Personality in Literature Part 4

II

PROFESSIONAL POLITICS

"Take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you wish: that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition." These words were written by an irresponsible fellow before the days of "responsibility" were inaugurated; before politicians had become a race apart, admired or execrated according to the temperament of the beholder; before writers were solemnly divided into men-of-letters, novelists, _littrateurs_, journalists, hacks, and professors; before physicians had become a close corporation of certificated benefactors; not, indeed, before lawyers had learnt to trade on human litigiousness, but before they had won the respect of the public for the disinterested exercise of their talents. The days of specialism have added to the sum-total of human knowledge; but they have diminished intercourse, they have made men more inaccessible to one another, they have promoted new groupings, new atmospheres, new officialdoms, new barriers and water-tight compartments.

The professional spirit has affected and infected the whole of modern society; we see its results in what we call the "disappearance of wit," or the "loss of the conversational faculty," or the "didactic habit," or anything else implying regret for the individualism of the past. It means that our several callings have separated us, have made us into creatures of our profession, have established us on our own particular pedestals on which, as good statues, we must remain, and that our common humanity is an insufficient link between us. Our special knowledge, our special habit, our special highly-esteemed reputation, sets up a barrier which cuts us off from our fellows and destroys community of feeling.

The politician of mediocre capacity may know enough to cut a figure among his political a.s.sociates only by judicious silence, or by talkativeness on those subjects of which others are ignorant. But put him among his non-political friends, and he is an oracle of wisdom upon the law and the Const.i.tution. The doctor, who has forgotten his scientific principles but has picked up some empirical knowledge, has the advantage of experience and authority as against the layman for whom he prescribes. The lawyer, the civil servant, the professional theologian, and the diplomat are in the same position. They all know enough of their subject to be superior to those who know next to nothing of it. They know enough to have pedestals of their own; to be on their guard; to have a reputation to maintain; to conceal the "dram of folly;" to be, to that extent, artificial in their relations with men. They dare not betray the "laughable blunder," which, said Charles Lamb, is the test your neighbour giveth you "that he will not betray or over-reach you."

In the case of the chartered accountant, or the stockbroker, or the pedlar, this special knowledge is not so d.a.m.ning a thing. No accountant, be he ever so limited, can be wholly contented with accountancy as an explanation or sum-total of life; nor can the broker, however absorbed in his business, admit to his friends that the manipulating of stocks and shares is the only matter which should consume the interest of mortals. It is otherwise with the politician, the priest, the man of letters, the professional philosopher, and even the lawyer and the soldier. There is nothing human which may not enter into politics, religion or philosophy, or become the subject of literature; the human complexion of the State may be transformed by the professional prejudice of the lawyer or the soldier.

Consider how, for democratic purposes, the Member of Parliament is made. There is no need to pay undue attention to the amusing exaggerations and distortions of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Cecil Chesterton.

The Member of Parliament has been supported in his const.i.tuency by a group of local politicals who have a healthy enthusiasm for the party war-cry. The serious candidate is too experienced, too professional, to share those enthusiasms in precisely that form which they a.s.sume, at election time, in the minds of his supporters. I do not mean that he is less enthusiastic than they, a less whole-hearted backer of his party, but that, from the nature of his political experience, politics presents itself to him under a perspective which cannot be theirs. He leaves his const.i.tuency a specially ordained champion of political truth; he arrives at Westminster a unit in the crowd.

If we follow our member to Westminster we shall soon find that he has fallen into the Parliamentary manner; that his ideas are grouped around the ideas familiar to the House of Commons; that he has taken its tone, and that his habits are becoming gradually a.s.similated to the habits of those few with whom he especially a.s.sociates himself. Let us attend a meeting of some propagandist committee comprising a number of expert politicians--Members of Parliament, or others. We shall find there the bond of a common knowledge, a common sympathy, a common approach towards a given subject, a common jargon. We shall be aware of the fact that we have come into a particular, highly-specialised atmosphere, where the familiar language of ordinary life, the familiar ideas, would be intrusions, meriting nothing but frowns or compa.s.sionate smiles.

