Chapter XI: Part 11

It has been passed, like many another fallacy, from generation to generation, and the enormous power of evil which lies in the female sex has been underestimated or conventionally disregarded for the sake of a poetic effect. The seducer is continually held up for condemnation, but the temptress is seldom remembered. It is common to write of women as the victims of men, and it is forgotten how many men are the victims in their earliest youth of women. Even in marriage the woman, by her infidelity, can inflict the most poignant, the most torturing dishonour on the man; the man’s infidelity does not in the least touch the honour of the woman. She can never be in doubt as to the fact of her children being her own; but he may be perpetually tortured by such a doubt, nay, may be compelled through lack of proof to give his name and shelter to his offspring when he is morally convinced that they are not his. The woman can bring shame into a great race as the man can never do, and ofttimes brings it with impunity. In marriage, moreover, the influence of the woman, whatever popular prejudices plead to the contrary, is constantly belittling and injurious to the intelligence of the man. How many great artists since the days of Andrea del Sarto have cursed the woman who has made them barter their heritage of genius for the ‘pottage’ of worldly affluence? How much, how often, and how pitilessly have the petty affairs, the personal greeds, the unsympathetic and low-toned character of the woman he has unfortunately wedded, put lead on the winged feet of the man of genius, and made him leave the Muses for the god of barter beloved of the common people in the market-place? Not infrequently what is called with pious praise a good woman, blameless in her own conduct and devoted to what she conceives to be her duties, has been more fatal to the originality, the integrity, and the intellectual brilliancy of a man than the worst courtesan could have been. The injury which women have done the minds of men may fairly be set off against those social and physical injuries which men are said by M. Dumas to inflict so ruthlessly on women.

If outside monogamous marriage the woman suffers from the man, within it man suffers from the woman. It is doubtful if but for the obligation to accept it, which is entailed by property, and the desire for legitimate heirs, one man in a hundred of the richer classes would consent to marry. Whenever Socialism succeeds in abolishing property, monogamy will be destroyed with it perforce.

In the lower strata of society the conjugal association is made on more equal terms: both work hard and both frequently come to blows. The poor man loses less by marriage than the rich man, for he has his comforts, his food and his clothes looked after gratis, but the poor woman gains very little indeed by it; and if she got a hearing in the political world, she would probably brawl against it, or, which is still more likely, she would do worse and insist on marriage laws which should restrict the personal freedom of the man as severely and as tyrannically as the Sabbath observance laws do in Scotland, and as the Puritan exactions did in the early years of American colonisation.

The net result of the entrance of the woman into the political arena can never be for the happiness of humanity.

‘Prevant leur revanche de l’immobilité à laquelle on les a condamnées elles vont courrir par n’importe quels chemins à côté de l’homme, devant lui si elles peuvent, contre lui s’il le faut à la conquête d’un nouveau monde. En matière de sensation la femme est l’extrême, l’excès, de l’homme.’ Dumas recognises the inevitable hostility which will be begotten between the sexes if they war in the same public arena; but he passes over it.

If female suffrage become law anywhere, it must be given to all women who have not rendered themselves ineligible for it by criminality. The result will scarcely be other than the emasculation and the confusion of the whole world of politics. The ideal woman is, we know, the type of heroism, fortitude, wisdom, sweetness and light; but even the ideal woman is not always distinguished by breadth of thought, and it is here a question not of the ideal woman at all, but of the millions of ordinary women who have as little of the sage in them as of the angel. Very few women are capable of being the sympathetic mistress of a great man, or the ennobling mother of a child of genius. Most women are the drag on the wheel of the higher aspirations, to the nobler impulses, to the more original and unconventional opinions, of the men whom they influence. The prospect of their increased ascendency over national movements is very ominous. Is the mass of male humanity ready to accept it?

Women will not find happiness in hostility to men even if they obtain a victory in it, which is very doubtful. Women of genius have never hated men: they have perhaps liked them too well. To the woman of genius love may not be the sole thing on earth, as it is to Gretchen; it is only one amongst the many emotions, charms and delights of life; but she never denies its attractions, its consolation, its supreme ecstasy, its exquisite sympathies. Heloise and Aspasia can love better than Penelope.

Who, then, will become those enemies of men to whom Dumas looks for the emancipation of the weaker sex? All the _délaissées_, all the _déclassées_, all the discontented, jaded, unloved, embittered women in the world, all those, and their number is legion, who have not genius or loveliness, fortune or power, the wisdom to be mute or the sorcery to charm; women restless, feverish, envious, irritable, embittered, whose time hangs heavy on their hands and whose brains seethe under the froth of ill-assorted and ill-assimilated knowledge.

‘Quarry the granite rock with razors,’ wrote John Newman, ‘or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope, with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human understanding, to contend against these giants, the passions and the pride of man;’—or against the difference and the influence of sex.

I know not why women should wish or clamour at once to resemble and to quarrel with man. The attitude is an unnatural one; it is sterile, not only physically but mentally. It is true that the prejudices and conventionalities of society, and the fictions of monogamy have stranded a vast number of women, undistinguished and unhappy, with no career and no interests, who would imagine themselves disgraced if they enjoyed the natural affections of life outside that pale of propriety which the conventions of society have created. These are the women who would care for political power and would be allowed to exercise it. What could the world gain from such as these? What would it not lose of the small modicum of freedom, of contentment, and of wisdom which it already possesses?

