RESPECTABLE CIVILISATION AND AFTER.

It is the boast of the ordinary patriotic Briton that he lives in a highly civilised country. During his tutelage, he learns that climate, or insularity of position on the face of the globe, or the system of monarchy, or the Bible, has, or have, combined or separately, made England the foremost nation on earth. In later life he is sometimes prone to exclaim against our "advanced civilisation," and even to go to the extreme of asserting that we could well dispense with much of it. The latter-day Anglo-Saxon, who thinks without thought, has for himself a very clear and satisfying idea of civilisation. Emerson, on the other hand, remarks that "nobody has attempted a definition of civilisation," and that "we usually suggest it by negations;" and he adduces instances of people lacking an alphabet, iron, and abstract thought. Thus, when we ask for an explanation of the term Civilisation, we usually hear an enumeration of the constituents of a state of primal savagery, and are then possibly referred to the material products, money, and Gatling guns of a nation for signs of its civilisation.

It is then much simpler for the majority to formulate intrinsic barbarism than to define refinement, and to delineate a reliable ideal of Civilisation. They are conscious that much, if not most of that which they would designate civilised could, upon close examination, be proved to be barbaric. Their easy exposition will not withstand keen scientific scrutiny; and a definition which will not stand this test is merely a stumbling-block in the way of inquiry. A member of a reputedly cultured community or class naturally resents attack upon those views and customs which in his estimate denote civilisation, and are of its very essence. If he is a pious Englishman, he will probably confess that in the matter of faith the people of Eastern countries are barbaric, while he fails to discern the trail of barbarity in his own creed and ritual. In like manner, a Philistine aristocrat will scarcely accede that there is barely one degree of coarseness betwixt his pleasures and those of the illiterate proletarian, who, in his turn, persuades himself that he is more intelligent and decent than his compeers of another land.

Yet the truth is that a very small number of the inhabitants of these isles can be justly labelled civilised. We must search, as it were, in the mode of Diogenes for "the highly organised man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honour and taste," who stands for Emerson's type of civilised humanity. That such examples are not unknown at this stage is as certain as the fact that many more are in the process of evolution. And although savagery in idea and practice confronts us this way and that in each scale of society, we shall do ill if we approach the study of modern barbarism in a vein of mocking pessimism. It is also necessary that a lively faith in the evolutionary principle applied to human nature should be tempered by a look behind while our hopes are young.

Slowly and painfully are we "working out the beast," slowly and painfully must we climb the stages till we cease to obey the blind dictates of instinctive impulse and to base our codes on the reigning opinions of the irrational mass. It is hardly needful to reiterate even one of the preliminary conclusions of all philosophers and humanists to prove that most men have no reasoned views upon the conduct of life. Seneca says that "the common sort find it easier to believe than to judge, and content themselves with what is usual, never examining whether it be good or no. By the common sort is intended the man of title as well as the clouted shoe." The veracity of Swift's aphorism that most men have as much turn for flying as for thinking, and of Carlyle's laconic "mostly fools," is unquestioned.

It is therefore no unsupported postulate that the larger part of civilised people always tend to lead barbaric lives, and that what each class is apt to accept as an approximation to a complete civilisation is a very inchoate form of that truer culture urged upon society by individualist reformers in each successive age. A very slight examination of the thought and pursuits of what is called the highest class in our existing social scale will serve to demonstrate the prevalence of barbarism. For there, as in the lower circles, we find the lines of apathy, vulgarity, and animalism graven on patrician faces, and proclaimed in the talk of the dinner-table, the smoking-room, and the covert-side. Obviously, all our peers are not ultra-barbarians; neither are all our bargees and coalheavers savages. Yet the dominant tone is just as often low and inane in the mansion as in the tenement, and with much less to offer in its extenuation. Millions toil and ache, and are vulgarised in order that a coterie of hereditary lords and titled parvenus shall enjoy the leisure which they mainly devote to frivolity and the killing of the Æons of time. Upon these, the intimates of monarchs, the protectors of the sacred pheasant, the distributors of largess, a barbaric populace alternately lavishes its affection and its abuse. So long as the baron flings his groats to the churls, all is peace in vassaldom; but when rents are racked, game laws enforced to their utmost limits, and the dice rattled in the hall, the voice of the people is upraised in tumult, and the virtuous artizan, clinking his silver winnings on the way from the racecourse, thanks heaven he is not as these nobles are, gamblers, adulterers, and oppressors of the widow and the orphan.

