What's Wrong with the World
do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly
describe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could only
smatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can
only stammer American; nor am I certain that the bygone duchesses who
were scarcely successful when they painted Melrose Abbey, were so much
more weak-minded than the modern duchesses who paint only their own
faces, and are bad at that. But that is not the point. What was the
theory, what was the idea, in their old, weak water-colors and their
shaky Italian? The idea was the same which in a ruder rank expressed
itself in home-made wines and hereditary recipes; and which still, in
a thousand unexpected ways, can be found clinging to the women of the
poor. It was the idea I urged in the second part of this book: that
the world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become artists and
perish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may
conquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she must
not be a private soldier in it. I do not think the elegant female with
her bad Italian was a perfect product, any more than I think the slum
woman talking gin and funerals is a perfect product; alas! there are few
perfect products. But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the new
woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it
is right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal.
The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter of
Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady
talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great
and golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life, who could be a
barrister because she could be anything. Sunken and neglected in the
sea of modern monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to their
original truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still
bury her father. The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing,
still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself and
her husband: that he must be Something in the City, that she may be
everything in the country.
There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to
God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a
flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and
certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features
of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of
life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes
the woman--she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me;
save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering
levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt
when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as
run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful
sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets
like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human
soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is
that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female,
drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it.
She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining
the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of
superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining
the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth
doing, it is worth doing badly.
PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN
I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT
A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress
because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need
scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision;
it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious
cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God,
like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth
which it is here relevant to repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the
French Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode
of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revolution
appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all
local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there
must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he did
not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of
jus divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he
attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short,
the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere
molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that
each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the
tyrant it ought to have. “I know nothing of the rights of men,” he said,
“but I know something of the rights of Englishmen.” There you have the
essential atheist. His argument is that we have got some protection by
natural accident and growth; and why should we profess to think beyond
it, for all the world as if we were the images of God! We are born under
a House of Lords, as birds under a house of leaves; we live under a
monarchy as niggers live under a tropic sun; it is not their fault if
they are slaves, and it is not ours if we are snobs. Thus, long
before Darwin struck his great blow at democracy, the essential of the
Darwinian argument had been already urged against the French Revolution.
Man, said Burke in effect, must adapt himself to everything, like an
animal; he must not try to alter everything, like an angel. The last
weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism and deism of the
eighteenth century came in the voice of Sterne, saying, “God tempers
the wind to the shorn lamb.” And Burke, the iron evolutionist,
essentially answered, “No; God tempers the shorn lamb to the wind.”
It is the lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he either dies or
becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught.
The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere
offense at the grotesque notion of visiting one’s grandfather in a cage
in the Regent’s Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and
many other grotesque things; they do not much mind making beasts
of themselves, and would not much mind having beasts made of their
forefathers. The real instinct was much deeper and much more valuable.
It was this: that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and
alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist
him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes. The popular
instinct sees in such developments the possibility of backs bowed and
hunch-backed for their burden, or limbs twisted for their task. It has
a very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and
systematically will mostly be done by a successful class and almost
solely in their interests. It has therefore a vision of inhuman hybrids
and half-human experiments much in the style of Mr. Wells’s “Island of
Dr. Moreau.” The rich man may come to breeding a tribe of dwarfs to be
his jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his hall-porters. Grooms might
be born bow-legged and tailors born cross-legged; perfumers might have
long, large noses and a crouching attitude, like hounds of scent; and
professional wine-tasters might have the horrible expression of one
tasting wine stamped upon their faces as infants. Whatever wild image
one employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, when
once it supposes that the fixed type called man could be changed. If
some millionaire wanted arms, some porter must grow ten arms like an
octopus; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must go with a hundred
trotting legs like a centipede. In the distorted mirror of hypothesis,
that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see such monstrous and evil
shapes; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left but one
nostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the mere notion of
adaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so very far
from the reality.
It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that we
should become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Pardon me,
that is exactly what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but some
of the tamest evolutionists too. There has risen high in recent
history an important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of the
future--which means the religion of those few weak-minded people who
live in the future. It is typical of our time that it has to look
for its god through a microscope; and our time has marked a definite
adoration of the insect. Like most things we call new, of course, it is
not at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes
bees seriously but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully as
he wrote about them. The wise king told the sluggard to watch the ant, a
charming occupation--for a sluggard. But in our own time has appeared a
very different tone, and more than one great man, as well as numberless
intelligent men, have in our time seriously suggested that we should
study the insect because we are his inferiors. The old moralists merely
took the virtues of man and distributed them quite decoratively and
arbitrarily among the animals. The ant was an almost heraldic symbol of
industry, as the lion was of courage, or, for the matter of that, the
pelican of charity. But if the mediaevals had been convinced that a
lion was not courageous, they would have dropped the lion and kept the
courage; if the pelican is not charitable, they would say, so much the
worse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say, permitted the ant to
enforce and typify man’s morality; they never allowed the ant to upset
it. They used the ant for industry as the lark for punctuality; they
looked up at the flapping birds and down at the crawling insects for a
homely lesson. But we have lived to see a sect that does not look down
at the insects, but looks up at the insects, that asks us essentially to
bow down and worship beetles, like ancient Egyptians.
Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius always
carries a magnifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we have
seen the bees not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armies
and hierarchies of warriors and queens. Imagination perpetually peers
and creeps further down the avenues and vistas in the tubes of science,
and one fancies every frantic reversal of proportions; the earwig
striding across the echoing plain like an elephant, or the grasshopper
coming roaring above our roofs like a vast aeroplane, as he leaps from
Hertfordshire to Surrey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple of
enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on something
wilder than arms or backbones; in which the ribbed columns have the
half-crawling look of dim and monstrous caterpillars; or the dome is
a starry spider hung horribly in the void. There is one of the modern
works of engineering that gives one something of this nameless fear
of the exaggerations of an underworld; and that is the curious curved
architecture of the under ground railway, commonly called the Twopenny
Tube. Those squat archways, without any upright line or pillar, look as
if they had been tunneled by huge worms who have never learned to lift
their heads. It is the very underground palace of the Serpent, the spirit
of changing shape and color, that is the enemy of man.
But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic suggestions that writers