To most women success is measured by the balance at the bank, by the applause of the hour, and nothing is esteemed which has not received the hall-mark of the world’s approval. There are exceptions, no doubt; but they have been and are, I think, fewer than the advocates of female suffrage would have us believe. Men too often are mere _moutons de Panurge_, but women are so almost invariably. The Arab who weeps when a female child is born to him is perhaps more correct in his measurement of the sex than the American who is prepared to make her the spoiled and wayward sovereign of his household.

I have previously used the words ‘mental and moral inferiority’; it is perhaps necessary to explain them. By mental inferiority I do not mean that the average women might not, if educated to it, learn as much mathematics or as much metaphysics as the ordinary man. I do not deny that Girton may produce senior wranglers or physiologists in time to come; it may do so. But the female mind has a radical weakness which is often also its peculiar charm; it is intensely subjective, it is only reluctantly forced to be impersonal, and it has the strongest possible tendency to tyranny, as I have said before. In public morality, also, the female mind is unconsciously unscrupulous; it is seldom very frank or honest, and it would burn down a temple to warm its own pannikin. Women of perfect honesty of intentions and antecedents will adopt a dishonest course, if they think it will serve an aim or a person they care for, with a headlong and cynical completeness which leaves men far behind it. In intrigue a man will often have scruples which the woman brushes aside as carelessly as if they were cobwebs, if once her passions or her jealousies are ardently involved. There is not much veracity anywhere in human nature, but it may always be roughly calculated that the man will be more truthful than the woman, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; his judgments will be less coloured by personal wishes and emotions, and his instincts towards justice will be straighter and less mobile than hers. Were women admitted into public life, bribery would become a still greater factor in that life than it now is, which is needless. All the world over, what is wanted for the health of the nations is the moral purification of politics, the elimination of venal and personal views, the disinterested advocacy and adoption of broad, just and magnanimous principles of action. Can it be said that the entry of women into politics would have this effect? He must be a sanguine man who can think that it would, and he must have but little knowledge of women.

_On a les défauts de ses qualités._ This is one of the most profound axioms ever evolved out of a study of human nature. And all which constitutes the charm of women, mutability, caprice, impressionability, power of headlong self-abandonment, mingled with intense subjectiveness and self-engrossment, would all make of women an inferior but of a most dangerous political force. Where Mr Gladstone has sent out troops and recalled them a dozen times, she, with similar but still greater oscillations of purpose, would send them out and recall them five hundred times. The _Souvent femme varie_ of Francois the First is true to all time. But in all her variations it is the Sejanus, the Orloff, the Biron, the Bothwell of the moment, whom she would wade through seas of blood to please. This makes at once her dangerousness and her charm.

As scientists look forward to the time when every man will be bald from boyhood, thus having outgrown the last likeness to the beasts that perish, so enthusiasts for female suffrage look forward to a time when woman will have shed all her fair follies and rectified all her amusing inconsistencies. What will she be like then? Very unlovely it may safely be predicted, as unlovely as the men without hair; very mischievous for evil, it may also be deemed certain.

A French physiologist, who lectured in Russia not very long ago, was amazed at the howls of impatience and disdain which was aroused in the female students amongst his audience in Moscow by his simple statement that the claims of the arts must not be wholly lost sight of in the demands and inquiries of science. They would not tolerate even the mention of the arts; in their fanaticism they would only worship one God. The youths were willing to award a place to art; the maidens would hear of nothing but science. ‘_Une grande sécheresse de cœur domine la femme qui se donne à la Science_;’ and with this dryness of the soul comes an unmerciful and intolerant disposition to tyranny over the minds of others.

It cannot be denied that the quality which in women bestows most happiness on those around them, is that which is called in French and has no exact descriptive word in English, _gaîte de cœur_. Not frivolous unusefulness, or passion for diversion and excitement, but a sweet and happy spirit, finding pleasure in small things and great, and shedding a light like that of Moore’s wild freshness of morning on the beaten tracks of life. Where will this pleasant gaiety and smiling radiance go when, harassed, heated, and blown by the bitter winds of strife, the woman seeks to outshriek the man on political platforms, or when with blood-stained hands she bends over the torture-trough of the physiological laboratory?

The humanities do not harden a woman: erudition may leave her loveliness and grace of form and mind; though as proficient a Greek and Latin scholar as any of the learned Italian women of the Renaissance, yet she may be the joy of her home and the angel of the poor. A love of learning, of art, of nature, keeps long young the heart in which it has a place. But the noisy conflicts of the polling-booths and the pitiless cruelties of the laboratories will not do so. There is in every woman, even in the best woman, a sleeping potentiality for crime, a curious possibility of fiendish evil. Even her maternal love is dangerously near an insane ferocity, which at times breaks out in infanticide or child-murder. Everything which tends to efface in her gentler and softer instincts tends to make of her a worse curse to the world than any man has ever been. If, indeed, in the centuries to come she should develop into the foe of man, which Dumas _fils_ wishes her to become, it is by no means improbable that men, in sheer self-defence, will be compelled to turn on her and chain her down into the impotency of servitude once more.

