weak creatures, it borders on high
chivalry ; for qualities produce one another. But if
Thackeray seem insufficiently typical in his work, and
Colonel Newcome seem insufficiently paternal, take
Shakespeare, and place by the side of Goriot no less
a father thai King Lear. For him paternal infatuation
arises not, as with Colonel Newcome, from readiness
to love, but from a mania for being loved ; and this
strange selfishness mixed with generosity goes over into
jealousy, graspiness, injustice, and that tragic alterna-
tion of rage and weakness, of proud raillery and childish
complaint. But Pere Goriot's paternal infatuation
arises from nothing, and is connected with nothing ;
it is inorganic, at best utterly maniacal in truth it is
a literary diagram. How unlike anything living must
needs be to a diagram, we can all of us study in
observing one of the most one-sided, nay, one of
the most maniacal varieties of human being the vain
man. In him we can watch how, where the vanity
does not interfere, qualities of a very different kind
can be very active intellectual interest, kindliness,
honesty, the very qualities which take a man most
out of himself, the most incompatible with vanity ;
or else we can watch, as in Meredith's " Egoist," how
vanity, instead of obliterating, will merely appropriate
and enslave such qualities as cksh with it, until a man's
genuine impulses, his sincerest thoughts and actions
250 ROSNY AND
change their nature, find a new basis, and become mere
lies.
Different as are, for instance, Flaubert and Zola,
they belong, nevertheless, to the same school as Balzac,
if we compare them with Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, or even
Bjornsen. Flaubert, with his effects produced by
extreme elimination of detail, and Zola, so brimful
and often overwhelming, are yet alike in the funda-
mental character of writers whose knowledge proceeds
from deliberate study, and whose interest in the subject
is due to its being a subject, and a good one. One
has, not unfrequently, the feeling that these great men
have sat down in front of the portion of life they have
undertaken to treat, after casting about for months
and weeks for something to write about, and one
remembers the astonishing lamentations of certain con-
temporary novelists interviewed by M. Huret, making
enumerations of every recondite unspeakableness with
the melancholy comment, "on a deja fait cela on a
meme fait cela." About all writers of this school,
major and minor, gods or mice, it is clear to the reader
that there is no reason for supposing them to have any-
thing to do with life in any form, to be alive, or to
have been alive. Were it not that we know, from
different sources, that novels are written by men, and
that we run easily to anthropomorphism in all matters,
we might quite well put down " Le Pere Goriot," " La
Cousine Bette," " Mme. Bovary," " L'Assommoir,"
and all the novels of MM. de Goncourt and of M.
Huysmans to the agency of some more or less divine
Chance in the manner of Lucretius, or to some wonder-
ful literary machine, phonograph and camera combined
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 251
with some contriving and superposing mechanism for
the automatic production of types.
Opposite to this school of analytical, literary, profes-
sional novelists like Balzac, there exists, in sharpest
contrast, the school of sympathising, personal, in a way
unprofessional novelists, whose greatest representative
is Tolstoi ; and which, with no idea of derivation, but
merely to give one of the most marvellous literary
personalities his due, I should call the school of
Stendhal.
The novel of this school, which has representatives
in all countries for the greatest novelists, from the
author of " Manon Lescaut " to the author of " Vanity
Fair," all belong to it the novel of this school seems
not written, but lived. It affects us as being so much
of life which the author has gone through, and he
seems to us to be lurking always in one nay, some-
times in all of the characters : that life has indeed
been lived by the author, not in the body, most likely,
but in the spirit ; he has really been one of those
characters in the fervour of sympathetic creation, for
there is nothing here which has been observed, con-
structed, invented it has been a reality, an inevitable
sequence in the imaginative experience of the writer.
What such novelists tell us has the weight of the words
of an eyewitness ; it has even, frequently, increasing
that weight, an eyewitness's vagueness and unaccount-
ableness. For the man in whose presence (or in whose
soul) certain things have actually taken place, does not
know about them with the same sort of clearness as
the man who has followed a deliberate experiment, or
reconstructed the how things must have happened by a
252 ROSNY AND
process of circumstantial logic. And there is in life
life spontaneous, flowing, complete, not life artificially
arranged by experiment an inevitable share of vague-
ness, due to the fact that all life is, after all, the per-
ception thereof by one creature at one moment, full
therefore of gaps and lapses. Neither is there in life
any unity of point of view, hence no stable system of
outlines or of colouring. Nothing is less like life, that
is to say, like our experience, than that marvellous
solidity, all-roundness, fulness, and almost distressing
projection of the analytic school of novel. It is quite
possible contrary to the opinion of impressionists
that a painted picture full of extreme detail should
give us a satisfactory sense of realisation ; because,
like the picture itself, the real objects are in most
cases stationary, allowing us to take in their detail,
deliberately to sit and stare. But life does not allow
you to sit and stare ; at least, it is not the same
portion of life which we are sitting in front of and
staring at. It is only by photographing the single
instances, and then patching them together by a sort
of reversed analysis ; it is only by thinking it out that
we ever know very clearly how anything ever happens.
Clearness is a desideratum, a product of the human
mind, which life itself has no use for. Hence there
is something convincing in the very vagueness with
which, as with a real atmosphere, the unanalytical
novelists frequently envelop events and persons. We
feel Manon Lescaut to have lived and died, because
we feel Des Grieux's love and despair. She is a
phantom, but a real one, as are the lovers and sweet-
hearts unseen by us, but not unfelt, of our friends.
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 253
We understand Mme. Bovary, Cousine Bette, Rougon,
Numa Roumestan, or the hero of " En Route " ; and
in a certain measure we do not understand, we cannot
account for all their doings, Natacha, Levine, the little
heroine of Bjornsen's u In God's Ways," or Stendhal's
Duchess, or Julien Sorel ; but, unless we are singularly
presumptuous and deluded, neither do we understand
with any such fearful certainty our nearest and dearest,
nay, ourselves.
As it is with the personages, so it is, to a certain
extent, with the places. We know that town in
Norway, that house at Moscow, with the mixture of
clearness and vagueness of real places in our memory.
Above all, with a very definite and special emotion ;
whereas the places in Balzac, Zola, and even in
Flaubert (think of Flaubert's Carthage !) are such as
we know very distinctly at the moment of looking
at them, even as we know pictures, but with no mood
attaching to them, and quite without that indefinable
familiarity which tells us, however vaguely, about the
omitted parts : where that road leads to, and what there
is on the other side of that block of houses or group
of trees ; a sort of halo of knowledge, which means
that, in body or in spirit, we have been in those
places.
IV
There is another, and a far graver objection to be
made against this, that I have called the professional or
literary school of novel : it is morally arid in its
perpetual pessimism ; it refuses the reader what, after
254 ROSNY AND
all, we claim from literature, as from other art, more
imperiously than we claim skill, imagination, know-
ledge, or even the sense of life, and that is the sense
that life is good. We are made neither more happy nor
more fit for happiness by the perpetual insistence on
the ugly side of things, the perpetual assurance of this
hopelessness. Moreover, if we are at all normally
constituted, with the normal experience of good and
evil, we recognise not merely that such a view of life
is false, but also, when it becomes universal in a writer
or a school of writers, that it is not at all how express
it ? well, not at all noble. For such a pessimistic
attitude the attitude of Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourts,
Maupassant, let alone all the little masters renders the
attainment of artistic impressiveness quite infinitely
easier. Nay, it becomes an almost mechanical, auto-
matic method for awakening the kind of emotion
which is, after all, the crudest of any the black mood.
It is significant that whereas Shakespeare alternates
serenity with gloom, sadness with joy, expressing life,
and various aspects in words sometimes heroically gay,
sometimes bitter and hopeless, the lesser men, Marston,
Webster, Tourneur or Ford, know only horrors and
misery, and only a philosophy of pessimistic vanity or
stoical indifference. For an unmixed kind of emotion
is easier to deal with than any kind of alternation,
a harmony is easier to construct out of few elements
than many ; and of all kinds of emotions the gloomy is
the easiest to play upon ; an artistic element more easy
to manage. It takes the highest genius to mingle and
harmonise the sad and the joyous, the easily lived
and the painfully felt, as in Tolstoi's marvellous
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 255
symphonies. And it is even more difficult im-
possible for any length of time to play on the
tonalities of unmixed optimism. Hence it is quite
natural that a people so artistically constructed as the
French, a school of writers so superbly literary, should
succumb to artistic dodgery, to school methods and
royal roads ; the novel, like a certain sort of painting,
has become in France so organised as to be virtually
a la portee de tous. Now, of such school methods and
literary royal roads, pessimism is one of the most
obvious. It is a method and a mannerism.
Pessimism gives, moreover, a false sense of superi-
ority both to the writer and the reader. The reader
feels, in dealing with imaginary miseries as matters
of course, that he is endowed with fortitude and not
to be duped by the powers above ; the writer gains
a Promethean attitude which immensely increases his
sense of power. Nay, the very sensitiveness and
honesty of a man will be warped into such a cheap
view of life. It takes an enormous dose of either to
resist the tendency to be pitiful or sarcastic where there
is nothing to be pitiful or sarcastic about ; one needs
to be very honest to be, so to speak, theoretically, nay
more, rhetorically honest with life's deserts and short-
comings. And the literary instinct, the artistic
traditions of our French contemporaries have apparently
cost them this higher, this thoroughly independent
sensitiveness and honesty towards life.
Of none of them does one feel this so acutely, I
think, as of Maupassant, and in exact proportion to
his admirable literary qualities. Think of a book like
" Bel Ami." Everyone, alas, who has lived at all in
256 ROSNY AND
the world (and particularly in the plain speaking world
of the Latins) has heard stories like those making up
this novel ; and has, many a time, had people pointed
out who would have fitted into it. But all this, as one
has caught whiffs from drains and sinks, with tolerably
breathable air between. Maupassant seems to live
permanently in these stenches, his thoughts, during the
elaboration of a volume of three hundred and fifty
closely printed pages, know nothing else ; and that he
should have enjoyed the writing, and any person the
reading, strikes me as scarcely human. It is by
comparison with a book like " Bel Ami " that one sees
what it is that makes Zola endurable. That very
element which mars the homogeneousness of his work
and takes from its trustworthiness, that Victor Hugo-
like tendency to see things in fantastic lights, to
translate the (alas ! normally) nasty into the super-
humanly terrible. This allows him to write, or rather
enables us to read, books on such subjects as
" Germinal " and even " La Terre." We can survive
(it seems) in madness situations which would kill the
sane. The mind, diverted to feelings of strength and
wonder, can stand the strain of otherwise unendurable
horrors ; and, in the presence of Zola's wicked Earth
sending up villains as it sends up wheat ears, with
monstrous indifferent fertility ; in the presence of that
mine of his which swallows cartloads of human life and
suffering, we can endure sights which would be
unendurable shown in their real proportions, and
shown as the only reality existing.
But Maupassant eliminates with unswerving instinct
everything which is not mean, and groups into a
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 257
perfectly graduated pattern everything which is
thoroughly ignoble. In real life things are only very
occasionally what we call artistic : reality is not always
ironical any more than it is always in agreeable
perspective. Within sight of my house is a hill, with
trees and houses, which is quite perfect as to arrange-
ment ; but all around are other hills, fields, trees,
houses, which seem all scattered any how. Similarly,
I know of several female orphanages which were
founded in a most uninteresting way by quite respect-
able women ; while I know only one orphanage of the
sort which was founded by a lady of exceedingly light
manners. The French novelist, who is an artist
(sometimes much more so than the contemporary
French painter), refuses to speak of the orphanages
founded by the respectable ladies, as the painter would
refuse to paint the hills and houses and trees all
scattered at random ; he spots at once and instantly
notes down the disreputable lady's foundation : that
has a point, makes a pattern, is worth talking about !
What sort of reality, what picture of life, can such men
give us ? They can no more be trusted than the etcher,
who looks out for lines converging into head and tail-
pieces, can be trusted for a faithful statement of ten
miles of road. The artistic sense the artistic sense
applied to literature, which is at once infinitely less and
infinitely more than art the dramatic love for contrast,
irony, and climax are as fatal to truthfulness in the
novel as any three unities and other classical require-
ments were fatal, once upon a time, to truthfulness in
the French play.
But, you will say, why ask for truthfulness ? why
258 ROSNY AND
not be satisfied with what these men really give, which
is arfy and not ask them for what they only say they
give, which is reality ? Have we not been seeing that
real reality, objective or subjective, is unattainable in
the novel ; that its creations are, when most scientific,
mere bird-women and men-horses, chimaeras, fantastic
monsters ?
True. But there is, in this curious anomalous art of
literature, an artistic quality without complete analogy
in painting, or sculpture, or music, and which tran-
scends all external convergence, pattern, climax, and
the rest. And there is within the power of the
novelist a kind of reality, a quality which affects us
as truthfulness, which far surpasses in efficacy the
utmost fidelity to single cases, or the highest clearness
of typical diagrams. What this quality consists in, on
what it depends, is one of the many mysteries of the
mysterious province of aesthetics, and even to exemplify
it would require as many notes as these, and about a
totally different set of writers. We should have, above
all, to speak of those two most different men, who are
yet alike in their special supremacy, Stendhal and
Tolstoi .... But the mere mention of their names will
suggest to the reader at least, as a matter of feeling
what is this quality in the novel which transcends all
minor artistic qualities, and what is this un-real
truthfulness, by which the greatest novelists subdue
our souls more efficaciously than by any detail or any
diagram ! The only name I can find for it is sympathy,
or passionate personal interest. Stendhal, Thackeray,
Tolstoi, even our golden but clay-footed idol, Mere-
dith, care for what they write about more than for
THE FRENCH ANALYTICAL NOVEL 259
their own writing. They are, whether cosmopolitan
cynics, bourgeois moralists, religious reformers, or
harum-scarum chivalrous romanticists, all alike in
their passionate preference for their Duchesses, their
Sorels, their Becky Sharps, and their Colonel New-
comes ; their Pierres, Levines, Annas, and Natachas ;
their Beauchamps and Diana Warwicks. And this
most potent aesthetic magic acting within acts on their
reader. He is convinced, enthralled ; he is satisfied that
all this must be real, since he is made to love or hate it.
These thoughts on realism, satisfactory and un-
satisfactory, have naturally grouped themselves in my
mind, around the work of J. H. Rosny, because, among
French novelists, he is, perhaps, the most important,
since Stendhal, who has cared for his subject more
than for his treatment. 1
1 The above was written more than ten years before the appear-
ance of the incomparable " Jean-Christophe" of M. Remain
Holland.
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF
WOMEN
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF
WOMEN
" '"pHESE lovely ladies and the like of them, are the
very head and front of mischief ; first because
. . . they have it in their power to do whatever they
like with men and things, and yet do so little with
either ; and, secondly, because, by very reason of their
beauty and virtue, they have become the excuse for
all the iniquity of our days ; it seems so impossible
that the social order which produces such creatures
should be a wrong one." RUSKIN, Fors Clamgera^
Letter 80.
I
In writing this preface for a translation of Mrs.
Stetson's " Women and Economics," and in recom-
mending the original to my Anglo-Saxon readers, I
am accomplishing the duty of a convert. I believe
that " Women and Economics " ought to open
the eyes, and, I think, also the hearts, of other
readers, because it has opened my own, to the real
importance of what is known as the Woman
Question.
263
264 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
I must begin by confessing that the question which
goes by that name had never attracted my attention,
or, rather, that I had on every occasion evaded and
avoided it. Not in the least, however, on account
of any ridicule which may attach to it. There is,
thank goodness, a spice of absurdity in every person,
and in every thing, we care for in this world ; and the
dear little old lady in Henry James's " Bostonians,"
who pathetically exclaims : " And would you condemn
us to remain mere lovely baubles ? " is the very
creature to endear a cause : she is the Brother Juniper,
so to speak, of the Woman Question.
My vague avoidance of the movement was not even
due to the perception of some of the less enjoyable
peculiarities of its devotees. For a very small know-
ledge of mankind, and a very slight degree of historical
culture, suffice to teach one that it is not the well-
balanced, the lucid, the sympathisingly indulgent or
the especially gracious and graceful among human
beings who are employed by Providence for the attack
and possible destruction of long-organised social evils :
nay, that martyrdom on behalf of any new cause begins,
one may say, by the constitution of the martyr as an
inevitable eccentric, unconscious of the diffidence, the
scepticism, the sympathy, the sense of fitness and
measure which check, divert, or hamper normal human
beings. The early saints, judging by St. Augustine's
" Confessions " and the " Legenda Aurea" must have
been appalling prigs, indifferent to family affections,
higher literature, hygiene, and rational cookery ; while
the Hebrew Prophets were quite devoid of their
historian's M. Kenan's intelligent indulgence for
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 265
the administrative passion of, say, Nebuchadnezzar,
or the touching pleasure in toilettes of Queen Jezebel.
And, as to Socialists, who may be considered as the
modern representatives of such virtuous tactlessness,
we have all seen something of them, and of their well-
meant efforts to clash with our habits of dress and
manners, and to ruffle our feelings on trifling occasions.
So that it does not require the generalising genius of
Dr. Nordau, clapping Tolstoi and Ibsen into his
specimen-box of " Degenerates," to tell us that the
Woman Question, Feminism, is likely to be taken up
by those disconnected and disjointed personalities who
are attracted by every other kind of thing in ism ;
whose power consists a little in their very inferiority ;
and whose abnormal and often morbid " pleasure in
saying ' No ' " (as Nietzsche puts it) is, after all, alas !
alas ! so very necessary in this world of quite normally
stupid and normally selfish and normally virtuous
" pleasure in saying ' Yes.' "...
