A Modern Symposium Part 2

How tall the trees! How immense the oysters! What has Europe by comparison! Mere flavour and form, mere beauty, delicacy and grace!

America, one would say, is the latest work of the great artist--we are told, indeed, by geologists, that it is the youngest of the continents--conceived at an age when he had begun to repeat himself, broad, summary, impressionist, audacious in empty s.p.a.ce; whereas Europe would seem to represent his pre-Raphaelite period, in its wealth of detail, its variety of figure, costume, architecture, landscape, its crudely contrasted colours and minute precision of individual form.

"And as with the countries, so with their civilizations. Europe is the home of cla.s.s, America of democracy. By democracy I do not mean a mere form of government--in that respect, of course, America is less democratic than England: I mean the mental att.i.tude that implies and engenders Indistinction. Indistinction, I say, rather than equality, for the word equality is misleading, and might seem to imply, for example, a social and economic parity of conditions, which no more exists in America than it does in Europe. Politically, as well as socially, America is a plutocracy; her democracy is spiritual and intellectual; and its essence is, the denial of all superiorities save that of wealth. Such superiorities, in fact, hardly exist across the Atlantic. All men there are intelligent, all efficient, all energetic; and as these are the only qualities they possess, so they are the only ones they feel called upon to admire. How different is the case with Europe! How innumerable and how confusing the gradations! For diversities of language and race, indeed, we may not be altogether responsible; but we have superadded to these, distinctions of manner, of feeling, of perception, of intellectual grasp and spiritual insight, unknown to the simpler and vaster consciousness of the West. In addition, in short, to the obvious and fundamentally natural standard of wealth, we have invented others impalpable and artificial in their character; and however rapidly these may be destined to disappear as the race progresses, and the influence of the West begins to dominate the East, they do, nevertheless, still persist, and give to our effete civilization the character of Aristocracy, that is of Caste. In all this we see, as I have suggested, the influence of environment. The old-world stock, transplanted across the ocean, imitates the characteristics of its new home. Sloughing off artificial distinctions, it manifests itself in bold simplicity, broad as the plains, turbulent as the rivers, formless as the mountains, crude as the fruits of its adopted country."

"Yet while thus forming themselves into the image of the new world, the Americans have not disdained to make use of such acquisitions of the Past as might be useful to them in the task that lay before them. They have rejected our ideals and our standards; but they have borrowed our capital and our inventions. They have thus been able--a thing unknown before in the history of the world--to start the battle against Nature with weapons ready forged. On the material results they have thus been able to achieve it is the less necessary for me to dilate, that they keep us so fully informed of them themselves. But it may be interesting to note an important consequence in their spiritual life, which has commonly escaped the notice of observers. Thanks to Europe, America has never been powerless in the face of Nature; therefore has never felt Fear; therefore never known Reverence; and therefore never experienced Religion. It may seem paradoxical to make such an a.s.sertion about the descendants of the Puritan Fathers; nor do I forget the notorious fact that America is the home of the sects, from the followers of Joseph Smith to those of Mrs. Eddy. But these are the phenomena that ill.u.s.trate my point. A nation which knew what religion was, in the European sense; whose roots were struck in the soil of spiritual conflict, of temptations and visions in haunted forests or desert sands by the Nile, of midnight risings, scourgings of the flesh, dirges in vast cathedrals, and the miracle of the Host solemnly veiled in a glory of painted light--such a nation would never have accepted Christian Science as a religion. No! Religion in America is a parasite without roots. The questions that have occupied Europe from the dawn of her history, for which she has fought more fiercely than for empire or liberty, for which she has fasted in deserts, agonized in cells, suffered on the cross, and at the stake, for which she has sacrificed wealth, health, ease, intelligence, life, these questions of the meaning of the world, the origin and destiny of the soul, the life after death, the existence of G.o.d, and His relation to the universe, for the American people simply do not exist. They are as inaccessible, as impossible to them, as the Sphere to the dwellers in Flatland. That whole dimension is unknown to them. Their healthy and robust intelligence confines itself to the things of this world. Their religion, if they have one, is what I believe they call 'healthy-mindedness.' It consists in ignoring everything that might suggest a doubt as to the worth of existence, and so conceivably paralyse activity. 'Let us eat and drink,' they say, with a hearty and robust good faith; omitting as irrelevant and morbid the discouraging appendix, 'for to-morrow we die.' Indeed! What has death to do with buildings twenty-four stories high, with the fastest trains, the noisiest cities, the busiest crowds in the world, and generally the largest, the finest, the most accelerated of everything that exists?

America has sloughed off religion; and as, in the history of Europe, religion has underlain every other activity, she has sloughed off, along with it, the whole European system of spiritual life.

Literature, for instance, and Art, do not exist across the Atlantic. I am aware, of course, that Americans write books and paint pictures.

But their books are not Literature, nor their pictures Art, except in so far as they represent a faint adumbration of the European tradition.

The true spirit of America has no use for such activities. And even if, as must occasionally happen in a population of eighty millions, there is born among them a man of artistic instincts, he is immediately and inevitably repelled to Europe, whence he derives his training and his inspiration, and where alone he can live, observe and create. That this must be so from the nature of the case is obvious when we reflect that the spirit of Art is disinterested contemplation, while that of America is cupidous acquisition. Americans, I am aware, believe that they will produce Literature and Art, as they produce coal and steel and oil, by the judicious application of intelligence and capital; but here they do themselves injustice. The qualities that are making them masters of the world, unfit them for slighter and less serious pursuits. The Future is for them, the kingdom of elevators, of telephones, of motor-cars, of flying-machines. Let them not idly hark back, misled by effete traditions, to the old European dream of the kingdom of heaven. '_Excudent alii_,' let them say, 'for Europe, Letters and Art; _tu regere argento populos, Morgane, memento_, let America rule the world by Syndicates and Trusts!' For such is her true destiny; and that she conceives it to be such, is evidenced by the determination with which she has suppressed all irrelevant activities.