If she once leave the power which nature has given her over her lovers, her friends, her sons, to become the opponent, the jealous rival and the acrid enemy of men, then men, it may be with surety predicted, will not long keep the gloves on as they fight with her, but with the brutality which is natural to the male animal and which is only curbed, not effaced, by the graceful hypocrisies of society and of courtship, will with his closed fists send her down into that lower place of _la femelle de l’homme_, from which it has been the effort and the boast of Christianity and of civilisation to raise her. Woman can never truly conquer man, except by those irresistible weapons which the Queen of the Amazons leaned on in her strife with Alexander.

Man has, I repeat, been very fair in his dealings with women, as far as legislation goes; he could easily have kept her from all time to the harem, and it has been a proof of his fairness, if not of his wisdom, that he has not done so. I have but little doubt but that, before long, he will cede to her clamour, and let her seat herself beside him, or opposite to him, on the benches of his representative houses. When he does, he will, I think, regret the loss of the harem.

There is a lax and perilous inclination in the mass of mankind, in these latter days of the century, to give anything which is much asked for.

‘To yield to clamour and to pallid fears,
What wisdom, temperance and truth deny;’

to let the reins go, and the steeds, which draw the chariot of national fate, gallop headlong, whither they will, downhill if they choose. The pessimism prevalent in the classes which think, lies at the root of their indifference to change, and their apathy and indolence before fresh demands. Men who do think at all, see how unsatisfactory all things are, how unreal all religions, how fictitious the bond of marriage, how mutable the laws of property, how appalling the future of the world, when there will not be even standing-room upon it for all the billions of peoples begotten. And they are, therefore, in that mood which makes them willing to try any new thing, even as men at death’s door languidly affirm their despairing readiness to try any nostrum or panacea tendered to them.

Woman may, will, very possibly, snatch from the nerveless hand of the sick man those legal and legislative rights which she covets. The political movements of modern times have been always in the direction of giving unlimited power to blind and unmeasured masses, whose use of that which is thus rashly given them the boldest prophet dare not predict. Such movement will probably give political power to women.

I confess that I, for one, dread the day which shall see this further development of that crude and restless character of the nineteenth century, which, with sublime self-contentment and self-conceit, it has presumed to call Progress.

VULGARITY

If the present age were less of a hypocrite than it is, probably its conscience would compel it to acknowledge that vulgarity is excessively common in it; more common than in any preceding time, despite its very bountiful assumptions of good taste and generalised education.

Vulgarity is almost a modern vice; it is doubtful whether classic ages knew it at all, except in that sense in which it must be said that even Socrates was vulgar, _i.e._, inquisitiveness, and in that other sense of love of display to which the tailless dog of Alkibiades was a mournful victim. We are aware that Alkibiades said he cut off his dog’s tail and ears to give the Athenians something to talk of, that they might not gossip about what else he was doing. But though gossip was no doubt rife in Athens, still, vulgarity in its worst sense, that is, in the struggle to seem what the struggler is not, could have had no existence in times when every man’s place was marked out for him, and the lines of demarcation could not be overstepped. Vulgarity began when the freedman began to give himself airs, and strut and talk as though he had been a porphyrogenitus; and this pretension was only possible in a decadence.

There may be a vast vulgarity of soul with an admirable polish of manners, and there may be a vast vulgarity of manner with a generous delicacy of soul. But, in this life, we are usually compelled to go by appearances, and we can seldom see beyond them, except in the cases of those few dear to, and intimate with us. We must be pardoned if we judge by the externals which are palpable to us and do not divine the virtues hidden beneath them.

An essayist has recently defined good manners as courtesy and truthfulness. Now this is simply nonsense. A person may be full of kindly courtesies, and never utter the shadow of an untruth, and yet he may have red-hot hands, a strident voice, an insupportable manner, dropped aspirates, and a horribly gross joviality, which make him the vulgarest of the vulgar. It is often said that a perfect Christian is a perfect gentleman, but this also is a very doubtful postulate. The good Christian may ‘love his neighbour as himself,’ and yet he may offend his ear with a cockney accent and sit down to his table with unwashed hands. ‘Manners make the man,’ is an old copy-book adage, and is not quiet true either: but it is certain that, without good manners, the virtues of a saint may be more offensive, by far, to society than the vices of a sinner. It is a mistake to confuse moral qualities with the social qualities which come from culture and from breeding.

