IMMT* 
 
 1 ^OIMO J ' 0^?" . 
 
 / > 


 
 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