Every kind of disinterested intellectual operation she has severely repudiated. In Europe we take delight in the operations of the mind as such, we let it play about a subject, merely for the fun of the thing; we approve knowledge for its own sake; we appreciate irony and wit.

But all this is unknown in America. The most intelligent people in the world, they severely limit their intelligence to the adaptation of means to ends. About the ends themselves they never permit themselves to speculate; and for this reason, though they calculate, they never think, though they invent, they never discover, and though they talk, they never converse. For thought implies speculation; discovery, reflection; conversation, leisure; and all alike imply a disinterestedness which has no place in the American system. For the same reason they do not play; they have converted games into battles; and battles in which every weapon is legitimate so long as it is victorious. An American football match exhibits in a type the American spirit, short, sharp, scientific, intense, no loitering by the road, no enjoyment of the process, no favour, no quarter, but a fight to the death with victory as the end, and anything and everything as the means.

"A nation so severely practical could hardly be expected to attach the same importance to the emotions as has been attributed to them by Europeans. Feeling, like Intellect, is not regarded, in the West, as an end in itself. And it is not uninteresting to note that the Americans are the only great nation that have not produced a single lyric of love worth recording. Physically, as well as spiritually, they are a people of cold temperament. Their women, so much and, I do not doubt, so legitimately admired, are as hard as they are brilliant; their glitter is the glitter of ice. Thus happily const.i.tuted, Americans are able to avoid the immense waste of time and energy involved in the formation and maintenance of subtle personal relations.

They marry, of course, they produce children, they propagate the race; but, I would venture to say, they do not love, as Europeans have loved; they do not exploit the emotion, a.n.a.lyse and enjoy it, still less express it in manners, in gesture, in epigram, in verse. And hence the kind of shudder produced in a cultivated European by the treatment of emotion in American fiction. The authors are trying to express something they have never experienced, and to graft the European tradition on to a civilization which has none of the elements necessary to nourish and support it.

"From this brief a.n.a.lysis of the att.i.tude of Americans towards life, the point with which I started will, I hope, have become clear, that it is idle to apply to them any of the tests which we apply to a European civilization. For they have rejected, whether they know it or not, our whole scheme of values. What, then, is their own? What do they recognize as an end? This is an interesting point on which I have reflected much in the course of my travels. Sometimes I have thought it was wealth, sometimes power, sometimes activity. But a poem, or at least a production in metre, which I came across in the States, gave me a new idea upon the subject. On such a point I speak with great diffidence; but I am inclined to think that my author was right; that the real end which Americans set before themselves is Acceleration. To be always moving, and always moving faster, that they think is the beatific life; and with their happy detachment from philosophy and speculation, they are not troubled by the question, Whither? If they are asked by Europeans, as they sometimes are, what is the point of going so fast? their only feeling is one of genuine astonishment. Why, they reply, you go fast! And what more can be said? Hence, their contempt for the leisure so much valued by Europeans. Leisure they feel, to be a kind of standing still, the unpardonable sin. Hence, also, their aversion to play, to conversation, to everything that is not work. I once asked an American who had been describing to me the scheme of his laborious life, where it was that the fun came in? He replied, without hesitation and without regret, that it came in nowhere. How should it? It could only act as a brake; and a brake upon Acceleration is the last thing tolerable to the American genius.

"The American genius, I say: but after all, and this is the real point of my remarks, what America is, Europe is becoming. We, who sit here, with the exception, of course, of Wilson, represent the Past, not the Future. Politicians, professors, lawyers, doctors, no matter what our calling, our judgments are determined by the old scale of values.

Intellect, Beauty, Emotion, these are the things we count precious; to wealth and to progress we are indifferent, save as conducing to these.

And thus, like the speakers who preceded me, we venture to criticize and doubt, where the modern man, American or European, simply and wholeheartedly accepts. For this it would be idle for us to blame ourselves, idle even to regret; we should simply and objectively note that we are out of court. All that we say may be true, but it is irrelevant. 'True,' says the man of the Future, 'we have no religion, literature, or art; we don't know whence we come, nor whither we go; but, what is more important, we don't care. What we do know is, that we are moving faster than any one ever moved before; and that there is every chance of our moving faster and faster. To inquire "whither" is the one thing that we recognize as blasphemous. The principle of the Universe is Acceleration, and we are its exponents; what is not accelerated will be extinguished; and if we cannot answer ultimate questions, that is the less to be regretted in that, a few centuries hence, there will be n.o.body left to ask them.'

"Such is the att.i.tude which I believe to be that of the Future, both in the West and in the East. I do not pretend to sympathize with it; but my perception of it gives a peculiar piquancy to my own position. I rejoice that I was born at the end of an epoch; that I stand as it were at the summit, just before the plunge into the valley below; and looking back, survey and summarize in a glance the ages that are past.

