What's Wrong with the World
wrong. The king was whipped in the cathedral; a performance which I
recommend to those who regret the unpopularity of church-going. But the
discovery was made; and Henry VIII scattered Becket’s bones as easily as
Tracy had scattered his brains.
Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics
were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire
of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not
for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity
was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of
Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the
churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to
end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of
things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet
the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long
before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The
huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in
moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began
to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull
it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to
Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor
creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told
to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent
conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case
of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by
being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived
enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind
has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian
ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult;
and left untried.
It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great
part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French
Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was
the decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have,
indeed, destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a free
peasantry in almost all Christian countries except England; of which we
shall say more anon. But representative government, the one universal
relic, is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theory
of the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, things
which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed
to its imitators in England, Germany, and America. The first of these
was the idea of honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something of
a stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative
English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it
was that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best
answer is that they were admired for being poor--poor when they might
have been rich.
No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute politique
of this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is
actually based on exactly the opposite argument; it is based on the
theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to
financial trickery. Whether the history of the English aristocracy,
from the spoliation of the monasteries to the annexation of the mines,
entirely supports this theory I am not now inquiring; but certainly
it is our theory, that wealth will be a protection against political
corruption. The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born
with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be
found with the silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is our faith in
this protection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting our
empire in the hands of families which inherit wealth without either
blood or manners. Some of our political houses are parvenue by pedigree;
they hand on vulgarity like a coat of-arms. In the case of many a modern
statesman to say that he is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is
at once inadequate and excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his
mouth. But all this only illustrates the English theory that poverty is
perilous for a politician.
It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have come about
with the Revolution legend touching publicity. The old democratic
doctrine was that the more light that was let in to all departments of
State, the easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptly
against wrong. In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses,
that mobs might throw stones. Again, no admirer of existing English
politics (if there is any admirer of existing English politics) will
really pretend that this ideal of publicity is exhausted, or even
attempted. Obviously public life grows more private every day. The
French have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing secrets and
making scandals; hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we, not
in sin but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus might
have happened in England; it is exactly the second trial that would have
been legally impossible. But, indeed, if we wish to realise how far we
fall short of the original republican outline, the sharpest way to test
it is to note how far we fall short even of the republican element
in the older regime. Not only are we less democratic than Danton and
Condorcet, but we are in many ways less democratic than Choiseul and
Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt were needy
middle-class people compared with our Rothschilds and Roseberys. And
in the matter of publicity the old French monarchy was infinitely more
democratic than any of the monarchies of today. Practically anybody
who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his
children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as the
people possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they can
sprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent
principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look
at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press is free
for criticism it is only used for adulation. The substantial difference
comes to something uncommonly like this: Eighteenth century tyranny
meant that you could say “The K__ of Br__rd is a profligate.” Twentieth
century liberty really means that you are allowed to say “The King of
Brentford is a model family man.”
But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical
purpose of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great
mediaeval dream, has in a strict and practical sense been a dream
unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England it is not
that we have carried out too literally, or achieved with disappointing
completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket or the equality of Marat.
Now I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of
ten thousand other cases; the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas,
these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and
crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by
a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a
deserted cemetery.
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VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessary
on the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to that
historic fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers will
expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I
have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal
imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything
like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day
that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an
earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done
under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a
blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their
ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the
ideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and
its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning
thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it. It is true of both
the cases I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored
purity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began
defiantly to practice purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and
rolled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion of
the poor man uppermost; it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella
to Whittington, by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise.
The kings went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal,
but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia
quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was that
the people did. The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of all
true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but
its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the New
Jerusalem.
But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the
extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they
have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they
have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never
wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.
Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these
old ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle
of domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of
history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like
the church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have
never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless
modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they
have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the
workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the
cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as
the working class is shouting to be let into it.
Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay
the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make
something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can
make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God
be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the
combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure, therefore, is
to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to
be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The
excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions
will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet
on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking
a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero
out of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics.
This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy
entertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. But
the mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of
invisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic
creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present
discussions--the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into