ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)
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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901) |
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{The Coming Terror 1891}
287 _____ 289
FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.
WHAT IS SENTIMENT?
IN a recent number of a new publication called The Speaker, there is an article on ‘Sentimentalism,’ in which it is contended very justly that the Aberglaube of hysterical emotion is a sham thing by the side of true pathos; but very falsely, that the air of the present day is overcharged with ‘Sentiment.’ The writer thus confounds what is real with what is true—Sentiment with Sentimentalism; and the confusion is one which has been made from time immemorial. Sentiment, I conceive, is the power which generalizes the experience of mankind, the verification of long centuries, concerning the links which unite members of the human family surely and remorsely to one another, and which thus justifies Poetry (in the words of Novalis) as the only Reality. Sentimentalism, on the other hand, is sentiment perverted and overcharged— in other words, become unscientific. While objecting somewhat 290 to his terminology, I cordially agree with the writer of the article I have named in the distinction he draws between true and false pathos in literature. I fail altogether, however, to follow him in his contention that either Sentiment or Sentimentalism are much in the air at present. I believe, rather, that cheap Science and cheap Cynicism are destroying, or trying to destroy, both the sham and the reality. Men nowadays do not feel too much, but far too little. Thanks partly to the influence of the baser portion of the public Press, the era of completed ethical obtusity seems fast approaching. ‘Et quando uberior vitiorum copia? quando The parallel might be pursued down to the smallest detail, but to pursue it is not my purpose. I merely desire to remark, en passant, that the present social crisis is not unprecedented, but has occurred more than once, and once phenomenally, in the Evolution of Mankind. The Gospel of Sentiment shook the world eighteen centuries ago. The Science of Sentiment, verifying the instinct of that gospel, will stir it now.
EMMA WADE’S MARTYRDOM.
IN May, 1879, there was lying in the county gaol of Lincoln a young girl just respited from a sentence of death. Under what possible delusion the jurymen who convicted her were labouring when they found her guilty of murder in the first degree, I cannot explain; possibly, however, they were bewildered by the summing-up of the Judge, who, according to the reporters, ‘reminded the jury that their verdict must be based, not upon their feelings, but their judgment.’ It seemed to me, at all events, that the verdict was very cruel, rash, and wrong, and that, while exhibiting little feeling, it showed no judgment whatever. The facts were very simple. Emma Wade, a domestic servant and the daughter of a police- constable, contracted an attachment for a jeweller’s assistant in Stamford, 298 was seduced by him, and gave birth to an illegitimate child. At the time of the birth she was residing at home, and the evidence showed that she was gentle, dutiful, and affectionate, both to her parents and to the child. Her father seems to have treated her kindly, with the patience of love, but it was proved that the mother subjected her to just that kind of persecution, seasoned with taunt and insult, which drives a feeble girl to despair.She was daily taunted with her shame, and urged to return to service. On the evening of April 18 her sister, hearing a scream, rushed upstairs, and found Emma in mortal agony. ‘Take the baby,’ she cried; ‘I have poisoned it and myself.’ Medical assistance being called in, the mother was recovered, but the infant died, traces of strychnine, Prussian blue, and wheat flour (elements of a poison called ‘Battle’s Vermin Killer’) being afterwards found in its stomach. Previous to taking the poison the distracted girl wrote to Scarcliff, her lover, a long letter of farewell, which I quote at full length, certain that it forms in itself a stronger appeal for mercy than any words of mine: ‘Stamford. ‘EMMA. ‘Respect Mrs. Weatherington. She has been a kind friend to me.I have sent you a piece of baby’s hair. You won’t forget her name—Constance May Scarcliff.’ It seems to me, taking all the circumstances into 300 consideration, that a more beautiful letter was never written. In its infinite simplicity and pathos, in its gentle dignity and sorrow, it is a wonderful production for the pen of a domestic servant. Note the tenderness of the thought, ‘I have one comfort, and that is I know my child will be happy,’ together with the last piteous words, ‘I have sent you a piece of baby’s hair.’ Yet with this docurnent before them, with the poor heart-broken martyr herself facing them, the jurymen, listening to their ‘judgment,’ not their ‘feelings,’ brought in their verdict of wilful murder.
THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE GALLOWS.
ON Tuesday morning, February 25, 1879, at eight o’clock, was performed the last scene of a drama in which the British public had taken an unprecedented interest, which eclipsed in its attractive horrors even the exciting news from the Cape, and made all minor records of the prison or the Divorce Court seem comparatively stale and tame. This drama might be entitled ‘The Life and Death of a Convict; or, The Apotheosis of the Gallows.’ Beginning at Bannercross, in Yorkshire, with about —* Emma Wade was respited.—R.B.— 303 as coarse and clumsy a bit of murder as ever awakened ignorant admiration, it passed into a series of episodes of the most every-day brutality, until it glided from utter commonplace into sudden romance under the very shadow of Death. A more uninteresting ruffian than Charles Peace can scarcely be conceived. A less dignified criminal never paid the extreme penalty of the law. There was nothing in him to awaken either attention or admiration, save his courage; and that courage, disintegrated into its component elements, seems to have consisted of unparalleled obtuseness and gigantic self- confidence. Yet of this poor wretch, who has scarcely one trait of redeeming manliness, and whose moral ugliness was without any sort of grandeur, the public Press actually manufactured a Hero. I say the Press advisedly. Save for the elaborate reports in the daily papers and the wild and wondrous inventions of the pictorial weeklies, Charles Peace would have gone out of this world ignored and despised even by that great criminal class to which he belonged. But ever since the memorable occasion when he tried to escape from the railway carriage, he had been consecrated to the penny- a-liner. He had been described in various forms of disguised panegyric as the Admirable Crichton of Housebreakers. Because he could play a little on the fiddle and had brought together one or two musical instruments, he was represented as a perfect Paganini 304 and a splendid amateur collector of violins. Because he had some little cleverness in mechanics and had within him the amateur engineer’s morbid passion for ‘patents,’ it was given out that his gifts of invention amounted to little short of genius. Because he had had one or two dirty liaisons, and in the sanctity of his private life always had a trull at his elbow, he was pictured as a criminal Don Juan, surrounded by Odalisques of splendid infamy. His character fascinated even philosophers. One gentle newspaper, the Spectator, accepted the penny-a-liner’s chronicle, and preached a beautiful homily upon it. There was something beyond measure alluring in the idea of an unclean old man with tremendous intellect and sublime courage, setting all the forces of the Law at defiance, by living all day the life of a respectable elderly gentleman with one arm, and all night the life of a truculent assassin with a fatal weapon. For all these pictures, for all these mercies of the mendacious, we have to thank the penny-a-liner. There was no deity but Peace, and the penny-a-liner was his Prophet. So the great sensation drama throve, though its production on the public scene, with all the advantage of big posters and capital letters, could be regarded as nothing short of a public calamity. ‘If ’twere now to die Thenceforward immortality was secure; even the penny-a-liner could not make it any safer. The path to the Gallows was ‘roses all the way.’ Nothing more was needed than to ‘die game,’ and the dénouement would approach sublimity.
THE DEFEAT OF THE TOTAL ABSTAINER.