I rejoice that my friends are Socrates and Plato, Dante, Michelangelo, Goethe instead of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I rejoice that I belong to an effete country; and that I sit at table with almost the last representatives of the culture, the learning and the ideals of centuries of civilization. I prefer the tradition of the Past to that of the Future; I value it the more for its contrast with that which is to come; and I am the more at ease inasmuch as I feel myself divested of all responsibility towards generations whose ideals and standards I am unable to appreciate.

"All this shows, of course, merely that I am not one of the people so aptly described by Wilson as the 'new generation.' But I flatter myself that my intellectual apprehension is not coloured by the circ.u.mstances of my own case, and that I have given you a clear and objective picture of what it is that really const.i.tutes progress. And with that proud consciousness in my mind, I resume my seat."

THE conclusion of this speech was greeted with a hubbub of laughter, approval, and protest confusedly mixed; in the midst of which it occurred to me that I would select Audubon as the next speaker. My reason was that Ellis, as I thought, under cover of an extravagant fit of spleen, had made rather a formidable attack on the doctrine of progress as commonly understood by social reformers. He had given us, as it were, the first notes of the Negative. But Audubon, I knew, would play the tune through to the end; and I thought we might as well have it all, and have it before it should be too late for the possible correctives of other speakers. Audubon was engaged in some occupation in the city, and how he came to be a member of our society I cannot tell; for he professed an uncompromising aversion to all speculation.

He was, however, a regular attendant and spoke well, though always in the sense that there was nothing worth speaking about. On this occasion he displayed, as usual, some reluctance to get on to his feet; and even when he was overruled began, characteristically, with a protest.

"I don't see why it should be a rule that everybody must speak. I believe I have said something of the kind before"--but here he was interrupted by a general exclamation that he had said it much too often; whereupon he dropped the subject, but maintained his tone of protest. "You don't understand," he went on, "what a difficult position I am in, especially in a discussion of this kind. My standpoint is radically different from that of the rest of you; and anything I say is bound to be out of key. You're all playing what you think to be the game of life, and playing it willingly. But I play only under compulsion; if you call it playing, when one is hounded out to field in all weathers without ever having a chance of an innings.

Or, rather, the game's more like tennis than cricket, and we're the little boys who pick up the b.a.l.l.s--and that, in my opinion, is a d.a.m.ned humiliating occupation. And surely you must all really think so too!

Of course, you don't like to admit it. n.o.body does. In the pulpit, in the press, in conversation, even, there's a conspiracy of silence and bluff. It's only in rare moments, when a few men get together in the smoking-room, that the truth comes out. But when it does come out it's always the same refrain, 'cui bono, cui bono?' I don't take much account of myself; but, if there is one thing of which I am proud, it is that I have never let myself be duped. From the earliest days I can remember I realized what the nature of this world really is. And all experience has confirmed that first intuition. That other people don't seem to have it, too, is a source of constant amazement to me. But really, and without wishing to be arrogant, I believe the reason is that they choose to be duped and I don't. They intend, at all costs, to be happy, or interested, or whatever it is that they prefer to call it. And I don't say they are not wise in their generation. But I'm not made like that; I just see things as they are; and I see that they're very bad--a point in which I differ from the Creator.

"Well, now, to come to to-night's discussion, and my att.i.tude towards it. You have a.s.sumed throughout, as, of course, you were bound to do, that things are worth while. But if they aren't, what becomes of all your aims, all your views, all your problems and disputes? The basis on which you are all agreed, however much you may differ in detail, is that things can be made better, and that it's worth while to make them so. But if one denies both propositions, what happens to the superstructure? And I do deny them; and not only that, but I can't conceive how anyone ever came to accept them. Surely, if one didn't approach the question with an irrational bias towards optimism, one would never imagine that there is such a thing as progress in anything that really matters. Or are even we here impressed by such silly and irrelevant facts as telephones and motor-cars? Ellis, I should think, has said enough to dispel that kind of illusion; and I don't want to labour a tedious point. If we are to look for progress at all we must look for it, I suppose, in men. And I have never seen any evidence that men are generally better than they used to be; on the contrary, I think there is evidence that they are worse. But anyhow, even granting that we could make things a bit better, what would be the use of doing it in a world like this? If the whole structure of the universe is bad, what's the good of fiddling with the details? You might as well waste your time in decorating the saloon of a sinking ship. Granting that you can improve the distribution of property, and raise the standard of health and intelligence and all the rest of it, granting you could to-morrow introduce your socialist state, or your liberal state, or your anarchical co-operation, or whatever the plan may be--how would you be better off in anything that matters? The main governing facts would be unaltered. Men, for example, would still be born, without being asked whether they want it or no. And that alone, to my mind, is enough to condemn the whole business. I can't think how it is that people don't resent more than they do the mere insult to their self-respect involved in such a situation. Nothing can cure it, nothing can improve it. It's a fundamental condition of life.

"If that were all it would be bad enough. But that's only the beginning. For the world into which we are thus ignominiously flung turns out to be incalculable and irrational. There are, of course, I know, what are called the laws of nature. But I--to tell the honest truth--I don't believe in them. I mean, I see no reason to suppose that the sun will rise to-morrow, or that the seasons will continue to observe their course, or that any of our most certain expectations will be fulfilled in the future as they have been in the past. We import into the universe our own prejudice in favour of order; and the universe, I admit, up to a point appears to conform to it. But I don't trust the conformity. Too many evidences abound of frivolous and incalculable caprice. Why should not the appearance of order be but one caprice the more, or even a crowning device of calculated malice?

