Without Prejudice Part 25

[Sidenote: The Small Boy]

A plague on both your Houses of Parliament! They legislate day and night, yet leave our lives unmodified. For our lives revolve on the pivot of custom, and our everyday movements are not political. The real ruler of England is the small boy of the streets! And, in truth, is it not so? By the unphilosophic regarded as akin to vermin, existing for the greater confusion of theologians, the small boy looms large to the man of insight, as the true conservator of custom--the one efficient _custos morum_. He it is who regulates the lengths to which we may go in eccentricity, and, above all, in hair:

Get your hair cut!

He is particular to a shade about clothes, and has a nice taste in hats.

One wonders how he acquired it. His patriotic proclivity, his hostility to national costumes other than English, his preference for uncoloured complexions--this one may understand; but his aesthetic instinct is a problem for Weismann. As the interpreter of the conventions, he is of a cast-iron rigidity, for is he not a child of Mrs. Grundy--his mother's own boy? He has no exceptions--it is "one law and one measure." He is the scavenger of manners, as the Constantinople street-dog is of gutters; a natural _police des moeurs_, infinitely more efficient than any artificial organisation; an all-ramifying a.s.sociation created to keep the bounds of social order, on duty at every street corner, alert to check every outbreak of individuality. Do ladies aspire to ride bicycles? Or wear bloomers? There is the small boy to face. It is a question for him.

Conciliate him, and you may laugh at the pragmatic. His, too, is a healthy barbarism, beneficent in its action, that thinks scorn of eyegla.s.ses and spectacles, and leads him to denounce quadruple vision, as, indeed, all departure from the simplicities of physical perfection. A human scarecrow he abhors, and will follow such an one through six streets to express his disapprobation. Extremes of size? whether of tallness or shortness? offend him equally. Whitman was not kinder to "the average man." Nor is the small boy's influence limited to sumptuary and corporeal censorship: by taking up certain songs he "makes" the nation's ballads, and every one knows what that means. Let me train a nation's small boys, I care not who makes its laws. O small boy, true sovereign of England, I take off my hat to thee!--to show thee the maker's name in the lining, and satify thy anxious inquiries as to where I got it.

[Sidenote: A Day in Town.]

I have often wondered what country children do for a holiday. Do good people go round collecting to give them a day in London or Liverpool or Manchester, so that their stunted lives that stretch on from year to year with never a whiff of town fog, never a glimpse of green 'buses, or dangerous crossings, or furnace-smoke, may be expanded and elevated? If not, I beg to move the starting of a Town Fund at once. Nothing can be more narrowing than rustic existence--there are old yokels whose lives have always moved within a four-mile radius, women who have grown gray without ever knowing what lay beyond the blue hills that girdled their native village. I once knew a chawbacon who came to town and was barked at by a street-dog. He stooped down to pick up one of the rough stones lying in the roadway to ward it off withal, but to his astonishment the stone refused to budge, for it was an integral part of the road. "Danged if that baint[*] queer!" he exclaimed. "At home the dogs be tied and the stones be loose. Here the dogs be loose and the stones be tied." Now, if that man had enjoyed a school excursion to the town when a boy, he would have deprived me of a good story. A glimpse of the town in youth might also do good in checking the perpetual urban immigration, which, alas!

removes so many of the rustic population from the soil, and places them under it. To this end all school excursions to London should take place in November. Yes, there is a vast future before that fund, and I shall be happy to start it with five thousand pounds, if two hundred and sixty-three one-armed Scotchmen of good moral character will bind themselves to do the same.

[* Transcriber's note: So in original.]

[Sidenote: The Profession of Charity.]