All these things I knew, of course, and I do not
really think it was any of them which made me thus
indifferent, and perhaps even a little hostile, towards
that Woman Question. Indeed, when I seek in the
depths of my consciousness, I think the real mischief
lay in that word " Woman." For while that movement
was, of course, intended to break down the barriers
legal, professional, educational and social which still
exist between the sexes, the inevitable pitting of one of
these sexes against the other, the inevitable harping on
what can or cannot, or must or must not be done, said or
thought by women, because they are not men (women !
women ! everlastingly women !), produced a special
266 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
feeling, pervading, overpowering, unendurable (like
that of visiting a harem or a nunnery), due to that
perpetual obtrusion of the one fact of sex, while the
other fact of human nature, the universal, chaste fact
represented by the word Homo as distinguished from
mere Vir and Femina, seemed for the moment lost
sight of.
And somehow if one is worth one's salt, if one
feels normal kinship not only with the talking and
(occasionally) thinking creatures around one, but also
with animals, plants, earth, skies, waters, and all things
past and present ; if one be able, as every decent
specimen of genus Homo must, to join in Francis of
Assisi's " Laudes omnium creaturarum " why, then,
one feels a little bored, a little outraged, nay, even
sickened, by this everlasting question of sex qualifica-
tions and sex disqualifications ; and (very unjustly,
but perhaps therefore very naturally) one gets to shrink
from that particular question exactly because it is the
Woman Question.
Very unjustly. Let me repeat that ; and remind
the reader that what I am describing is my still
unregenerate state.
II
My conversion to the importance of the Woman
Question was, as I have said, the work of " Women
and Economics " ; and I was thus converted by Mrs.
Stetson's unpretending little book, because in it the
rights and wrongs of Femina, das Weib^ were not
merely opposed to the rights and wrongs of Vir, der
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 267
Mann, but subordinated to those of what is, after all,
a bigger item of creation : Homo, der Mensch.
There was nothing new in connecting the Woman
Question with Economics. If I may judge by myself,
the majority of people who know anything of Political
Economy must be accustomed to regard such questions
as marriage, divorce, prostitution, the legal position of
mothers and fathers, and many of the peculiarities of
law and custom with respect to the sexes, as hinging
upon the facts of wealth production and distribution,
tenure of soil, heredity and division of property ; upon
the whole immense question of the individual's share
in the products of nature, of invention and of industry.
Indeed, I much suspect that, as in my case, many
thinking persons shelve the question of women's
abilities and disabilities exactly because it seems to
depend almost completely upon the far more important
question of the redistribution of wealth ; to demand
only a minor act of social justice and social practicality
(bringing much waste energy under cultivation)
inevitably involved in the greater act of social
justice and social practicality which, through revolu-
tion or evolution, must needs take place some day
or other.
The originality, the scientific soundness and moral
efficacy of " Women and Economics," appear to me
to lie in its partially reversing this fact ; and in its
substituting a moral and psychological reason for the
rather miraculous mechanicalness which mars every
form of the " historical materialism " of the Marxian
school. In other words, this book shows that the
present condition of women their state of dependence,
268 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
tutelage, and semi-idleness ; their sequestration from
the discipline of competition and social selection, in
fact their economic parasitism is in itself a most
important factor in the wrongness of all our economic
arrangements, in the insufficient production, the waste-
ful expenditure, the degrading mal-distribution of
wealth.
This main thesis of the book can be summed up as
follows :
In consequence of the immense benefit which a
prolonged stage of infancy, that is to say of intellectual
and moral plasticity, obtained for the human race, all
other advantages tended, during the beginnings of
civilisation, and have tended ever since, to be sacrificed
to the rearing of children ; and, first and foremost
there has been sacrificed to it that equality in the
power of obtaining sustenance, and that consequent
mutual independence in such matters, which we find
existing between the male and female half of almost
every other race of animal. The human race, as has
been continually demonstrated (but, perhaps, nowhere
so well as in the studies on the Play Instinct of Pro-
fessor Karl Groos), has obtained much of its superiority
through the partial replacing of instinct by individual
experiment and conscious tradition ; but this has
meant that the human infant has been born into the
world far less mature, far less typically developed, and
far less near to independence than the young sheep
which can walk within half an hour of its birth, let
alone of the chick which can find the right seed almost
as soon as it has broken out of the shell. In pro-
portion as the human adult has become rich in
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 269
individual powers, has the human infant required a
longer and longer period of tutelage ; with the result
of requiring of the human mother a longer and longer
devotion of her strength, her mind, and, even more,
of her time, to the rearing of offspring. The
difference between the female of genus homo and the
female of other genera has therefore originated not in
a longer period of gestation (for that of the horse, for
instance, is nearly one-third longer), but in a longer
period of education of the young. The different
position of the female whom we call Woman is due to
a difference not in physiological but in sociological
functions.
For the longer duration of human infancy, and,
even more, the greater helplessness, the greater
educability of the human infant, has made it difficult,
and in some cases impossible, for the human mother to
find food for herself, let alone food for her growing and
already weaned child. Hence, the continuance of the
human race has called forth a personage who (save
among birds, so oddly like human beings in many
things) can scarcely be said to exist among animals :
the Father. The Father, as distinguished from the mere
begetter ; the pseudo-father in many stages of primi-
tive life (without ironical references to later stages of
existence !), the uncle, the maternal male relative, the
head of the tribe, the patriarch : the man who provides
food for the child, and food for the woman who rears
it ; the man who procures, by industry, or violence,
a home (cave, cabin, tent, or house) in which the
woman remains with the children, while he himself
goes forth to hunt, to tend flocks, to make captives,
270 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
to till the ground, to buy and sell ; and in modern
times to do those hundred curious things which, pro-
ducing no tangible product, come under the heading
of "making money."
This all seems very simple ; but the consequences
are complex. The female homo, thus left to rear the
children (and do what else she can), becomes, what
the female of other animals is not, or only (in birds
and certain lower creatures) for a very short time, the
dependent of the male homo. The home which she
inhabits is his home, the food she eats is his food, the
children she rears become, whether father or only
patriarch, his children ; and, by a natural devolution,
she herself, the woman thus dependent upon his
activity and thus appropriated to his children's service,
becomes part and parcel of the home, of the goods,
of the children ; becomes appropriated to the nursing,
the cooking, the clothing, the keeping in repair ;
becomes, thus amalgamated with the man's property,
a piece of property herself, body and soul, a slave
(often originally a captive, stolen or bought), and what
every slave naturally is, a chattel. By this process,
therefore, we have obtained a primitive human group,
differing most essentially from the group composed
by the male and female of other genera : the man and
the woman, vir ac femina, do not stand opposite one
another, he a little taller, she a little rounder, like
Adam and Eve on the panels of Memling or Kranach ;
but in a quite asymmetrical relation : a big man, as in
certain archaic statues, holding in his hand a little
woman ; a god (if we are poetical, and if we face the
advantages of the case) protecting a human creature ;
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 271
or (if we are cynical, and look to the disadvantages)
a human being playing with a doll.
Ill
In his remarkable book, " Division du Travail
Social" M. Emile Durkheim writes as follows :
" The female of those remotest ages was by no
means the feeble being that she has gradually become
as a result of increasing morality. Prehistoric bones
make it quite plain to us that, in those earliest times,
there was much less difference of strength than we find
nowadays between the two sexes. And even now, we
find that during childhood the skeletons of the male
and female present but little difference ; the character-
istics being, on the whole, rather feminine. If, there-
fore, we admit that the growth of the individual
reproduces, so to speak, on a small scale, the develop-
ment of the species, then we may fairly conjecture that
the same similarity between the sexes existed at the
beginning of human evolution, and we may regard the
feminine form as an approximation to that original
single type of humanity, from which the masculine
variety has gradually become differentiated. 1
1 Readers who wish to find this question of the original pre-
dominance of the female discussed with more liberality of view
than in the above quotation, should read (and for other reasons
also) Mr. Lester Ward's extremely suggestive volume on " Pure
Sociology." For the biological facts and theories consult Geddes
and Thomson, "The Evolution of Sex." Neither of these books
has any practical bias.
272 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
" As regards the highest organ of physical and
psychical life, it has been shown by Dr. Lebon, with
mathematical precision, that the brain of both sexes
must have originally presented just such a degree of
similarity. The comparison of a large number of
skulls, selected among the most different races and
civilisations, has led him to the following conclusion :
that, if we compare individuals of the same age, of the
same stature and weight, the brain of the male will be
found considerably bulkier than that of the female ;
and that this inequality increases regularly with the
increase of civilisation ; in such a way that the brain
and, therefore, the mind of the woman is constantly
tending to differ, to her disadvantage, from the brain
and the mind of the man. For instance, the difference
found to exist between the average skulls of modern
Parisians of the two sexes is almost double the differ-
ence which exists between the male and female skulls
of the ancient Egyptians. A German anthropologist,
Bischoff, has come to the same conclusions on this
subject as Dr. Lebon. This anatomical resemblance is
accompanied by similarity of function. For, in those
early civilisations, the feminine functions are not
sharply marked off from the masculine ones ; on the
contrary, the two sexes lead very much the same life.
There are even nowadays a considerable number of
savage races where the woman takes her share in
political life. This has been remarked more especially
among the American Indians, like the Iroquois and
Natchez ; also at Hawaii, where the female shares the
life of the men in a hundred ways ; also in New
Zealand and Samoa. Similarly, it is not rare to find
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 273
the women accompanying their men on warlike expedi-
tions, urging them on in the fray and even taking an
active part in it. In Cuba and in Dahomey also they
are as warlike as the men, and fight by their side.
. . . Now, it is to be observed that, among all these
peoples, the institution of marriage is extremely
rudimentary. . . . We are acquainted with a type of
family, comparatively near us in time, and which
possesses only a germ, so to speak, of marriage : we
allude to the maternal family. ... In this, marriage,
or what goes by the name of marriage, consists in but
few obligations, frequently limited also in duration,
which bind the husband to the wife's relations. . . .
Whereas, the further we advance, and the nearer we
draw to modern times, the more also do we see
marriage take on in complexity. . . . And it is certain
that, at the same time, we find a greater and greater
division of labour as between the two sexes. . . . For
ages past woman has withdrawn from warfare and
public business and concentrated all her activities
within the limits of the individual family. And the
part which she plays has become only more and more
specialised ; so that nowadays, and among civilised
nations, the female leads a life absolutely different from
that of the male. It is as if the two great halves of
the soul's life had become severed, and as if one of the
two sexes had appropriated the emotional functions and
the other the functions of the intellect."
I am very glad to have been able to furnish my
reader, instead of a precis of parts of " Women and
Economics," the above quotation on the subject of that
equality of faculties and community of functions which
18
274 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
may (or may not) have originally existed between the
two halves of genus homo, and upon that subsequent
differentiation which resulted in what M. Durkheim
has aptly and joyfully defined as a " stationary or even
retrograde tendency" in the female skull. For, to such
readers as have reason (perhaps owing to their superior
knowledge) for giving much weight to similar state-
ments about prehistoric civilisations ; and to such
readers also as feel that the fact of having possessed
any particular desideratum in the past constitutes a
better claim to its possession in the future, to both
these classes of readers, it must be much more satis-
factory to be assured of the original and primaeval
importance of womankind by M. Durkheim, who
jubilates at the " stationnement et regression des cranes
ftminins " as a splendid argument in favour of
thorough-going division of labour, than to take it on
the authority of Mrs. Stetson herself, who, of course,
may be suspected of partiality for any hypotheses
redounding to the glory of our earliest mothers.
I am also glad to have devolved, so to speak, the
onusprobandi of the original equality of male and female
skulls, of the primitive similarity of habits, functions,
and powers of the two sexes, and particularly the
responsibility for that uncertain spectre, the " Matri-
arch," on to an adversary of female emancipation ;
because I suspect that, in the undeveloped state of
anthropology and prehistoric sociology, the alleged
facts and cherished hypotheses of one day are sure to be
upset the next. And also because I have a very strong
feeling that the desirability of any particular thing in
the future has nothing to do with its existence or non-
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 275
existence in the past ; and that the question of the
position of women, say, in the year 2000 A.D., will
depend not upon the position of women in the year
well, the year 20,000 before the Deluge but upon the
condition of the world at large, the intellectual, moral,
particularly economical state of men and women, in
our own times. For to a believer in the principle
of evolution, the nature, the fate, of an organ, a
faculty, an institution, an art, a class or a sex, are a
matter of adaptation to the condition of everything
else which can affect it ; the specialisation even that
" division of labour " which M. Durkheim places
(instead of poor old happiness, long since dethroned)
as the aim of all human effort the social organisation
we are all so proud of (marriage laws, private property,
inheritance, army, bureaucracy, public instruction),
have had, after all, exceedingly humble origins. Man
himself I will not say Homo Himself or Herself has
developed out of some very simple bit of slime ; so why
should the woman of the future require to prove so
many quarterings, to demonstrate that she is of decayed
nobility, to point to genealogical trees with a Matriarch
at their root ?
IV
Thus, in my opinion, Mrs. Stetson's truly valuable
achievement consists in showing that the exclusion of
women from the world's activity and their subordina-
tion to men, have ceased to be either beneficial or
inevitable, however beneficial and inevitable they may
have been towards securing the lengthened infancy and
276 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
greater educability of human beings, and also the
storage and increase of inventions and laws, thanks to
a rigidly organised home. Mrs. Stetson has satis-
factorily demonstrated (to me at least) that one
particular automatic arrangement of social evolution
has done its work : like slavery, like serfage, like
feudalism, like monasticism, like centralisation (accord-
ing to individualists), like capitalism (according to
socialists), the subordination of women has served its
purpose and now become an impediment to progress ;
an impediment which progress is therefore bound
to sweep away. The childhood, the greater teach-
ableness of genus homo can now no longer be en-
dangered ; and a large proportion of human education
has, since thousands of years, passed from the care of
the mother to that of the community as a whole, or of
portions guilds, priesthoods, universities, and so forth
of the community ; while, on the other hand, the
inventions and traditions have been stored, multiplied,
and diffused far beyond the powers of family education.
Civilisation is being impoverished by the paying off of
a debt. It is time that debt should be cancelled.
The benefit has long been secured beyond all possi-
bility of loss ; but the price is still being paid. Now
what is this price ? M. Durkheim and the sociologists
of whom he is typical, have answered with complacent
simplicity : " The stagnation and regression of the
Female Mind." Less easily pleased than these learned
theorists, Mrs. Stetson has set about analysing the
facts covered by their satisfactory little sentence, and
demonstrating in detail what the " Stagnation and
Regression of the Female Mind " implies. She has
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 277
shown that it means the removal of womankind from
the field of action and reaction called the universe at
large to the field of action and reaction called " the
family circle " ; the substitution, as a factor of adapta-
tion and selection, of the preference of the husband
or possible husband for the preferences, so to speak,
of the whole of creation. In other words, the
sequestration of the capacities of one half of the human
race, and their enclosure inside the habits and powers
of the other half of the human race. Briefly, a condi-
tion in which the man plays the part of the animal who
moves and feeds freely on the earth's surface ; and the
woman the part of the parasitic creature who lives inside
that animal's tissues. The comparison is exact; but
we ought not to push the analogy to the point of con-
sidering the parasitism of womankind as the parasitism
of a destructive microbe. The mischief lies not in the
fact of parasitism (does not M. Durkheim assure us
that all co-operation is a form of parasitism, and the
co-operation of the woman absolutely requires her
parasitism ?), but in the fact that this parasitic life has
developed in the parasite one set of faculties and
atrophied another ; atrophied the faculties which the
woman had (or might have had, even if in lesser
degree) in common with the man, and developed those
which were due to the fact of her being a woman.
Philosophers and others of M. Durkheim's way of
thinking will here interrupt in favour of those
qualities thus developed ; and insist that the dis-
tinctively feminine peculiarities are not a drawback,
but a blessing. Of course some are. But even if we
admit that chastity, maternal unselfishness, tender-
278 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
ness, gentleness, are due to woman's dependent position
(a theory invalidated by the coyness in courtship
and the passion for their young of she-animals, who are
anything but dependent on their males), and if we add
to these solid perfections, aesthetic graces which the
aesthetic Greeks by no means viewed as especially
feminine ; even if we grant for argument's sake that
all the good in women is due to their parasitic status,
this gain must be added to the main advantage resulting
from " feminine stagnation and regression," namely,
the prolongation of childhood and the establishment
of the family group, not deducted from the price at
which it has been bought. And similarly, we must not
let our Durkheim friends and adversaries argue as if
these virtues would vanish off the earth if the position
of women were changed. For, whatever their origin,
they have become sufficiently common to both sexes
for Buddhism and Christianity to have made chastity,
mansuetude and unselfishness the basis of their ethical
system, which means that even if women were to
become spiritual facsimiles of men, they would still be
exhorted to practise these virtues, or else that these
virtues (as Nietzsche contends) are by no means so
essential as M. Durkheim and other respectable
sociologists take for granted. As it happens, Mrs.
Stetson and I think that Buddha and Christ are nearer
the truth in this matter than Nietzsche. But the
qualities whose over-development in women is the evil
result of " stagnation and regression " are not com-
mended by either Buddha or Christ or Nietzsche,
and cannot, without much strain, be considered as
virtues by any one. They are, at least in their un-
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 279
desirable preponderance, a part of the heavy price
which all the above-named virtues and desiderata have
cost humanity in the past, a price which, in our
opinion, humanity may as well stop paying in the
future. Having, as I trust, made this point sufficiently
clear, we may return to Mrs. Stetson's analysis of that
price, and inquire what has the race lost through
feminine regression and stagnation, however indispens-
able this neat pair of abstractions may have proved
in their day.
The first answer which arises in the mind is naturally
a direct one : the work which womankind might have
accomplished during those hundreds and hundreds of
years -tf she had not had a man to work for her ; the
work which might have been given by two halves of
the human race, instead of being given by one only.