THAT lively old water-drinker of genius, Mr. George Cruikshank, who played ‘Hamlet’ en amateur at fifty, and could dance you a break-down and double-shuffle in his grand climacteric, would have been hotly indignant if he could have lived to become 309 familiar with certain recent aspects of the great Temperance Question. In a picture which combined a maximum of moral truth with a minimum of artistic taste, he tried to drive poor humanity once and for ever away from the Bottle; and he was not much daunted when a wine-loving humorist retaliated with an equally horrible caricature representing the hideous creatures to be seen in a Drop of Water magnified under the microscope. For a considerable period the teetotalers have really been having the best of it. Their wonder of stump orators, Mr. J. B. Gough, having by strictly abstaining from stimulants attained a patriarchal beard and a stentorian power of lung, had made the licensed victualler tremble, from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s. Following in the wake of this noisy platitudinarian, numberless bad and good physicians have had an epidemic of abstinence. Physicians, like other people, or, rather, more than other people, are subject to periodical crazes. Now it is a craze for bromide of potassium, or some other panacea; again, as recently, it is a craze against all sorts of intoxicating liquors.Happily, the reaction has at last set in, and the leading doctors of the day have banded together to put down that most irrepressible and pernicious of all propagandists, the Total Abstainer. After the remarkable series of articles which appeared in the Contemporary Review—a series which must have done incalculable good, and 310 for which society has reason to be grateful to the able editor—the advocates of Total Abstinence can scarcely have another word to say. When such high living authorities as Sir James Paget, Sir William Gull, Dr. Risdon Barnett, Dr. Radcliffe, and Mr. Brudenell Carter, all spoke more or less in favour of alcohol, the consensus of testimony was overpowering; and it is to be hoped that after this, and at least for a time, we may be spared the familiar legend of the Total Abstainer who died triumphantly in his bed at eighty, after having kept all the commandments, and drunk nothing stronger than toast and water. ‘When the sot has descended through his chosen course of imbecility, or dropsy, to the dead-house, Morbid Anatomy is ready to receive him—knows him well. At the post-mortem she would say, “Liver hard aud nodulated. Brain dense and small; its covering thick.” And if you would listen to her unattractive 312 but interesting tale, she would trace throughout the sot’s body a series of changes which leave unaltered no part of him worth speaking of. She would tell you that the once delicate, filmy texture which, when he was young, had surrounded like a pure atmosphere every fibre and tube of his mechanism, making him lithe and supple, has now become rather a dense fog than a pure atmosphere:—dense stuff, which, instead of lubricating, has closed in upon and crushed out of existence more and more of the fibres and tubes, especially in the brain and liver: whence the imbecility and the dropsy.’ The only comment to be made on this, perhaps, is that inveterate tea-drinking might produce quite as lamentable a result; nay, that it might be induced even by too persistent a course of the hot buttered toast so much loved by Mr. Chadband. But Dr. Moxon, the physician to whom we owe that terrible picture, and whose paper, with all its wild and sometimes foolish language, was the finest of the whole series, only dissects the demented sot in order to martyr the delirious teetotaler. He tells us, with sly unction, of the case of the gentleman who, having consulted a ‘great authority,’ and been told to ‘live on fish and wholemeal bread and to drink water,’ had done so for two years, with the result that he looked a compound of water, fish, and wholemeal! He tells us also, with no little ire against the Band of Hope, of the ‘honest working cooper,’ who injured his ankle with one of his tools, whose constitution became involved in fever, and who, when. ordered to take stimulants, refused to touch anything containing alcohol, and died in consequence in a few days. Dr. Moxon is, as I 313 suggested, a wild writer, and his article was verbose and eccentric, but he uttered terrible truths. His picture of the effect of alcohol in ‘weakening common-sense in opposition to individuality’ was masterly. ‘The power of alcohol in this world,’ he affirmed, ‘is due to the fact that it keeps down the oppressive power of others, and of their common-sense, over the individual sense, and so makes a man better company to himself and others.’ He followed out the argument in a style as convincing as it was luminous; and I think his reasoning had more effect on thinking people than many of the pregnant truisms which seemed to form the philosophy of Drs. Paget and Gull.
V.