Mr. Labouchere is singularly unfair to a new profession. Beggary has long been a recognised profession, with its traditions, customs, and past-masters, and it is time that philanthropy should now be admitted to an equal status. There is no reason in the world why it should be left in the hands of amateurs, who muddle away funds by their lack of science and experience. Supposing a man sees his way to doing good--founding a home for incurables, or drunkards, or establishing a dispensary, or anything you please--why should he not make a living by it? What if he does get five hundred a year, is he not worth it, provided always the inst.i.tution fulfils a useful function and is not a sham? Surely he does more for Society in return for his money than a Treasury clerk! Probably but for him--but for his wish to earn an income--the charitable inst.i.tution would never have come into existence. Political economy already shows us how the individual's desire for profit brings humanity all its blessings, opens up new countries for it, and supplies them with wars and railways.

If men did not buy shares with a view to a percentage on their savings, the march of civilisation would come to a halt. Since the philanthropy of percentage is so obvious, why should we not recognise the percentage of philanthropy? Charity has gone into business. Why not?

[Sidenote: The Privileges of Poverty.]

The only people who seem to escape the malady of the century are the poor. The _Weltschmerz_ touches them not; however great their suffering, it is always individual. The privileges of poverty are, I fear, insufficiently appreciated in these grasping times. It is not only income-tax that the poor man is exempt from. There is a much more painful tax on income than the pecuniary--it is the thought of those who are worsted in the struggle for bare existence. _Vae victis!_ Yet those who achieve the bare existence, who starve not, neither shiver, have surely enviable compensations. Not theirs the distressful, wearying problems of sociology. Far from feeling any responsibility for their fellow-beings, they do not even fulfil their own personal duty to society,--witness the breeding of babies in back streets. They have no sympathy with the troubles of any other cla.s.s--they eat their hard crust and they drink their bitter beer without a thought of the dyspepsia of the diner-out, and their appet.i.te is not dulled by any suspicion of heart-sickness in good society. Starvation other than physical they do not understand, and spiritual struggles are caviare. The state of the rich does not give them sleepless nights--they have no yearnings to reform them or amend their condition. The terrible overcrowding of the upper cla.s.ses on Belgravian staircases wakes not a pang; they are untouched by the sufferings of insufficiently-clad ladies in draughty stalls and royal antechambers; and the grievances of old army men move them not. Not theirs to ponder sorrowfully over the lost souls of politicians or the degeneration of public manners. They live their own lives--and, whatsoever the burden, they do not bear any one's but their own.

[Sidenote: Salvation for the Seraphim]

Herbert Spencer says he knew a retired naval officer in whose mind G.o.d figured as a transcendently powerful sea-captain; and we have all heard the story of the English admiral who, when fighting the Dutch, felt sure G.o.d wouldn't desert a fellow-countryman. But this ingenuous identification of earthly and divine interests has been carried to the point of imbecility by General Booth in his claim to

"THE LARGEST CIRCULATION."

The _War Cry_, so the General states, Among the angels circulates, To Heaven having gone; but, oh, That it had first expired below!

Which is uglier--the crude spiritualism of the Salvationist or the crude materialism of the scientist? I receive the same sort of shock when I peruse Mrs. Spurgeon's fond picture of her departed husband waylaying the angels at the shining street-corners to preach the gospel to them, as when I read that woman's poetry is inferior to man's because she exhales less carbonic acid.

[Sidenote: Truth--Local and Temporal]