But here again we have need for a distinguo, though
not a casuistic one. The woman did do work through-
out that time. Not merely the essential work, direct
and indirect, of rearing a new generation and, in a
measure, keeping up the acquired standard of civilisa-
tion ; but also the work, less essential indeed to the
race, which enabled the man not merely to seek for
food away from the home, but also to be as idle as he
required (or at least as he liked) while in it. The
woman, save among the exceptionally wealthy, has
always been the chief domestic servant ; and even
nowadays she is so, to a greater or lesser extent. The
woman, therefore, has worked ; but and here comes
the subtle distinction on which the whole economic
and sociological part of the subject reposes she has
worked not for the consumption of the world at large,
and subject to the world's selection of good or bad,
useful or useless, work ; but for the consumption of
one man and subject to that one man's preferences.
The woman has worked without thereby developing
those qualities which competition has developed among
male workers. She has not become as efficient a human
being as her brothers ; whatever her individual in-
herited aptitudes (and, as Mrs. Stetson aptly reminds
us, women are, after all, the children of men as well
as of women, and must, therefore, inherit some of
their father's natural powers), she has not been allowed
to develop them in the struggle for life ; but has been
condemned, on the contrary, to atrophy them in forms
of labour which can require only the most common
gifts, since they are required equally of every woman
in every family. Let us repeat this fact : womankind
has not acquired that degree of bodily, mental, and
aesthetic efficiency which can result only from the
competition of such qualities, and from that professional
education which is itself a result of competition. This,
please observe, is not the view only of Mrs. Stetson
and the persons in favour of female emancipation.
M. Durkheim's famous " stagnation and regression "
of the female mind can mean only that women have
become a great deal less competent than they either
originally were, or than the favouring power of natural
selection would have made them.
But this is by no means the whole of the price which
the human race has had to pay for the needful " division
of labour " between its two halves. Negatively, the
position of women has prevented their developing
certain of their possibilities ; positively, it has forced
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 281
them to develop certain other of their possibilities.
It has atrophied the merely human faculties, which they
possess rudimentarily in common with men : it has, on
the other hand, hypertrophied the peculiarity which
distinguished them from man : hypertrophied their
sex. There is one particular sentence in " Women
and Economics " which converted me to the cause of
female emancipation : " Women are over-sexed."
Women over-sexed ! Over-sexed ! There seems
something odious and almost intolerable in that word.
In the fact also but odious and intolerable in a manner
more subtle and more serious than mere scandalised
modesty can ever understand. Let me try to explain
the extreme importance of Mrs. Stetson's thought.
Over-sexed does not mean over-much addicted to sexual
indulgence ; very far from it, for that is the case not
with women, but with men, of whom we do not say
that they are over-sexed. What we mean by over-sexed
is that, while men are a great many things besides
being males soldiers and sailors, tinkers and tailors,
and all the rest of the nursery rhyme women are,
first and foremost, females, and then again females, and
then still more females. It is a case for paraphrasing
Danton ; only that, alas ! there is a considerable differ-
ence between " de faudace^ de Vaudace et encore de
Vaudace " and " de la femme, de la femme, et encore de
la femme" which latter sums up the outspoken views
of the Latin races, and the practice, alas ! of the less
282 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
outspoken but more practical Teutonic ones. And
here we touch the full mischief. That women are
over-sexed means that, instead of depending upon their
intelligence, their strength, endurance, and honesty,
they depend mainly upon their sex ; that they appeal
to men, dominate men through the fact of their sex ;
that (if the foregoing seems an exaggeration) they are
economically supported by men because they are wanted
as wives and mothers of children that is to say,
wanted for their sex. And it means, therefore, by a
fearful irony, that the half of humanity which is con-
stitutionally (and by the bare fact of motherhood)
more chaste, less dominated by sexual impulses and
thoughts, has unconsciously, and all the more inevit-
ably, acquired its power, secured its livelihood, by
making the other half of humanity less chaste, by
appealing through every means, material, aesthetic and
imaginative, sensual or sentimental, to those already
excessive impulses and thoughts of sex. The woman
has appealed to the man, not as other men appeal to
him, as a comrade, a competitor, a fellow-citizen, or
an open enemy of different nationality, creed, or class ;
but as a possible wife, as a female.
This has been a cause of weakness and degradation
to the man ; a " fall," like that of Adam ; and, in
those countries where literature is thoroughly out-
spoken, man, like Adam, has thrown the blame on
Eve, as the instrument of the Devil. I am not alluding
to the Fathers of the Church or to ascetic writers ; but
to the essayists, novelists, and dramatists who have
taken their place in modern life, and who have merely
restated, in language less allegorical, but by no means
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 283
more polite, the legend, or rather, alas ! the sociological
fact, of the death and damnation of man's soul through
woman.
This is, of course, particularly the case among our
Continental neighbours, more outspoken than we upon
all sexual questions, and unhampered by the thought
of Thackeray's Erubescent Young Person. The old,
old story is repeated with slight variations from
Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and from Michelet to
Dumas fils. I think it may be studied best in the
works of this really very humanitarian though exceed-
ingly amusing dramatist.
" Well, then," asks Mme. Leverdet in his " Ami
des Femmes," " what conclusion have you come to as
a result of your studies of womankind ? You needn't
mind telling me, for I am zfemme cT esprit."
" My conclusion," answers De Ryons, the " Ami des
Femmes " " my conclusion is that Woman, such as
she exists at present, is a creature entirely illogical,
inferior, and harmful ' un etre illogique^ subalterne et
malfaisant? '
The admirable preface of the play, and the whole
tenor of the author's works, show that the younger
Dumas is making use of the personage of De Ryons
to speak his own innermost convictions, and that these
are the convictions of a very sincere and very dis-
heartened moralist. As such, they are well worthy of
our attention ; and in the light of Mrs. Stetson's
words, " Women are over-sexed " ought to carry
more weight than a whole cargo of "Woman Question"
pamphlets. In the first place, Dumas fils is rebelling,
with the mixed cynicism and enthusiasm of his moralist's
284 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
nature, against the poetical lie, covering so much ugly
prose, that " Love is enough." Rebelling, that is to
say, against the narrowing of that great word love
down to a single one of its possible meanings ; rebelling
against the notion that the power of loving, of giving
one's self, body and soul, which is necessary for the
efficacy and dignity of all human labour, of all human
relationship, should be expended solely in the passion
of a man for a woman. He sees and he preaches how
small a part sex has a right to play in this big and
complex world, how episodic a part in this wide and
varied human life. And he sees that the danger
and the evil come from what we have learned to call
the over-sexed woman, but which he calls, like every
Frenchman, merely La Femme.
For he is himself that Femme 's first and foremost
victim ; he is hag-ridden by that fearful neo-Latin
abstraction as in an inevitable reality. Similar in this
to so very different a man as Michelet, Dumas de-
scribes La Femme as if she were a single and invariable
type, and, moreover, also the type of a disease. It is
altogether impossible to translate into English the
particular words which either Michelet or Dumas
(I forget which) has coined as expressive of the inti-
mate nature of womankind. But in another place
Michelet defines the object of his love and pity, of
his very honest " Frauendienst" as " la femme, toujours
faible et souvent furieuse" while Dumas has a less
medical and much more amusing formula : " Ces
charmants et terribles petits carnivores pour lesquels
on se deshonore, on se ruine, on se tue, et dont 1'unique
preoccupation, au milieu de ce carnage universel, est
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 285
de s'habiller tantot comme des parapluies et tantot
comme des sonnettes."
Dumas, however, is not inferior to Michelet in
physiological lore, particularly of the kind offered to
the world by men of science rather hungry than
scrupulous. In this preface of " L'Ami des Femmes,"
we have a list of all the possible varieties of La Femme,
with inventories of her peculiarities, from the lines in
her hands to the shape and consistence of her calves,
let alone the smoothness or crispness of hair, the
flatness or sharpness of nose, the skin which is either
always warm or always cold, and those curious olfactory
details which prove that, so far as French writers are
concerned, it is quite untrue that genus homo is inferior
to the canine race in the faculty of scent. Physiologic-
ally and sociologically, Dumas believes unhesitatingly
in the existence of La Femme. And believing in her
as such, he sees in her a horrible danger to man's moral
progress ; he sees her attack him, grapple with him,
destroy him, in her capacity not of human being, of
competitor, of enemy, but in her capacity of woman,
of mistress or wife. Against this danger man must
eternally struggle ; the creature made in God's image
must be saved from this diseased piece of its own
flesh. Man must diminish the power of woman by
diminishing his own sensuality and folly. One feels
all through this laughing cynicism a sort of priestly
rage at the impossibility of finding out some better
mode of continuing the race, at the impossibility of
thoroughly getting rid of this constant disgrace and
danger.
Meanwhile, there women are, and the only thing is
286 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
to be exceedingly wise and consistent and austere with
them ; not to be unjust or angry with their miserable
nature, which is not any fault of theirs. Besides, and
that is the worst of it, these sirens, these man-destroy-
ing monsters, do everything to make themselves
agreeable ; these dangerous wild beasts are, alas !
charming.
VI
All this is, you will answer, mere literary exaggera-
tion. There have been an enormous number of most
useful women in the world, Mrs. Fry, Queen Elizabeth,
Joan of Arc, the mother of the Gracchi ; and, as a
fact, it is these selfsame Latin countries, with all their
filthy talk about La Femme, her ailments and powers,
who bore us Anglo-Saxons almost equally with their
talk about the miraculous virtues of La Mere, who is,
after all, only La Femme . . . well, as the Latins
would put it, when she is too old or too busy to be
La Femme.
Doubtless. And it is not " Women and Economics,"
nor I, its converted expounder, who give so inordinate
an importance to the influence of the over-sexed woman
upon the moral cleanness, the chastity, of mankind ; it
is the very people, like Dumas, who believe, which we
do not, in the universal existence and eternal duration
of La Femme.
Mrs. Stetson has mentioned this aspect of the ques-
tion, and I have followed her example, because it is
certainly an important one. But Mrs. Stetson has
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 287
taught me to see that there is another aspect, more
important by far. The fostering of vices, especially
of vices so harmful to the race as those presided over
by La Femme, is a very grave mischief ; but vices, from
their vicious nature, are more or less exceptional and
tend to die out. And a far more serious evil consists in
the wasting and perverting of virtues, the systematic
misapplication of healthy feelings and energies. Now
the chief point made by the author of " Women and
Economics," the point which, as it converted myself,
ought to convert many others from indifference to the
Woman Question, is concerned with the misapplication
and waste of the productive energies and generous
impulses of men, thanks to the necessity of providing
not only for themselves and their offspring, but for a
woman who has been brought up not as a citizen, but
as a parasite, not as a comrade, but as a servant, or
well, consider the word even in its most sentimental
and honourable sense as a lover. The economic
dependence of women (however inevitable and useful
in the past) has not merely limited the amount of
productive bodily and mental work at the disposal
of the community, but it has very seriously increased
the mal-distribution of that work and of its products
by creating, within the community, a system of units
of virtuous egoism, a network of virtuous rapacity
which has made the supposed organic social whole a
mere gigantic delusion. Virtuous egoism, and virtuous
rapacity ; for /'/ is virtuous on the man's part, husband
or intending husband, to sacrifice himself for another
human being ; and the consciousness of the virtue
enables the sacrifice to be extended, with a clear con-
288 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
science, to the interests of the community at large. A
man has to be first a good father and husband, and
only afterwards, with such honesty as remains over, a
good citizen.
" Such honesty as remains over ! Sacrifice of the
community to the wife and children ! " you exclaim.
u Why, this accusation of yours against the modern
man and the modern woman is far more really dreadful
than any of that French rubbish about La Femme and
her victims ! " Exactly so ; and a great deal more
important, because it is a great deal truer and more
sweeping. The very fact of its truth not being recog-
nised merely goes to prove how extraordinarily our
moral sense in economic matters has been perverted
(or has failed to grow), owing to the fact of the man
having to supply the material wants and satisfy the
caprices not only of himself, but of that " better " or
worse self who sees the world only through his eyes,
and damages the world only through his hands. It is
not a question of cheating or robbing. I am not a
collectivist ; I believe no more in the rights of labour
than in the rights of property ; and I have no reason
for supposing that the author of " Women and
Economics" does so either. People's moral obtuseness
is, on the contrary, proved irrefutably by their always
connecting the idea of dishonesty with such narrow and
crass categories as cheating and robbery cheating and
robbery which can be practised only against individuals,
and on very rare occasions ; besides being severely,
perhaps almost too severely, punished. What cannot
be punished (but is on the contrary praised and
admired, when successful) is exactly the chronic and
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 289
all-pervading preference of the interest of the indi-
vidual as against the interest of the community, the
debasing of the standard of work and the quality of
products. Now, this kind of dishonesty triumphs not
merely in commerce and industry (perhaps almost least
there, where most visible), but in all the professions
which are exercised, and in many cases (bureaucracies
of all kinds, civil and ecclesiastic, and who shall say
how large a portion of pur supposed necessary military
system ?) are kept in useless existence merely because
men have to make a living. " Je nen vois pas la
necessite " : the minister might make that simple answer
to the unmarried parasite, office-seeker, or journalist,
or whatever he was ; but no minister, however cynical,
would dare to question the married man's right nay,
his duty to support his wife and family, or, more
strictly, his wife.
I repeat : more strictly his wife ; because it is, in
reality, not the unborn children, or even the born
children, who decide the " standard of living " ; but
the wife, extremely on the spot, and already accustomed
both to a certain degree of expenditure as a reality,
and, what is quite as important, to a certain expendi-
ture as an ideal in the future. Even the poorest
paupers contrive to rear offspring ; and, by a
melancholy irony, the greater part of the world's most
necessary work happens to be done by people " whose
dear papa was poor," as Stevenson makes the good
little boy express it. No, no, it is not the children
who ask for carriage horses, toilettes, and footmen, or
(in more sordid spheres) for the Ibsenian " home for
happy people," with its one overworked drudge and
19
2 9 o THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
its preoccupation about the husband's dinner. It is
not even the children who clamour for nurse-maids
and governesses and expensive schools : it is the
wife.
VII
" Tout cela a ete fait pour casser" remarks Nana,
after one of her bouts of destruction. Reputable
women do not, usually, while away a dull morning like
Zola's ingenuous courtesan ; they do not set to tearing
and smashing. But the only difference, very often, is
that while the light lady destroyed in a couple of hours
the product of many men's and many months' labour,
the virtuous woman of the well-to-do classes, and of
the classes (more numerous and important) aspiring or
pretending to such well-to-do-ness, alters, discards,
throws away more gradually those objects which are no
longer consonant with " what one has to have," and
whose continued use would therefore suggest the horrid
thought that the family was not really well-off; in
eminently business countries the thought that the
husband's business was not thriving. "It is good for
trade," remark the more responsible among these
ladies, unconsciously echoing a reflexion of that same
Nana. It is good for trade : and so is a town being
burnt down, or swallowed up by an earthquake, or
washed away by a tidal wave. It makes room for
more objects (dresses, crockery, furniture, houses, or
human beings) ; but, meanwhile, you have wasted
those that were already there, and all the labour and
capital they have cost to produce.
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 291
But the spirit of wastefulness is by no means the
worst co-relative among women of the spirit of
rapacity, of ** getting wealth, not making it," as
Mrs. Stetson luminously describes it, which the
economic dependence of the wife develops (as a virtue,
too !) in the husband. An enormous amount of the
hardness in bargaining, the readiness to take advantage,
the willingness to use debasing methods (such as our
modern hypnotising advertisement system), the whole-
sale acceptance of intellectual and moral, if not material,
adulteration of work and its products corresponds in
the husband to what is honoured as thrift, as good man-
agement, in the wife. It is more than probable that
the time wasted, the bad covetousness excited, the futile
ingenuity exercised by the women who crowd round
the windows of our great shops and attend their odious
" sales," are really the result of a perverted possibility
of virtue.
For the man's virtue is to make money ; the woman's
virtue is to make money go a long way. And, between
the two virtues, we are continually told that a business
house cannot give better wages and shorter hours
because it would be " crowded out of the market " ;
and we are told also, by more solemn moralists still,
that nations cannot do without war, lest they lose their
" commercial outlets," or fail to secure those they have
not yet got.
Who can object ? All these people are good
husbands and good wives ; the home is the pivot of
our morality. And the most disheartening thing is,
that all this is true.
292 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
VIII
How do you propose to remedy it? By what arrange-
ments do you expect to make the wife the economic
equal of her husband, the joint citizen of the
community ?
I propose nothing, because I do not know. All I
feel sure of is, that if people only want a change
sufficiently strongly and persistently, that change will
work out its means in one way or another. Which
way ? is a question often unanswerable, because the
practical detail depends upon other practical details
which the continuance of the present state of things is
hiding from us, or even forbidding. And because,
moreover, we are surrounded on all sides by resources
which become available only in connection with other
resources, and only under the synthetic power of desire.
The lids of boiling kettles went on rising all through
Antiquity and the Middle Ages ; but the notion of
using that expansive movement of steam could not
occur until people had already got roads and mariners'
compass and mechanical mills, and until people were
beginning to find stage-coaches and sailing vessels and
wind-mills and water-mills a little unsatisfactory. The
integration of women as direct economic, and therefore
direct moral and civic, factors in the community, is not
a more difficult question than the question of the
integration of the labouring classes into the real life of
nations ; and yet the " social question " will find, some
day, its unexpected solution ; and the " Woman
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 293
Question " will, very likely, have to be settled before
that.
Have to be settled ? I would have said " settle
itself," for that is more like my meaning, if it were not
that I wish to insist that questions do not settle them-
selves satisfactorily, unless we wish and help them to
do so. It is for the sake of such increase of wish for
a change in the economic position of women, or, at
all events, a diminution of the present very strong
prejudice against such a change, that the discussion of
ways and means appears, to me at least, principally
useful. I do not agree with Mrs. Stetson's suggestion
of our eventually living in a kind of hotel, or at least
dining permanently in a restaurant ; but the discussion
of such a plan, odious as it appears to me, is infinitely
useful in accustoming us to the thought that some
arrangement will require to be devised for delivering
women from the necessities of housekeeping. I see
some similar usefulness even in discussions about the
future of women (including the possibility of that
famous " third sex " which haunts the imagination
of the Latin believers in La Femme\ such as I. H.