ON the 25th of January, 1759—that is to say, a little over one hundred and thirty years ago—one of the most free and precious Beings that ever was born to wear the poetic mantle first drew breath in a humble cottage in the near neighbourhood of the Scottish town of Ayr. He himself has recorded the event in one of the most spirited of his songs: ‘Our monarch’s hindmost year but one 314 ‘The gossip keekit in his loof, The remainder of the song, with its references to ‘misfortunes great and sma’’ to come, and the love the poet would bear to the female kind, was singularly truthful and characteristic. Robert Burns lived to enjoy a little tawdry personal fame, to be overridden by misfortunes in their most squalid and wretched shape, and to leave to his country a great legacy of noble Song. But one fact I wish particularly to dwell upon, for in it lies the moral of this brief note: Burns was too free and true for his generation, and he died of a broken heart on account of its neglect. Who has not read, and who does not remember, that infinitely pathetic anecdote told by Mr. Lockhart, as told to him by David Macculloch, of how, one summer day, Burns was walking alone on the shady side of a street in Dumfries, while the opposite side was gay with groups of ladies and gentlemen going to a county festivity, not one of whom would recognise him. Macculloch accosted him, and asked him to cross the street; but Burns answered, ‘Nay, nay, my young friend—that’s all over now’; and then quoted in a broken voice the lines of Lady Grizzel Baillie’s ballad: ‘O were we young, as we once hae been, 315 Only a little time before the poor Ploughman had been the lion of the hour; but, as he truly said, that was ‘all over.’ The ignorant gentry and drunken squirearchy of the south of Scotland were tired of his splendid manhood, his fearless honesty, and his simple, independent ways. ‘Robin was a rovin’ boy, The drunken squirearchy, whose progenitors broke the poet’s heart, and who, if the poet were alive now, would break his heart again, are full of enthusiasm for his memory. Even some of the more liberal-minded ministers of the Gospel join in the acclaim. Farmers and shepherds, factors and ploughmen, all come together on the one great occasion to honour the bard whom everybody can understand, because his synonym is the Whisky Bottle. They weep over his woes; they smack their lips over his satire; they shriek at his denunciations, and they murmur his songs.Burns or Bacchus—it is all one. The chief point is that, now or never, there is an excuse for getting ‘reeling ripe’ or ‘mortal drunk.’ It is poetic, it is literary, it is—hiccup!—honouring the Muses. Any frenzy, however maniacal, is justifiable under the circumstances. ‘Glorious Robin!’ Pledge him again and again, pledge him and bless him; and when you can’t pledge him upright, pledge him prone, as 317 you lie, with your fellow Burns-worshippers, under the table. ‘The poor inhabitant below He too often mistook excitement for inspiration, and rushed into revolt for its own sake; but he would have been the first to perceive the folly and the cruelty of selecting for admiration and imitation only one side, and that side the worst, of a great man’s character. If he could be present in the spirit at a few of the gatherings held annually in his name, and if he could then flit away to some annual gatherings of the ‘unco guid,’ he would be troubled to perceive that both those who love and those who hate him are worshipping the same fetish—a whisky bottle. It is a pity, a very great pity, that so much enthusiasm should be spilt about on a single evening, or on special occasions. Were 319 I a Scotch poet, living or dead, I should prefer a very little sober appreciation to any amount of drunken idolatry; and I should not care to gauge the height of my success by the depth of degradation into which I had plunged my votaries. Be that as it may, the poet who taught, as the flower of his human experience, that ‘prudent, cautious self-control is Wisdom’s root,’ should have some fitter temple than a tavern, and some kindlier consecration than the maudlin applause of maniacs in all stages of alcoholic delirium.
BENEFICENT ‘MURDER’ (1).*
AMID the storm of popular indignation over the horrors of the recent execution by electricity, one curious—and to me most significant—circumstance appears to have been overlooked. Simultaneously with the news of Kemmler’s judicial torture in the interests of Science, we have received from America the news that Count Tolstoi’s ‘ Kreutzer Sonata,’ and other ‘immoral’ books, have been suppressed in the interests of Morality. It has not, possibly, occurred to many that there is any other than an accidental connection between those two recent events; but to my mind they are only —* The two letters under this title are reprinted from the Daily Telegraph, where they appeared immediately after the execution of Kemmler.— 320 two aspects of the same social question, two strange results of the same political force which I have on a former occasion called ‘Providence made Easy.’ Both the conduct of life and its duration are regulated, for the time being, by the pragmatic sanction of the Legislator. All other sanctions are temporarily abolished. The reverence for human life, for the human body, has departed with the reverence for the Soul, for Freedom, for individual hope and aspiration; and, under the same cloak of empirical knowledge, Morality and Science shake hands. Was I not justified, then, in asserting that our modern Trades Union of scientists and materialists was merely a survival of the old Calvinism—that Calvinism which, ever since honest John triumphed in the burning of Servetus, has been ‘cruel as the grave’?
BENEFICENT ‘MURDER’ (2).