I have said that Socrates must have been in a certain degree vulgar, because he was so abominably inquisitive. For surely all interrogation is vulgar? When strangers visit us, we can at once tell whether they are ill-bred or high-bred persons by the mere fact of whether they do, or do not, ask us questions. Even in intimacy, much interrogation is a vulgarity; it may be taken for granted that your friend will tell you what he wishes you to know. Here and there when a question seems necessary, if silence would imply coldness and indifference, then must it be put with the utmost delicacy and without any kind of semblance of its being considered a demand which must be answered. All interrogation for purposes of curiosity is vulgar, curiosity itself being so vulgar; and even the plea of friendship or of love cannot be pleaded in extenuation of it. But if love and friendship be pardoned their inquisitiveness, the anxiety of the general public to have their curiosity satisfied as to the habits, ways and scandals of those who are conspicuous in any way, is mere vulgar intrusiveness, which the ‘society newspapers,’ as they are called, do, in all countries, feed to a most pernicious degree. Private life has no longer any door that it can shut and bolt against the intrusion of the crowd. Whether a royal prince has quarrelled with his wife, or a country mayoress has quarelled with a house-maid, the press, large or small, metropolitan or provincial, serves up the story to the rapacious curiosity of the world-wide, or the merely local public. This intrusion on personal and wholly private matters is an evil which increases every day; it is a twofold evil, for it is alike a curse to those whose privacy it poisons, and a curse to those whose debased appetites it feeds. It would be wholly impossible, in an age which was not vulgar, for those journals which live on personalities to find a public. They are created by the greed of the multitude which calls for them. It is useless to blame the proprietors and editors who live on them; the true culprits are the readers—the legions of readers—who relish and patronise them, and without whose support such carrion flies could not live out a summer.

‘It is so easy to talk about people’ is the excuse constantly made by those who are reproved for gossiping about others who are not even, perhaps, their personal acquaintances. Yes, it is very easy; the most mindless creature can do it; the asp, be he ever so small, can sting the hero, and perchance can slay him; but gossip of a malicious kind is intensely vulgar, and to none but the vulgar should it be welcome, even if their vulgarity be such as is hidden under a cloak of good manners. It is true that there is a sort of spurious wit which springs out of calumny, and which is _malgré nous_ too often diverting to the best of us, and this sort of personality has a kind of contagious attraction which is apt to grow even on those who loathe it, much as absinthe does. But it is none the less vulgar, and vulgarises the mind which admits its charm, as absinthe slowly eats up the vitality and the digestive powers of those who yield to its attraction. Were there no vulgarity, it may be said that there would be no scandal; for scandal is born of that marked desire to think ill of others, and that restless inquisitiveness into affairs that do not concern us, which is pre-eminently vulgar. When we talk of the follies of our friends, or the backslidings of our acquaintances, in a duchess’s boudoir, we are every whit as vulgar as the fishwives or the village dames jabbering of the sins of Jack and Jill in any ale-house. The roots of the vulgarity are the same—inquisitiveness and idleness. All personalities are vulgar; and whether personalities are used as the base weapons to turn an argument, or as the equally base bait wherewith to make the fortunes of a newspaper, they are alike offensive and unpardonable. The best characteristic of the best society would be that they should be absolutely forbidden in it.

Another reason why the present age is more vulgar than any preceding it, may also be found in the fact that, in it pretension is infinitely more abundant, because infinitely more successful than it ever was before. An autocratic aristocracy, or a perfect equality, would equally make pretension impossible. But, at the present time, aristocracy is without power, and equality has no existence outside the dreams of Utopians. The result is, that the whole vast mass of humanity, uncontrolled, can struggle, and push, and strive, and sweat, and exhaust itself, to appear something that it is not, and all repose and calm and dignity, which are the foes of vulgarity, are destroyed.

Essayists have often attempted to define high breeding; but it remains indefinable. Its incomparable charm, its perfect ease, its dignity which is never asserted, yet which the most obtuse can always feel is in reserve, its very manner of performing all the trifling acts of social usage and obligation, are beyond definition. They are too delicate and too subtle for the harshness of classification. The courtier of the old story who, when told by Louis Quatorze to go first, went first without protest, was a high-bred gentleman. Charles the First, when he kept his patience and his peace under the insults of his trial at Westminster, was one also. Mme. du Barry screams and sobs at the foot of the guillotine; Marie Antoinette is calm.

True, I once knew a perfectly well-bred person who yet could neither read nor write. I can see her now in her little cottage in the Derbyshire woods, on the brown, flashing water of the Derwent River (Darron, as the people of Derbyshire call it), a fair, neat, stout, old woman with a round face and a clean mob cap. She had been a factory girl in her youth (indeed, all her womanhood had worked at the cotton mill on the river), and now was too old to do anything except to keep her one-roomed cottage, with its tall lancet windows, its peaked red roof, and its sweet-smelling garden, with its high elder hedge, as neat and fresh and clean as human hands could make them. Dear old Mary! with her racy, Chaucerian English, and her happy, cheerful temper, and her silver spectacles, which some of the ‘gentry’ had given her, and her big Bible on the little round table, and the black kettle boiling in the wide fireplace, and her casements wide open to the nodding moss-roses and the sweet-brier boughs! Dear old Mary! she was a bit of Shakespeare’s England, of Milton’s England, of Spenser’s England, and the memory of her, and of her cottage by the brown, bright river often comes back to me across the width of years. She was a perfectly well-bred person; she made one welcome to her little home with simple, perfect courtesy, without flutter, or fuss, or any effort of any sort; she had neither envy nor servility; grateful for all kindness, she never either abused the ‘gentry’ or flattered them; and her admirable manner never varied to the peddler at her door or to the squire of her village; would never have varied, I am sure, if the queen of her country had crossed her door-step. For she had the repose of contentment, of simplicity, and of that self-respect which can never exist where envy and effort are. She could neither read nor write; she scrubbed and washed and worked for herself; she had never left that one little green nook of Derbyshire, or seen other roads than the steep shady highway which went up to the pine woods behind her house; but she was a perfectly well-bred woman, born of a time calmer, broader, wiser, more generous than ours.