And anyhow, the things that most concern us, tempests, epidemics, accidents, from the catastrophe of birth to the deliverance of death, we have no power to foresee or to forestall. Yet, in face of all this, borne home to us every hour of every day, we cling to the creed of universal law; and on the flux of chaos write our 'credo quia impossibile.'

"Well, that is a heresy of mine I have never found anyone to share.

But no matter. My case is so strong I can afford to give it away point by point. Granting then, that there were order in the universe, how does that make it any better? Does it not rather make it worse, if the order is such as to produce evil? And how great that evil is I need not insist. For it has been presupposed in everything that has been said to-night. If it were a satisfactory world you wouldn't all be wanting to alter it. Still, you may say--people always do--'if there is evil there is also good.' But it is just the things people call good, even more than those they admit to be evil, that make me despair of the world. How anyone with self-respect can accept, and accept thankfully, the sort of things people do accept is to me a standing mystery. It is surely the greatest triumph achieved by the Power that made the universe that every week there gather into the churches congregations of victims to recite their grat.i.tude for 'their creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life.' The blessings!

What are they? Money? Success? Reputation? I don't profess, myself, to be anything better than a man of the world; but that those things should be valued as they are by men of the world is a thing that pa.s.ses my understanding. 'Well, but,' says the moralist, 'there's always duty and work.' But what is the value of work if there's nothing worth working for? 'Ah, but,' says the poet, 'there's beauty and love.' But the beauty and love he seeks is something he never finds. What he grasps is the shadow, not the thing. And even the shadow flits past and eludes him on the stream of time.

"And just there is the final demonstration of the malignity of the scheme of things. Time itself works against us. The moments that are evil it eternalizes; the moments that might be good it hurries to annihilation. All that is most precious is most precarious. Vainly do we cry to the moment: 'Verweile doch, du bist so schon!' Only the heavy hours are heavy-footed. The winged Psyche, even at the moment of birth, is sick with the pangs of dissolution.

"These, surely, are facts, not imaginations. Why, then, is it that men refuse to look them in the face? Or, if they do, turn at once away to construct some other kind of world? For that is the most extraordinary thing of all, that men invent systems, and that those systems are optimistic. It is as though they said: 'Things must be good. But as they obviously are not good, they must really be other than they are.'

And hence these extraordinary doctrines, so pitiful, so pathetic, so absurd, of the eternal good G.o.d who made this bad world, of the Absolute whose only manifestation is the Relative, of the Real which has so much less reality than the Phenomenal. Or, if all that be rejected, we transfer our heaven from eternity to time, and project into the future the perfection we miss in the present or in the past.

'True,' we say, 'a bad world! but then how good it will be!' And with that illusion generation after generation take up their burden and march, because beyond the wilderness there must be a Promised Land into which some day some creatures unknown will enter. As though the evil of the past could be redeemed by any achievement of the future, or the perfection of one make up for the irremediable failure of another!

"Such ideas have only to be stated for their absurdity to be palpable.

Yet none the less they hold men. Why? I cannot tell. I only know that they do not and cannot hold me; that I look like a stranger from another world upon the business of this one; that I am among you, but not of you; that your motives and aims to me are utterly unintelligible; that you can give no account of them to which I can attach any sense; that I have no clue to the enigma you seem so lightly to solve by your religion, your philosophy, your science; that your hopes are not mine, your ambitions not mine, your principles not mine; that I am shipwrecked, and see around me none but are shipwrecked too; yet, that these, as they cling to their spars, call them good ships and true, speak bravely of the harbour to which they are prosperously sailing, and even as they are engulfed, with their last breath, cry, 'lo, we are arrived, and our friends are waiting on the quay!' Who, under these circ.u.mstances is mad? Is it I? Is it you? I can only drift and wait. It may be that beyond these waters there is a harbour and a sh.o.r.e. But I cannot steer for it, for I have no rudder, no compa.s.s, no chart. You say you have. Go on, then, but do not call to me. I must sink or swim alone. And the best for which I can hope is speedily to be lost in the silent gulf of oblivion."

OFTEN as I had heard Audubon express these sentiments before, I had never known him to reveal so freely and so pa.s.sionately the innermost bitterness of his soul. There was, no doubt, something in the circ.u.mstances of the time and place that prompted him to this personal note. For it was now the darkest and stillest hour of the night; and we sat in the dim starlight, hardly seeing one another, so that it seemed possible to say, as behind a veil, things that otherwise it would have been natural to suppress. A long silence followed Audubon's last words. They went home, I dare say to many of us more than we should have cared to confess. And I felt some difficulty whom to choose of the few who had not yet spoken, so as to avoid, as far as possible, a tone that would jar upon our mood. Finally, I selected Coryat, the poet, knowing he was incapable of a false note, and hoping he might perhaps begin to pull us, as it were, up out of the pit into which we had slipped. He responded from the darkness, with the hesitation and incoherence which, in him, I have always found so charming.

"I don't know," he began, "of course--well, yes, it may be all very bad--at least for some people. But I don't believe it is. And I doubt whether Audubon really--well, I oughtn't to say that, I suppose. But anyhow, I'm sure most people don't agree with him. At any rate, for my part, I find life extraordinarily good, just as it is, not mine only, I mean, but everybody's; well, except Audubon's, I suppose I ought to say, and even he, perhaps finds it rather good to be able to find it so bad. But I'm not going to argue with him, because I know it's no use.