IN view of the reproaches of some correspondents, who contend that they do not quite know what I mean or what I am complaining about, I find it necessary to add a few further words of explanation. I never posed as a Gnostic, as ‘one who knows,’ and if I show scant respect for authoritative opinions, I feel quite as little respect for any opinions of my own. I invariably try, however, to make these opinions clear. Since I appear to have failed in the first instance, let me try again. —* See, further on, the remarks on the Social Aid side of General Booth’s scheme.— 331 their bodies and use their lungs by organizing for one universal Shout. Out of this tumult, to which the ‘tom-tom’ of the poor savage is music, peace and salvation are to come.Looming in the near future is the Golden Age, when any individual who refuses to join in the general noise will be regarded as anti-social, as an unsympathetic member of the community. In the face of this and kindred horrors, we are asked to believe that beneficent and philanthropic Organization is everything, and that individual peace and personal freedom are of little or no consequence.
BOOKSELLERS’ ROMANCE.
MR. RIDER HAGGARD, whose own work in fiction is at present delighting all who take pleasure in the marvellous, and who possesses in a certain measure the imagination of a poet, has published in the Contemporary Review a diatribe against the novel of the period, the moral of which appears to be: ‘If modern fiction fails to content you, try back to “Robinson Crusoe;” and if home scenery fails to inspire you, go to Africa.’ Now, it is no part of my business to defend our modern novelists from their latest critic, any more than it is to deny the novelty and the charm of Mr. Haggard’s own flights into easy romance; but in this particular instance I looked for a Daniel come to judgment, and I 332 find only a Jeremiah. Leaving out of sight all that my clever contemporaries have done in fiction, work at least equal to the finest ore ever dug out of the Dark Continent, I want seriously to ask if Mr. Haggard, in the heyday of his sudden popularity, is not rather overestimating the prodigy of his own advent; and whether, after all, true Romance has very much to do with those wild fancy-flights which transport the booksellers for a season, but alarm the quiet students of human nature? Romance, if I understand it rightly, is the art of idealizing the splendid facts of life, of seizing human nature at its highest, and presenting it in types of poetic beauty, rather than the art of telling tales for the marines, and disseminating the philosophy of the preposterous.If the hope of the English public lay in Mr. Haggard’s way, we should have to recognise Jules Verne as a fine romancist, and place the fairy taletellers right over the head of Shakespeare; snatch the Bible frorn its shelf and substitute the ‘Arabian Nights;’ and instead of Walter Scott and Charles Reade, Dumas and Victor Hugo, content ourselves with the author of the wonderful adventures of Peter Wilkins. I am not, let it be borne in mind, underrating the author of ‘King Solomon’s Mines,’ although, if I were to pronounce an opinion, I should say that a commonplace, vivid, truthful bit of work like ‘Kidnapped’ was really more imaginative; but even Mr. Louis Stevenson would 333 be the last man to maintain that his work in this direction was a new departure. The point I wish to insist upon is that great fiction, instead of escaping from the realm of common-sense into that of pure fancy, throws the light of imagination over that realm of common-sense in such a way as to make of it a veritable fairyland. Nor is Mr. Haggard in any way justified as a romancist because, in the manner of M. Verne, he puts in the centre of his domain of fancy a few excessively prosy and old-fashioned realistic types, such as the wonderful Englishman with the white legs, the wandering African chief, and the hideous sibyl of innumerable story-tellers. He is quite within his right in escaping human character, but if he were a true romancist he would certainly not escape it; and, again, if he were a new as well as a true romancist, he would leave on the mind a higher and nobler impression than is to be derived from the literature written for, and beloved by, the boys of England. In his story of ‘She,’ he certainly does show imagination; but surely the whole work is marred and spoiled by the inconsistency which blends a good poetical idea, worthy treatment in verse, with the commonplace associations and stereotyped characters so long familiar in books of the modern marvellous written for Paternoster Row, and published with illustrations. The idea of ‘She’ is fine; the treatment, in spite of its cleverness, is not far beyond the method of 334 M. Verne. Instead of truth irradiated by idealism, we have beauty degraded by commonplace; and as a consequence, the tale, in spite of all its clever workmanship, leaves the impression of a large canvas painted to order. This, of course, does not prevent it from being very amusing; only the fact of having written an amusing book does not justify an author in affirming that amusement is to be the prime vocation of the novelist of the future.
