What's Wrong with the World
desires. Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the only
way of producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured
as the only way of preventing poverty. Nobody’s real heart is in the
idea of preventing a free man from owning his own farm, or an old woman
from cultivating her own garden, any more than anybody’s real heart was
in the heartless battle of the machines. The purpose of this chapter
is sufficiently served in indicating that this proposal also is a pis
aller, a desperate second best--like teetotalism. I do not propose to
prove here that Socialism is a poison; it is enough if I maintain that
it is a medicine and not a wine.
The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families
free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic,
of one man one house--this remains the real vision and magnet of
mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less
human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman
who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one;
Socialism may be the world’s deliverance, but it is not the world’s
desire.
PART TWO. IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN
I. THE CHARM OF JINGOISM
I have cast about widely to find a title for this section; and I confess
that the word “Imperialism” is a clumsy version of my meaning. But
no other word came nearer; “Militarism” would have been even more
misleading, and “The Superman” makes nonsense of any discussion that he
enters. Perhaps, upon the whole, the word “Caesarism” would have been
better; but I desire a popular word; and Imperialism (as the reader will
perceive) does cover for the most part the men and theories that I mean
to discuss.
This small confusion is increased, however, by the fact that I do also
disbelieve in Imperialism in its popular sense, as a mode or theory
of the patriotic sentiment of this country. But popular Imperialism in
England has very little to do with the sort of Caesarean Imperialism
I wish to sketch. I differ from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes’ and
Kipling; but I do not think, as some of its opponents do, that it is
an insolent creation of English harshness and rapacity. Imperialism,
I think, is a fiction created, not by English hardness, but by English
softness; nay, in a sense, even by English kindness.
The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental as the
most sentimental reasons for believing in heaven. New South Wales
is quite literally regarded as a place where the wicked cease from
troubling and the weary are at rest; that is, a paradise for uncles
who have turned dishonest and for nephews who are born tired. British
Columbia is in strict sense a fairyland, it is a world where a magic and
irrational luck is supposed to attend the youngest sons. This strange
optimism about the ends of the earth is an English weakness; but to show
that it is not a coldness or a harshness it is quite sufficient to
say that no one shared it more than that gigantic English
sentimentalist--the great Charles Dickens. The end of “David
Copperfield” is unreal not merely because it is an optimistic ending,
but because it is an Imperialistic ending. The decorous British
happiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes would be
embarrassed by the perpetual presence of the hopeless tragedy of Emily,
or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and
Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them
with no conceivable cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomes
contented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of
a sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.
To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only
objection is that it is an illusion of comfort; that an Empire whose
heart is failing should be specially proud of the extremities, is to me
no more sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose brain is gone should
still be proud of his legs. It consoles men for the evident ugliness and
apathy of England with legends of fair youth and heroic strenuousness in
distant continents and islands. A man can sit amid the squalor of Seven
Dials and feel that life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on the
veldt. Just so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feel
that life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbiton. Brixton and
Surbiton are “new”; they are expanding; they are “nearer to nature,”
in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile. The only
objection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton are not
young giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets, singing
with the sweet energy of the spring. Nor are the people of the Colonies
when you meet them young giants or pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys
who have lost their last music of real things by getting out of the
sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a man of real though decadent
genius, threw a theoretic glamour over them which is already fading. Mr.
Kipling is, in a precise and rather startling sense, the exception that
proves the rule. For he has imagination, of an oriental and cruel kind,
but he has it, not because he grew up in a new country, but precisely
because he grew up in the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted in a
past--an Asiatic past. He might never have written “Kabul River” if he
had been born in Melbourne.
I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion), that
Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both weak
and perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create a kind
of sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, which
it can only share. It is a love of living with one’s inferiors. The
notion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is a
dream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shape
and in almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent and
conservative people; therefore they embodied that attempt at Empire
in long and lingering dynasties. The French are a violent people, and
therefore they twice conquered that Empire by violence of arms. The
English are above all a poetical and optimistic people; and therefore
their Empire is something vague and yet sympathetic, something distant
and yet dear. But this dream of theirs of being powerful in the
uttermost places, though a native weakness, is still a weakness in them;
much more of a weakness than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. If
ever we were in collision with our real brothers and rivals we should
leave all this fancy out of account. We should no more dream of pitting
Australian armies against German than of pitting Tasmanian sculpture
against French. I have thus explained, lest anyone should accuse me of
concealing an unpopular attitude, why I do not believe in Imperialism as
commonly understood. I think it not merely an occasional wrong to other
peoples, but a continuous feebleness, a running sore, in my own. But it
is also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism that is an amiable
delusion partly in order to show how different it is from the deeper,
more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have been forced to
call Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter. In order to get to
the root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism we must cast
back and begin anew with a more general discussion of the first needs of
human intercourse.
*****
II. WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace.
Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering
and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to
everybody, can stop one’s heart with the very thought of them. But while
this is granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely true
that these universal things are strange; it is moreover true that they
are subtle. In the last analysis most common things will be found to
be highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the
difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they will
call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct
of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of
describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That
there is a strong physical element in both romance and the Memento
Mori makes them if possible more baffling than if they had been wholly
intellectual. No man could say exactly how much his sexuality was
colored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere boyish itch for
irrevocable adventures, like running away to sea. No man could say how
far his animal dread of the end was mixed up with mystical traditions
touching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things are
animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties
begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part and
go home to their tea.
It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore
it is not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-room
song of my youth which began “In the gloaming, O, my darling,” was
vulgar enough as a song; but the connection between human passion and
the twilight is none the less an exquisite and even inscrutable thing.
Or to take another obvious instance: the jokes about a mother-in-law
are scarcely delicate, but the problem of a mother-in-law is extremely
delicate. A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the
twilight. She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things--law and a
mother. The caricatures misrepresent her; but they arise out of a real
human enigma. “Comic Cuts” deals with the difficulty wrongly, but it
would need George Meredith at his best to deal with the difficulty
rightly. The nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this: it is not
that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.
But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have
all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument,
the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it “the very
nadir and scoff of good conversationalists.” Now there are very deep
reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well
as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. First of
all it is a gesture of primeval worship. The sky must be invoked; and
to begin everything with the weather is a sort of pagan way of beginning
everything with prayer. Jones and Brown talk about the weather: but so
do Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary idea
in politeness--equality. For the very word politeness is only the Greek
for citizenship. The word politeness is akin to the word policeman: a
charming thought. Properly understood, the citizen should be more polite
than the gentleman; perhaps the policeman should be the most courtly and
elegant of the three. But all good manners must obviously begin with
the sharing of something in a simple style. Two men should share an
umbrella; if they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share
the rain, with all its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy.
“For He maketh His sun to shine....” This is the second element in the
weather; its recognition of human equality in that we all have our hats
under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the universe. Arising out of
this is the third wholesome strain in the custom; I mean that it begins
with the body and with our inevitable bodily brotherhood. All true
friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of
rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are