The other day I listened to some green-room persiflage between an actress and an eminent actor-manager. The lady said she had loved him years ago, and thrown herself at his head, but had never been able to bring him to a proposal. I asked if she would have been satisfied with the provincial rights. I am not at all sure that the introduction of this principle of legal part.i.tion would not promote domestic harmony, especially in theatrical circles, where the practice already prevails in the matter of plays. Indeed, this principle of part.i.tion has already been carried beyond its original sphere. Do I not remember a theatrical lawsuit four or five years ago in which the plaintiff sought to restrain the defendant from styling himself part-author of a piece, on the ground that he (the defendant) had not done a stroke of the work, and had been paid ten pounds for it; while the defendant claimed that he had only parted with his rights as regards London, and that in the provinces he was still ent.i.tled to claim a share of the authorship? Pascal long ago pointed out, in his "Pensees," that virtue and vice were largely dependent on distance from the equator (a lat.i.tudinarianism in morals that does not seem to have shocked his Port Royal friends). But even he failed to reach this daring conception of "local fame." The marvel is that when once reached it should have been let slip again. It seems to me an invaluable remedy for disputes: absolutely infallible. When Mr. Stuart c.u.mberland wrote from India to claim the plot of "The Charlatan," how simple to accord him the authorship--_in India!_ At once we perceive a _modus vivendi_ for the followers of Donnelly and the adherents of common-sense. In America Bacon shall be the author of "Hamlet," but the English rights in the piece shall go to Shakespeare. In the same spirit of compromise Cruikshank might have been content to be the author of "Oliver Twist" in the Hebrides and the second-cla.s.s saloons of Atlantic steamers. Herman should be sole author of "The Silver King" in Pall Mall, and Jones in Piccadilly. Some metropolitan streets belong by one pavement to one parish, and by the other to another; so that in the case of parochial celebrities it would be possible for the rival great men to glare at each other across the road--not, however, daring to cross it, for fear of losing their reputation. The Frenchman's long-standing a.s.sumption of Parisian rights in the victory of Waterloo would be put upon a legitimate basis.

By a logical extension of the principle we could allow Homer to be born in Chios on Mondays, in Colophon on Tuesdays, and so with each of the seven cities which starved him. They use up the week nicely. On the odd day of leap year we might concede that he never existed, and allow him to be resolved into the pieces into which he was torn by Wolf. Had this pacificatory principle been discovered earlier, "The Letters of Phalaris"

would never have fluttered Europe, and Swift would have had no need to write "The Battle of the Books." It is never too late to mend, however, and an academy of leading politicians and ecclesiastics should be at once formed to draw up an authoritative "Calendar and Topography of Belief,"

fixing once for all the dates and places on or in which it is permissible to hold any given opinion. Although, when I come to think of it, Science and Religion have long been tacitly reconciled on this principle, Religion being true on Sundays and Science on week-days.

[Sidenote: The Creed of Despair.]

I am convinced that optimism is exactly the wrong sort of medicine for our "present discontents." It is time to try h.o.m.oeopathy. My suggestion is that the religion of the future shall consist of the most pessimistic propositions imaginable; its creed shall be G.o.dless and immoral, its thirty-nine articles shall exhaust the possibilities of unfaith and its burden shall be _vanitas vanitatum_. Man shall be an automaton, and life an hereditary disease, and the world a hospital, and truth a dream, and beauty an optical illusion. These sad tidings of great sorrow shall be organized into a state church, with bishops and paraphernalia, and shall be sucked in by the infant at its mother's breast. Men shall be tutored in unrighteousness, and innocence shall be under ecclesiastical ban.

Faith and Hope shall be of the seven deadly virtues, and unalloyed despair of man and nature a dogma it were blasphemous to doubt. The good shall be persecuted and the theists tortured, and those that say there is balm in Gilead, shall be thrust beyond the pale of decent society.

Then, oh, what a spiritual revival there will be! Every gleam of light will be eagerly sought for, every ray focussed; every hint of love and pity and beauty, of significance and divinity, in this infinite and infinitely mysterious universe, will be eagerly s.n.a.t.c.hed up and thrust upon an age hide-bound in orthodoxy; every touch and trace of tenderness that softens suffering and sweetens the bitterness of death, will be treasured up in secret mistrust of the reigning creed; every n.o.ble thought and deed, every sacred tear, will be thrown into the balance of heresy with every dear delight of poetry and art, of woods and waters, of dawns and sunsets; with every grace of childhood and glory of man and womanhood. And every suppressed doubt of the hideousness of the universe will sink deep and ferment in darkness, and persecution will sit on every natural safety valve till at last the pent forces will swell and crack the sterile soil, and there will be an explosion that shall send a pillar of living fire towards the heavens of bra.s.s. The clerics will be among the first to feel the stirrings of infidel hope--a few will give up their livings rather than preach what they do not believe, but the majority--especially the bishops--will cling to the Church of Despair, hoping against hope that their despair is true. There will be wonderful word-spinnings in the reviews, and the dominant pessimism will be justified by algebraic a.n.a.logies. But, beneath it all, the church will be infected to the core with faith, and for the first time in history we shall get a believing clergy. There will be secret societies founded to publish the Bible, and Colonel Ingersoll will lecture at the hall of religion, and the prisons will be crowded with martyred iconoclasts incredulous of the gospel of science. No, there is nothing so unwise as your optimistic organized creeds, with their suggestions of officialdom, red-tape, and back-stairs influence. We shall never be perfectly religious and moral till we are trained from childhood to unG.o.dly works, forced to attend long sermons on the error of existence, and badgered into public impiety by force of opinion.