336 PROFESSOR HUXLEY’S MIRACULOUS CONVERSION (1).*
I HAVE only just read, with feelings of mingled surprise and delight, Professor Huxley’s letter to the Times newspaper on the subject of the Salvation Army and General Booth. It is so sweet to find one’s self a true prophet; and did I not prophesy some little time ago, in a contemporary, that Professor Huxley would soon be converted ‘like another Saul’? The Arch-Sociologist, the denier of the natural freedom and equality of man, the upholder of ‘a statute of limitations in matters of wrong-doing,’ the denouncer of Freedom as laissez-faire, the preacher of Providence made Easy and special Governmental supervision in all departments, now wheels round in the very face of Mr. Spencer, and cries: ‘I said so! Organization is dangerous! the safeguard of society lies in the freedom of the Individual!’And all this because one man of untutored intellect, with limited reasoning powers and miraculous powers of organization, has done in a few short years what all the Churches, including the Church of Pragmatic Science, have utterly failed to do—has awakened the imagination of the British Philistine to the fact that the miseries of the social deposits must be reckoned with, and has, in a measure, pointed —* The first of the following letters appeared in the Times and Daily Chronicle, the second in the Chronicle only.— 337 out ‘the way.’ Why, only a while ago the militant Professor was stumping the magazines and advocating the possibility of advancing evolution by force from without and from above; was ‘persecuting’ the faithful who clamoured to be saved or damned in their own fashion; and here he is, already struck down by a Light from Heaven (or some other dwelling-place of the aristocracy) proclaiming that he, too, is of the Faithful, of the poor persecuted remnant which ‘believes’! — * Professor Huxley’s only comment on this was a protest that I utterly misstated his views, and that I was, he believed, merely a writer of ‘works of imagination.’ The good Professor’s contempt for his opponents, for all who dare to question his empirical statements, is notorious. To him, even Mr. Spencer was only ‘an abstract Philosopher.’ —
342 PROFESSOR HUXLEY’S MIRACULOUS CONVERSION (2).
In the Times of December 9, 1890, appeared another letter from Professor Huxley, written in the same vein as his first diatribe, on General Booth’s scheme, and attached to it was the letter from my pen, which was printed in the Daily Chronicle (and the Daily Chronicle only) on the previous day. Now, my letter was issued to the public Press on the previous Sunday, but several of the dailies passed it by without insertion, on the conventional ground that the letter of which it was a criticism ‘had not appeared in their columns.’ The Times, however, with characteristic unfairness, published it a day late, in order that, when my protest was seen and read, Professor Huxley might have another opportunity of raising false issues on the subject. These, as we all know, are the usual tactics of the great organ of British Philistia. It cannot be fair and honest, even in so small a matter as the printing of correspondence. From the day when it fought on the side of Slavery during the American Civil War to the day when it organized the Pigott forgery, and from that day to the present, when it lets loose the quasi-scientific Boanerges to fulminate against the Salvation Army and talk half-instructed twaddle about Simon 343 Magus and the Mendicant Friars, it has been steadily posing as the enemy of human progress and human enlightenment. [Note: Professor Huxley’s letters to The Times, to which Buchanan is responding above, are available in the Letters to the Press section.]
‘THE JOURNALIST IN ABSOLUTION.’*
WRITING neither as a person having authority, nor as one of the scribes, I wish to put on record, if you will permit me, my complete and absolute sympathy with Mr. Parnell. He may, or may not, be an Adulterer—that, in any case, I consider a detail chiefly interesting to himself; but I contend that his technical and legal guilt is no proof whatever of his moral turpitude. No question involving the relation of the sexes can be absolutely decided in the tainted atmosphere of —* First published just after the divorce suit of O’Shea v. Parnell.— 350 our foul Divorce Court, and the case of ‘O’ Shea v. Parnell’ was established by the unworthiest of all evidence, that of prying chambermaids, prurient lodging-house keepers, and all the miserable human fry who swim in the unclean shallows of the legal puddle. To my mind, Mr. Parnell’s stern and absolute silence, his determination not to be dragged through the obscene mire, is negative evidence in his favour. He has chosen, like a strong man, to let the blow fall on his own shoulders, and the result is that Mrs. O’Shea has been spared and almost forgotten, while all the moral wolves are clamouring for Mr. Parnell’s blood. But even if Mr. Parnell is guilty, no man can tell in what degree. That, as I have said, is a matter chiefly concerning himself. What concerns us, men who stand as simple spectators of a persecution unparalleled in the history of Politics, is the means which are being adopted to hound a great man out of public life.