And the same thing is true of most corporate journalism and most corporate religion. The atmosphere is highly specialised; it is binding; and those who live in it believe it to be co-extensive with the whole of life. Let us bind ourselves by Tolstoy; let us agree to loosen ourselves by Nietzsche; but, in any case let us agree to love our neighbour on the principle of a close corporation. The main influences which shape the modern world operate, for the most part, through intellectual groups; each group can only be appealed to in a language familiar to it; it can only act on principles (consciously accepted or presupposed) which are its very special property; you can never touch it to the quick, in its corporate and active capacity, without accepting or appearing to accept its collective prejudices.

Its differentia is that which separates it from the unit of common humanity.

Thus we come to something more difficult to a.n.a.lyse than specialisation of work--a specialisation of sentiment, habits and morals, which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere which they have appropriated, and so limited as to be blind in the broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken. And yet it is through these groups, keen-eyed in one direction, blind in others, that the intellect, the reforming zeal, the earnestness, the idealism of the age, have to pa.s.s before ideas and vague aspiration can be transformed into action or effective influence. These groups are the main-drainage-system of modern life; they are the ordinary channels through which the business of the world has to pa.s.s, and its organised thought be directed. Take any one of these groups, and consider its differential character, its mode of apperception, its _thos_, and you find it something deformed, twisted, strained in one direction, like a tree by the sea-sh.o.r.e. But take a few score of them, and imagine their qualities fused together, and the result would accord with the ideals of common humanity--ideals vaguely conceived, perhaps, but generous.

It is just because the qualities of these groups, in politics, religion, social work, and to a lesser extent in literature, are not and cannot be fused together, but on the contrary, stand apart in water-tight compartments, so that the whole is like an elaborate system of checks to make each part inoperative, that, at a time when the whole community is strangely alive with good will, the actual social achievement is beyond measure disappointing.

The test of success or failure is the degree of satisfaction afforded to the common man. By the "common man" I do not mean the inferior man, but the man who has not specialised himself out of his common humanity. If there is any interest which an honest lawyer can share with an honest fisherman, a decent c.o.c.kney with a decent Bedouin Arab, he does it in virtue of this n.o.bler "commonness;" it may include the interests of good fellows.h.i.+p, of delight in song or nature, of a belief in G.o.d, and a host of indescribable interests which do not belong to the mechanism and compulsory organisation of life; it includes some "dram of folly," some capacity for "laughable blunder"

in intercourse between men. Culture may break in upon this "commonness" and destroy it. But it need not be so. Shakespeare has this commonness in a high degree; so have Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Lamb; all great artists have had it when their culture has not crazed them, or when they have not lifted themselves into an almost mystical absorption in exercising some gift of austere, monumental expression; in which case, like Milton, they scarcely belong to the category of humans; their food is ambrosial, and their wine is nectar.

The task of the inspired politician has become harder in proportion as the problem of government has become more intricate and more specialised. He must work through his machinery, which includes not only the administrative machine, but all those groups, in and out of Parliament, limited by their ethical and sentimental specialities. He must be professional enough to appreciate the ground of their excellences, and "common" enough to discard their limitations. It is only when there are several such men, powerful enough to leaven politics and lead politicians, that modern democracy can have any shadow of reality--men who understand the rank and file of humanity, conversant also with the complicated machine and the contending groups of narrowly defined ideals, men fired with that constructive imagination which crystallises in common sense.

III

SPECIALISM IN RELIGION

It is significant that the name "Religion of Humanity" was given to a set of tenets which strictly speaking contained no religion at all.