[Sidenote: Social Bugbears.]

First there were the Radicals, who stood for the apogee of human villainy, though it now appears they were Conservatives of the mildest type. Then came the turn of the Atheists, who, for all I have been able to discover, were very respectable creatures full of religious ardour, who spelt G.o.d with a small "g" and justice with a capital "J." Then the Socialists had their innings. But "we are all Socialists now," and the empty mantle of villainy has fallen upon Anarchism, which, as far as I can make out, is the simplest and most innocent creed ever invented, and which debars its adherents from exercising any compulsion upon anybody else, relying upon the natural moral working of the human heart. How this is compatible with bombs it is for _Messieurs les Anarchistes_ to explain. Needless to say the a.s.sa.s.sinous Anarchists are disavowed by their philosophical brethren.

[Sidenote: Martyrs.]

Although we moderns work harder than our fathers for our opinions, we are sometimes taunted with not being so ready to die for them. But, as Renan points out, thinkers have no need to die to demonstrate a theorem. Saints may die for their faith because faith is a personal matter. Even so we are still ready to die for our honour. The Christian martyrs did prove that Christianity was a reality to them; but Galileo's death would have been irrelevant to the rotation of the earth. There is no _argumentum per hominem_ possible here; the truth is impersonal. It is only for beliefs that exclude certainty that a man is tempted to martyrdom. The martyr is indeed, as the etymology implies, a witness; but his death is not a witness to the truth of his belief--merely to the truth of his believing.

Blandine at her stake, enduring a hundred horrors unflinchingly, seems in addition to prove that faith was the first anaesthetic. It is curious to note how the word "martyr" has been degraded; so that we have to-day martyrs to the gout instead of to the truth. The idea of suffering has quite ousted the idea of witnessing. What a pity the word got these painful a.s.sociations! There are "martyrs" to the truth--witnesses who without dying testify to the divine streak in life; and unconscious "martyrs" who, by their simple sincerity, their unpretentious unselfishness, prove more than a bookshelf of theology. I have found "martyrdom" in the grip of a friend's hand, though if I had told him so he would have apologised for squeezing so hard. And is not every pretty woman a "martyr"--a revelation of an inner soul of beauty and goodness in this chaotic universe? There! I have succ.u.mbed again to the common masculine impulse to conceive beauty and goodness as a chemical combination, subtly inter-related; whereas the slightest practical experience in the laboratory of life discovers them but a mechanical mixture, dissociable and not seldom antipathetic.

[Sidenote: The London Season]

I remember being so bored one night at dinner, by the ceaseless chatter about Burne-Jones, that I asked my fair neighbour: "Who is Burne-Jones?"

Her reply was as smart as it was feminine. "I don't believe you." There is a moral in this. Why be a slave to the season? Why bother to read all the newest novels, see all the newest plays, hear all the newest musicians, remember all the newest "Reminiscences," and believe all the newest religions, when by pleading ignorance you will pa.s.s not only as an eccentric but a connoisseur? On second thoughts, why not eschew the season altogether? G.o.d made the seasons and man made the season, as Cowper forgot to say. And a nice mess man has made of it, turning night into day and heating his rooms in the summer. The London Season, not Winter, Mr. Cowper, is the true "Ruler of the Inverted Year."

[Sidenote: The Academy]