A few miles off in the valley, where she never by any chance went, the excursion trains used to vomit forth, at Easter and in Whitsun week, throngs of the mill hands of the period, cads and their flames, tawdry, blowzy, noisy, drunken; the women with dress that aped ‘the fashion,’ and pyramids of artificial flowers on their heads; the men as grotesque and hideous in their own way; tearing through woods and fields like swarms of devastating locusts, and dragging the fern and hawthorn boughs they had torn down in the dust, ending the lovely spring day in pot-houses, drinking gin and bitters, or heavy ales by the quart, and tumbling pell-mell into the night train, roaring music-hall choruses; sodden, tipsy, yelling, loathsome creatures, such as make the monkey look a king, and the newt seem an angel beside humanity—exact semblance and emblem of the vulgarity of the age.

Far away from those green hills and vales of Derbyshire I pass to-day in Tuscany a little wine-house built this year; it has been run up in a few months by a speculative builder; it has its name and purpose gaudily sprawling in letters two feet long across its front; it has bright pistachio shutters and a slate roof with no eaves; it has a dusty gravelled space in front of it; it looks tawdry, stingy, pretentious, meagre, squalid, fine, all in one. A little way off it is another wine-house, built somewhere about the sixteenth century; it is made of solid grey stone; it has a roof of brown tiles, with overhanging eaves like a broad-leafed hat drawn down to shade a modest countenance; it has deep arched windows, with some carved stone around and above them; it has an outside stairway in stone and some ivy creeping about it; it has grass before it and some cherry and peach trees; the only sign of its calling is the bough hung above the doorway. The two wine-houses are, methinks, most apt examples of the sobriety and beauty which our forefathers put into the humblest things of life and the flimsy tawdriness and unendurable hideousness which the present age displays in all it produces. I have not a doubt that the one under the cherry tree, with its bough for a sign, and its deep casements, and its clean, aged look, will be soon deserted by the majority of the carters and fruit growers and river fishermen who pass this way, in favour of its vulgar rival, where I am quite sure the wines will be watered tenfold and the artichokes fried in rancid oil; its patrons will eat and drink ill, but they will go to the new one, I doubt not, all of them, except a few old men, who will cling to the habit of their youth. Very possibly those who own the old one will feel compelled to adapt themselves to the progress of the age; will cut the eaves off their roof, hew down their fruit trees, whitewash their grey stone, and turn their fine old windows into glass doors with pistachio blinds—and still it will not equal its rival in the eyes of the carters and fishers and gardeners, since it was not made yesterday! Neither its owners nor its customers can scarcely be expected to be wiser than are all the municipal counsellors of Europe.

Perfect simplicity is the antithesis of vulgarity, and simplicity is the quality which modern life is most calculated to destroy. The whole tendency of modern education is to create an intense self-consciousness; and whoever is self-conscious has lost the charm of simplicity, and has already become vulgar in a manner. The most high-bred persons are those in whom we find a perfect naturalness, an entire absence of self-consciousness. The whole influence of modern education is to concentrate the mind of the child on itself; as it grows up this egoism becomes confirmed; you have at once an individual both self-absorbed and affected, both hard towards others and vain of itself.

When pretension was less possible, vulgarity was less visible, because its chief root did not exist. When the French nobility, in the time of Louis Quatorze, began to _engraisser leurs terres_ with the ill-acquired fortunes of farmer-generals’ daughters, their manners began to deteriorate and their courtesy began to be no more than an empty shell filled with rottenness. They were not yet vulgar in their manners, but vulgarity had begun to taint their minds and their race, and their _mésalliances_ did not have the power to save them from the scaffold. Cowardice is always vulgar, and the present age is pre-eminently cowardly; full of egotistic nervousness and unconcealed fear of all those physical dangers to which science has told all men they are liable. Pasteur is its god, and the microbe its Mephistopheles. A French writer defined it, the other day, as the age of the ‘infinitely little.’ It might be also defined as the age of absorbing self-consciousness. It is eternally placing itself in innumerable attitudes to pose before the camera of a photographer; the old, the ugly, the obscure, the deformed, delight in multiplying their likenesses on cardboard, even more than do the young, the beautiful, the famous, and the well-made. All the resources of invention are taxed to reproduce effigies of persons who have not a good feature in their faces or a correct line in their limbs, and all the resources of science are solicited to keep breath in the bodies of people who had better never have lived at all. Cymon grins before a camera as self-satisfied as though he were Adonis, and Demos is told that he is the one sacred offspring of the gods to which all creation is freely sacrificed. Out of this self-worship springs a hideous, a blatant vulgarity, which is more likely to increase than to diminish. Exaggeration of our own value is one of the most offensive of all the forms of vulgarity, and science has much to answer for in its present pompous and sycophantic attitude before the importance and the excellence of humanity. Humanity gets drunk on such intoxicating flattery of itself.