Positivism gained ground in middle-Victorian England not merely because Science and the theory of Evolution were in the ascendant, but still more because it was recognised that the orthodox Churches were out of harmony with modern life; that they were ministering neither to modern humanitarian feeling nor to humanity. Positivism survives to this day in the person of Mr. Frederic Harrison and a few others (including several of the leaders of the Young Turkish party); but it would by this time have been a powerful creed if it had been really a creed, if it had anything spiritual and _credible_ to offer to those who are outraged by the professional neglect, self-absorption, and intellectual insincerity of the Churches. Everyone is aware of the failure of the Churches to touch modern life; to escape from their grooves; to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations of old-fas.h.i.+oned formul instead of finding vital, human, developing expressions of the spiritual craving of man. Even Mr. George Cadbury is aware of this failure, as he showed by his zeal for the inquiry into church attendance some years ago, an inquiry which has been repeated this year with results unsatisfactory to the Churches. The question has been debated again and again, and inquirers have been unable to make up their minds whether it is the Churches that are not good enough for the people, or the people who are not good enough for the Churches. It is a question of the priority of the chicken or the egg. It is not known whether public sentiment is depraved because it is alienated from the Churches, or whether the Churches are depraved because they have excluded so many of the most powerful moral forces of the time. Certain it is that they have offended by their exclusiveness; by the narrowing down of interest; by the cliquishness of those who are specialists in piety or ritual. We may observe their habit of mind in that narrow Victorian sect which converted Mr.

Gosse's strong-willed and in many ways lovable father into an intolerant tyrant (as set forth in _Father and Son_); that lax and sn.o.bbish branch of the Anglican Church which failed to capture Mr.

Bernard Shaw in his youth, because it stood only for a "cla.s.s prejudice;" and those strange types of Christianity which, as Mr.

Lowes d.i.c.kinson expresses it, find no disharmony between belief in a "Power that is supposed to have created the stars and the tiger" and "the sentimental, almost erotic character of many Christian hymns:

Jesu, lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly."

The evidence of those who have been estranged from the Churches is worth considering. We see that Mr. Gosse was driven from them in his youth by their sectarian narrowness and unwillingness to face intellectual inquiry; Mr. Shaw by the flippancy of the Irish Church, its cla.s.s prejudice, its false respectability; Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson, among other reasons, because at a time when men are learning to adapt the processes of Nature to their ends, when it becomes them to "dwell less and less upon their weaknesses and more and more upon their strength," the orthodox Christians a.s.sert that we are "miserable sinners," that "there is no health in us," when they "ought to be too busy demonstrating in fact the contrary." Members of the general public in one way and another have become accustomed to regard religion with an uneasy constraint; there are harmless things which must not be said in the presence of a priest; there is a pastorality about the minister which implies a flock and a coterie; and Englishmen seldom mention the name of G.o.d without an appearance of apology or secret shame. Religion has become largely a matter of cliques, coteries, a.s.sociations--of specialism in codes and casuistry.

I will not press the question whether the history of the Christian Church has not been the history of the perversions of Christianity. A distinguished Chinese author not long ago indicted the alleged un-Christian methods of our missionaries in China; Dr. Halil Halid, a Turk, has pointed out that it is in the Christian countries that the Christian virtues of humility and disdain of wealth are least in evidence. What concerns us now is the feeling in formally Christian countries that in spite of Christianity the Christian Churches have not taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is on earth; they have not taught toleration and love; they have urged us to ignore the present world in the interests of the next; and because their own followers have refused to do anything of the kind they have isolated religion from practical life. I agree that many Churches, seeking to adapt themselves to modern needs, have organised social clubs, carried on political crusades, and rendered useful service in "rescue work;" but even so they have rather tended to distinguish between themselves in their spiritual capacity and themselves in their secular capacity. The majority of people do not seem to find in the religious services of the Churches a note that touches their practical needs or their spiritual ideals. The most successful popular appeal has been made by those organisations which have endeavoured to add to the zest of life by exciting music, tuneful hymns, and buoyant rhetoric.

