DEO VOLENTE. Essays. - Essay VIII. On Society.

 

ESSAY VIII. On Society.

But these are the days of advance, the works of the men of mind,

When who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman’s ware or his word?

Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind

The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.

TENNYSON.

 

NEITHER wise gentlemen nor wise politicians prefer discourse of politics to discourse of philosophy. The wise politicians prefer against such casual discourse because they have the power to govern, and prefer the substance to the theory, while the wise gentlemen know that as politics are dominated by party spirit, one of the severest forms of common madness, they must toil twofold and debate in a complete void of power with an almost impotent influence. In the many spheres of philosophy and ethics one seeks to improve; in the single sphere of politics one seeks chiefly to denigrate; the foolish may easily perform the latter, the wise must sweat to achieve the former. ‘The hand which cannot build a hovel, may demolish a temple.’

   If every man governed himself there would be no need of government, if every man were just there would be no need of law, if every parent were educative there would be no need of schooling; if all the world’s individuals corrected themselves, the world would be corrected, and a man confers more benefit on his country by his character than by his vote. That is why Jesus so quickly dismissed the trap set him by the Pharisees with that many sided answer, ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but unto God the things that are God’s’. Jesus of course could easily have made his cause a political cause, even a military cause as Judas would have preferred, but I believe He realised quite fully that society and government and politics are all merely concepts either relating to men or denoting men. It was the individual he was interested in, and it was with the aim of improving the individual that he believed all other things were to be improved. His view was in this respect the opposite of Plato’s, whose talk about large lenses in the Republic implied that he thought societies improved individuals more than individuals improved societies. Modern history has rather disproved that notion, for we are now more generally wealthy, healthy, and knowledgeable, as societies than we have ever been before, yet the spirit of the individual seems to burn very low in the circumstances. Indeed, if civilisation is a phoenix the twenty-first century has thus far made ashes enough.

   Yet I will venture a few observations about how certain small practical matters might be of assistance in improving our present society, if only because I know that the process of individual improvement in the world is going to be a very long one, and that meanwhile a few ordinary alterations may be of material assistance to us in our weakness. There is one thing, in my opinion, above all others that a society needs, and it must be manifest in a public form as well as a private form: a means of softening its peoples’ roused tempers. Man grows indignant, and his pride can be sharp. Truthfully we are all of us noble creatures with virtue for our pith, but things accumulate upon us and make mincemeat of our patience. It is in impatience that most error occurs. Therefore, there ought to be something prepared in a society where people at the end of their tether may resort. A place in public of running water without traffic, privacy without loneliness, music without loudness. Such a place could be a park but it should have to exist on certain principles. It should have to steadily forbid gaiety and rowdiness even at the cost of courtesy, for those in a heightened state of distemper can never bear frolics; it should have to restrict its entrance only to those who confess at the gate that they are in a state of high tension; most importantly, it should provide artistic respite: harp music, classical sculpture, gardens, pleasing architecture, and so forth.

   Art is the most affecting of impulses. Its colours, those bright shades now so often employed in advertising with an impulse other than æsthetic, communicate with the primary urges of man. A strong red, subconsciously no doubt but decidedly, stirs perhaps ancestral memories of shed blood gathering like wax on the ground; a clear blue works the recollections of sea and sky, and thus all that those two boundless elements suggest in the emotions: adventure, the untrammelled pursuit, fresh air, renewed prospects, the dynamism of weather, wet, fierce, and thunderous; and then the striking green, whose piercing hues tell of jungle, scrubland, the refracted collation of summer hedgerows, perhaps winking with the warm tears of May, but ever breathing the sweet diffusive scent of the newly showered earth; or the darker green, solemn in mystery, warning of thicker boscage and so greater camouflage for the viper, the frog, and the Enemy; then orange, richly blushing like the surprised complexion of a sun-kissed damsel in an exceptional June; its tones tell of juices heavy-laden with sugar, caught in the membranes of their pregnant fruit, its rays speak of sunsets which brushed a far-flung scenery in a long distant age; then at last yellow and pink, the pastel shifts of less potent light, which tickle the fancy and please the attention with the thought that all is as well as a blackberry ripening on a bramble, or as serene as a daffodil flouncing in a meadow.