Remark how even what is called the ‘best’ society sins as these do who forsake the grey stone house for the slate-roofed and stuccoed one. There has been an endless outcry about good taste in the last score of years. But where is it to be really found? Not in the crowds who rush all over the world by steam, nor in those who dwell in modern cities. Good taste cannot be gregarious. Good taste cannot endure a square box to live in, however the square box may be coloured. That the modern poet can reside in Westbourne Grove, and the modern painter in Cromwell Road, is enough to set the hair of all the Muses on end. If Carlyle had lived at Concord, like Emerson, how much calmer and wiser thought, how much less jaundiced raving, would the world have had from him! That is to say, if he would have had the soul to feel the green and fragrant tranquillity of Concord, which is doubtful. Cities may do good to the minds of men by the friction of opinions found in them, but life spent only in cities under their present conditions is debasing and pernicious, for those conditions are essentially and hopelessly vulgar.

If the soul of Shelley in the body of Sardanapalus, with the riches of Crœsus, could now dwell in Paris, London, or New York, it is doubtful whether he would be able to resist the pressure of the social forces round him and strike out any new forms of pleasure or festivity. All that he would be able to do would, perhaps, be to give better dinners than other people. The forms of entertainment in them are monotonous, and trivial where they are not coarse. When a man colossally rich, and therefore boundlessly powerful, appears, what new thing does he originate? What fresh grace does he add to society; what imagination does he bring into his efforts to amuse the world? None; absolutely none. He may have more gold plate than other people; he may have more powdered footmen about his hall; he may have rosewood mangers for his stables; but he has no invention, no brilliancy, no independence of tradition; he will follow all the old worn ways of what is called pleasure, and he will ask crowds to push and perspire on his staircases, and will conceive that he has amused the world.

When one reflects on the immense possibilities of an enormously rich man, or a very great prince, and sees all the _banalité_, the repetition, and the utter lack of any imagination, in all that these rich men and these great princes do, one is forced to conclude that the vulgarity of the world at large has been too much for them, and that they can no more struggle against it than a rhinoceros against a quagmire; his very weight serves to make the poor giant sink deeper and quicker into the slime.

From his birth to his death it is hard indeed for any man, even the greatest, to escape the vulgarity of the world around him. Scarcely is he born than the world seizes him, to make him absurd with the fussy conventionalities of the baptismal ceremony, and, after clogging his steps, and clinging to him throughout his whole existence, vulgarity will seize on his dead body and make even that grotesque with the low comedy of its funeral rites. Had Victor Hugo not possessed very real qualities of greatness in him he would have been made ridiculous forever by the farce of the burial which Paris intended as an honour to him.

All ceremonies of life which ought to be characterised by simplicity and dignity, vulgarity has marked and seized for its own. What can be more vulgar than the marriage ceremony in what are called civilised countries? What can more completely take away all delicacy, sanctity, privacy and poetry from love than these crowds, this parade, these coarse exhibitions, this public advertisement of what should be hidden away in silence and in sacred solitude? To see a marriage at the Madeleine or St Philippe du Roule, or St George’s, Hanover Square, or any other great church in any great city of the world, is to see the vulgarity of modern life at its height. The rape of the Sabines, or the rough bridal still in favour with the Turcomans and Tartars, is modesty and beauty beside the fashionable wedding of the nineteenth century, or the grotesque commonplace of civil marriage. Catullus would not have written ‘O Hymen Hymenæ!’ if he had been taken to contemplate the thousand and one rare petticoats of a modern trousseau, or the tricolored scarf of a continental mayor, or the chairs and tables of a registry office in England or America.

Modern habit has contrived to dwarf and to vulgarise everything, from the highest passions to the simplest actions; and its chains are so strong that the king in his palace and the philosopher in his study cannot keep altogether free of them.

Why has it done so? Presumably because this vulgarity is acceptable and agreeable to the majority. In modern life the majority, however blatant, ignorant or incapable, gives the law, and the _âmes d’elite_ have, being few in number, no power to oppose to the flood of coarse commonplace, with which they are surrounded and overwhelmed. Plutocracy is everywhere replacing aristocracy, and has its arrogance without its elegance. The tendency of the age is not towards the equalising of fortunes, despite the boasts of modern liberalism; it is rather towards the creation of enormous individual fortunes, rapidly acquired and lying in an indigested mass on the stomach of Humanity. It is not the possessors of these riches who will purify the world from vulgarity. Vulgarity is, on the contrary, likely to live, and multiply, and increase in power and in extent. Haste is one of its parents, and pretension the other. Hurry can never be either gracious or graceful, and the effort to appear what we are not is the deadliest foe to peace and to personal dignity.