Rosny has introduced (I scarcely know whether as a
joke or not) into his " Chemin d'Amour." All these
speculations, serious or frivolous, enthusiastic or
cynical, serve to plough up the solid, sterile ground
of our prejudices, and to expose our thoughts and
feelings to the fertilising influences of time and
chance.
Besides this fact, the one thing certain about the
future of women is, surely, that they ought to be given,
by the removal of legal and professional disabilities, a
294 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
chance, if not of becoming different from what they
have been, at all events of showing what they really
are. For one of the paradoxes of this most paradoxi-
cal question is precisely that, with all our literature
about La Femme, and all our violent discussions,
economical, physiological, psychological, sociological
(each deciding according to some hypothesis of his
immature science), as to what women must or must not
be allowed to do, and what women must and must not
succeed or fail in we do not really know what women
are. Women, so to speak, as a natural product, as
distinguished from women as a creation of men ; for
women, hitherto, have been as much a creation of men
as the grafted fruit tree, the milch cow, or the gelding
who spends six hours in pulling a carriage, and the rest
of the twenty-four standing in a stable. Very excellent
things, no doubt, and a great deal more useful and
agreeable to man than a bitter-berried thorn, or a
she-buffalo, or a wild horse of the pampas ; but
scarcely allowing us to judge, by what they at
present are, of what their species must eternally and
necessarily be.
One of the very great uses of Mrs. Stetson's most
useful book is to accustom those who can think, to
think in terms of change, of adaptation, of evolution ;
to free us from the superstition that the present is the
type of the eternal, and that our preferences of to-day
are what decide the fate of the universe. Woman
even letting alone La Femme is, so to speak, the
last scientific survival of the pre-Darwinian belief
in the invariability of types ; Woman^ I may add,
is almost a relic of the philosophy of the Middle
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 295
Ages ; for has not Woman an Essence, something
quite apart from herself, an essence like the " virtus
dormitiva " of opium (not always so tranquil-
lising), an essential quality of being well being a
woman ?
One word more. There is a notion, founded in the
main on the facts of a period of struggle, segrega-
tion of interests, and general uncomfortable transition,
that if women attain legal and economic independence,
if they get to live, bodily and intellectually and socially,
a life more similar, I might say more symmetrical, to
that of men, they will necessarily become let us put it
plainly, less attractive to possible husbands. Of course,
if they have changed, they will no longer realise the
ideal of gracefulness, beauty, and lovableness of the
particular men who like them just as they are ; but
then those particular men will themselves probably no
longer exist. Moreover, there is, undoubtedly, a
certain co-relation between the qualities of the two
sexes, due to the fact, which we are all of us (not only
M. Durkheim with his " division of labour ") inclined
to forget, namely, that the woman is, after all, not
merely the wife (since that noble word must be put to
such mean use) of the man, but also his daughter, his
sister, and his companion ; and that, as such, he
requires her to be not unlike, but like himself. There
is, if we watch for it, a family resemblance, after all,
between the men and women of the same country. I
was very much struck, while at Tangier, by the fact
that the husbands of those veiled and painted Moorish
women were themselves so oddly like women in men's
clothes, those languid Moors lolling in their shops,
296 THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN
with black beards which looked almost as if they had
been gummed on to their delicate white faces : the
ultra-feminine woman belonged, quite naturally, to the
effeminate man. In a similar way, the " masculine "
Englishwoman, fox-hunting, alp-climbing, boating, is
the natural companion of the out-of-door, athletic,
sporting, colonising Englishman ; she has been taught
by her big brothers during their holidays " not to be a
muff"; she has learned to be ashamed of the things
" the boys " would be ashamed of. And, living as I
do equally among Latins and Anglo-Saxons, I have got
to guess that, if the Latins see a " third sex " in a
portion of Anglo-Saxon womankind, the Anglo-Saxons,
on the other hand, have a vague but strong feeling that
a corresponding category might be found among the
Latin males morally emasculated by belief in La Femme.
For if manly be an adjective denoting certain virtues,
and effeminate an adjective denoting certain weaknesses,
you may be sure that the same civilisation, the same
habits and preferences, will produce more of the one
than of the other in all the members of a race, just
because they do belong to the same race. The man
makes the woman, and the woman (as Dumas and the
believers in La Femme are the first to tell us) in her
turn makes the man ; woman in the image of man,
man in the image of woman.
And since I have used the word image^ and have
alluded to the grace and beauty, or the gracelessness
and ugliness, of the women of the future, let me remind
Mrs. Stetson's readers that it is just the most aesthetic,
but also the most athletic and the most intellectual,
people of the past which has left us those statues
THE ECONOMIC PARASITISM OF WOMEN 297
of gods and goddesses in the presence of whose
marvellous vigour and loveliness we are often in
doubt whether to give the name of Apollo, or that
of Athena.
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
"... Through such souls alone
God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. ..."
I
COMING, as it did, when all England was en-
grossed by the tragic practicalities of the War,
the death of Ruskin failed to bring home, as the death
of every great master normally does, the full sense
of what this man has done and can do for our more
than momentary dignity and welfare. The case
being such, it is better to come, as I do, when others
have long since had their say ; since there is now
hope of some attention from those whom I would try
to bring back to a study of Ruskin, by enumerating
some of the possibilities and habits of thought and
feeling which I am myself aware of owing, at least
in definite and imperious form, to the teachings of
this great prophet of righteous happiness. And the
attention I should most desire is that of the younger
of my possible readers and those of most advanced
opinions ; because I am convinced that, far-spreading
301
302 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
as was his influence on his immediate contemporaries,
and large as is the debt (though often second-hand and
unacknowledged) due to him by the following genera-
tion, the very best of Ruskin's efficacy can be expected
in the future : an efficacy more limited, perhaps, but
more genuine and fruitful, unhelped, but unmarred
also, by community of prejudice and error, and
founded solely and safely on similarity of feeling
and of aspiration. For the intuitions of Ruskin's
many-sided genius were recommended to the majority
of his contemporaries a majority larger than could
really assimilate them by the system of symbolical
metaphysics and dogmatic morals in which he set
them with so tedious an ingenuity ; but our modern
habits of thought have reduced this artificial frame-
work to little more than a dreary litter, which wearies
and vexes at every step. It is, therefore, high time
to point out the genuine, though unconscious, organic
system which unifies all that is living and fruitful
in Ruskin's work, the vital synthesis of one of the
richest and noblest and really best balanced of creative
personalities.
More essentially than almost any other illustrious
writer, Ruskin has been a giver of great gifts. He
has opened out to us many and various fields of
aesthetic and imaginative enjoyment, which we can sum
up under a number of rough headings Turner,
Gothic, the Alps, Venice, Mediaeval Painting, Imagina-
tive Topography, certain Botanical and Geological
Interests, and many of the most essential and also
the most recondite qualities of art ; and he has, with
the unerringness of unconscious instinct, united them
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 303
all in a scheme of living, nay, rather of feeling and
facing life, which is the spontaneous outcome of his
character the very flesh and blood of his soul given
us to partake of. Moreover, this attitude towards
life (higher than Goethe's or Carlyle's, more complete
than Wordsworth's or Kenan's, more human than
Spinoza's or Emerson's) has the active, and at the
same time contemplative, satisfactoriness of being in
the widest sense religious ; how truly so those best
can judge who will strip away the mere ecclesiastical
symbolism and theological metaphysics from Ruskin's
genuine and spontaneous thought. Religious, in his
detachment from all material possession or social
vanity, his capacity to take of things only their spiri-
tual use, their ideal fruition ; religious, in his desire
for union with all creatures through gentleness and
sharing ; religious, above all, in his passionate power
of communion with all the universe through love
and wonder. No writer has felt more strongly the
spiritual man's disgust with the narrow utilitarianism
(not Bentham's nor Mill's, truly) which looks upon
the world as so much food and fuel, hides and wool ;
and no writer (not even Tolstoi) has felt greater wrath
at the exploitation of human beings by other human
beings. In the same way that men were sacred in
Ruskin's eyes, so also was the visible and sensible
universe) ; because he felt (expressing his feeling in
the formulas of God's works and God's children)
that both the universe and man should stand in
relationship of spirituality with the spiritual human
being.
304 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
II
This leads me to begin what must needs be a very
rough-and-ready enumeration of Ruskin's many and
many-sided achievements, by protesting against the
common belief, shared in dogmatic moments by
himself, that Ruskin was unable to sympathise with
progress and was hostile to everything modern. His
early education made him, indeed, impervious to many
sides of science, and he had neither time nor disposi-
tion to exchange the theological notions he had
received ready-made for any kind of philosophy. But
the progress which Ruskin sneered at and the modern-
ness which he anathematised were, after all, the very
same which distressed and disgusted so different a
man as Renan progress which considered science
merely as an instrument for commercial production,
or, at best, for sanitary improvement, and modern-
ness which regarded philosophical thought as a
useful solvent of inconvenient spiritualities. We must
remember that " modern " meant for Ruskin, not
our latter-day habits of mind, already full of sympathy
with the past and impatience of the present and
tinged so deeply with reluctance and regret, but the
mental habits, if " mental " they might be called,
of the second and third quarters of the nineteenth
century ; of that period of chaotic materialism, of
hand to mouth ruthless egoism, against which not
only Carlyle came to protest, but Karl Marx also.
The wrath of Ruskin forestalled, despite exaggeration
and dogmatism, a way of feeling which the scientific
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 305
and philosophical development of our day, nay, even
the increased habit of material welfare, will make
more and more usual in the future.
Moreover, I would point out that Ruskin showed
equal abhorrence for what is the very reverse of
modern and of progress, the brutish neglect of the
beautiful work of the past, the disrespect for Nature's
fruitfulness and cleanness resulting from centuries
of sloth and barbarism, such as he saw it in Italy, in
France, and in the Canton Valais. The diseased
newness of Leeds or Manchester and the diseased
decay of Venice or Verona affected him, equally, as
the desecration of the soul's sanctuary. And the
deeper science, the wider practicality, of coming times
will justify the noble priestly wrath he experienced.
But my meaning about this will become clearer, and
Ruskin's meaning also, in the course of enumerating
a few of the interests he brought into life, and then
of summing up his attitude towards life as a whole.
Ill
And to begin with art.
The action of Ruskin has been to break down
all narrow dilettanteism, even of men like Winckle-
mann and Reynolds, and show that art was sprung
from daily life and fit for daily life's consumption.
Without ever belittling (as was the fashion in those
days of Buckle and Taine) that creative genius which
is the flower of one epoch but also the seed of another,
Ruskin insisted on the participation of the humblest
20
306 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
skill and sentiment in all the great work of the past ;
and indicated clearly, even if he did not formulate,
that masterpieces owed the spontaneous appreciation
which they got to the existence of artistic forms and
qualities like their own in the commonest household
objects. Moreover, while teaching his reader to
take interest in the constructive reason of all architec-
ture, Ruskin went far beyond considering this con-
structive reason as the essential of architectural
beauty. The passages in the " Seven Lamps," and
elsewhere, on the evidences of living interest, of
seemingly capricious but in reality instinctively mean-
ingful alteration of proportions and relations of line,
curve, mass and surface, forestall to my mind one
of the most important discoveries which scientific
aesthetics will have some day to register.
And here I would point out that, in order to get
Ruskin's full meaning, we must never separate his
writings from those wonderful illustrations which tell
us all the things words can never say. It is in them
that he has given us the real quality of mediaeval
architecture. Nay, more than that ; he has given us,
in his rendering of balcony and window tracery, of
the pine-cone brickwork of steeples, of the feathery
keenness of lance-like ironwork, not merely the
aesthetic loveliness, but also the imaginative fascina-
tion, of Venice and Verona. Think how even Goethe
saw those towns, and how we see them. Well, the
difference is due, two-thirds, to Ruskin. Similarly
with the Alps. Look at his drawings, in " Modern
Painters," of the Mont Blanc range. These things
make one forevermore feel the uplifting, the bud-
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 307
ding of clustered peaks, the sweep of moraine and
avalanche tracks, the cling of forests, and add to the
reality the charm of his having seen and felt it.
Ruskin gave us one of our greatest pleasures (gave
it consciously and as an artistic factor in life) topo-
graphy ; teaching us to feel the countries growing,
forming, as we move through them ; teaching us to
evoke the haunting presence of scenery, on dreary
days or evenings, over maps ; the very names of
stations growing delightful, and a talk about miles
and levels and surveyors' details becoming fraught with
delight, a poem.
This art of getting the imaginative essence of things,
of combining the mysterious associations, subtle,
microscopic, between lovelinesses of all kinds, between
all evidences of noble life, which Ruskin gave us,
enabled him also to point out the real literary quality
which great paintings (Turner's, for instance, in the
" Loire side " and " St. Gothard ") got by mere
selection of visible items. Nor must we think of
Ruskin's analyses of these pictures as mere ingenious
exercises like those first taught by Lessing, which
distract the mind from real artistic quality. What
Ruskin taught on the largest scale and by unconscious
system was, not to substitute the aims of one art
for those of another, but to unite in our mind separate
imaginative delights, actual and remembered, and
to multiply them indefinitely by each other till the
whole world became an organic unity, not by mere
links of causality or category, but by the vivifying
sense of love and wonder. Ruskin felt all things
with the energy and complexity due to previous
3 o8 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
feeling. The mere titles of chapters and illustrations
(" Venga Medusa," " The Locks of Typhon," " The
Sea Foundations ") show his impressions to have been
like tones rich in harmonics which are chords in
themselves ; and many of his records of mere scientific
observations seem to be throbbing with imaginative
pleasure : the record, for instance, of how he calculated
the erosion of a certain mountain, and that delightful
statement, one of his most beautiful bits of writing,
"the true high cirri , never cross a mountain in Europe.
How often have I hoped to see an Alp rising through
and above their level-laid and rippled fields."
This culminates, perhaps, in the great chapter
of " Modern Painters " on " The Use of Mountains " :
to give motion to water, change to air and diversity
to soil ; and we may add, after this chapter, to refresh,
ennoble, and enlarge the soul of man. How in such
passages as these Ruskin awakens our imaginative
sympathy with the universe, teaching us to multiply,
for instance, by the knowledge whence the great
rivers come, the solemnity of the sight of them in
defile or in estuary. What interest all this realisation
of life brings into life ! Surely, he who should feel
habitually as Ruskin teaches us to feel, merely in
this one chapter, would be rich with the bare necessaries,
and certainly would want no amusements or excite-
ments, even on a rainy day, knowing the snow to
be falling, the brooks to be rushing, behind the mist
on the mountains. Nay, he would have things to look
forward to as others look forward to the newspaper
or the theatre. What dramas are the skies preparing ?
What pageants will be held at sunset ?
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 309
IV
Instead of which, we privileged folk . . . well, let
us drop a veil over the futilities, the wasteful vanities,
with which we cheat our tedious leisure, while the
leisure, harder won, of our less fortunate brethren is
employed, let us say, in reading betting news and
accounts of murders and executions ; a vicious circle
of overwork and idleness, of waste and lack of
opportunity. Here, on the contrary, we are taught
by Ruskin a virtuous circle of virtuous efficacy :
intellectual and aesthetic interests being not merely
wholesome and ennobling in themselves, but freeing
us from the pursuit, often unjust, and always selfish,
of superfluous materialities and wasteful vanities,
liberating our minds and lives, and incidentally the lives
and minds of others, from the grindstone. From the
grindstone. This metaphor inevitably enters my mind
with the remembrance of another passage of just such
passionate imagination, in this same volume of
" Modern Painters " the description of Turner's
"Wind Mill." "Turning round a couple of stones
for the mere pulverisation of human food," he writes,
" is not noble work for the winds." The half
page gives the essence of Ruskin's philosophy, because
it gives the whole of his strong harmonious mode of
feeling. It does more than merely show the religious
quality of Ruskin, which places him alongside of Isaiah,
of St. Francis, and the great nameless makers of
primaeval myths, to whom the forces of nature are
neither masters nor servants, but brethren, recreated
310 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
(as all things are recreated in the act of thought) in
the image of man's own higher nature. It shows,
also, his very noble and very original intuition of the
comparative values of different kinds of work, his
craving for such work as shall be fruitful, not merely
for the belly but for the soul.
Some of us see the wind as a thing to grind corn,
and the stream as a thing to spin cotton ; and we have,
many of us, alas, from lazy conformity with the baser
practicality of our time, grown almost to think that
setting natural forces (even if polluted in so doing)
thus to provide us food and clothing, is doing them a
kind of honour, allowing them, mere soulless things,
to share the life of creatures having minds, to wit,
ourselves. Ruskin has shown (despite theology
asserting that the world was made to be man's
kitchen-garden) that our human life was worth partici-
pating in, that our human souls existed (" where a
soul can be discerned ") just in proportion as either
employs Nature for something beyond preparing food
or providing clothing. He has not been hoodwinked
by fine phrases about " saving human labour." The
labour is not saved if it is set merely to other work,
as stupefying and as merely hand to mouth as that
you took it from. There is gain only if, setting the
winds to grind and the waters to spin, we set the men
and women hitherto employed at loom or grindstone
to watch the winds and streams, to feel their life and
rejoice in it. There is gain even if, by reducing
natural forces to drudgery, a certain proportion among
us, having ceased to use our muscles for such purposes,
employ our minds in thoughts of higher knowledge
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 311
and wider kindliness. But, in reality, we employ this
privileged freedom of mind and time mainly to
calculate how to get more out of the natural forces
more money out of their produce and more
satisfactions of vanity out of the money. This passage
forms a fit introduction to Ruskin's economical and
socialistic views.
Economical and socialistic, in the sense neither
of orthodox political economy nor of ordinary socialism,
Ruskin's scheme, elaborated with little knowledge
of economic science or of the discipline of science
of any kind, strikes us at first as a hopeless jumble.
He is an individualist, an opponent of collectivism.