Set a barbarian to lash a barbarian if you wish to see injustice done. The fact is that, being barbarous, we first allow an accident of birth to raise a man to a position of power, and then run atilt at our shoddy dignities because the power tends to impede general well-being. Worth of mind is the one qualification for esteem, a trite enough dictum in the mouths of those who persistently ignore its truth. But the time must come when the aristocracy of character will be the only recognised aristocracy in civilised nations.

I think that if one should suggest that it is right to hate the members of our "bloated aristocracy," he is no less absurd than those who fawn around the lackeys of a court. Our noble lords are not of one type, as our common people are not of one cast, though in many rude examples of nobility we can trace the basic elements of ruffianism, and see the bestial fruits thereof. What most concerns us is the question whether a society that grants titles to its successful money-grabbers is clean-purged of its antique barbarism. An academical diploma conferred upon a teacher of the arts or sciences is possibly one means by which the respectful heed of the uncultured is secured for new doctrine. For the one who appends certain characters to his signature will be held in esteem by the many as a man worth hearing. Even in the matter of degrees given to scholars of distinction, we too often discover that such award fosters moral and mental deterioration, and that it narrows and mars the career of thinkers who are elevated to a throne of authority. Our laureates must need be eminently wary in their main theories, though they may pipe an undernote of revolt in the sequestered grove, to ease their souls of the sting of the stultifying penalty of vulgar rank. Yes, titles of all kinds seem to have a tendency to degrade; and the sun of courtly favour often withers the real and aids the growth of the spurious nobility. "Brave old Samuel," ever a Respectable in leading sentiments, was more so when he took a dole from the palace. There is little hope for the amendment of the semi-barbaric prophet when he is taken from the wilderness and thrust into a position only tenurable by wily compromise with the Respectabilities.

Very engrossing is the study of Respectability in high places. "These be the men we are told to look up to," said a tattered plebeian, whose eyes had been blasted by the hunting magistrate who was riding on other men's land. But that we do "look up to" our rich, idle folk with an avid awe is undoubted. Few persons in a town are especially interested in hearing that Mr. Herbert Spencer is there on a visit; but we are most of us anxious to shake hands with a prize-fighter, or the "Jubilee Plunger," or to take tea with a millionaire's wife. We look up to or hunt after such because they have vulgar notoriety or money, and we are not concerned to know how they came by their popularity and their cash, and whether they deserve either, and make a good use of their power. Were it not for the few civilised beings who dare to be considered odd, this odious admiration of trivial character and empty claims would mean a ripening to the decay of society. Involuntarily, the civilised make the ways of barbarity easy to thousands, for they absolve the lethargic from the exertion of severe thinking.

The paradise towards which the bourgeoisie strive is not the leisure to refine the mind, but the opportunity to vie with the more commonplace section of the upper class in dissipation. The labourer who resents the lordling's contumely, and indicts him for living a lazy life, may only work when he is starving, and perhaps not then. His ideal may rise no higher than perpetual beer and ninepins, while the squire craves no higher satisfaction in life than hunting six days a week, and champagne, billiards, and the sporting papers on Sunday. The evil is in the setting up of a barbaric aim of life in all classes. Our greatest ideals are the commercial and the voluptuous. The eternal pursuit of the frivolous, which makes up the chief part of what is foolishly termed "high life," and the sordid middle-class struggle to amass money, are accepted by the shallow as tokens of our progress in civilisation. We are rich and luxurious; we are therefore far above the savage. Yet how far? Our leisured and affluent have for the greater number returned to the employment of a pre-pastoral epoch. Look at the lives of thousands of English gentlemen. Truer barbarians never existed of old than many of those whose whole thought, energy, and wealth are given up to sport. Many of them are restless nomads, ever hurrying from one quarter of the globe to another in search of fresh game to kill. I do not underrate the need for the development of the physical man, nor ignore the value of sports rightly comprehended as a means to the end of training and recreating the body. But what shall be said of that multitude of our countrymen who live to amuse themselves in such primitive fashion? It is these who waste their powers, and barbarise the vulgar by the force of ill example.