In our unprecedented age of incessant change, continuous revolution, and swift innovation, we have become accustomed to the idea that the social order can and must be altered, that men must take things into their own hands. The fatalism of the old orthodoxy is not for a people who see that things are accomplished by the human will; such people are naturally impatient with those who entreat the Deity to do for them what they can very well do for themselves. The last of the great fatalists in English literature is Mr. Thomas Hardy. He was moved by the downfall of the old settled civilisation and the purposeless, vexing changes which swept like a hurricane on a nation now suddenly made conscious of its evil lot. He was aware of the "modern vice of unrest" at a time when the human will had not yet set itself to direct and organise change. Thus it was that he came to p.r.o.nounce the last word about Fatalism, and, in so doing, to reduce it to absurdity. "The First Cause," as Sue Fawley perceived it, "worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage;" she blamed "things in general, because they are so horrid and cruel!"

Whatever one's theological views may be, no one to-day tolerates in the drama of life any G.o.d-of-the-machine. In Greece, art and religion went hand in hand, and this was possible because G.o.ds were like men and manifested themselves through Nature, not in a sphere outside Nature. No civilisation prior to our own experienced so rapid an evolution as Athens in the fifth century B.C.; but when that century was over, it was still possible for a philosopher to draw robust symbolical ill.u.s.trations from the old mythology. The Modernists to-day are only applying a law of history when they say that religion must evolve with the evolution of human culture. In the first thirteen centuries, the Christian Church did in practice change and adapt itself to civilisation. As long as the world was conservative, a conservative Church could keep pace with it. The first cataclysm came at the time when civilisation was again rapidly changing, and Christianity only emerged torn and divided by the Reformation. But the world to-day is being altered far more rapidly than at the time of the Renaissance. It turns from the Churches, not because it is tired of the spiritual life, or of other-worldliness, but because, just as it demands of literature and art that they should appeal to the modern mind and heart, so it can be content with nothing less from religion.

And it is just because the Churches have been too conservative, because they tend to tradition, formul, conventions, and manners which, retained beyond their time, a.s.sume the garb of unreality, that they are abandoned or slighted by the people--as they must continue to be slighted--until new prophets arise to present universal truths in a new and practical form; to endeavour to preach religion as the great man of letters endeavours to represent beauty and truth.

IV

SPECIALISM IN WAR

England is very near to the Continent of Europe, and we are accustomed to thinking of Western civilisation as one. Yet every time we cross the Channel we are reminded in some fresh way of the foreignness of foreign countries. The dwelling-houses of France, for instance, are different from the dwelling-houses of England in respect of the important fact that they are all to some extent fortified houses.

Great and small houses alike are evidently built with a view to defence from within. If you take a country walk anywhere in Normandy you find that the gardens of the country houses have ma.s.sive gates and high walls, the front door is like a portcullis, and the window shutters are barricades. The smallest cottages have great doors and window shutters, and if there is a garden, it is two to one that the wall is a real wall. And not only in the country districts, but in the towns, pre-eminently in Paris itself, each house or block of flats is so constructed as to defy the violent intruder.

It strikes us strangely, as we walk through the cities of France and reflect upon the reasons for these square doors and these guarded windows. We have suffered no recent invasion, we have had no b.l.o.o.d.y revolution. During the whole of the nineteenth century our island has known nothing more violent than the Peterloo ma.s.sacre or the Chartist riots. We have constantly had wars, but they have been distant wars, a matter for the hireling soldier, and not often dragging in the volunteer civilian. If we were disgusted when we heard the true story of the Crimea, we soon forgot the story. We were shocked again by the facts of the Boer War; we had not thought that so many men could be so quickly killed, so many millions of money whittled away. But even the South African War never remotely seemed to threaten the security of our own islands. For the most part, the policeman has been enough. A light bolt and a key guard us against petty burglars; we walk abroad unarmed--at the worst, we comment on the fact that it is well to carry a stick if we walk alone in Epping Forest. We have abolished duelling.

We have forbidden prize-fights. Even the horse-whip has ceased to be the patrician's mode of redressing wrong. For a.s.sault, libel, slander, we have a remedy in the law courts. Even in our punishment of criminals, if occasionally we have to put a man out of the way by discreetly hanging him, we never subject him to the degradation of a whipping. Youthful barbarians at public schools still roll about and pummel one another, but the organised, stand-up fight, such as was fought in Tom Brown's schooldays, is discouraged; public opinion is against it. From infancy we are taught to be peaceful, law-abiding citizens.