He has a theory of the intrinsic value of labour which
seems to come out of some Marxian pamphlet ; and,
by its side, definitions of equitable exchange and
summings up of the dependence of value on imagi-
native and emotional causes, which foreshadow the
deepest analysis of Tarde's " Logique Soctale." But
when we look at Ruskin's books *on economy in the
light of his other work, we find the clue through this
confusion ; and we rejoice that his lack of scientific
training and his unbridled personal assertiveness have
made him misconceive the very subject treated by other
economists, and answer them so often at cross purposes.
For, while the followers of Mill or Marx have amply
furnished us with treatises (more or less logical and
more or less narrow-minded) on the question of
how and by whom wealth is really produced,
312 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
Ruskin, following only his passionate human sense,
has given us what is wholly different : a theory how
wealth ought to be spent. This way of looking at
the subject (notwithstanding some wrong-headedness
and much quibbling) enlarges and corrects political
economy even on the mere scientific side, introducing
the consideration of factors such as are nowadays
beginning to sweep away the recent notions of
" historical materialism," and setting the question of
productive and unproductive labour in a more perfect
manner than any other writer on economics, orthodox
or socialist, whom I know. I could quote twenty
passages from the " Political Economy of Art " and
from " Unto this Last " alone, which, were they taken
to heart, would improve not only economic theory
as propounded in books, but economic practice as
it enters into the life of every well-to-do man and
woman. That national wealth is meaningless save
as equivalent of national happiness ; that he who
spends deals not with his money only, but with the
mode of occupation, the present bodily and spiritual
welfare, the future misery or comfort, of those his
money sets <to work ; that every object of luxury
consumed without improvement to the consumers'
bodily or spiritual efficiency, is so much human labour
destroyed, and so much human life and happiness
wasted ; that, in fact, there is as much morality or
immorality in the mode of spending wealth as in that
of acquiring it, and that every prosperous person is,
however unconsciously, the honest or dishonest steward
of his community ; these are the chief headings of
Ruskin's political economy. These are the truths
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 313
which Ruskin has guessed in their main features and
elaborated, with the unerring sight of deepest
sympathy, in every kind of detail. And they are
truths which, if we saw and felt them thoroughly,
would, as I hinted, -add a great new factor to all
economic problems : the factor of moral and imagi-
native selection, of an idee force (in M. Fouillee's phrase)
acting as an economic determinant.
VI
I have spoken of moral and imaginative preference.
I ought to have added, to do justice to Ruskin's special
genius, " and aesthetic." For it seems to me that
Ruskin shows, in his own person, that such aspirations
after justice, kindliness and simplicity of life are the
result of a wide sweep of imagination, which feels
distant evil as discordant with good at hand ; and,
even more, of that habit of harmony, that craving
for contemplative satisfaction, which make up the
aesthetic nature. I have insisted on the importance
of this aesthetic side for an even weightier reason :
that a belief in it is the deepest basis of Ruskin's hopes
for social improvement. Increased sympathy and
self-restraint, usually the only factors thereof which
moralists take into consideration, are thought of (or
rather felt] by Ruskin as the means of substituting
the interests and pleasures of the imagination for the
exorbitant interests and pleasures of sensuality, of
vanity or of acquisitiveness.
There would be food enough and shelter enough
314 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
and leisure in the world for every one, such is Ruskin's
unformulated thought, if every one would be satisfied
with such superfluous wealth, with such superior
power, as is represented by the spiritual possession
and spiritual multiplication of everything that is and
can be beautiful. Like every great dream of universal
happiness, Ruskin's conception of God's kingdom
on earth is that of a kingdom of the spirit. " None
of us yet know," he wrote in " The Eagle's Nest,"
"what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought,
bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories,
faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful
thoughts, which care cannot disturb nor pain make
gloomy, nor poverty take away." And the impor-
tance of the teaching of Ruskin is largely, as I said
at the beginning, that he gave us not merely the
conception of a higher, wider, less selfish and more
active life, but that he gave us, in the unintended
revelations of his own personality, the proof that such
a life can actually be lived. No man, perhaps, has
ever possessed so great a power of living in all the
things which increase, instead of diminishing, by use
and sharing ; from the great mountain, whose image
ennobled further the nobility of the buildings with
which he connected it, as in the splendid Matterhorn
passage in the "Stones of Venice," down to the rooms
of the inn at Champagnole, where he " rejoiced the
more in every pleasure that it was not new.' 1 I have
chosen this illustration because it exemplifies what he
was fond of preaching, the increasing fertility of all
beautiful and noble things under the faithful tillage of
our love.
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 315
Alas, such tillage is beyond the power of most
men, and few, very few of us, ill -organised and
unselected creatures, life's paupers or invalids, however
rich in money or robust in body, can " see and possess
royally," as Ruskin did, the spiritual kingdoms of
the earth. Mankind at large, leisured and well-to-do,
and even intellectually cultivated, has not the health
or energy or staying power to live or wish to live
in such a kingdom of the spirit. Even apart from
sensuality, sloth or the weakling's need for excitement,
we still require, for the most part, to be kept alive
by Ibsen's " vital lies," ballasted by prejudice, stiffened
into consistency by vanity, and tempted into activity
by every lust and covetousness : and, as for the
incentives of imaginative pleasure and higher sympathy,
if we had only them, we should most of us die in the
workhouse. We are not very highly evolved or well
organised creatures so far. Ruskin could never realise
this. And, on the whole, it is fortunate he could not,
since, although it made him unjust and abusive where
others would be merely self-contemptuous and hope-
fully patient, it enabled him to fulfil his vocation
as a great spiritual precursor. Every religion, in its
noblest parts, is, after all, a counsel of perfection,
ennobling and lastingly efficacious just in proportion
as it can influence only the chosen few. And the
highest ethical use of a religion is thus to influence,
thus to select, the capable, and to produce in them
a higher standard of capacity for those below to rise
by. Ruskin's counsel of perfection is different from
those we are accustomed to, but it is not, therefore,
more far-fetched. It is not more unlikely that
3i6 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
mankind may some day seek its happiness in mountains,
noble works of art, generous thoughts and all the
sharable enjoyments called aesthetic, than that mankind
will learn to love its neighbour like itself. It need not
be more difficult to live in and by an inner harmony
of one's soul, than to live in God : who knows, indeed,
whether it would not be identically the same process ?
VII
And now, before concluding my very rough-and-
ready tribute of gratitude to Ruskin, this seems the
right place to forestall another objection likely to be
made both by believer and agnostic, that Ruskin,
namely, could frame what has been called his religion
of beauty, because he had the help, potent in reality or
in delusion, of the other religion, the orthodox one, of
which he is for ever talking. I am, on the contrary,
struck more and more by the fact, that the dogmatic
part of this religion not only masked from us much of
the vital value of Ruskin's nature, but hampered him
even more in some of his greatest, most natural
conceptions : a materialistic and anthropomorphic
philosophy, a cut - and - dried unpsychological ethic,
elaborated in a comparatively ignorant and cruel past,
and handed down, with every kind of misinterpretation
and quibble, by minds deficient in all historical sense
this, which is the dogmatic part of every orthodox
creed, could never help the religious reality of such
a soul as Ruskin's. Like every great poetical mind,
Ruskin's was naturally pantheistic ; not by dint of
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 317
metaphysical abstraction and the reduction of all
differences to a uniformity of nothingness, but through
the conception of all things in the terms of a pure and
ardent human spirit. There is loving sympathy in his
thought of the leaves gently making room for one
another ; and tragic solemnity in that of the erosion,
the gradual levelling away, of the great mountain.
To him, as to St. Francis, as to Goethe and Shelley,
such processes were not mechanical but archangelic.
Here the creed in which he had been brought up
interfered ; and instead of showing us nature as he felt
it, desiring, loving, struggling, living, he was bound
to explain it as a passive machinery in the hands of
a manlike and capricious deity. I put aside his un-
ceasing quibbling to explain the right or wrong of an
artistic form, the superiority of a Gothic balustrade
over a Palladian, the fineness of a rock by Turner and
the wretchedness of a rock by Salvator Rosa, nay,
questions of veneering and undercutting, by reference
to the Decalogue, the Prophets or Deuteronomy. The
very crudeness of these things renders them merely
wearisome, but intellectually harmless. But this
dogmatic belief actually warped Ruskin's thought
and checked his spontaneous intentions.
No man was gifted with greater natural intuition
of the organic, of affinity, growth, change, and all
those harmonious complexities which we, remarking
them, call " tendencies " in things ; yet he allowed
himself to think only in terms of deliberate willing,
ordering, arranging, rewarding, punishing, in terms
of humanly devised machinery and wretched human
jurisprudence. With his wonderful eye for everything
3i8 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
that told of life, he yet intellectually knew of only
creation and its theological correlative, annihilation.
How much finer would have been his historical
conception of art, had he understood that the death
(as he calls it) of a form of art is not a judgment from
heaven, but a process which has its beneficent side, the
possible preparation for a fresh living form. Nay, his
habit of looking at the universe in a way not essentially
different from that of Dante, had an even worse effect,
depriving Ruskin, in a serious degree, of real hope
in the future. The notion, the result of modern
psychology from Spinoza and Kant downwards, that
beauty is the name given to certain relations of
proportion, visible or imaginative, in harmony with
man's organic wants, this view, so really spiritual
because subjective, and corresponding so happily with
that of moral fitness and its imperative, was one which
naturally fitted in with Ruskin's aesthetic intuitions,
with all his discoveries about form, composition and
imaginative effect, and with his aspirations after a
" spiritual kingdom " it harmonised so perfectly. But
Ruskin believed that beauty was a sort of entity, put
by the Creator into things, and which it is the duty of
man thence to extract ; and thinking thus, he naturally
felt that the preference for inferior art was a form of
wickedness, and that artistic appreciation must be
taught to a stiff-necked generation by dint of an
enormous amount of theological revilings. For, as
I said before, the worst effect of his theological
bias upon Ruskin is its depriving him of real faith,
of hope in possible improvement. The idea of
spontaneity, like the idea of evolution, is carefully
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 319
excluded by his dogmatism. Now, the discovery or
invention of evolution has given us a habit of con-
ceiving life as spontaneity and adaptation, above all,
as unconscious, necessary improvement, instead of
continual unquiet readjustment and effort of our little
human will ; and with it has come a kind of wider
optimistic finality ; or a possibility, humbly and hope-
fully, of doing without finality at all. It is instructive
to compare with Ruskin's harassed feeling, that all
will go wrong in the world unless it be converted to
his notions, the hopeful serenity of even such a pessi-
mist as Renan ; the Frenchman's reassuring certainty,
even in his plays and dialogues, that the moral world
will live through every crisis, and that the good and
evil we fight and mourn about are only our small
human ways of looking at the movements of a universe
which takes care of itself. Whereas, alas, the universe
of Ruskin is (despite its singing streams and rejoicing
mountains) inert, mechanical ; a dead weight lugged
about by a personal (and on the whole inefficient)
creator, and requiring to be poked and scolded by
Ruskin himself.
VIII
And to sum up. When we have separated what
Ruskin can give the future from what (unfortunately
in the long run, though fortunately at the moment)
Ruskin got foisted on him by the past, I think we
shall see that in Ruskin, as in every other great prophet,
the valuable, the efficacious element was, not what
he intended to teach, but the personality, the type
320 RUSKIN AS A REFORMER
of human power in nature, which we feel through
all his teachings. Ruskin's deliberate intention was
to place Turner above Claude, Gothic above Renais-
sance, the Middle Ages above Modern Times, Hand
Labour above Machinery, Protestantism above
Catholicism, and Biblical interpretation above Scientific.
But this programme matters little, and soon will
matter not at all, these questions sinking more and
more into squabbles about definitions and crusades
about names, the embodiment thereof in his work
being marked by injustice, violence, sophistry, and
self-contradiction. But, meanwhile, the real man, the
organised, intuitive, unhesitating creature of perception
and aspiration, has subdued all this to his unconscious
purposes, and has left us the priceless teachings of his
true preferences and antipathies. He has shown
us art, history, nature, enlarged, transformed and
glorified through the loving energy of his spirit.
He has shown us a scheme of life in which greater
justice for all would result merely from greater happi-
ness of endowment of every one. He has given us
an example of contemplative union with all living
things, and in this contemplative ecstasy made all
noble things alive. The most larklike soul of our
time, he sings at heaven's gates, and his song makes
heaven's gates be everywhere above us. Greatest of
all his gifts, he has given us himself: himself
unconscious of all the baser temptations which we
struggle with, and absorbed in happy, fruitful thoughts
and feelings, sharable with every free-born spirit.
His work, as I said before, is useless comparatively
but positively supremely useful, because it is a counsel
RUSKIN AS A REFORMER 321
of perfection ; and one might say, without exaggera-
tion, that the highest meaning we can put into this
ceaseless jostle of rapacities and vanities which we
now call real life, would be the hope that the day may
come when all mankind, or mankind's flower at least,
will be permitted by circumstance and be enabled by
endowment to seek their most natural happiness as
this real man has really done.
21
ON MODERN UTOPIAS
AN OPEN LETTER TO H. G. WELLS
ON MODERN UTOPIAS
AN OPEN LETTER TO H. G. WELLS
IN placing your name at the head of a new book
of my own, my motive is, naturally, to do myself
credit while showing you honour. But I also seek an
opportunity of conversing with you in that perfectly
intimate manner so often prevented by our own shy or
philistine personality, and possible only, perhaps, under
the chaperonage of that most sympathising and unreal
of all phantoms, the Reader.
Our talk, of course, will be about the most wonder-
ful of all your inventions : the planet, twin of
our earth, where (as Sterne already remarked about
the Continent) things are better done than over
here.
I have just been re-reading your "Utopia" and
your "Anticipations"; and my thoughts are still in
a prodigious welter, curdling into currents by no means
easy to follow, and eddying round certain reefs, with
or without beacons. One of these recurrent rocks is
that against which our theological forefathers were
perpetually breaking their logic, and to a certain extent
their hearts : the question, if I may give it a name
3*5
326 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
formed by analogy, of the Inefficacy of Grace, the
persistence of Sin and Punishment in the face of
Redemption, the question why, since there was a royal
road to Heaven, should so many souls go nevertheless
to Hell ? To you and me, and all who think like
us, this self-same query recurs for ever in a garb of
evolutional philosophy : Why should progress be so
little progressive? Why should Utopia be ... well,
only Utopia?
This is what your books make me ask myself ;
whereunto, also, your books furnish at least an implicit
answer, and it is about this mainly that I want to have
a talk, because I find that we do not entirely agree.
It is perhaps inevitable. You are and that is the
usefulness and delightfulness of you a builder of
Utopias ; and all Utopias, like all schemes of salvation,
pivot upon an if. Every constructive reformer is
ready to set all (or most) things right, providing only
you will promise to obey him on one little point,
or at least grant this point might have been otherwise.
Thus : if only people would observe some particular
law, or (as more recent prophets prefer) disobey every
law without distinction ; if only people would abolish
private property, or disregard all selfish (or all
unselfish and merciful) impulses ; if only they would
be strictly communistic, or monogamic, or hygienic ;
if only they would think less, or drink less, or have
fewer children, or (saving your presence) have a few
yards less of unnecessary intestine ; if only they would
follow the dictates of Lycurgus, Comte, Pope Pius X.,
Tolstoi, or Nietzsche then, &c., &c., &c. as if by
magic. But so long as mankind obstinately (brutishly
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 327
or sentimentally or ignorantly, as the case may be)
declines to accept the particular terms upon which
the particular speaker has fixed his fancy, why, of
course, all that mankind can possibly do will be mere
vanity and vexation ; for nothing equals the critical
acumen with which every other scheme of redemption
is destroyed by each successive preacher of the one
thing needful. Has not Mr. Bernard Shaw achieved
his comic masterpiece in the proposal, following on
the demonstration of the futility of all reforms, whether
Whig, Radical, Collectivist, or Anarchist, that the
efficiency of the citizen should be entrusted to an office
for the breeding of human beings ?
But enough of such examples. Even without them,
it is obvious that all Kingdoms of Heaven depend on
an IF. The // of your particular Utopia, my dear
Mr. Wells, is certainly the most easily admitted, if
not the most easily granted, of all similar conditions ;
because it is the least narrow and precise, and indeed
is not so much expressed by yourself as perpetually
suggested to the reader's own thoughts. This ;/ of
yours, this little bit of perfection required by you,
as by all other utopists, as a starting-point for all
improvement, can, however, be summed up in a few
words, as follows : Progress might have been and
might be far rapider and more secure, and the world
a less wretched and hopeless place for many folk, if
the achievements of mankind had not been perpetually
checked, deviated, or rendered nugatory, and its power
of mind, heart, and will allowed in a considerable
degree to run to waste. Thus, if I understand right,
your Utopian planet beyond Sirius differs from its
328 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
twin world Earth exactly in so far as its past has
escaped certain historical accidents which have slackened
our progress ; as the seed of good has fallen less often
on indifferent obduracy, or been gobbled up less cer-
tainly by self-interest and perfunctoriness ; as whatever
germinating wisdom has not been choked by routine
and prejudice. There has been less loss of time and
effort and thought in Utopia ; that, take it all round,
has been the difference between it and our poor Earth.
Such an explanation fits into our modern conception
of Nature (in so far as Nature can be opposed to Man)
as being eminently wasteful : millions of germs for one
living organism, myriads of variations for one improve-
ment. But even better does this explanation tally with
the evidence of everyday life, of ingenious thoughts
become dead letter, fruitful rules grown to barren
routines, preferences to prejudices, convictions to
superstitions ; and individual talents, power, good in-
tentions, becoming not merely the paving-stones, but
the very brick and mortar, of hell.
In your first chapter of " Anticipations " you have
analysed how the coming together of the two inven-
tions of the steam pump and the tram-rail, both applied
to the old arrangements of the stage-coach, has bound
us over to the intolerable stereotyped cumbersomeness
of a railroad system. The chapter is a profoundly
suggestive analysis of the deviation of what might be by
what is. Such spoiling of new wine by old bottles was
recognised long ago in the domain of conduct and
character ; and half the novels written are unconscious
essays on the ruin of powers for happiness and good by
the institutions and arrangements made to secure good
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 329
and happiness in other times or for other persons :
marriage, inheritance, education, profession ; all inven-
tions which, when and where they do not help, inevit-
ably impede.