   I admit that I am something of a sentimentalist for art as historically understood. Yet not without reason, for although there are surely some good modern artistic impulses, generally speaking it is a fact that there has been far too much flying in the face of tradition since 1950. Anything which is not immediately new and radical is considered traditional, but the history of art is thousands of years old and there have been many different moods and periods in all its forms, in music, painting, architecture, literature. Innovation has always existed in art, but too often now something is only considered modern if it is shocking or inscrutable. History has a great deal to teach us, we should heed it, he who is not in sympathy with history is not in sympathy with himself, for he who is not in sympathy with the past is not in sympathy with the present. The present is the work of the past, and the histories of the past, be they ever so tragic, were the means by which the present, be it never so wonderful, is able to exist. None who despise history can be trusted, for such persons cannot learn by example.

   Art is the suffering of a thousand pains for a single pleasure, thus a good painting is art, a good cantata is art, a good life is art. Illness bravely borne is art, charity (true charity and not alms-giving) in the midst of salubriousness is art, irritation concealed is art, for virtue is the spirit of art, courage is its action, and modesty its face. Every nation should take up and cherish whatever is left to it of its unique culture. Its history, tradition, character, identity, and language, are products of the early conditions of civilisation. Unless a catastrophe should occur to mankind, such conditions will not exist again. To consciously and assertively wage war on these aspects of culture is therefore to in fact efface what cannot be restored, and to lessen the quality of the earth in the name of a disguised impulse for destruction. For what must the marvels of modern technology, of electric lures and companions, inevitably dispose us more freshly towards except the even greater marvels and the far brighter companions of people, animals, and plants, which comprise mere parts in God’s own more extraordinary and plenteous technology of nature. This plenteousness was most tastefully used in former times, through the employment of stone and timber, brick and wood, materials abundant everywhere and not synthesised in a laboratory; noble materials, which uplift a troubled citizenry, quite unlike polythene.

   The great argument for admitting the truth and force of superior taste is that life, mortal and human, is limited and should be used to the best possible advantage. Of course a man can only deal with what he knows, but when he comes to know better things of actual worth, more meaningful and attractive than all he has known before, to repudiate them and cling to their inferior correlatives is like choosing to drink from ponds instead of springs. In fact, upon this very point, I once had a debate with my youngest brother regarding the superior merits of the classical tradition of music to the modern tradition. He attempted to maintain the ground, which I think indefensible, of taste being merely a matter of random chance or decision. There is an almost magnanimous aspect to this argument, it suggests that people have a right of choice and commends freedom of mood. Music can stir the deepest feelings of man, but in feeling, as in most other things, the quicker impulse is often the lesser. A quick drumbeat accompanied by a loud rousing war cry, which is frankly the formula of many a contemporary song, is instantly stirring, whereas the slow and refined elements of a movement by Bach or Rachmaninov will require time, patience, and a sympathetic intelligence, to appreciate. By the law of equality the belch of a gorilla is equal to the soprano air of ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’. It is the foolish idea of beauty being in the eye of the beholder instead of being seen by the beholder and recognised by the eye of the mind. Those of sense and honesty must call the former a falsehood of the imagination. All sound is sound but not all sound is music, and music like all arts is the better the more generally accomplished its creator. So taste becomes a matter of important distinction; those who have superior taste will appreciate superior works, those who have not will not, and superiority is always determined by respected worth rather than applause. For respected worth must imply the presence of a greater complexity of thought, a complexity ordered instead of confused, in its subtle intermingling of the quiet and the expressed—while applause requires only noise.

   Howsoever, good taste is obtained only by slow gradations and the lower rungs, if not rotten, are often the means to the higher. Perhaps too some things partly in poor taste are partly in good taste as well, and want but small alteration to be wholesome. Yet the distinction holds and ought never to be abolished upon the deceitful grounds of a malicious and inverted snobbery, cherished and maintained too often by the well established, that speaks of merit as elitism and progress as arrogance.

   Society, I suppose, will only be respectful again when it is respectable again. There are a number of books in print now compiling some of the Victorian photographer Francis Frith’s pictures, of which many are simple shots of the country as it used to be. I even have a book which compares some with photographs taken of the same places a hundred years later, but I had to put it away to avoid melancholia. The general impression is one of space, cleanliness, symmetry, and order. Of course the slums of the industrial cities could present different scenes, but even in those pictures, though poverty is obvious and disease apparent, the sense of a tradition in stone and clothing is still discernible, whereas nowadays such slums might be anywhere in the world. Moreover those industrial centres were not so indicative of the country at large as Dickens has inclined us to think; the seaside towns especially appear astonishingly clean. Moreover the industry apparent there is enough to astound anyone familiar with those places to-day. Fishing boats were all along the beaches and with them hale, smiling, noble, old fishermen. Truly this country used to eat everything which bred around its shores! Also the sense of respect to class and education is manifest in the appearance and demeanour of everyone pictured. How changed we are! How altered!