Most of us, then, know very little about physical violence. The shedding of blood is an unfamiliar spectacle. If a man is knocked down by a motor-bus, we may or we may not feel human sympathy, but certainly we are physically shocked by the gruesome sight. We send men to the gallows, but we no longer watch their agony on Tyburn Hill. We despatch men to a frontier war, but we know little about their wounds.

And yet, as of old, our martial ardour is aroused and we glow with patriotic pride when a regiment of soldiers marches past to the sound of music. As of old, the thought of any great European war excites us, even fascinates us. We know enough, indeed, to a.s.sure ourselves that a great war would mean economic ruin, that even a distant war between two foreign countries, such as Turkey and Italy, or Turkey and Bulgaria, will probably react unfavourably on our own trade. Yet the thought of a great war still profoundly interests the ma.s.s of Englishmen; they are fascinated; they almost long for news of the great, decisive, b.l.o.o.d.y battle which means a sensation, a spectacle, an acquaintance with something doing, a something strange, gruesome, violent, and vast.

I am not saying that the people of this country approved of the war which Italy thought good to wage against Turkey, or were pleased at the horrible slaughter in the Balkans. It is obvious, on the contrary, that they strongly disapproved. The "Great Illusion," so effectively exposed by Norman Angell, is no longer universally entertained.

Capital has learnt the horrors of war, and organised labour has emphatically declared against it. And yet, though there were few English people who would not have stopped the Turco-Italian war and mitigated the horrors of the Balkan war if they could have done so, it is manifest that there were few who did not revel in the sensation, just as some years ago even our most philanthropic cla.s.ses deplored and revelled in the spectacle of Macedonian atrocities. A fire at a theatre, an appalling railway accident, and especially murder on a vast, heroic scale, attracts, in these peaceful days, certainly not less than in the days when barbarism was customary.

Now, violence and brutality are obviously one thing to a peaceful people and a very different thing to people accustomed to violence in their daily lives. Upon a man of sedentary occupation a prize-fight must have a very different effect from that which it will have upon men accustomed to the use of their fists. It is worth asking: What is this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace? What is this emotion which leads men to be heroic by proxy? Is it surviving physical excellence which reveals itself in this way, or is it a c.u.mbrous atavistic relic like the appendix which the doctors remove?

We see, for instance, enormous crowds gathering at the football matches where professional players show their prowess, and muscles trained and hardened for the fray. We know that there was a crowd looking forward to the Wells-Johnson contest. Contrast these events with a cricket match, where there is practically no violence. Whatever be the reason, any sportsman will testify to the fact that the crowd which goes to see cricket is generally a cricketing crowd, but that the crowd which goes to a cup-tie football match is by no means in the same way a footballing crowd. In other words, so far as the onlookers are concerned, the cricket match is more truly a sporting event than is the professional football match or the Wells-Johnson contest.

Whatever the answer be, it is certain that when we beat the big drum of patriotism and set the guns firing, the thrill which it arouses in the vocal populace is different from the thrill in a people accustomed to violence and blood. We say the "vocal" populace, remembering that there is a portion of the population, very important to the community and growing in power, which is not facile in the art of self-expression. That portion of the population was in evidence at the time of the great Coal Strike, when it seemed actually on the verge of rebellion, when it actually committed violence to the horror and surprise of our peaceful middle cla.s.ses. The fact is that the very poor are never so far from the violent life as are members of other cla.s.ses. Violent deaths are not infrequent in factories, in coal-mines, in great building-works, in dockyards. The life of deprivation makes the pa.s.sion of anger frequent; among the poor blows are often exchanged, and the police are seldom called upon to interfere. Necessarily, from the nature of the case, the poor are more familiar with violence than are their richer and more conventional neighbours; it is a natural thing for the more ignorant of them to fall back upon physical force, as they did at Liverpool. And so, too, just as they are more accustomed to petty war, they are less interested in war between nations. In Italy it was the working-men who protested against the war with Turkey.