Let us not wonder that, in bygone days, a gaping peasantry, with quaint uncouth notions of what constituted an efficient mouthpiece of their wants, yelled at the hustings for the return of those who rode straight, and could pummel the best man of the mob in a brace of rounds. Of such order are still the credentials in some of the Pagan constituencies, where the beer-steeped intelligence pleads the election of "an old-fashioned sort and a thorough sportsman."

We are still rearing these rude types in our public schools and universities, and for these we laudably reserve the chief places on the senate, on justiciary benches, and in local boards. Despite their educational chances and social opportunities, these are surely among the retrograde, with their argot culled from the racing journals, their strange drawling pronunciation of the English tongue, their points of breeding, their caddish hauteur, their rampant John Bullisms, and their innate aversion to thought and earnestness. "The fop of Charles's time," says Leslie, in Mr. Mallock's "New Republic," "aimed at seeming a wit and a scholar. The fop of ours aims at being a fool and a dunce."

Quitting this strange horde, let us descend to the mart for an examination of the Commercial Ideal. No one denies that for a nation of shopkeepers we have done great things in the world's history. In a very large measure we are civilised by the shop, and it is only when the shop absorbs the best of us, mental and physical, that commercial activity tends to retard progress. Provide that a man's moral sense and intellect are not warped or unexercised in the making of money, and there is nothing degrading, but the opposite, in his desire to succeed commercially. But in the fierceness of competition in an over-populated country, cruel barbarity and detestable meanness and cunning arise. And not only these, but the curse of intellectual and Æsthetic atrophy lights upon the host. Out of this undue stress is developed a tendency to sordid living, a preference for the lower gratifications of life. Yet need money-getting always degrade the people? Will the prosperous business career of the future be alone compatible with a low standard of thought, and a corrupt canon of commercial morals?

"Life without industry is guilt; industry without art is brutality." Now, in the push and drive of industry at the close of this century it is as hard for myriads to keep the soul alive, as it is for many thousands to find food for the body. The trader who makes Mammon his idol, who thinks money, and spends his wealth irrationally, brutalises life. But for the others, let us rather pity and try to amend the condition of those who cannot, in plain terms, "leave the shop." There are strong-minded and somewhat exceptional tradesmen who can shake off the dust of the warehouse, and spend the hours of freedom in the cultivation of the intellect. There are men of business who do excellent work in art and science, while their jaded associates are satisfying their purely animal wants. The question is—Can a man live the higher life, and succeed in the worldly meaning of prosperity? Men do not grow money by storing the brain with knowledge, and the merchant who ponders upon a phase of evolution, or murmurs a rhythm of Tennyson while he is at the ledger, will most probably be an indifferent money-maker. Lamb's Good Clerk, you will remember, "gets on" because his first aim is to be a good piece of mechanism. It is a grievous reflection that zeal for the desk should eat up the brain and better part of a good man, and leave him a machine. The expert clerk is as valuable as the clever author or the great painter; but the trouble is that while the trader is making himself efficient as a trader, he is frequently neglecting his mind, narrowing his social judgments, and tending backwards.

Is there no escape from a seemingly invincible fate that restricts the thought and energy of the million to the bare affairs of the shop? It does almost seem at first that there is none. What we have to determine is whether we shall aid the production of mediocre shopkeepers, who will desire to live cultured lives, while they devote a due share of thought to the shop, or whether we shall continue to rear a class who place business first and culture last, or practically without their scheme of life. For every sociologist this is a great problem. Speaking out of my own prejudice, I would rather live in a country of moderately prosperous men, who read, and speculated, and had aspirations for something higher than lucre, than in the land where the mass were rich and unintellectual.