‘Dans les anciennes sociétés l’aristocracie de l’argent était
contrepesée par l’aristocracie de la naissance, l’aristocracie de
l’esprit, et l’aristocracie du cœur. Mais nous, en abandonnant
jusqu’au souvenir même de ces distinctions, nous n’avons laissé
subsister que celles que la fortune peut mettre entre les hommes....
Dans les anciennes sociétés la fortune comme la noblesse représentait
quelque chose d’autre, si je puis ainsi dire, et de plus qu’elle-même.
Elle était vraiment une force sociale parcequ’elle était une force
morale. On s’enrichssiait honêtement: de telle sorte que la richesse
représentait non-seulement, comme je crois que disent les économistes,
le travail accumulé de trois ou quatre générations, mais encore toutes
les vertus modestes qui perpétuent l’amour du travail dans une même
famille, et querque chose enfin de plus haut, de plus noble, de plus
rare que lout cela: le sacrifice de l’égoïsme à l’intérèt, la
considération, la dignité du nom. Il n’y a plus d’effort, il n’y a
même pas de travail, à l’origine d’un grand nombre de ces nouvelles
fortunes, et l’on peut se demander s’il y a, seulement de
l’intelligence. Mais, en revanche, il y a de l’audace, et surtout
cette conviction que la richesse n’a pas de juges mais seulement des
envieux et des adorateurs. C’est ce qui fait aujourd’hui l’immoralité
toute particulière et toute nouvelle de cette adoration que nous
professons publiquement pour lui. Le temps approche où il ne sera pas
fâcheux, mais honteux, d’être pauvre.’

These words of the celebrated French critic, Brunetière, written _apropos_ of _La France Juive_, are essentially true, even if truth is in them somewhat exaggerated, for in the middle ages riches were often acquired by violence, or pandering to vice in high places. The modern worship of riches _per se_ is a vulgarity, and as he has said, it even amounts to a crime.

Such opinions as his are opposed to the temper of the age; are called reactionary, old-fashioned and exclusive; but there is a great truth in them. If the edge were not rubbed off of personal dignity, if the bloom were not brushed off of good taste, and the appreciation of privacy and _recueillement_ greatly weakened, all the personalities of the press and of society would never have been endured or permitted to attain the growth which they have attained. The faults of an age are begotten and borne out of itself; it suffers from what it creates. One looks in vain, in this age, for any indication of any new revolt against the bond of vulgarity, or return to more delicate, more dignified, more reserved manners of life. If socialism should have its way with the world (which is probable), it will not only be vulgar, it will be sordid; all loveliness will perish; and, with all ambition forbidden, heroism and greatness will be things unknown, and genius a crime against the divinity of the Eternal Mediocre. The socialism of Bakounine, of Marx, of Krapotkine, of Tolstoï, is the dreariest and dullest of all earthly things—an Utopia without an idea, a level as blank and hopeless as the dust plains of a Russian summer. It may be a vision, dreary as it is, which will one day be realised. There is hourly growing in the world a dull and sullen antagonism against all superiority, all pre-eminent excellence, whether of intellect, birth or manner; and this jealousy has the germs in it of that universal war on superiority which will be necessary to bring about the triumph of socialism. At present, society is stronger than the socialists; is stronger in Germany, in America, in Italy, in Russia, even in France; but how much longer it will have this superior strength who can say? Socialism being founded, not on love, as it pretends, but on hatred—hatred of superiority—appeals to a malignant instinct in human nature, in the mediocrity of human nature, which is likely to increase as the vast and terrible increase of population makes the struggle of existence more close and more desperate. Socialism will very possibly ravage and lay waste the earth like a hydra-headed Attila; but there will be nothing to be hoped for from it in aid of the graces, the charms, or the dignity of life. Were riches more careful of these, they would hold their own better in the contest with socialism. Were society more elegant, more self-respecting, more intelligent, more distinguished, it would give its defenders much more reason and strength to plead in favour of its preservation.

But society is on the whole both stupid and vulgar. It scarcely knows the good from the bad in anything. If a fashion is set, it follows the fashion sheepishly, without knowing why it does so. It has neither genuine conscience, nor genuine taste. It will stone A. for what it admires in B., and will crucify Y. for what it smilingly condones in Z. It has no true standard for anything. It is at once hypercritical and over-indulgent. What it calls its taste is but a purblind servility. It will take the deformed basset-hound as a pet, and neglect all the beautiful canine races; it will broil in throngs on a bare strip of sand, and avoid all the lovely places by wood and sea; it will worship a black rose, and never glance at all the roses which nature has made. If only Fashion decree, the basset-hound, the bare sand, and the black rose are to it the idols of the hour. It has no consistency; it will change the Japanese for the Rococo, the Renaissance for the Queen Anne, the Watteau for the Oriental, or mix them all together, at the mere weathercock dictate of fashion or caprice. It has no more consistency in its code of morals; it will ask Messalina anywhere as long as a prince speaks to her and she is the fashion; if the prince ceases to speak and she ceases to be the fashion, it puts up its fan at her vices, and scores her name out of its visiting list. There is no reality in either its pretensions to morality or good taste.