Its all the other people I want to quarrel with--except Ellis, who has I believe some idea of the things that really count. But I don't think Allison has, or Wilson, or most of the people who talk about progress.

Because, if you project, so to speak, all your goods into the future, that shows that you don't appreciate those that belong to life just as it is and wherever it is. And there must, I am sure, be something wrong about a view that makes the past and the present merely a means to the future. It's as though one were to take a bottle and turn it upside down, emptying the wine out without noticing it; and then plan how tremendously one will improve the shape of the bottle. Well, I'm not interested in the shape of bottles. And I am interested in wine.

And--which is the point--I know that the wine is always there. It was there in the past, it's here in the present, and it will be there in the future; yes, in spite of you all!" He flung this out with a kind of defiance that made us laugh. Whereupon he paused, as if he had done something indiscreet, and then after looking in vain for a bridge to take him across to his next starting-place, decided, as it seemed, to jump, and went on as follows: "There's Wilson, for instance, tells us that the new generation have no use for--I don't know that he used that dreadful phrase, but that's what he meant--that they have 'no use for'

the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Middle Ages, or the eighteenth century, or anything but themselves. Well, I can only say I'm very sorry for them, and very glad I'm not one of them. Why, just think of the extraordinary obliquity, or rather blindness of it! Because you don't agree with Plato, or Marcus Aurelius, or Saint Francis, you think they're only fit for the ash-heap. You might as well say you wouldn't drink any wine except what was made to-day! The literature and art of the past can never be dead. It's the flask where the geni of life is imprisoned; you've only to open it and the life is yours. And what life! That it's different from ours is just its merit. I don't mean that it's necessarily better; but it preserves for us the things we have dropped out. Because we, no more than the men of the past, exhaust all the possibilities. The whole wonderful drama of life is unfolded in time, and we of this century are only one scene of it; not the most pa.s.sionate either or the most absorbing. As actors, of course, we're concerned only with this scene. But the curious thing is, we're spectators, too, or can be if we like. And from the spectator's point of view, many of the episodes in the past are much more interesting, if not more important, than those of the present. I mean, it seems to me so stupid--I oughtn't to say stupid, I suppose, because of course you aren't exactly----" Whereat we laughed again, and he pulled himself up. "What I mean is, that to take the philosophy or the religion of the past and put it into your laboratory and test it for truth, and throw it away if it doesn't answer the test, is to misconceive the whole value and meaning of it. The real question is, What extraordinary, fascinating, tragic or comic life went to produce this precious specimen? What new revelation does it give of the possibilities of the world? That's how you look at it, if you have the sense of life. You feel after life everywhere. You love it when you touch it. You ask it no questions about being good or bad. It just is, and you are akin to it. Fancy, for instance, a man being able to walk through the British Museum and pa.s.s the frieze of the Parthenon, and say he has no use for it! And why? Because, I suppose, we don't dress like that now, and can't ride horses bareback. Well, so much the worse for us! But just think. There shrieking from the wall--no, I ought to say singing with the voice of angels--is the spirit of life in its loveliest, strongest, divinest incarnation, saying 'love me, understand me, be like me!' And the new generation pa.s.ses by with its nose in the air sniffing, 'No! You're played out! You didn't know science. And you didn't produce four children a-piece, as we mean to.

And your education was rhetorical, and your philosophy absurd, and your vices--oh, unmentionable! No, no, young men! Not for us, thank you!'

And so they stalk on, don't you see them, with their rational costume, and their rational minds, and their hard little hearts, and the empty place where their imagination ought to be! Dreadful, dreadful! Or perhaps they go, say, to a.s.sisi, and Saint Francis comes to talk to them. And 'Look,' he says, 'what a beautiful world, if you'd only get rid of your enc.u.mbrances! Money, houses, clothes, food, it's all so much obstruction! Come and see the real thing; come and live with the life of the soul; burn like a flame, blossom like a flower, flow like a mountain stream!' 'My dear sir,' they reply, 'you're unclean, impudent and ignorant! Moreover you're encouraging mendicancy and superst.i.tion.

Not to-day, thank you!' And off they go to the Charity Organisation Committee. It's--it's----" He pulled himself up again, and then went on more quietly. "Well, one oughtn't to get angry, and I dare say I'm misrepresenting everybody. Besides, I haven't said exactly what I wanted to say. I wanted to say--what was it? Oh, yes! that this kind of att.i.tude is bound up with the idea of progress. It comes of taking all the value out of the past and present, in order to put it into the future. And then you _don't_ put it there! You can't! It evaporates somehow, in the process. Where is it then? Well, I believe it's always there, in life, and in every kind of life. It's there all the time, in all the things you condemn. Of course the things really are bad that you say are bad. But they're so good as well! I mean--well, the other day I read one of those dreadful articles--at least, of course they're very useful I suppose--about the condition of the agricultural labourer. Well, then I took a ride in the country, and saw it all in its setting and complete, with everything the article had left out; and it wasn't so bad after all. I don't mean to say it was all good either, but it was just wonderful. There were great horses with s.h.a.ggy fetlocks resting in green fields, and cattle wading in shallow fords, and streams fringed with willows, and little cheeping birds among the reeds, and larks and cuckoos and thrushes. And there were orchards white with blossom, and little gardens in the sun, and shadows of clouds brushing over the plain. And the much-discussed labourer was in the midst of all this. And he really wasn't an incarnate grievance! He was thinking about his horses, or his bread and cheese, or his children squalling in the road, or his pig and his c.o.c.ks and hens. Of course I don't suppose he knew how beautiful everything was; but I'm sure he had a sort of comfortable feeling of being a part of it all, of being somehow all right. And he wasn't worrying about his condition, as you all worry for him. I don't mean you aren't right to worry, in a way; except that no one ought to worry.