 

Now virtue is a tool of ambition.

And loyalty a guise of sedition.

 

   ‘Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgement come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:

   ‘The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,

   ‘And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

   ‘And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.’ REVELATION. xviii. 10-14.

   So much is departed. There is surely no greater sign of perversity in any social consensus than the view that to be privileged is a negative thing and to be demeaned a positive thing, yet that is how things have developed. Politicising feeling and stoking resentments has become the habit of our time. It is now fashionable to make a victim of oneself and a culprit of the world, though nine times in ten the reverse will be true. What do we receive of the world? Merely birth, sustenance, care, and shelter; or companionship, purpose, language, and diversion, indeed everything which was not ours already in our mothers’ wombs. We make idols of ourselves, our words law, our opinions currency; we act like kings, like birds which refuse to fly because they think they can swim, or leopards which refuse to run because they think they can burrow; we act like kings, but we are hardly even men.

   Commonsense is good but uncommon sense is better. Why now do we delight so much in demonstration, riot, protest, and scorn? The brainless though many-headed multitude give up untying a shoe lace and cut it in half instead. In this age when prosperity has become so general there is a greater obsession with class and injury than ever before. For there are in this world ‘offences given and offences not given but taken’ and now that the former are so few the latter are become more numerous. Justice is endlessly demanded, but social justice is only one limb of natural justice, and indeed it is impossible to imagine the former without presuming upon the latter. Let all trust in providence, to be good is better than to be right.

   It may be regretted that the great aristocrats of the past have been so displaced throughout Europe, for their wealth being of the longest standing, and their distinction the most deeply founded, would cause the least resentment. Howbeit the old tradition has been very brutally mauled, and an open field of ambition now awaits the grubby world. None who succeed can be loved, none who fail will be pitied. Everyone outwardly or inwardly covets more than his fellows. Jealousy is the consequence and, via jealousy, anything but philosophy, anything but resignation or duty, or the sublime consequences of either. The two world wars were dreadful things that ought never to have occurred, especially the first, but their worst effect was not the destruction of kings, nor of nobility, nor even of the soldiers, officers, and citizens,  killed; their worst effect was the despondency they left in those that lived. Almost everything central to European civilisation was abandoned after these wars, the churches were bereft, the palaces and manors were razed, old forms and old shops of old trades were closed, so that a hollowed out bowl was left of the world, unfit to carry anything to the brim, fit only to accumulate mould around its edges. Many would have cheered at the time for thought of these things, perhaps they only meant well, but would they have cheered so earnestly if they could have foreseen all which has since unfolded?

 

There lived a king, as I’ve been told,

In the wonder-working days of old,

When hearts were twice as good as gold,

—And twenty times as mellow.

 

Good-temper triumphed in his face,

And in his heart he found a place

For all the erring human race

—And every wretched fellow.

 

When he had Rhenish wine to drink

It made him very sad to think

That some, at junket or at jink,

—Must be content with toddy.

 

He wished all men as rich as he

(And he was rich as rich could be),

So to the top of every tree

—Promoted everybody.

 

Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats,

And Bishops in their shovel hats

Were plentiful as tabby cats

—In point of fact, too many.

 

Ambassadors cropped up like hay,

Prime Ministers and such as they

Grew like asparagus in May,

—And dukes were three a penny.

 

On every side Field-Marshals gleamed,

Small beer were Lords-Lieutenant deemed,

With Admirals the ocean teemed

—All round his wide dominions.

 

And Party Leaders you might meet

In twos and threes in every street

Maintaining, with no little heat,

—Their various opinions.

 

That king, although no one denies

His heart was of abnormal size,

Yet he’d have acted otherwise

—If he had been acuter.

 

The end is easily foretold,

When every blessed thing you hold

Is made of silver, or of gold

—You long for simple pewter. 

 

When you have nothing else to wear

But cloth of gold and satins rare

For cloth of gold you cease to care

—Up goes the price of shoddy.

 

In short, whoever you may be

To this conclusion you’ll agree,

When everyone is somebody,

—Then no one’s anybody!’

W.S. GILBERT.