THE COURTESAN ON THE STAGE.
I HAVE recently read, with no usual interest, a clever and trenchant article on ‘Stage Courtesans.’ To ‘shatter the sentiment,’ as the writer expresses it, of such plays as the ‘Lady of the Camellias,’ is a task which even his able pen is quite unable to accomplish; for that sentiment, I believe, is founded on some of the strongest instincts of human nature. Moreover, the type of Camille is, according to my small experience, quite as common as the type of Cora Pearl; and from the days of the Magdalen to those of De Quincey’s Ann the street-walker, the class named ‘unfortunate’ has claimed, and claimed justly, the sympathy of all mortals except a few supervestal virgins and a large proportion of matchmaking matrons. I am not, however, vindicating in this connection the morbid psychology of the sentimental 355 school of the early Empire. I am simply contending for justice to a type of character which, with all its depravities, is full of irresistible artistic fascinations.
GOETHE AND CRITICISM.
WHEN Goethe found his sheep’s-head on a common, and proclaimed his discovery of the inter-maxillary bone, he was doing better work for Humanity than when, in his minor poems and romances, he preached the retrograde gospel of Egoismus. Science may possibly have gained something by his anatomical generalizations, but Literature has lost everything by his successful sermonizing. To a belated idealist like myself, the whole work of Goethe is a clumsy pyramid on the world’s highway. By one solitary effort of true imagination the great pagan saved his soul for posterity, and just where he was most primitive, most conventional, least egoistical, did he achieve his poetical success. A commonplace story of seduction, relieved by the cynical asides of a conventional Devil, remains as Goethe’s masterpiece. Meantime his mean and selfish gospel has sunk deep into the souls of little men, emerging from time to time to paralyze sentiment and imagination, 358 and creating literary monsters as hideous as the Frenchman Zola and as crude and unfinished as the Scandinavian Ibsen. That this same gospel of Egoismus appeals to a certain order of intelligence may at once be conceded; it is a fact proved by the vitality of Goethe as a literary influence. Although that influence has been mainly in the region of criticism, and although, in spite of it, the great humanists Balzac and Hugo have emerged triumphant, it is still a force to be reckoned with, more especially as in recent manifestations it combines itself with the inchoate force of Science. It is, however, in its very essence anti-literary—a statement easily proved by a reference to the literary history of this century. Goethe has begotten a whole race of Critics, but not one modern Poet, not one modern writer of genius, has turned to him for paternal inspiration.
‘DRAMATIC CRITICISM AS SHE IS WROTE.’*
‘IF an English school, which heaven forefend! should be moved to attempt a similar pleasantry’ (p. 9). Mr. Archer means to say the reverse of what he writes. In English the sentence would —* Extracts from a book called ‘About the Theatre.’ by William Archer. See ante, ‘The Modern Young Man as Critic.’— 359 run: ‘If an English school should be moved (which heaven forefend!) to attempt a similar pleasantry.’ _____ 361 _____ 363
FINAL WORDS.
THE PARADOX.
THE paradox of this book, permeating it throughout, is the one stated in the letters entitled 'Are Men born Free and Equal?' to the effect that true Socialism is another name for Individualism. A little reflection, however, may convince us that it is perhaps no paradox at all.
THE SOCIAL SANCTION.
INDIVIDUALISM, however, is not to be confounded with unlimited freedom of personal conduct. In exact proportion to the duty Society owes to the Individual, is the duty owed by the Individual to Society.