But you oughtn't to suppose it's all a dreadful and intolerable thing, just because you can imagine something better. That, of course, is only one case; but I believe it's the same everywhere; yes, even in the big cities, which, to my taste, look from outside much more repulsive and terrible. There's a quality in the inevitable facts of life, in making one's living, and marrying and producing children, in the ending of one and the beginning of another day, in the uncertainties and fears and hopes, in the tragedies as well as the comedies, something that arrests and interests and absorbs, even if it doesn't delight. I'm not saying people are happy; sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't.

But anyhow they are interested. And life itself is the interest. And that interest is perennial, and of all ages and all cla.s.ses. And if you leave it out you leave out the only thing that counts. That's why ideals are so empty; just because, I mean, they don't exist. And I a.s.sure you--now I'm going to confess--that often, when I come away from some meeting or from reading some dreadful article on social reform, I feel as if I could embrace everything and everyone I come across, simply for being so good as to exist--the 'bus-drivers, the cabmen, the shop-keepers, the slum-landlords, the slum-victims, the prost.i.tutes, the thieves. There they are, anyhow, in their extraordinary setting, floating on the great river of life, that was and is and will be, itself its own justification, through whatever country it may flow.

And if you don't realize that--if you have a whole community that doesn't realize it--then, however happy and comfortable and equitable and all the rest of it you make your society, you haven't really done much for them. Their last state may even be worse than the first, because they will have lost the natural instinctive acceptance of life, without learning how to accept it on the higher plane.

"And that is why--now comes what I really do care about, and what I've been wanting to say--that is why there is nothing so important for the future or the present of the world as poetry. Allison, for instance, and Wilson would be different men if only they would read my works!

I'm not sure even if I may say so, that Remenham himself wouldn't be the better." Remenham, however, smilingly indicated that he had read them. Whereat Coryat rather comically remarked, "Oh, well! Yes!

Perhaps then my poetry isn't quite good enough. But there's Shakespeare, and Milton, and--I don't care who it is, so long as it has the essential of all great poetry, and that is to make you feel the worth of things. I don't mean by that the happiness, but just the extraordinary value, of which all these unsolved questions about Good and Evil are themselves part. No one, I am sure, ever laid down a great tragedy--take the most terrible of all, take 'Lear'--without an overwhelming sense of the value of life; life as it is, life at its most pitiless and cruel, with all its iniquities, suffering, perplexity; without feeling he would far rather have lived and had all that than not have lived at all. But tragedy is an extreme case. In every simpler and more common case the poet does the same thing for us.

He shows us that the lives he touches have worth, worth of pleasure, of humour, of patience, of wisdom painfully acquired, of endurance, of hope, even I will say of failure and despair. He doesn't blink anything, he looks straight at it all, but he sees it in the true perspective, under a white light, and seeing all the Evil says nevertheless with G.o.d, 'Behold, it is very good.' You see," he added, with his charming smile, turning to Audubon, "I agree with G.o.d, not with you. And perhaps if you were to read poetry ... but, you know, you must not only read it; you've got to feel it."

"Ah," said Audubon, "but that I'm afraid is the difficulty."

"I suppose it is. Well--I don't know that I can say any more."

And without further ado he dropped back into his seat.

SITTING next to Coryat was a man who had not for a long time been present at our meetings. His name was Harington. He was a wealthy man, the head of a very ancient family; and at one time had taken a prominent part in politics. But, of late, he had resided mainly in Italy devoting himself to study and to the collection of works of art.

I did not know what his opinions were, for it so happened that I had never heard him speak or had any talk with him. I had no idea, therefore, when I called upon him, what he would be likely to say, and I waited with a good deal of curiosity as he stood a few moments silent. It was now beginning to get light, and I could see his face, which was unusually handsome and distinguished. He had indeed the air of a seventeenth-century n.o.bleman, and might, except for the costume, have stepped out of a canvas of Van Dyck. Presently he spoke in a rich mellow voice and with a gravity that harmonized with his bearing.

"Let me begin with a confession, perhaps I ought even to say an apology. To be among you again after so many years is a privilege; but it is one which brings with it elements of embarra.s.sment. I have lived so long in a foreign land that I feel myself an alien here. I hear voices familiar of old, but I have forgotten their language; I see forms once well known, but the atmosphere in which they move seems strange. I am fresh from Italy; and England comes upon me with a shock. Even her physical aspect I see as I never saw it before. I find it lovely, with a loveliness peculiar and unique. But I miss something to which I have become accustomed in the south; I miss light, form, greatness, and breadth. Instead, there is grey or golden haze, blurred outlines, tender skies, lush luxurious greenery. Italy rings like metal; England is a m.u.f.fled drum. The one has the ardour of Beauty; the other the charm of the Picturesque. I dwell upon this because I seem to see--perhaps I am fanciful--a kindred distinction between the north and the south in quality of mind. The Greek intelligence, and the Italian, is pitiless, searching, white as the Mediterranean sunshine; the English and German is kindly, discreet, amiably and tenderly confused. The one blazes naked in a brazen sky; the other is tempered by vapours of sentiment. The English, in particular, I think, seldom make a serious attempt to face the truth.