 

   There are certain politics which resemble thorns or burs in their qualities, both in overgrowing and displacing better plants, and in pricking and cutting all they touch. High taxation is an example of a most odious, immoral, and unpractical, political policy. When the Roman emperor Caracalla had, during his infamous reign, doubled the inheritance tax from five per cent to ten per cent it was felt by his imperial successors, of which a very few possessed any virtuous merit at all, that the imposition of so high an income tax was too oppressive a policy even for their selfish and covetous ardour to maintain. After Caracalla’s death the former proportion was restored. Thus the vast magnificence of the Roman Empire, in all its might and splendour, was maintained upon a five per cent inheritance tax for the better part of five hundred years.

   Avariciousness has scaled more blazing peaks of ardour since, for inheritance tax in twenty-first century Britain is twenty per cent on fortunes greater than three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand pounds, and thirty percent on fortunes greater than two-million pounds. That which then seemed oppressive to despots now seems evidently insufficient to democrats.

   It is difficult morally to identify a distinction between the theft of a burglar and the unnecessary tax of a governor. In fact, it is likely that an infrequent loss by burglary would seem a loss relatively insubstantial when compared to those losses suffered by whole populations through the protracted and regular effects of unwarrantable taxations.

In the first place high taxation inevitably bloats a government beyond its true and useful size. The potent vice of lucre can enter through the portals of state as well and as silently as elsewhere, it may be that it flourishes in such complacent habitats best of all.

   The humblest workman is glad of his little all, and gladder still of a little more. He thinks but positively of his own prospective acquisitions when he might curse and revile another’s. Property is a great seductress, and Marx himself could not feel truly displeased by a fortunate windfall of his very own. If one could justly indulge the pleasing notion that all mankind are altruists in spirit, and only misanthropes in form, then it would seem surely as much the joy of the workman as the aristocrat that the noble young heir should come into his palatial inheritance. For a palace is beautiful, and a young aspirant member of mankind has inherited it; so the inheritance is an accession to all mankind. Though beauty and grandeur may not exist in ubiquitous measure, if only for the fact that beauty is uncommon because its umpire is ugliness, yet where they exist let them exist. Beauty bestows benefit and joy in its glances, though one should not possess it. To know beauty is the privilege of ugliness, to know ugliness is the burden of beauty. Where is the pathos in the ugly duckling? It is neither in the ugliness of the duckling nor in its beauty as a swan, but in the beauty of its family. Were it not for the beauty of the others the duckling could not be ugly. The tale would have been more aptly titled The Beautiful Family and the Offspring Ugliness.

   Not that I myself hold great stock by riches, but I do not jealously look on those who have it. If they spend them poorly I should feel disapproval, but if they spend them wisely, maintaining a useful social position and cultivating such things as the arts, I should feel approval, not envy. As far as history can tell a nation is most profited by having wealthy people in it, and discouraging such people for the sake of an ideology such as Marxism, which has a squeamish phobia for anyone who is not on his last legs in the gutter, is absurd. When a country would be greatly aided by encouraging the wealthy generally, to not encourage them for the sake of a prejudice is like failing to rescue a man injured on a cliff because, as a principle, it is dangerous to approach the edge.

   Many clergymen hold precisely the opposite opinion, and this I have gathered from experience. Yet all such discourse in church, whether on one side or the other, is surely distasteful. These same debates are held everywhere else in society, and many might hope that the church would prove an escape from such discord, a place of unity; but no, politics are rife there too. Some clerics make the great mistake even of attempting to vindicate their political bigotry by their religious faith. This comes of a real, and perhaps not altogether subconscious, preference in the church for politics to religion. How many party speeches are now passed for sermons in the pulpit? It is by no means an irregular phenomenon, especially amongst the many actually agnostic clergy in the church to-day. All these attempts in fact come to the exact opposite of the avowed intention; not the vindication of political bigotry by religious faith, but the sullying of religious faith by political bigotry. Truly, the connection between politics and religion is very thin, and commonly they look squarely opposite each other. They are like the two points of a horseshoe—of the great, seven feet high, bronze horseshoe given by George IV to the Rutlanders—they are connected, but only peculiarly. They are connected in the prayers for the Sovereign’s Majesty and Royal Family, in the Episcopal peers of the upper house, and the duties generally of church to monarchy, but not in anything specific or particular. For that reason I do not think churches should interfere in political debates on contraception, abortion, or euthanasia, which are very abstruse questions, almost entirely caused by modern circumstances, and never directly mentioned in the Bible. Nor should the abstractions of great literature count for anything in matters of internal law; this has been informally granted in England since the days of Alfred.