There is an economic aspect of the alternatives. Art thrives where there is wealth; but money does not of necessity make good art. At present two formidable hindrances stand in the way of developing culture—over-population, and a passion for ostentation. Regulate the reproductive faculty, and save the potential slave of industrialism from a struggle that waxes keener yearly. This must be done in the individual and national interest, to the gradual diminishment of abject poverty and the lessening of the awful strain in the congested centres. Allied with this teaching, there should be a wide inculcation of the value of a refined simplicity of material life, a substitution of high-thinking for mere barbarous display in living. These were the leading precepts of John Stuart Mill to an unheedful generation; but I, for one, take courage in the view that this will become the creed of many as we advance in the art of living. In Liberty, Mill writes:

"The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and demoralising effects of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time produce their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their power."

The way of the civiliser is hard. If the men and women of ideals and broad sympathies go, as Mills enjoins, into Barbaria and Philistia as apostles, they must be prepared to receive the hurts of primitive weapons. Missionaries are not welcomed with barbaric shouts of glee when they land to subvert ancient faiths. Neither are apostles of righteousness and sweetness and light beloved of our children of darkness in Belgravia and Bloomsbury. But as Mr. Hamerton asks in his "Intellectual Life": "Are the Philistines to have all the talk to themselves for ever; are they to rehearse their stupid old platitudes without the least fear of contradiction? How long, O Lord, how long?" Yet, let your apostle be the quintessence of tact and humility, he will not escape slander, odium, and contempt when he essays to contradict the ancient platitudes. Broach boldly any subject, from religion to corset-wearing, in the drawing-room at Bloomsbury, or in the back parlour at Lambeth, and you will have to contend against stubborn apathy. To cultivate eccentricity of opinion and conduct for the purpose of evoking the curiosity of the languid Respectables, is a form of insanity which no one will suppose I am advocating as an effort towards civilisation. But social danger is always to be apprehended from conventionality that is stagnantly content with the existing order, and has not the desire nor energy to advance. It is, then, the onerous duty of a thoughtful member of the respectable classes to awaken his relatives or associates from a blank contentment with mere animal well-being and trivial aims. He must not shrink from the burden because it is the habit of unthinking persons to believe that the conclusions of sounder brains have been gained by the same meagre thinking as their own flimsy theories, or that his wrought-out views are only crotchets advanced to flatter his egoism. For by those who shirk deep thinking, intellectual seriousness in others is merely regarded as a more or less peculiar temperamental trait. They do not know that the eternal voluntary martyrdom of thinkers is their salvation. They are unaware that the good and the earnest toil daily in order that the evil and the frivolous may be preserved to reap the reward of toilsome thought, in which the apathetic have had no share, and for which they have little praise. Reflect upon what Darwin has done for morality, science, and art, and then mark the mean ingratitude and ignorant misrepresentation of some of those who are now being made whole by his sane science. Will the Respectables always crucify their social redeemers?

Not wholly encouraging is the investigation of barbarism in our industrial and proletarian classes. Yet perhaps, if there is one party above another that appears to be progressing rapidly towards a higher civilisation, it is the operative. When one thinks of what the working class has done, with its lack of advantage in the past, and its scant opportunity in the present, the progress is one of the most wonderful and hopeful omens of modern times. It is inevitable that the acquisition of a little knowledge should bear some ill fruit among the sound; but the humanising influences of education far exceed in their proved result the expectation of the early pioneers of a noble movement. Much has been done, and much remains to be accomplished, in the work of constructing the foundations and superstructure of an ultimate democratic civilisation. Whitman and Ibsen, latter-day prophets of sound social foresight, predicted at the outset of their careers that in the fibre and stuff of a cultured democracy lies our hope.

Undoubtedly, the moral tone of the industrial class is growing higher yearly. The rough hand of the artisan has fashioned much of our civilisation, and his hard, calculating intelligence will have a larger share in the government of the near future. I confess that it thrills me to hear that a set of miners in the North have begged the custodian of a public library to provide them with Mr. Meredith's fine but "difficult" novels. Again, we should rejoice to learn that a factory worker, who has taught himself to read at the age of forty, is studying Mr. Spencer's "First Principles."