And you yourself, in your very remarkable little
essay called " Scepticism of the Instrument," have
drawn attention to the intellectual loss due to the very
forms of our speech and the categories of our thinking
impoverishing and distorting all detail and reality to
suit lopsided formula. In short, nearly everything
which serves a purpose is apt to become a nuisance ;
and economy on one side implies, at least nine times
in ten, waste of something on another. Wastefulness :
everything under the sun (and probably inside the sun)
is wastefulness ! Such will have to be the burden of
the latter-day Ecclesiastes ; and in so far our latter-
day pessimism is an improvement upon that of the
Preacher of even more pessimistic and more wasteful
times. For the lesson of history as well as of natural
science is that wastefulness tends to diminish and
eliminate itself; and that, conversely, the obedience
to purpose increases in all things just in proportion as
a purpose forms itself and emerges out of the random
lurchings and fumblings of the universe. But as yet
purpose has but little to say ; and Wastefulness, which
we call Chance, has the best of it. I have just alluded
to the Parable of the Sower and the Seed ; it has an
application wider than the one which British Infants
are to be taught, denominationally or not denomina-
tionally, in or out of school hours : The seed falls
on the highway and is trodden to mud by the passers-
by, whom it might have fed ; the fowls of the air pick
330 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
it out of the furrow and devour it ; there are thousands
of square miles of rock upon which it is parched, and
millions of acres of thorns in which it is choked ; the
only exaggeration in the whole allegory being the
hundred-fold multiplication of the one little grain
which chances upon good soil. " He that hath ears
to hear let him hear," concludes the Master when he
has set that forth. And we latter-day believers have
heard the parable as a fair account of the ways of the
Universe and of Man's poor efforts in their midst.
Only, my dear Mr. Wells, there is a point which we
are apt to overlook in this whole depressing story :
the rocks and the thorns, the greedy pigeons, described
as if they had come into being only to frustrate that
well-meaning agriculturist, had been in that place long
before the Sower himself ; nay, the grain existed long
before he took it into his head to use it for bread and
sow it in his furrows ; what he called barren soil was
such only in the eyes of his hungry and hopeful effort ;
what he called thorns or weeds were inferior to other
plants merely because they did not afford him suste-
nance ; and the seed was wasted when it got into the
crops of the birds only because he had intended that
it should become bread for his belly. In other words,
wastefulness is, as the Jesuit moralists would have said,
a matter of direction of the intention ; and the things
Man happens to require for sustenance of his body
and soul are not necessarily the same which the universe
intends producing ; nay, it may be man's self-engrossed
imagination which attributes to the universe intentions
of any sort. I have made this little digression in order
to forestall from the first any accusation of pessimism,
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 331
particularly of that Schopenhauer type which holds
that the universe (including its expression the Wille}
is always interfering with Man's real interests, to wit,
complete or partial self-annihilation. All that I mean
is, that given that Man, with his sensitiveness to pain
and consequent arrangements for trying to escape it,
is merely one part, and a recently superadded part, of
what we patronisingly designate as the Great Whole,
there is no wonder in much of man's ingenuity and
effort, like the seed of the parable, and from the
Sower's point of view, being wasted. The matter for
astonishment to me is rather how, despite the stones
and brambles and thievish birds, there should already
have come to be so many bushels of wheat and barley
and oats, so many well-baked loaves, and even the
most refined and least nourishing cakes, metaphorical
brioches, for instance, of art, sentiment, and ideal, such
as that French princess proposed to offer people in
years of famine. It is this view of things in general
which, among other reasons, prevents my being much
surprised, or even much discouraged, at our planet
differing from its twin star Utopia.
But the indifference, construed by pessimists into
hostility, of the Universe to man's rather tardy arrival
and claims, is by no means the only reason for the
slowness of his progress. As I have already hinted
with reference to marriage, education, and similar
useful encumbrances, it is man's own presence and his
own requirements which are really most to blame in
this unsatisfactory business.
He is, on the whole, paying the price of his own
refuse-heaps. " Refuse-heaps ! " exclaims the sanitary
332 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
reformer and patentee for wholesale Rubbish-into-Fuel-
Conversion (half in Latin, of course, and half in
Greek) : " and pray, why should there be any refuse-
heaps at all ? " Because the refuse-heap is the chief
instrument by which all progress has been achieved :
the refuse-heap called turn about unfitness, failure, vice,
sin, dishonour, or merely illegality, on to which Natural
Selection and Human Selection have for ever been
throwing whatever, at any particular moment, happened
to be in the way of their sweepings and garnishings ;
whatever, like the fossil which Thoreau flung out of
his hermitage window, was more bother than it was
worth. This rough-and-ready method has been, to
say the least, expensive. Think of that destruction
of possibilities ! The variations suppressed for ever
merely that one type should gain the preponderance
needful for a few years ! Why, early civilisation (and
perhaps not so very early either) must have been a
perpetual killing off of individuals too sensitive, too
imaginative, too independent, too good, in fact, for
patriarchal and military civilisations ; even as, nowa-
days, individuals too good for strenuous commercialism
find themselves discouraged in a quieter though equally
crushing manner. And not only individuals have been
exterminated, but in each survivor many a possibility
sacrificed to a standard of necessary righteousness.
Nay, every advance in morality has meant the sacrifice
of all decent people who still clung to the practice,
whatever it might be, which began to be branded as
immoral ; even as manslaughter and vendetta will
become the exclusive privilege of " Born Criminals "
with odd-shaped ears and a taste for tattooing (see
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 333
Lombroso) only by the vigorous destruction of all
possible Othellos and Orestes, with whatever chivalry
and heroism there may be in them.
Mr. Lester Ward and Mrs. Stetson have told us of
an irreparable loss of time and opportunity accompany-
ing the necessary subordination of the female to the
male, and the passage from the matriarchal to the
patriarchal state of society. What is a great deal more
certain (though we blush to mention it) is the fearful
waste of excellent qualities (of which we may judge by
Aspasia, Mary Magdalene, poor Gretchen, and sundry
humble or eminent ladies of our own acquaintance)
which must have attended, and still attend, the needful
segregation of the woman destined for motherhood
from the woman whose sterile and dishonourable
vocation has, after all, considerably helped the estab-
lishment of the lofty monogamic household. In fact,
it is doubtful whether progress has lost more by
incursions of barbarians and bouts of fanaticism than
by the ruthlessness of its own slow and unintelligent
methods. We do not like to teach this to our children,
or even to admit it to ourselves ; we should be glad
yes, even you and I, dear Mr. Wells, let alone the
followers of Comte if we could lay all such mischief
at the door of wicked tyrants, and capitalists, and
cunning priests (those " Bonzes," " Fakirs," and " Old
Men of the Mountain," who were such a comfort to
eighteenth-century optimism), and blink the suspicion
that morality has employed immoral methods, and pro-
gress cost some stagnation and regression. We are
not yet spiritually strong and elastic enough to admit
of moral instability and adaptation. We still require
334 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
the safety of sanctions, the corroboration of prejudices,
the exhilaration of mutual anathema. On our fatiguing
and puzzling journey towards recognition of realities
we want to be comforted with what Ibsen's doctor
calls " Vital Lies." And " Vital Lies," however in-
dispensable for an individual, a class, or a period, are
lies nevertheless, involving failure, catastrophe, or mere
perfunctoriness ; and as such they also are another
instance of the wasteful system on which human pro-
gress is carried on. Wastefulness ! Wastefulness
everywhere, says the Preacher. The refuse-heap be-
comes indeed ever smaller and smaller, fewer useless
things remaining to be thrown away, fewer useful
things being thrown away with them ; but the very
process by which all this happens is wasteful itself.
Nor is it surprising if the conscious spirit of man is
thus wasteful, in however steadily decreasing a ratio,
since it has arisen, after all, out of the unconscious
automatism of the universe. And even as Pascal's
Divinity could afford injustice because he had eternity
to right it in, so the Forces of Nature can be dignified
and patient because they are not flustered by pleasure
and pain : why should they mind how long it takes
to attain anything when very likely they do not want
to attain anything at all ? ,
Such considerations, I imagine you answering, may
afford a metaphysical Lenten diet for the lay priests of
progress, the responsible and busy Samurai of Utopia,
during their yearly retreat among the polar ice-fields.
But, practically speaking, Mankind is separate from
all these cosmic forces. And seeing that Mankind is
conscious of pleasure and pain, and consequently gifted
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 335
with foresight and volition, why the deuce should it
not apply this foresight and volition to arranging a
more tolerable earth? And here we are back, my
dear builder of Utopias, at the original // of your
whole system. For what has made the difference
between your decent and decently happy planet and
this Earth as seen from the top of a Strand omnibus
has not been the accident of a war less or a discovery
more, nor even the presence of a greater number
of persons of virtue or talent, but simply that, in
Utopia, people in general have been less inexplicably
stupid and lazy and heartless and self-indulgent than
here.
Less inexplicably. For I feel in all your anger and
all your humorous sadness, even as in all the anathemas
of all the prophets, the sting of the inexplicable : the
human race is stiff-necked, obstinately blind to its own
good. Now here it seems to me that you, like all the
floaters of Kingdoms of Heaven, are distinctly unjust.
The human race, I venture to say, has not shown, and
does not show, itself one bit more stupid, heartless,
lazy, or self-indulgent than you or I would in its place.
There has been wastefulness on the part of the Forces
of Nature, the Great Abstractions who are indifferent.
But as to human beings, they have been applying their
poor wits and will, under extremely trying circum-
stances, to their daily and hourly needs ; needs com-
prising rest and enjoyment (what we moralists call
" sloth " and " self-indulgence ") quite as much as the
more obvious renovation of their tissues and replenish-
ing of the race .
In so doing, like the famous savages of rhetoricians,
336 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
mankind frequently cuts down the tree for the fruit, and
eats its corn as spinach ; it damages to-morrow, but it
satisfies to-day ; and to-day is imperious. Mankind
also damages its neighbour and posterity, but it satisfies
(I must repeat it) the ego's immediate and cruel wants.
Hence vice, crime and (more detrimental still in the
long run) all the various perfunctorinesses and frauds
which raise your indignation legitimately, but ought
not (for you are a great novelist) to excite your
astonishment you who described the wiles of the
hungry pseudo-writer who did poor Mr. and Mrs.
Lewisham out of their typewriter's deposit. You are,
for instance, angry that our schools should not be
better adapted to the education of the young. But
our schools (the one which educated Kipps, for in-
stance) are perfectly adapted to their real vital object,
namely, furnishing a livelihood to sundry genteel,
incompetent moralists and scholars, and, on the other
side, ridding parents and guardians of the harassing
responsibility and presence of unruly youngsters.
English people, less hypocritical because more practical
than Latins, will even admit that seeming perfunctori-
ness is no drawback : Eton is useful in furnishing a
lad with presentable future friends ; Alma Mater ^ with
her Schola Logics, Schola Mathematics, Schola Musics,
and other Faust-like inscriptions over Gothic doors,
turns a boy into a man worthy of a latch-key. The
simple truth was ingenuously put to this present writer
by the youth who averred that Greek and Latin,
doubtless Hellas and Imperial Rome, were useful " to
pass exams." Half of our institutions, of our codes,
morals, ideals, believe me, dear Mr. Wells, are useful
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 337
" to pass exams " ; and exams are useful well, in
order not to have to pass any more.
Nor are the offences against progress always of this
smug British type : in Southern countries (let us say)
one is horrified by the suffering of galled and over-
laden horses ; and one is forced to pick one's way
and stop one's nose in the public street. But can we
expect the miserable carter to be more careful (even
if he had the money) of his harness than of his own
ragged clothes, still less to unload half his freight and
come back again, when his day's work and pay depends
on doing that broiling journey a certain number of
times ? And where would you have the sluttish house-
wife throw her messes when she has no place save the
convenient thoroughfare ?
This illustration is, I fear, rather humble and repul-
sive. But the lives and souls of most folk are (and
still more, have been) humble and repulsive : ill-fed,
unwashed, untaught, often tired and nearly always
hurried ; so that one wonders how, even like those
poor Southern peasants, mankind has yet been able
to put by, year by year, more savings in the bank,
and swell the capital of good.
" II faut vivre, Monseigneur," says the human race,
like the jail-bird to the Minister. And you know,
dear Mr. Wells, that you abhor the only answer pos-
sible to that, Schopenhauer's and the other pessimists' ;
you refuse to say, "Je n'en vois point la necessite."
And meanwhile, living, because it has meant dying
less soon and suffering less constantly, has slowly
brought its remedy with it. The avoidance of pain
and the snatching a scanty pleasure have been man's
22
338 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
real and sole business, with the consequence, as I have
repeated too often, of much destruction, of much
clogging and littering, but with the consequence also
of constantly increasing order and forethought and
self-control. For the lessening of our own discomfort
forces a certain restraint on our neighbour ; the lessen-
ing of his discomfort a certain restraint on us ; fore-
sight grows into imagination, imagination into sym-
pathy ; appetite itself ends by teaching moderation,
and self-defence, respect for others ; thus, as Professor
Baldwin has shown us, the child, by gradually increasing
perception of the outer world and increasing experience
of other folk, grows at length into the adult citizen.
You, yourself, dear Mr. Wells, have written a more
convincing book than this " Modern Utopia," your
book of " Anticipations," of how the world is likely to
progress by the mere shifting and pushing of its short-
sighted and selfish activities. We shall, even as we
have, but with increasing speed, become more sound
and sane, more leisurely and sensitive and thoughtful,
as we become less poor and ignorant. Our added
leisure and finer sensitiveness will enable us to do less
mischief in seeking our good, and make us more
dependent for our comfort on the comfort of others.
Our cleaner, more ventilated fancy will sicken at whiffs
from even distant refuse-heaps left by less squeamish
and more hurried ancestors, refuse-heaps into which
they swept what they could not deal with, and let it
fester and breed disease, such as industrial exploitation,
criminal justice, marriage laws, prostitution, and so
forth, which we still accept as parts of public sanitation.
Quickly or slowly, man, asserting himself in the
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 339
universe, will diminish the universe's wastefulness.
Quickly, say you, with your incomparable romancing
ingenuity and intolerant novelist's sympathy ; slowly,
says your brother-thinker, Gabriel Tarde, with his
historian's and economist's belief in strata of civilisa-
tion, in slow permeation or levelling up. But, quicker
or slower, this automatic progress requires time ; and
it is time which you, in your " Modern Utopia," have
suddenly taken to grudge. In thinking over the
betterment which must come, you have (at least it
seems to me) lost patience with the evil, the folly, and
wastefulness under your eyes ; and you have set
to planning a royal road, to framing some device by
which (as in some Monte Carlo " system ") there will
be all, or very nearly all, gain, and no loss to speak
of. And you have invented a Utopia where time and
experience are replaced by foresight and self-control ;
where forces for good shall no longer run to waste,
and forces for evil be snuffed out by deliberate effort.
There is already in the world an amazing amount of
knowledge, of disinterestedness (at least as far as money
and comfort goes), and of volition : let this be con-
sciously applied to future improvement, no longer left
to casual work, there are already a good number
(perhaps there have always been) of superior men and
women : let this elite direct the rest, showing its fitness
to govern others by its fitness to govern itself and
behold ! we have your Samurai, your voluntary oli-
garchy, your noble caste, recruited by the elimination
of all baser motives. The idea is so good that it is
not new : the Pythagoreans, I am told, were people
of this kind ; the Jesuits, who did such wonders in
340 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
Paraguay, were men whose individual passions had
been deviated and canalised ad majorem Dei Gloriam,
although the God and the Glory were sometimes queer.
And to me, who am, after all, but a poor aesthete in
moralist's garb, there is about the whole thing a
pleasant reminiscence of Mozartian choruses in the
Zauberflote, of a venerable, deep-voiced Sarastro, clad
in white and singing eighteenth-century humanitarian-
ism. The attractiveness of the notion, and its perpetual
recurrence in some shape or other, suggests that there
may be truth at the bottom of it ; at all events, that,
by constant reverting to some such arrangement, man-
kind may eventually make it possible.
Eventually ', but only eventually. For, and here one
of my vague dissentient currents of thought finds a
channel of expression, it seems to me that such a
system of government by the wise and good is rather
the result of the world's greater wisdom and goodness
than its probable cause. Apart from such oligarchies
of persons specially fit for military or statesmanly
functions (but otherwise indifferent poor enough), like
Sparta, or Venice, or the House of Lords at an un-
known historical period, I can imagine such govern-
ment by the Wise and Virtuous only in moments of
emergency and crisis. In the very suggestive little
Utopian novel, " Histoire de Quatre Ans," by my
friend Daniel Halevy, for instance, the austere elite of
men of science take the entire management of the
human cattle remaining on earth, and even break and
breed them, so to speak, for the plough. But this is
after the collapse of society through the over-sudden
introduction of virtually gratuitous chemical food and
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 341
consequent leisure, and a fine bout of mysterious
pestilences which has purged the earth more effectually
than Robespierre even could have done with purifying
guillotines. And my friend Daniel Halevy does not
say how the human cattle and their high-minded
farmers got on in the long run ; nay, he even ends his
tantalising story with an incursion of Tartars and a
return of that " Great Corrector of Monstrous Times,
Shaker of o'er-rank States, and Grand Decider of
Dusty and Old Titles," the " Mars Armipotent " of
splendid Fletcher's verse. And M. Renan, while (in
his pessimist moment of the " Dialogues Philoso-
phiques ") furnishing a singularly terrible scheme of
a world given over to the tender mercies of a scientific
dlite, has (like the charming, inconsistent, human, sly
moralist he was) warned us in several other places
against such oligarchies ; indeed, made it quite clear
that, brute though Caliban often is, it is safer to leave
the world to him than to the austere and philanthropic
Prospero.