When we think of the immense potentialities and capabilities of society, of all that it might become, of all that it might accomplish, and behold the monotony of insipid folly, of ape-like imitation, of consummate hypocrisy, in which it is content to roll on through the course of the years, one cannot but feel that, if its ultimate doom be to be swallowed up and vomited forth again, lifeless and shapeless, by the dragon of socialism, it will have no more than its due; that it will fall through its own sloth and vileness as the empire of Rome fell under the hordes of the barbarians.

That charming writer Gustave Droz has said that railways are at once the symbol and the outcome of the vulgarity of the age; and that whoever lets himself be shot through space like a parcel through a tube, and condescends to eat in a crowd at a station buffet, cannot by any possibility retain dignity of appearance or elegance of manners. The inelegant scrambling and pushing, and elbowing and vociferating of a modern railway station form an exact and painful image of this restless, rude and gregarious century.

Compare the stately progress of a Queen Elizabeth, or a Louis Quatorze through the provinces, calm, leisurely, dignified, magnificent, with the modern monarch or prince always in movement as if he were a _commis-voyageur_, interviewed ridiculously on a square of red carpet on a station platform, and breathlessly listening to a breathless mayor’s silly and verbose address of welcome; then rushing off, as if he were paid so much an hour, to be jostled at a dog show, hustled at an agricultural exhibition, and forced to shake hands with the very politicians who have just brought before the House the abolition of the royal prerogative. It is not the question here of whether royalty is, or is not, better upheld or abolished; but so long as royalty exists, and so long as its existence is dear to many millions, and esteemed of benefit by them, it is infinitely to be regretted that it should have lost, as it has lost, all the divinity which should hedge a king.

Recent publications of royal feelings and royal doings may be of use to the enemies of royalty by showing what twaddling nothings fill up its day; but to royalty itself they can only be belittleing and injurious in a great degree, whilst the want of delicacy which could give to the public eye such intimate revelations of personal emotions and struggles with poverty, as the publication of the _Letters of the Princess Alice of England_ made public property, is so staring and so strange that it seems like the public desecration of a grave.

Books, in which the most trivial and personal details are published in print by those who should veil their faces like the Latin in sorrow and veil them in their purples, could only be possible in an age in which vulgarity has even reached up and sapped the very foundations of all thrones. One cannot but feel pity for the poor dead princess, who would surely have writhed under such indignity, when one sees in the crudeness and cruelty of print her homely descriptions of suckling her children and struggling with a narrow purse, descriptions so plainly intended for no eyes but those of the person to whom they were addressed. Better—how much better!—have buried with her those humble letters in which the soul is seen naked as in its prayer-closet, and which are no more fit to be dragged out into the garish day of publicity than the bodily nakedness of a chaste woman is fit to be pilloried in a market-place. I repeat, only an age intensely and despairingly vulgar could have rendered the publication of such letters as those royal letters to royal persons possible. Letters of intimacy are the most sacred things of life; they are the proofs of the most intimate trust and confidence which can be placed in us; and to make them public is to violate all the sweetest sanctities of life and of death.

_La pudeur de l’âme_ is forever destroyed where such exposure of feelings, the most intimate and the most personal, becomes possible. In the preface to those letters it is said that the public will in these days know everything about us, and therefore it is better that they should know the truth from us. Not so; this attitude is indeed submission to the mob: it is unveiling the bosom in the market-place. Any amount of calumny cannot destroy dignity; but dignity is forever destroyed when it condescends to call in the multitude to count its tears and see its kisses.

The great man and the great woman should say to the world: ‘Think of me what you choose. It is indifferent to me. You are not my master; and I shall never accept you as a judge.’ This should be the attitude of all royalty, whether that of the king, the hero, or the genius.

THE STATE AS AN IMMORAL
FACTOR

The tendency of the last years of the nineteenth century is toward increase in the powers of the state and decrease in the powers of the individual citizen. Whether the government of a country be at this moment nominally free, or whether it be avowedly despotic, whether it be an empire, a republic, a constitutional monarchy, or a self-governing and neutralised principality, the actual government is a substitution of state machinery for individual choice and individual liberty. In Servia, in Bulgaria, in France, in Germany, in England, in America, in Australia, anywhere you will, the outward forms of government differ widely, but beneath all there is the same interference of the state with personal volition, the same obligation for the individual to accept the dictum of the state in lieu of his own judgment. The only difference is that such a pretension is natural and excusable in an autocracy; in a constitutional or republican state it is an anomaly, even an absurdity. But whether it be considered admirable or accursed, the fact is conspicuous that every year adds to the pretensions and powers of the state, and every year diminishes the personal freedom of the man.

To whatever the fact be traceable, it is there, and it is probably due to the increase of a purely _doctrinaire_ education, which with itself increases the number of persons who look upon humanity as a drill-sergeant looks upon battalions of conscripts; the battalions must learn to move mechanically in masses, and no single unit of them must be allowed to murmur or to fall out of the ranks. That this conscript, or that, may be in torture all the while matters nothing whatever to the drill-sergeant. That what would have been an excellent citizen makes a rebellious or inefficient conscript is not his business either; he only requires a battalion which moves with mechanical precision. The state is but a drill-sergeant on a large scale, with a whole nationality marched out on the parade-ground.