III. THE OUTCOME IN MINOR LITERARY CRITICISM.
SINCE the first publication of ‘The Young Man as Critic,’ and of the correspondence which in this book follows it in sequence (‘Is Chivalry still Possible?’), at least two of the persons severely censured have made both my criticism and myself the subject of continual animadversion, or, rather, recrimination. This was only natural, and to be expected. I have 371 now, therefore, to revise my judgment, as every honest writer is bound to do, and to indicate those particulars in which I feel myself to have exaggerated the truth. It appears to me, then, on reflection, that I have been unfair to some of our young men, in so far as I have accused them of a want of any intellectual ideal whatsoever. Further familiarity with their writings convinces me that they have certainly the virtue of sincerity, and that, allowing for the aberrations of personal malice, they are conscientiously endeavouring to criticise literature according to their lights.Their belief is that our literary salvation lies in the direction of absolute and trivial Realism; their conception of a work of Art is that it should be an unimpeachable transcription ‘from the life.’ They have faith, also, like their teacher, Goethe, in the power of Womanhood as a force to disintegrate social convention and moral superstition — a faith, by the way, which (pace! these gentlemen’s reproaches) I have been preaching all my life. On the whole, then, I conceive that the difference between writers of this class and myself is temperamental rather than intellectual; that, different as our methods and our sympathies may be, our conclusions are not always diverse.
374 TYPES OF EGOISMUS.
ALTHOUGH the type I am attempting to describe may be traced far back in history, the chief modern example is Goethe*; not the Goethe of ‘Faust’ and the ‘Divan,’ but the Goethe of ‘Wilhelm Meister’ and the ‘Elective Affinities.’ In spite of all that wise critics have said to the contrary, I have always contended that Goethe, so far from being an ‘Art for Art’ philosopher, was permeated through and through with the self-consciousness of a haunting non-moral Morality. It was he who first among moderns began to analyze and to dissect his own sensations, and to reduce his heart-beats to a science. In his case, however, it was a strong and healthy man condescending to that self-analysis which, in less vigorous natures, develops into anæmia and vainglory. The result was to be found less in the giant himself than in his numerous literary progeny—a tainted and exhausted breed still lingering among us, chiefly in the form of the albino. —* See my article, ‘The Character of Goethe,’ in ‘A Look Round Literature.’— 375 Mr. Howells is just as much tainted with Egoismus as the nerve-shocking negroesque M. Zola. The self-analyzing and hypercultured young lady of Boston is as disagreeable in her superfinity as the nevrose heroine of ‘La Curée’ is in her sexual mania. In either case Morality has poisoned and perverted Art. Here, as in other developments of the disease, I see in the so-called Gospel of the Ego, not a new revelation, but the last slimy trail of the Goethe system of ethics, shown in productions which, like the forgotten and worthless portion of Goethe’s work, were devoid of imagination and true human sentiment. What is new and immense to the young men of the ferociously ‘moral’ newspapers has been familiar and detestable to me from the first moment I began to think and write. Where they find literary salvation I have found only the last dregs of a Devil’s gospel which has corrupted almost every branch of modern literature, and which, had Heaven not sent the world its literary knights errant in Victor Hugo and Dumas, would have long ago destroyed all poetry in the world. To them the moral of the Ego is novel; to me it is as old as the ‘Elective Affinities’ and Goethe’s self culture, with little new in it, and that little untrue, and delivered without a gleam of consecrating insight.
376 ‘MORALITY’ AS LITERATURE.
THE literary character is curiously inconsistent. A little while ago we were being assured on every hand that Art had nothing whatever to do with Ethics, and a large number of intelligent writers, in order to vindicate that theory, were joining together in a wild revel of indecent exposure. The reaction has come. We are now assured with equal vehemence that the functions of Art are ethical or nothing, and an equally large number of intelligent writers are flooding the world with sermons upon questions of Morality.
381 THE OUTCOME IN IDEALISM.
I AM perfectly prepared to meet any charge of inconsistency, made upon the ground that I am at once an advocate of Socialism and an advocate of Individualism. I would destroy false Individualism by the socialistic test, and I would destroy sham Socialism by the test which is converse. One half of this book is devoted to proving, with Mill, that individuals have a natural right to free, unfettered, and even eccentric development; while the argument of the other half is that individual development, being often crass, anarchic, selfish, and harmful to Society, has to be carefully watched and qualified by the corporate conscience.
‘POOR HUMANITY.’
HUMANITY, at the present moment, may be compared to a Hypochondriac, to Molière’s own ‘Malade Imaginaire.’
THE END.
_________________________________________ BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
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