It might be possible perhaps, with time (of which,
however, you are very chary !) to guard against the
unpleasantness of your Samurai Regime, particularly by
encouraging your other class of erratic (and I fear
rather rowdy) creative geniuses. It might even (and
to this I should propose devoting a little of our energy)
become possible to diminish the trickiness and one-
sidedness of superior people's individual constitution,
and their tendency to rough-and-ready logic. But
even if you get perfect disinterested thoughtfulness
from a minority, do you really believe this disinterested
thoughtfulness, immaculate, sound, but fitful, sporadic,
342 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
and tentative, could build a world of virtue and wisdom
out of the shoddy resolves, the sham comprehension,
the genuine small self-seekingness and shirking of the
majority ?
Why, we have not yet got the better of what is
tricky and trashy in the individual saint or genius ;
and, as to disciples, every reformer has seen (or rather
been too purblind to see) his teachings misunderstood
or misapplied or turned into dead letter by those he
trusted most. Did not the Apostles, under the eye
of the Master, begin quarrelling for precedence?
The Samurai, therefore, may organise statistics and
laboratories, but I doubt whether they will do much
effective organisation of mankind at large. I venture,
indeed, to think that their real use will be to organise
themselves, I might almost say, each to organise himself
and herself. Good, wise, and responsible people are
never good, wise, or responsible enough or in the right
directions and moments ; and it will be a great gain to
all progress if they be, personally and collectively, up
to the mark, a thoroughly efficient moral and intel-
lectual vanguard. It will be a gain if virtue and
wisdom cease to be a positive nuisance. Let the
Samurai educate and organise themselves and not
others ; if their systems of morals and education, their
new scruples and new duties, their new ideals and
dignities and pleasures, are really good for anything,
why, then, this better born and better bred class will
gradually be imitated by their inferiors ; the world
will rot a little less for their presence. They are the
salt of the earth ; let them see to not losing their
savour !
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 343
To do this will give them work enough, to breed
and educate their own children ; nay, one might almost
say, to breed and educate their own individual thoughts
and desires.
I am gradually working my way through that con-
fusion of enthusiastic assent and ill-defined suspicion
with which your " Modern Utopia " has filled me.
And now I find that while wishing with all my heart
for your well organised republic, while longing to
become a knightly priest of progress, while hankering
even for a little sound persecution of literary fops like
your Bare-legged Nature-worshipper and your Senti-
mental Philistine with his Lady and his Dear Doggie ;
while at all events accepting your religion of respon-
sibility and foresight as the one my soul has ever
yearned for ; while . . . well, while all this has been
going on, something has murmured in my innermost
ear, " Beware of a new perfunctory ritual, a new
hypocrisy, a new intolerance ; beware of a new super-
stition "
For this perpetual reaching out to the Future is a
violation of Reality. Mankind has not bothered much
about the Future because it has had its hands full with
the Present. And mankind such, at least, is my
crass instinctive philosophy mankind has been right.
And what is more, you, dear Mr. Wells, know this far
better than I, and have shown it with passionate pathos
and humour in " Mr. Lewisham " and " Kipps " ; and
it is only when you sit down to systematise and
specialise the Future that you forget this living know-
ledge, as specialists and system- makers always forget
all save the speciality and the system. The metaphysics
344 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
of your worship of the Future are, I venture to say,
wrong, as wrong as those of any other priest preaching
of any other Kingdom of Heaven.
Life is not a single-aimed effort towards continuance
and development, towards becoming somebody or
something different. Seen through the scheme of
the historian or biologist, its facts grouped and
accentuated into his special intellectual pattern, life
is a ceaseless becoming. But looked at, or rather felt,
in a different way, life takes the signification of a
ceaseless being; and as a being, not a becoming, does
life affect the real creature and constitute real expe-
rience. Life (even the life of those Patriarchs who
did nothing but be begotten and beget) is not merely
procreation, but endurance ; and if each individual
were not busy making his own few years, nay, his own
hour and minute, tolerable, the Race, for all its meta-
phorical powers of survival, would have died out a
good while ago ; nor would there be much talk of a
future (on earth or off it) if there were not a most
imperious present, full of ease and distress.
Even as theologians inventoried life according to
the requirements of a day of judgment, so, particularly
since Schopenhauer and Darwin, philosophers have
taken in account only the qualities which, because
they are useful, are perpetuated ; and have denied
utility to those which are not perpetual. Philosophers
have fixed their eyes on the Will-to-Continue, belong-
ing to that abstraction, the Race ; and have neglected
the Will-not-to-Suffer, belonging to the individual ;
a Will quite as important and a good deal more
ascertainable.
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 345
For would there have been any human or animal
action at all, any thought, any volition, any effort, any
food, or any love, but for the fact of individual
pain, discomfort, distress, and its poor younger sister,
individual satisfaction ? Would you, dear Mr. Wells,
and your Samurai and New-Republicans , and your
humble admirer myself nay, a great many remarkable
persons, saints, sages, John-a-Dreamses and Torque-
madas of various ages and conditions have all been
busy with Utopias and Paradises and Hells, but for
the pressure of that same Will-not-to-SufFer ; but for
the preferences, intellectual and sentimental yet organic,
vicarious yet personal and present, of our own rather
odd individuality, and sometimes rather to the incon-
venience of our neighbours ! Our neighbours, mean-
while, not saints nor sages, nor poets nor heroes, but
just the normal philistines beloved of Dr. Nordau,
have (as before remarked) furthered and hampered
progress by their less peculiar attempts at making the
present tolerable. All mankind, superior or inferior,
has been busy keeping itself alive by material and
metaphorical food and rest, and also by narcotics and
stimulants. This latter fact has been a little blinked
by utilitarians and moralists, so I wish to insist on it :
yes, the human race might have come to an end but
for satisfactions and alleviations which have sometimes
cost degradation and disease and an increase of misery
to themselves and their progeny. The excitement and
the dreams of cruelty and superstition have helped to
keep the race (because the individual) going, even like
the excitement and dreams of alcohol and opium.
And the world would be depopulate but for the fact
346 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
that human creatures have not merely begotten others,
but kept their own vital hopes alive, thanks to the
Gods' wholesale intoxicant called Love. You, dear
Mr. Wells, with your Lewishams and Kippses, have
brought home to your readers that those lovers, sheep-
ishly ecstatic among the music-filled or moonlit bowers
of, say, Folkestone Leas, are re-tempering their own
soul, quite as much as replenishing the earth, in the
one sort of poetry open to shopmen and housemaids,
even as did the cave and lake dwellers, their ancestors.
Indeed, you novelists may bring home to psychologists
and sociologists and other rather dreary persons this
great neglected cosmic fact : that human development
depends not only on the warning power of pain, but
on the restorative power of pleasure.
Now, thinking about Utopias and arranging for them
is the born Samurai's pleasure, as similar thinking of
God and Heaven and living for these has been the
pleasure of the Saint.
Perhaps the most useful function of all religions (as
distinguished from mere codes of conduct which have
employed religious sanctions) has been thus to keep
alive a certain number of religious people, who, but
for the exhilaration of communion with a divinity and
the corroborating peacefulness of a communion with
fellow-worshippers, would have died for sheer misery
and forlornness. Now, religious people have been,
and are, a necessary factor in all progress, and only
the more necessary for their scarcity.
Saintliness and heroism have perhaps done little
direct good, perhaps done harm, practically and in the
way they meant it ; they have not been, most likely,
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 347
half as fruitful of useful action as the selfish and
thoughtless self-seekingness of grosser folk. But they
have corrected, pruned, and lopped the instincts of life
which otherwise ran to seed of death. There is more
than an allegoric significance in chastity being the
saintly quality above all others ; since chastity, in itself
sterile, keeps the young brood, the quickening germ,
from neglect, from devastation and death. A certain
number must preach and live for altruism, not because
altruism is a principle of life, but because the egoistic
life-principles are too riotous and self-destructive.
And as with thought of one's neighbour, so also with
thought of that neighbour-in-time, the Future. The
Future can exist only in the thought and feeling of the
Present, as the Neighbour (in so far as Neighbour, as
ALTER) exists only in the thought and feeling of the
Ego. Both are necessary mitigations of the actually
existent, of the imperious now and the imperious self ;
and both impose qualifications, sometimes prohibitions,
on instincts and actions stronger, more vital and neces-
sary, than themselves : " Not thus " " Not so much"
" Not this at all." The thought of a neighbour is
to make some self less miserable ; the thought of a
future is to reclaim a possible present. And little by
little, as the present becomes richer and the ego more
complex, there will enter into the present more and more
strands of the future ; and the ease and discomfort of
the self will be shot and veined more and more subtly
and indissolubly with the ease and discomfort of the
neighbour. The dreams of the dreamers will slowly
become reality. The chaste, sometimes sterile, saints
will have bequeathed their features to the offspring of
348 ON MODERN UTOPIAS
the teeming, the forgotten fleshly generations ; and
that mystery will happen to which Renan has secretly
and fearfully alluded : the Divinity will have been
born of the prayers of its worshippers.
In that Kingdom of Heaven there will be no saints ;
in the realised Utopia no Samurai ; for saints imply
sinners and Samurai imply uninitiate. But meanwhile
and I return to my worship of the Present there
has to be a definite worship of the Future. There are
Samurai (with recognition in eyes and voice rather
than in garb) needed to prevent progress being too
perpetually wasted, but not, methinks, to organise it ;
tender-hearted Samurai physicians to check the birth
of the unfit rather than to breed supermen on Mr.
Shaw's principles ; sceptical Samurai moralists less to
say " believe " and " obey " than to ask " are you quite
sure ?" and "try for yourself." And such Samurai, in
their serene but sometimes arduous and solitary efforts
at (forgive what seems an anti-climax !) humbugging
themselves and others as little as possible, will require
a religion to keep them alive, a dreamed-of future to
console them for the present. They will require a
book like your adventures in the Twin-Planet beyond
Sirius as an aid to devotion, a latter-day u Pilgrim's
Progress."
I am aware, as I write these lines, that there is an
air of obscurantism about them. I confess to a super-
stition in favour of the secret and ironical ways of
the Universe, and a perhaps mean-spirited fear of
human pre-arrangement of all things ; deeming, as
I do, that our intellect, though vast, cannot yet
compass the Multitudinous Unexpected ; and that
ON MODERN UTOPIAS 349
what little intelligence and sympathy and will we
possess is barely sufficient for everyday use and every
day's unaccountable surprises.
Thoroughly earnest and strenuous people may
stigmatise this attitude as dilettanteish ; and I have
a notion that they do not really like me. But I
feel sure, dear Mr. Wells, that you will protect me
against your Samurai and their presumable Index
Expurgatorius ; nay, that you will pull a few wires,
in order that the revised edition of the New Republican
Breviary should contain some little high-minded
quotation from this over-garrulous letter of your
devoted and grateful reader.
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
I HAD intended the postscript should be about
this book of mine, putting a thread of connection
through these essays, and telling the reader, or at
least the Reviewer, what it is all about. There were
several things to explain, the title for instance, and
what was meant by gospels and what was meant by
anarchy. Such postscripts (and similar prefaces) are
amusing enough to write, if not to read ; with some
of charm there must have been in the old-fashioned
masked ball, where bona fide explanations were taken
for mystifications and vice versa. Moreover, after
a volume-full of studies of other people's philosophy,
one feels inclined to air one's own a little, and
talk about oneself. This postscript therefore was
to have been about my own book, and not at
all about that letter to Mr. Wells. And now
instead. . . .
For Mr. Wells possesses the intolerable power (the
more intolerable that I enjoy the abuse of it) of
setting me off thinking anew when I have shaken
down comfortably among my own ideas and do not
23 353
354 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
want to hear any more of his. Thus, since printing
that letter (in the Fortnightly Review) which was
to have settled Mr. Wells and Utopias for good and
all, so far, at least, as concerned myself, I have
read the book on America, and am once more per-
plexed (and delighted) in my mind.
Perplexed on various points, which may be summed
up thus : Can Mr. Wells be right and I be wrong ?
Is it possible that my obduracy about Samurai and
New Republicans, about constructive socialism and
the deliberate scheming out of the future, briefly, about
the acceleration of progress by intentional effort, can
this, my hardened incredulity, be the result merely of
. . . well, let us say of my having been born under
the sign of Laissez Faire, more precisely at the con-
junction of Herbert Spencer and Buckle, moreover,
in the darkest middle of the dark Nineteenth Century ?
Otherwise stated : is there really a change abroad, has
the new century ushered in new relations between
Thought and Practice which we, of the old time,
cannot appreciate or even see? The supposition of
being in the wrong is always annoying ; and the worst
of the matter is that I shall never know whether I
am or not. For how can superannuated thought think
itself out of date ? So, like the inquisitive lover
in that Tuscan folksong, I should like to die (but
Mr. Wells also) a little temporary death, in order to
see, not who would weep and who would laugh over
our respective biers ; but which of us two, Mr. Wells
or I, is going to be regarded as the more delightfully
quaint by retrospective readers of, let us say, the year
Two Thousand.
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 355
The regrettable imperfections in the Automatic
Futuroscope and the "Phonograph of the yet Unspoken
making it so far impossible to gratify this legitimate
curiosity, I shall try and cheat my impatience by
informing Future Ages and Mr. Wells what
proposals I am willing to make for the benefit of
posterity, and what improvements nice people of
to-day might really attempt with a view to making
the people of the future a good deal nker than them-
selves. And in so doing I shall be explaining the
title of this volume of essays, and what I mean by
gospels, and what I mean by anarchy.
II
No longer having a Personal Divinity to whom to
devote our surplus moral energies, we many of us want
to do something for the Future. We are beginning
to substitute for the Grace before meat of our Fathers
a less outspoken and less regular, but only the more
sincere and efficacious little silent ceremony of thanks-
giving whenever we become aware of something
fortunate in our daily life. But not of thanksgiving
only ; there is a spice of fear, and, in consequence,
a desire of atonement : Has not someone suffered
in the production of this excellent food for body or
soul ? What of the midnight baker, the serf-plough-
man ? With what has the oven been heated, and
the soil (we have heard of blood for such uses) been
manured ? The thought not merely of the present
toil and want underlying our leisure and luxury,
356 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
but of all the past ruthlessness of law and custom
which has brought about our morality, all this is
apt to upset the balance of our satisfaction and to
cause intermittent or steady impulses towards bringing
our purer will, our clearer intelligence, as some sort
of oblation. The evil of the Past shall be atoned for
by the Good of the Future ! And, once more, we are
becoming millenarians.
In this feeling, shared with all religiously minded
rationalists of to-day, Mr. Wells and I are fraternally
united. We both of us believe in a Kingdom of
Heaven on Earth. The difference between us is, that
while Mr. Wells would set Disinterested Thinking and
Impersonal Feeling the task of actively and positively
bringing about this millennium ; I should be satis-
fied with preparing such thought and emotion for
service against the coming of the new dispensation,
and my wildest hopes would be exceeded if such
thought and emotion could cease to be a stumbling-
block in the meantime.
In that letter of mine to Mr. H. G. Wells, I
expressed my conviction that what small amount
of civilisation mankind has hitherto achieved is due
not so much to any intellectual and moral efforts, as
to mankind's uneasy shifting of burdens and snatching
at solaces ; in fact, not to the thought of the future
but to the care for the present : a process of improve-
ment unconscious and automatic like the Universe's
other processes ; like them also in the highest degree
wasteful and dilatory. And one of my reasons for
this belief is that the bulk of the thinking and feeling
intended to help on human improvement has really
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 357
not been good enough for the purpose. Not good
enough in the sense of not sufficiently impersonal and
disciplined.
This may seem odd, because the unpracticality of
ninety-nine hundredths of all philosophical and religious
thought and feeling has made people think that it is if
anything too wise and too noble. As a matter of fact,
however, in no other fields of human activity has
unruly impulse raged with such impunity. For con-
sider : in all practical relations of life the Old Adam
of one man is kept within bounds by the Old Adam
of another ; and is checked moreover by the common
consent of the majority, with its master of the
ceremonies or policeman. But no such official has ever
existed with regard to the things of the spirit. People
have indeed been taught, often with demonstrations by
the Secular Arm, what to think on certain questions of
metaphysics and mythology. But at no time of the
world's history have they been taught how to think
whatever they did think : how in the sense of with
what degree of self-assertion and self-contradiction, of
aggressiveness or equivocation. Indeed, the lack of
discipline, of decorum, nay common decency, in man-
kind's carriage of their own thought, may be due in
part to the theological habits in which, through
tradition and through reaction, most thinkers have been
brought up. There is a saying of M. Kenan's, that
the conception of such a thing as abstract truth was
fostered, if not originated, by the doctrinal disputes of
early Christianity. And this seems likely, if we mean
that theology encouraged the metaphysical habit of
considering truth as a kind of entity which] a man
358 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
could or not possess and reverence, and the respectful
possession of which sacramental entity sent a man to
heaven, instead of to prison and to hell. We are so
accustomed to this attitude as not to perceive the
grotesqueness of an individual pretending, or believing
himself, to be not a human being who has learned and
unlearned and is busy thinking out some question, but
an oracle-mouth, connected telephonically with the
Everlasting Mysteries, and out of which only Truth
can be muttered or bellowed : the stoled and mitred
We of the Church, surviving dowdily as the We of the
Daily Press. Be this as it may, the theological habit of
taking for granted, like the legendary Master of Balliol,
that what I dont know isn't knowledge has to answer for
such immodesty and violence in the realms of thought
(usually described as serene] as would have otherwise
been impossible from individuals who, when not acting
as mouthpieces of eternal verity, were perfectly decent,
modest and rational. Religious training also, with its
constant commentary on the prognostications and
anathemas of a school of particularly enigmatical and
vituperative Hebrew dervishes, has accidentally accus-
tomed us to endure and even to assume the prophetic
attitude ; since, when one comes to think of it, the
possession of exceptional psychological acumen, of
generous purpose and of splendid expression, is not
naturally and necessarily allied with the intellectual bad
manners and uproariousness indulged in with impunity
by Carlyle and Ruskin, Tolstoi and Nietzsche. While,
on the other hand, theological disputations, those
wonderful jousts of syllogisms with which Abelard or
St. Bernard seem to have starred it through all the
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 359
capitals of Christendom, have left behind a tendency
towards using argument not as a tool for sorting facts,
but rather as a weapon for cleaving the skull of an
adversary ; thus grafting some of the prize-fighter's
brutality on to the more delicate and amiable acrobatic
tricks of thought handed down by the sophists of
antiquity.