But it seems that the more educated and the more organised we become, the more we leave our affairs to be managed by professionals. When a nation declares for war, it declares for a war to be waged by its professionals, and it turns them on to do a job which, according to civilised practices, is a dirty job. And when it is fired with patriotic pride for achievements won in the field it is exercising its emotions on something it cannot understand or realise, for the simple reason that the violence of war is strange, distantly horrible, fascinating, but unfamiliar. It has never directly entered into our experience.

V

SPECIALISM IN LITERATURE

Some time ago Mr. Brander Matthews made the original suggestion in the _North American Review_ that books should be written for the benefit of the reader. The suggestion is not on the face of it paradoxical, but it will be rank heresy to those who blame the public for not bowing down before the sacrosanct.i.ty of the "serious" author. He admits that "a book ought to be rich with the full flavour of the author's personality;" primarily it ought to express him; but secondarily--and this is Mr. Brander Matthews' point--"it is for the sole benefit of the reader."

I think we may go a little further than Mr. Matthews, and find a second reason why certain authors fail to find favour with the general reader. In the case which Mr. Matthews seemed to be considering there are authors who have every qualification for writing except that they cannot write. Secondly, there are authors who, in the ordinary literary sense of the term, can write, who have gathered knowledge and formed seriously-grounded opinions about life, who are nevertheless so out of touch with the broad, common interests of men that they invariably fail to make a strong emotional or imaginative appeal.

Every reader is acquainted with the tiresome writer who has a great deal to say but labours infinitely in the saying of it. In a crude, energetic, excessively eulogised novel published in America a few years ago--_Queed_--we were introduced to an economist engaged upon a work so learned that he knew there were only three persons in America capable of understanding it. There is, doubtless, something to be said for an appreciative audience of three; but it is safe to a.s.sert that even the exact sciences might be made more widely intelligible. I am, however, thinking primarily of those studies which have some claim to rank as literary studies. It is through literature that the historian, the biographer, the sociologist, and the philosopher must make their contributions to knowledge. Yet how much research and how much acute thinking are wasted because the student has not the means of making his subject alive for others, has not the reconstructive imagination by means of which truth is communicated! It is because he cannot write.

But this being able to write is not a matter of putting words and clauses together with correctness and elegance. That much the mere scholar generally understands, and it is because he thinks it sufficient that he fails. What is wanted is a quality of mind which is too often excluded from the specialist by his habit of thought. "A few years of journalism," said Mr. W.B. Yeats on one occasion, "is an invaluable discipline for the man of letters." No one is more fully alive to the defects of journalism than Mr. Yeats--its frequent looseness, prejudice, obviousness, and dissipation of interest. But, in spite of that, he saw that the good journalist's faculty of addressing himself directly to the subject in hand, of stating it clearly and in its essentials without waste of words, of so escaping his own particular mould of thought that he may be easily intelligible to a variety of minds, required a discipline and a broadening invaluable to the man who really has something to say. The specialist is inclined to lack the broad outlook of one who is interested in many things; he acquires a jargon of his own; his mind runs in the narrow channel to which that jargon corresponds; the language he uses becomes stilted and dead. There is no tonic in the truths he tries to proclaim, no relevance to the rest of knowledge. In other words, what he has to say may be scientifically valuable, but he fails to convey it to any but his fellow-specialists.

Mr. Brander Matthews points out that the great students are those who have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense, than the romantic or transcendental tradition, with its mysticism and obscurity. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the most lucid of philosophers, are scarcely easier to follow than John Stuart Mill, Huxley, and Leslie Stephen. But it is hardly necessary to enter a _caveat_ against supposing that lucidity of expression is precisely proportional to clearness of thought. The philosophy of Kant did not admit of the simple language of Hume, and T.H. Green and Mr. Bradley are not to be blamed if they are more difficult to understand than Sir Leslie Stephen.