   I do not wonder however at the almost constant interest people seem to take in politics to-day. I have seen the hopeless concrete abroad, smelled the stinking coast, felt the rubbish-heaped city, heard the ear-ringing motorcars in the hamlet, the village, and the country town. It is no surprise to me that people turn avidly political because they are discontented. The common structure of society is not well designed to avert those losses of temper and equanimity which, if traced throughout their history, may be seen to have caused many of the worst tragedies of mankind. Cities certainly are poorly designed to heighten our grace. We are social animals it is true, but we are also large, demanding, and thoughtful, animals; we must have our space and quiet. To thickly conglomerate sheer millions of people within a few miles square, and to suspend a great many of them in concrete cells towering hundreds of feet into the air, is obscene. It is an offence unto the race, and who can wonder when it is reported that these citizens are unhappy, or worse, are angry and filled with hatred against each other, and that many of them have turned to criminality, to swiftly ruin their hopes and prospects because the city has already ruined their happiness.

   Too many people should not live together without privacy and quietude. There should be places where our social instincts may be freely indulged, for the short periods of time when we really wish to indulge them, such as those old public houses, now dying their slow deaths, where gentlemen and workmen, in their own appropriated areas, enjoyed their respective feelings of comradeship and purpose amongst fellows of their own ilk and kidney. Or tea parlours, for the sensible beings who have realised that alcohol causes more errors and agony than almost anything else on earth, where, amidst a natural array of papers and pictures, eighteenth-century men and gentlemen enjoyed one another’s conversation. The church furthermore, now so widely and indicatively neglected, where every village came to know itself and to devote itself to goodness and morality, was a regular place of society, the better for being an obligation, where neighbours were obliged to acknowledge each other as fellow mortals, where the rich cauterised their arrogance and smiled on the poor, and the poor killed their envy and smiled on the rich, where, for an hour or so, society died and fellowship lived!

   Nothing mortal is perfect, but certain things are more imperfect than others, and how can anyone think that the small, and consequently greater, the modest, and consequently nobler, village lives of old England past were not preferable in many respects to the flat lives of new England present. Cultures and people change with time, but tradition is a continuous thread which connects families across generations and whole eras across history. Much in the name of progress is liable to be lost but there surely has never been so reckless and overconfident an age as this present one, where history is looked upon as a mere collection of tales, and tradition as a mass of eccentricities. More ought to be done to preserve what is left, before all is lost and we have nothing but the ashes of the earth to bequeath to a forlorn posterity.

 

 

 

1705, the Royal Naval Hospital, London              

2014, London Hospital.

 

1488, the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

 

1997, the National Library, London.

 

1844, the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, London.

 

2002, the New Abbey Mills Pumping Station, London.

   ‘No one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilised, in contradistinction to more primitive, countries it was one of the most religious that the world has known. Moreover its particular type of Christianity laid a peculiarly direct emphasis upon conduct; for, though it recognised both grace and faith as essentials to salvation, it was in practice also very largely a doctrine of salvation by works.—

   ‘But the remarkable feature of evangelicalism was that it came so largely to dispense with the abnormal; made other-worldliness an everyday conviction and, so to say, a business proposition; and thus induced a highly civilised people to put pleasure in the background, and what it conceived to be duty in the foreground, to a quite exceptional degree. A text from the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘He endured as seeing Him who is invisible’, has often and very aptly been used to commemorate General Gordon. It might equally have been applied to Livingstone’s lonely heroism in midmost Africa, to Gladstone laying daily before God the issues of right and wrong in national politics, to Shaftesbury championing oppressed classes who could never conceivably reward him, to Clarkson and Wilberforce in an earlier day climbing their ‘obstinate hill’ to end the slave trade and slavery; and no less truly, though on a lower spiritual plane, to the common conscientious Victorian:

 

Staid Englishman, who toil and slave

From your first childhood to your grave,

And seldom spend and always save—

And do your duty all your life

By your young family and wife.

CLOUGH.

   ‘This is not the place to evaluate Victorian evangelicalism on religious or theological grounds. But to ignore its effect on outward life would be to render much of the period’s history unintelligible. It is often now accused of being gloomy, but it seemed less so at the time of its votaries; who for their self-denials had compensations not visible to their latter-day critics. Certainly, however, it was anti-hedonistic. To-day’s passion for pleasure would have shocked it profoundly. Its own corresponding passion was for self-improvement; and perhaps there never has been an age and a country in which so many individuals climbed to outstanding excellences or achievements of one sort or another across the most discouraging barriers.’ SIR ROBERT ENSOR.