Ill
And here I see an opportunity of doing what, after
all, I ought to do, namely, say a word or two about my
own book and its title and sub-title. For this volume
appears to be, more than anything else, an unintended
exposure of such intellectual disorder as we have just
been discussing. Unintended ; since these essays are
in the most literal sense marginalia, mere puttings into
shape of the notes taken, often with a pencil on the
poor defaced books themselves, in the course of my
readings ; and the title, " Gospels of Anarchy," has been
extended from the initial essay to the whole volume
because the connecting thread throughout it all appears
to be my effort to extract some kind of order from the
anarchy of the authors under consideration. In every
case, even that of the novelists, my marginal notes
reveal the need of saving that part of my teachers'
teachings which I could subscribe to from the mass of
illogical orexaggerated notions in which it is embedded.
The professed anarchists under examination, Stirner,
Ibsen, Whitman, Brewster, and Barres, nay (I am sorry
to have to tell him so !) Bernard Shaw, are by no
means more subversive, in their most intentional sub-
360 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
versiveness, than the other apostles who did not dream
of preaching or practising intellectual anarchy. On
the contrary, one might almost say that the disorder,
the passionate unruliness, the blind following of
individual impulse, the derision of what other men
have thought, the setting at defiance of the modes
according to which all mankind has learned to think,
the intellectual anarchy, in short, is greatest among
upholders of old religious dogmas or ethics, and the
framers of carefully thought-out systems. For let me
explain once more what I mean by intellectual anarchy.
It does not imply revolt from the creed in which a
man has been brought up : Ruskin, for a good half of
his life, was intellectually lawless precisely because he
tried to explain aesthetic and moral phenomena by the
theological notions of the past : it is disorderly to
connect the political fall of Venice with Palladian
architecture, and the inferiority of the later Scaliger
tombs with the vices of despots. It is disorderly,
when a man has emerged as far as Ruskin in his later
and socialistic writings, still to continue thinking in
terms of Original Sin. Even at the time of " Fors,"
Ruskin was haunted by the notion of a devil, however
metaphorical, lurking in our paths, of Evil, with a
capital E, poisoning the well-heads of all the holiest
things. Ruskin ceased to believe in Christian dogma ;
but he retained the theological habit of contempt and
condemnation which, with its artificial raising of the
judge over the judged, brings with it so much moral
perversion and cruelty, so much intellectual crooked-
ness and refusal to see. And these things also are
disorder in the spiritual realm ; disorder none the less
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 361
real because it is the disorder inherited from an over-
conservative Past, as distinguished from the disorder
threatened (like that of professed anarchists) by an
impatient Future.
Similarly it is disorder in the kingdom of the spirit
when one of the noblest and most lucid of thinkers,
the incomparable Nietzsche, allows himself, and is
allowed by his disciples, to display in his years pf
saneness the terrible taint of approaching insanity. It
is disorder equally when a man capable of being a
physician of the soul's diseases like Nordau, permits
himself, and is permitted, to diagnose a whole century's
worth of art and literature as the production of various
kinds of mania. Disorder that one of the most
unflinching discoverers of social untruth, Tolstoi,
condemns not one century's art, but nearly all the art
of all the ages, because it does not point the moral like
" Uncle Tom's Cabin." And if I may re-state my
perhaps audacious opinion when an illustrious psycho-
logist like William James preaches the Will to believe,
there is not merely disorder postulated in the dislocated
universe, but disorder actually present in the little
world of writers and of readers. I have emphasised, in
my previous sentence, the words " allowed " and " per-
mitted." For part of our habitual intellectual anarchy
consists in the fact that instead of mitigating and
checking the extravagances to which solitary irresponsi-
bility may lead a thinker, disciples and adversaries must
really be charged with the worst of them. For
disciples do not become disciples at all unless you
furnish them with something wherewith to startle the
neighbourhood and annoy their elders ; they insist on
362 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
your knowing your own mind to the extent of leaving
no mind worth knowing ; and they thus arrest the
natural process by which a thinker drops some of his
own mistakes and picks up some of the truths of
his rivals : like nothing so much in their action as
those parasites whose presence in the body determines
ossification of the tissues, premature senility, and a
tendency to paralysis or to mania. Should this seem
the sour-grapes of a writer chiefly notable for never
having had a disciple, let the reader rummage in his
memory for any case of a wise man being brought to
book by a modest " Aren't you exaggerating, O
Master ? " No : the chorus of disciples is always
ready with its "Assuredly, O Socrates "
The adversaries, on the other hand, misunderstand-
ing and misrepresenting, merely exasperate the Sage or
Prophet into caricaturing his own ideas in order to
oppose theirs. Nor are the criticising adversaries the
worst : your original thinker is usually exasperated
into absurdity by the fact of criticising some one else,
indeed, of recognising the existence of any tendency or
views contrary to his own, even if they have been there
for centuries, or rather particularly if such is the case.
Thus, the fact that Christ's preachings of mansuetude
had had a considerable audience, was, from the practical
standpoint, an indication that there is something to be
said for Christian virtues and even a place for them in
the economy of the reasonable and self-respecting soul.
But to Nietzsche (who in such things was not more of
a maniac than many other great thinkers) this popula-
rity of Christian ethics was a clear proof that they were
unsuitable to the Super-Man ; and so, quick, hand me
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 363
the hammer of Zarathustra to smash them all in
smithereens !
Of course, it must be said that the Founder of
Christianity had in his time laid about him pretty
freely against Pharisees and Scribes ; and had exacted
rather much from the rich young man who was willing
to sell part of his estate ; in fact so much that the
young man seems to have decided to sell none at all.
And, in those sacred steps of moral exaggeration,
Tolstoi has surely made up for Nietzsche's Egoism by
condemning smoking and bicycling and scented soap as
incompatible with love of one's neighbour. . . . Thus,
taken as a class, moralists and religious teachers of all
times have asked too much to obtain anything save
dead-letter and reaction ; apostolic and Franciscan and
Puritan Christianity on the one hand, and all the
various Stoical and Rousseau-ish Reason and Nature
Worships, on the other, showing us the bankruptcy of
all such high-flown unpracticality. While as to the
various doctrines erecting the Ego as the centre of all
things and inculcating, like that of M. Barres in his pre-
Nationalist days, the cultivation of the Mot, their only
recommendation is that they should have ended off
in the delightful comedies of Mr. Bernard Shaw.
There remain to be considered those philosophers
who, leaving morals alone, have undertaken to furnish
mankind with the necessary amount of abstract Truth,
and to train it to clear and honest thought. This
object has been sought chiefly by building symmetrical
systems on the sites previously occupied by their
rivals' gazebos, or out of the discarded materials of
some crumbled edifice of belief ; so that any durable
364 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
result has usually been accidental, or at least incidental,
A very remarkable book I have lately been reading, the
" English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century " of
my old friend Mr. A. W. Benn, has left me with an
overpowering impression that the most useful work of
modern philosophy (a work, as the Education Bill
shows, very far from completed !) has been the slow
and arduous casting away of a portion of the Philosophy
of Antiquity and the Middle Ages under the name of
Established Religion, together with some picturesque
remnants, accidentally mixed up with it, of even more
venerable, indeed pre-historic, rites and regulations
concerning sacrifices, fetishes and totems. Moreover,
this indispensable piece of work, besides being merely
negative and destructive, has been carried on mainly in
that same unintentional, automatic manner in which the
other steps of human progress have been secured :
metaphysicians and divines having attacked one another
from sheer self-assertion, self-interest and pugnacity y
and a certain amount of error having luckily been torn
down and trampled in these blind and undisciplined
scuffles. But neither religion nor philosophy are really
to thank for this incidental good result ; and neither
has shown any compunction for other incidental results
of a less profitable kind, of which loss of time and
littering the human mind with refuse are among the
least.
I am aware that all the various exaggerations and
errors compensate and neutralise one another in due
course. But it seems an unwise arrangement that
wisdom and virtue, of all things, should employ half
of their day in clearing away the follies of previous
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 365
wisdom and virtue, and the other half in devising new
follies of their own. In my marginal notes on Tolstoi
I have adverted to the successive idol-makings and idol-
burnings of which the history of thought chiefly
consists. And in those on Nordau's " Degeneracy " I
have tried to show how alternations of being persecuted
and persecuting explain the lapses and ravings of great
men, without our needing to classify genius with
epilepsy or to fall foul of the obscure ancestors of
illustrious persons. And the dominant note of this
volume of essays is the dreary sense that initiation into
the wisdom of the sages and prophets should consist
mainly in wading through the rubbish in which that
wisdom lies overwhelmed ; and in carrying, by a weary-
ing effort, one's willingness to learn and to respect
through that pandemonium of self-assertion and
anathema.
And this is what I was thinking of when I began by
saying that abstract thought and ideal emotions, while
imagining themselves too good for practical application,
have in reality not been honest, and disciplined and
responsible and unselfish enough for use.
IV
I can imagine a crass and worldly person remarking
that where it is a question of daily bread, or of material
convenience, progress, though slow (and Mr. Wells has
told us how slow ! ), is not carried on exclusively upon
these lines. And that the prevalence of such dis-
orderly habits in certain departments of human activity
366 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
proves that those departments, to wit, philosophy,
ethics and every kind of religion, are quite separate
from the real life of mankind and have interest only for
the persons who cultivate them in so eccentric and fruit-
less a fashion. M. Kenan's paternal criticism on the
symbolist poets might be applied, alas, to the philo-
sophers and moralists of whom he is himself the
most sceptically amiable : " Ce sont des enfants qui
s'amusent." Sages and prophets and saints, whether
masters or disciples, would thus seem to have been
venting their surplus energy according to Mr. Herbert
Spencer's formula of the Play Instinct ; and practical
persons are aware that the play instinct leads, when to
no worse, to sand castles, soap bubbles and mud pies.
This is the tacit opinion of the immense majority of
human beings ; indeed, this judgment is so automatic
and organic that it might startle most people to hear
it put into words, and only a philosopher and moralist
can waste breath in putting it ! But looking facts in
the face, this unspoken judgment of mankind is
probably fairly correct. Philosophic speculation as
distinguished from scientific, and ethical ideal
as distinguished from superstitious regulations and
practices, have, so far, had wonderfully little con-
tact with the life of mankind ; mankind has there-
fore not insisted on their being of a better quality ;
and not being of a better quality, &c., &c. 'Tis a
vicious circle.
Here, being myself a philosopher and moralist, I
can only, from the bottom of my heart, ejaculate
" More's the pity ! " It is a pity that mankind
should live from hand to mouth without any veritable
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 367
thinking of thoughts or feeling of emotions save those
connected with keeping itself tolerably alive and leav-
ing behind a fresh supply of tolerably or intolerably
living creatures. It is a dull state of things, and dul-
ness turns easily to stimulants, which do more harm
than good. Thinking large thoughts, feeling wide and
unselfish emotions, is pleasant ; and it ought also to be
useful. Mankind is none the better off in practical
matters for its own selfishness and narrowness of mind.
And (I do not think this can be a mere remnant of
teleological superstition) if the play instinct of
the race has expressed itself for seons in philosophy and
religion, surely it must be that this play instinct (like
that of kittens practising how to mouse, or little girls
how to put dolls to bed) is the preparation for some
useful employment. The time may come, who knows ?
when intellectual systems and ideal emotions be put to
practical use ; and then mankind will see to their being >
what they have not often been, really usable.
Now when the Kingdom of Heaven shall be coming
on Earth (and for those who believe in it the Kingdom
of Heaven is always coming within their lifetime or
their children's !) one of the most unmistakable
signs will be the gradual cessation of all self-assertive
ragings on the part of the Wise, and the gradual
abatement of exaggerated claims and denunciations
on the part of the Holy. Philosophers will begin
368 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
to think not in opposition but in co-operation, even
as the Lion, we are told, will on a similar occasion
lie down with the Lamb ; and moralists will be full
of understanding and respect towards human nature.
Prophesying, in the fashion in which Carlyle and
Ruskin, Tolstoi and Nietzsche, have carried on that
calling, will cease ; and most particularly prophesying
against other prophets. Idols will no longer be
publicly burnt by their former worshippers ; and
idols will be made only for strictly private devotion.
Moral and intellectual health will be sufficient for each
to choose how much he can accept of each set of views ;
intolerance, exaggeration and aggressiveness will no
longer be needed to awaken torpid, or keep up
vacillating, interest ; the consciousness of being able
to do but little will be an incentive to do the most ;
faith will move molehills because it no longer expects
to move mountains ; and the avowal of such a thing
as a will to belie-ve (in the sense of Professor William
James) will be recognised as the sign of incapacity for
any real belief at all.
If this is the change which Mr. Wells expects the
twentieth century to inaugurate, why then deliberative
planning-out of the Future, Constructive Socialism,
and Voluntary Service (of a Samurai type) of Coming
Generations, may presently begin to be realised.
But the sign of the Coming of Utopia will be the
purging and re-tempering of philosophical thought
and ethical emotion in the furnace of responsibility.
Is this change really about to set in, even if it
take almost a geological era to bring to maturity ?
I am unable to form an opinion ; for I belong, alas,
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 369
to the generation of the Unreclaimed. But, for
anything I can tell, it may be beginning already,
with the appearance (if they have appeared !) of a
small number of individuals belonging to the practical
classes, like Mr. Wells's " skilled mechanic " and Mr.
Shaw's immortal chauffeur 'Ennery, who will bring
into abstract and ideal matters, into philosophy and
ethics, some of the modesty of expectation and of the
disciplined delicacy of handling without which they
could not have perfected a bicycle and driven a
motor-car.
Accustomed to do their best for the sake of the
smallest advantage ; accustomed to distrust equally
themselves and their material, and to test skill by
results ; accustomed to work in concert with their
mates and keep an eye on the improvements of their
rivals ; accustomed especially to the chances of success
and failure, such people may bring into the things
of the Spirit a habit of fair play and self-criticism,
of respect for achievement and contempt for per-
functoriness, a sense of responsibility born of dealing
with things which have immediate and indisputable
consequences, with simple and relentless facts which
no definitions and no rhetoric can alter. It may be
that this is the case. The integration of ideal thought
and aspiration with practical life may be about to
begin, may in fact be beginning ; the anarchy of
idea-less and impractical ideals may be drawing to
a close. And the future at our hand, or at least
within our sight, may show some application of that
capacity for systematic thinking and impersonal
emotion which has hitherto seemed little more than
370 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
a play instinct of the leisured portions of mankind.
It may be. At any rate, Mr. Wells has a right to
expect it ; and we have a right to expect it when we
consider Mr. Wells.
For in all his scientific books, but most of all in
this latest one on America, Mr. Wells has given
us something more valuable than even the most
valuable ideas, and something more novel than the
newest ones ; and that is an example of what the
attitude of the individual thinker might and (in my
opinion) should be. The thing seems so simple and
natural, now it is there, that it is almost unnecessary,
and at any rate difficult, to describe it. Mr. Wells
is not merely truthful in what he says many people,
including some impostors, have been that : he is
truthful in his way of saying it. He does not
dogmatise and he does not prophesy ; he just thinks
his own thoughts and asks us to listen to what he
thinks. He does not imagine that he is come with
a hammer to break idols and adversaries' skulls ;
nor pretend, to himself any more than to others, that
he is come as the exponent of consecrated wisdom.
He is neither the prophetic /, nor the sacerdotal We.
He is just himself, believing in his own thoughts
because they are his own, and ready to allow other
folk to believe in theirs for the same simple reason.
He knows that he is not the Mind of the Universe
nor the Conscience of the Centuries, but an individual,
like and unlike other individuals, liable to error,
but all the more determined to be as little mistaken
as may be ; unable to attain certainty for himself,
but all the more unable to accept it from any one else.
A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS 371
In fact he is, in his manner of feeling himself and
of presenting himself to others, absolutely true to
the reality of the case. Hence he is modest and
self-reliant. And above all, knowing that he cannot
give as much as is needed, he is generous in giving
all he has. It never enters his head to ask anyone
to be his follower ; he seems never to have heard of
those sublime sibylline manners with which prophets
threaten to tell you nothing if you are not willing
to accept all. What he says is said because it interests
himself, and in the wish that it may also interest
you ; but he recognises that he himself is the
person most interested. Similarly, he is no more
proud than he is ashamed, of being an individual :
he recognises it as the common lot and the sine
qua non of activity, though the origin of some
drawbacks. He does his best because it is all he
can do.
It may be that such is a common attitude among
scientific workers ; I am too ignorant of their ways
to tell. What I do know is that it is not the attitude
of philosophers and of moralists, of sages and prophets
and priests. What it is, undoubtedly, is human or
humane, in the sense of being rational and well-bred ;
giving much, taking much, and not claiming more
than one's own standing-room ; moreover, that it
answers to the reality of things. Hence it is an
attitude which will work in with reality's action.
What is more, I feel convinced that this is the attitude
of the Future ; the one which the Future will require,
without any doubt ; the one which the Future will
furnish, I most ardently hope. And in this hope of
372 A POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MR. WELLS
the gradual coming of intellectual self-restraint and
goodwill, I am happy to take leave of the prophets
and gospels of the anarchical past and anarchical
present.
January August y 1907.
ONWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKI.VG AND LONDON.
DC SOUTHERN REGIONAL
A 000 670 629 5