Their prejudices and ideals shut them in, like their green hedges; and they live, even intellectually, in a country of little fields. I do not deny that this is soothing and restful; but I feel it--shall I confess--intolerably cooping. I long for the searching light, the wide prospect; for the vision of things as they really are. I have consorted too long with Aristotle and Machiavelli to find myself at home in the country of the Anglican Church and of Herbert Spencer."

Here he paused, and seemed to hesitate, while we wondered what he could be leading up to. Then, resuming, "This may seem," he went on, "a long introduction; but it is not irrelevant; though I feel some hesitation in applying it. But, if the last speaker will permit me to take my text from him, I would ask him, is it not a curiously indiscriminate procedure to affirm indifferently value in all life? A poet surely--and Coryat's practice, if he will allow me to say so, is sounder than his theory--a poet seeks to render, wherever he can find it, the exquisite, the choice, the distinguished and the rare. Not life, but beauty is his quest. He does not reproduce Nature, he imposes upon her a standard. And so it is with every art, including the art of life itself. Life as such is neither good nor bad, and, Audubon's undistinguishing censure is surely as much out of place as Coryat's undistinguishing approval. Life is raw material for the artist, whether he be the private man carrying out his own destiny, or the statesman shaping that of a nation. The end of the artist in either case is the good life; and on his own conception of that will depend the value of his work.

"I recall to your minds these obvious facts, at the risk of being tedious, because to-night, seeing the turn that our discussion has taken, we must regard ourselves as statesmen, or as would-be statesmen.

And I, in that capacity, finding myself in disagreement with everybody, except perhaps Cantilupe, and asking myself the reason why, can only conclude that I have a different notion of the end to be pursued, and of the means whereby it can be attained. All of you, I think, except Cantilupe, have a.s.sumed that the good life, whatever it may be, can be attained by everybody; and that society should be arranged so as to secure that result. That is, in fact, the democratic postulate, which is now so generally accepted not only in this company but in the world at large. But it is that postulate that I dispute. I hold that the good life must either be the privilege of a few, or not exist at all.

The good life in my view, is the life of a gentleman. That word, I know, has been degraded; and there is no more ominous sign of the degradation of the English people. But I use it in its true and n.o.ble sense. I mean by a gentleman a man of responsibility; one who because he enjoys privileges recognizes duties; a landed proprietor who is also, and therefore, a soldier and a statesman; a man with a natural capacity and a hereditary tradition to rule; a member, in a word, of a governing aristocracy. Not that the good life consists in governing; but only a governing cla.s.s and those who centre round them are capable of the good life. n.o.bility is a privilege of the n.o.bleman, and n.o.bility is essential to goodness. We are told indeed, that Good is to be found in virtue, in knowledge, in art, in love. I will not dispute it; but we must add that only a n.o.ble man can be virtuous greatly, know wisely, perceive and feel finely. And virtue that is mean, knowledge that is pedantic, art that is base, love that is sensual are not Goods at all. A n.o.ble man of necessity feels and expresses himself n.o.bly.

His speech is literature, his gesture art, his action drama, his affections music. About him centres all that is great in literature, science, art. Magnificent buildings, exquisite pictures, statues, poems, songs, crowd about his habitation and attend him from the cradle to the grave. His fine intelligence draws to itself those of like disposition. He seeks genius, but he shuns pedantry; for his knowledge is part of his life. All that is great he instinctively apprehends, because it is akin to himself. And only so can anything be truly apprehended. For every man and every cla.s.s can only understand and practise the virtues appropriate to their occupations. A professor will never be a hero, however much he reads the cla.s.sics. A shop-walker will never be a poet, however much he reads poetry. If you want virtue, in the ancient sense, the sense of honour, of courage, of self-reliance, of the instinct to command, you must have a cla.s.s of gentlemen. Otherwise virtue will be at best a mere conception in the head, a figment of the brain, not a character and a force. Why is the teaching of the cla.s.sics now discredited among you? Not because it is not as valuable as ever it was, but because there is no one left to understand its value. The tradesmen who govern you feel instinctively that it is not for them, and they are right. It is above and beyond them. But it was the natural food of gentlemen. And the example may serve to ill.u.s.trate the general truth, that you cannot revolutionize cla.s.ses and their relations without revolutionizing culture. It is idle to suppose you can communicate to a democracy the heritage of an aristocracy. You may give them books, show them pictures, offer them examples. In vain! The seed cannot grow in the new soil. The ma.s.ses will never be educated in the sense that the cla.s.ses were. You may rejoice in the fact, or you may regret it; but at least it should be recognized. For my own part I regret it, and I regret it because I conceive that the good life is the life of the gentleman.

"From this it follows that my ideal of a polity is aristocratic. For a cla.s.s of gentlemen presupposes cla.s.ses of workers to support it. And these, from the ideal point of view, must be regarded as mere means. I do not say that that is just; I do not say it is what we should choose; but I am sure it is the law of the world in which we live. Through the whole realm of nature every kind exists only to be the means of supporting life in another. Everywhere the higher preys upon the lower; everywhere the Good is parasitic on the Bad. And as in nature, so in human society. Read history with an impartial mind, read it in the white light, and you will see that there has never been a great civilization that was not based upon iniquity. Those who have eyes to see have always admitted, and always will, that the greatest civilization of Europe was that of Greece. And of that civilization not merely an accompaniment but the essential condition was slavery.

Take away that and you take away Pericles, Phidias, Sophocles, Plato.