As I have before tried to show, the neglect of civilising thought and study is not voluntary in the case of many busy men and women. It is largely an outcome of complex commercial rivalry and overpressure that thousands should not share in the higher refinements of civilisation, and that science should be outside their rule of life instead of at the bottom of it. Thoreau speaks of the best part of the husbandman being ploughed into the soil for compost; and the figure represents the case for legions of toilers. Mr. Ruskin is among the oracles when he announces that "the final outcome of all wealth is the producing as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures." Perhaps so; but for the nonce, we mostly plod on in that "dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being," which we are wont to describe as "getting on in the world."

It is a great thing, this educational advance of the tool-skilled. Yet there is much to be done. It is needless to rehearse the manifold savage characteristics, the mob frenzies, and the low pleasures of many of the working class—imperfections which all of us exhibit either in like kind or with faint difference. We forget that a mechanic who indulges in a weekly debauch, and sometimes beats a constable, has his counterpart in those who call themselves superior. Ruffianism, brutality, and gross sensuality are not restricted to one class. English epicurism is mostly of the lower kind in every rank. The uncivilised of the upper class spend the larger part of their incomes upon dishes and drinks; the coarse of the labouring class expend nearly half their wages on beer. Our sensuousness trends in the direction of sensuality. We pride ourselves that we are able to consume quantities of flesh, and we apotheosise John Barleycorn with Shakspere.

Very sombre is the spectacle of the life that bruises the million. To one who walks the streets observantly on public holidays, the white faces and worn bodies of his toiling brothers tell of dull, grinding lives. See the poor mercantile clerks and the shopmen, the genteel drudges, the indispensable factors of wealth which they will never share. Well does Guy de Maupassant picture the type:

"With sallow faces and twisted bodies, and one of their shoulders a little forced up by perpetual bending at work over a table ... they all belonged to the army of poor threadbare devils who vegetate frugally in a mean little plaster-house, with a flower bed for a garden."

How can we inveigh against these tired workers for the drowsy occupation of their few leisure hours? What is chiefly at fault is the crushing system that leaves so little time for expansion of the mind and the sympathies, the ideal that shapes the many to this level cast. Mr. Grant White gives a grimly sardonic sketch of a London shopkeeping pair in his "England Without and Within." He tells of faces that had probably "once expressed some of the vivacity of youth; but this had passed away, and nothing, no trace of thought or feeling, had come into its place—only fat; a greasy witness of content." But there is more pathos than humour in this study from lower middle-class life. Were there not originally the germs of ideas, imagination, and emotion, in these unfortunate contented souls? Are such doomed to take no thought for higher things than bread-getting and eating, and will their minds for ever starve on the Bethel hymn and the newspaper?

More pitiful and tragic is the state of the lowest, the lapsed, the untameable of the slums. "Our society," says M. Taine, "is a fine edifice, but in the lowest story what a sink of impurity.... It seems to me that the evil and the good are greater here than in France." The law cannot cure inherent propensities to evil doing, and pious philanthropy can merely patch a rotten vestment; but scientific criminologists will eventually probe to the root. Too long have we relied upon the gaoler and the priest. We are learning now that congenital crime is a subject for the physiologist and the mental pathologist. So, too, with the plague of chronic destitution, the prime infamy of pseudo-civilisation. Instinctive barbaric pity urges liberal almsgiving; but the beautiful emotion of sympathy needs as much control in its gratification as the purely animal appetites. We shall awake soon to the truth that it is our selfish Respectability that must be fought with the weapons of a new economic science, based upon righteousness. We should strive to destroy the sources of hopeless want, as we endeavour to exterminate disease microbes in the body.

Are these the visions of Utopianism? No; for when we consider what modern science has done in its infancy, we may surely reckon upon greater victory in days now dawning. To support this inspiring creed of science we do not need to fabricate evidences out of improbability, conjecture, and fallacy; for the proofs are plain and convincing, and will survive the severest criticism. Truly, if we make moan one day for the tenacity of unreason in the human brain, we may rejoice on the morrow in the thought that never in history has the outlook been brighter.

It is too evident that thousands who can no longer be satisfied with the guesses of primitive barbarians concerning man's origin and destiny still cover their inner convictions with the cloak of Respectability, and endeavour to seem that which they are not. Honesty will thrive with the wane of Respectability.