Dismiss Greece, if you like. Where then will you turn? To the Middle Ages? You encounter feudalism and serfdom. To the modern world? You run against wage-labour. Ah, but, you say, we look to the future. We shall abolish wage-labour, as we have abolished slavery. We shall have an equitable society in which everybody will do productive work, and n.o.body will live at the cost of others. I do not know whether you can do this; it is possible you may; but I ask you to count the cost. And first let me call your attention to what you have actually done during the course of the past century. You have deposed your aristocracy and set up in their place men who work for their living, instead of for the public good, merchants, bankers, shop-keepers, railway directors, brewers, company-promoters. Whether you are better and more justly governed I do not pause to enquire. You appear to be satisfied that you are. But what I see, returning to England only at rare intervals, and what you perhaps cannot so easily see, is that you are ruining all your standards. Dignity, manners, n.o.bility, nay, common honesty itself, is rapidly disappearing from among you. Every time I return I find you more sordid, more petty, more insular, more ugly and unperceptive. For the higher things, the real goods, were supported and sustained among you by your cla.s.s of gentlemen, while they deserved the name. But by depriving them of power you have deprived them of responsibility, which is the salt of privilege; and they are rotting before your eyes, crumbling away and dropping into the ruck. Whether the general level of your civilization is rising I do not p.r.o.nounce. I do not even think the question of importance; for any rise must be almost imperceptible. The salient fact is that the pinnacles are disappearing; that soon there will be nothing left that seeks the stars. Your middle cla.s.ses have no doubt many virtues; they are, I will presume, sensible, capable, industrious, and respectable. But they have no notion of greatness, nay, they have an instinctive hatred of it. Whatever else they may have done, they have destroyed all n.o.bility. In art, in literature, in drama, in the building of palaces or villas, _nihil tetigerunt quod non faedaverunt_. Such is the result of entrusting power to men who make their own living, instead of to a cla.s.s set apart by hereditary privilege to govern and to realize the good life. But, you may still urge, this is only a temporary stage.

We still have a parasitic cla.s.s, the cla.s.s of capitalists. It is only when we have got rid of them, that the real equality will begin, and with it will come all other excellence. Well, I think it possible that you might establish, I will not say absolute equality, but an equality far greater than the world has ever seen; that you might exact from everybody some kind of productive work, in return for the guarantee of a comfortable livelihood. But there is no presumption that in that way you will produce the n.o.bility of character which I hold to be the only thing really good. For such n.o.bility, as all history and experience clearly shows, if we will interrogate it honestly, is the product of a cla.s.s-consciousness. Personal initiative, personal force, a freedom from sordid cares, a sense of hereditary obligation based on hereditary privilege, the consciousness of being set apart for high purposes, of being one's own master and the master of others, all that and much more goes to the building up of the gentleman; and all that is impossible in a socialistic state. In the eternal order of this inexorable world it is prescribed that greatness cannot grow except in the soil of iniquity, and that justice can produce nothing but mediocrity. That the ma.s.ses should choose justice at the cost of greatness is intelligible, nay it is inevitable; and that choice is the inner meaning of democracy. But gentlemen should have had the insight to see, and the courage to affirm, that the price was too great to pay.

They did not; and the penalty is that they are ceasing to exist. They have sacrificed themselves to the attempt to establish equity. But in that attempt I can take no interest. The society in which I believe is an aristocratic one. I hold, with Plato and Aristotle, that the ma.s.ses ought to be treated as means, treated kindly, treated justly, so far as the polity permits, but treated as subordinate always to a higher end.

But your feet are set on the other track. You are determined to abolish cla.s.ses; to level down in order to level up; to destroy superiorities in order to raise the average. I do not say you will not succeed. But if you do, you will realize comfort at the expense of greatness, and your society will be one not of men but of ants and bees.

"For Democracy--note it well--destroys greatness in every kind, of intellect, of perception, as well as of character. And especially it destroys art, that reflection of life without which we cannot be said to live. For the artist is the rarest, the most choice of men. His senses, his perception, his intelligence have a natural and inborn fineness and distinction. He belongs to a cla.s.s, a very small, a very exclusive one. And he needs a cla.s.s to appreciate and support him. No democracy has ever produced or understood art. The case of Athens is wrongly adduced; for Athens was an aristocracy under the influence of an aristocrat at the time the Parthenon was built. At all times Art has been fostered by patrons, never by the people. How should they foster it? Instinctively they hate it, as they hate all superiorities.

It was not Florence but the Medici and the Pope that employed Michelangelo; not Milan but Ludovic the Moor that valued Leonardo. It was the English n.o.bles that patronized Reynolds and Gainsborough; the darlings of our middle cla.s.s are Herkomer and Collier. There have been poets, it is true, who have been born of the people and loved of them; and I do not despise poetry of that kind. But it is not the great thing. The great thing is Sophocles and Virgil, a fine culture wedded to a rich nature. And such a marriage is not accomplished in the fields or the market-place. The literature loved by democracy is a literature like themselves; not literature at all, but journalism, gross, shrieking, sensational, base. So with the drama, so with architecture, so with every art. Subst.i.tute the ma.s.s for the patron, and you eliminate taste. The artist perishes; the charlatan survives and flourishes. Only in science have you still an aristocracy. For the crowd sees that there is profit in science, and lets it go its way.

Because of the accident that it can be applied, it may be disinterestedly pursued. And democracy hitherto, though impatiently, endures an ideal aim in the hope of degrading its achievement to its own uses.