LECTURE BY PROFESSOR TUCKER.
The following is the text of the lecture delivered by Professor Tucker at the Independent-hall on April 29, under the auspices of the Congregational Literary Society :—
The question "What is Civilisation ?" is one which is evidently pressing itself upon thousands of thoughtful minds. It is a question most frequently and most naturally prompted by the many things we see and hear of in our midst, which seem to give the lie to a jubilant and boastful generation. From what we know of the best minds from the beginnings of history till to-day, we may gather that the inquiry has been ever present with them. In all ages, from that of Ecclesiastes to that of Epictetus, from the age of Epictetus to the age of Carlyle, those best minds have put to themselves a similar question, variously phrased, but always meaning the same. What is the great end of life? What is man's perfection ? Is life worth living ? Is civilisation a failure? These and other forms of words, put sometimes with the note of serene inquiry, sometimes with the note of deepening despair, sometimes, it must be confessed, with pettish querulousness, all amount to the same in the end! But perhaps the number of those who ask the question despairingly is greater to day than in any past time. Sinister prophecies and jeremiads sound all about us, and there is little doubt that the first and long abiding inclination of the man of culture is to side with these, rather than with the pæns which the optimists raise over triumphing democracy and triumphing machinery.
Now, I cannot expect, and I shall not vainly try, to dispose of a far reaching question like this in one brief discourse. As soon as we begin to formulate our thoughts upon the subject, we realise its immensity. But certain thoughts I have, which I will offer to you for what they are worth. And in all honesty, and as an encouragement to others in their reflections, let me confess that the impression with which I entered upon this task has been greatly modified by meditation and examination of the facts. No one who remembers anything of what I have elsewhere said will suspect me of blowing the trumpet of the nineteenth century On the other hand, you shall not hear to-night any general indictment of it. I value beyond expression the influence of the teaching of Carlyle and Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, but with a full appreciation of what the world owes to them, I cannot but feel that in any previous age a Carlyle, with his stern temperament and uncompromising demand for truth, would have found other and worse forms of cant and injustice to tear his heart with indignation. Any age would have been, as he called his own, a "haggard epoch." A Ruskin living amid all the fecundity of his beloved Italian art would have cried still more vehemently than he cries now, "the entire system of this modern life is corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth." For would his art have compensated him for the wickedness embodied in a Borgia, and the heartlessness which speaks through a Machiavelli ? A Matthew Arnold in the reign of Anne would have insisted with no less zeal on more sweetness and more light and the all-pervading Philistinism—a different Philistinism no doubt, but a Philistinism no whit more amiable than ours.
Let us not regret this temperament of discontent. It is but a sign of the unabating aspiration of man for the higher life. The fact that almost all cultured thinkers seem, like Lady Clara Vere de Vere, to be "sickening of a vague disease" of unrest and dissatisfaction and ennui; that they believe the times are out of joint, that they look before and after and pine for what is not; that they find the sky above them of brass, and the earth beneath them of iron—this phenomenon is if we rightly consider it, a hopeful sign. Est Deus in nobis, we have a divinity within us, and this divinity is the spirit of progress. When once the highest minds, the guiding, stimulating minds, are satisfied with life as it is, the march of civilisation must cease. Let society be thankful to be scolded, goaded, driven anyhow to become better than it is ; and let us not ask resentfully whether all that is said of us in comparison with past ages is absolutely true, but rather let us inquire how much more elevated future ages may be made in comparison with us. Do we not owe all our present progress from barbarism to the aspirations and discontents of the thinkers and strivers of old ?
There have always been the two classes of those who deplore and those who belaud the condition of their own times, of the despondent souls who exclaim, like Horace in his most pessimistic moments, " our fathers' generation, leas noble than our grandfathers, hath brought forth us baser than themselves, so that we might beget a yet more vicious progeny," and of the shallow materialists who asseverate that we have arrived at the best of all possible worlds; of those who like the writer of Fors, tell us that beauty and truth and nobility are all but gone out of the world and that we are like a herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place into the sea, and of those who, in the words of Mr Harrison, are ever "singing hymns to science and democracy and steam."
Now, I venture to assert that the former class, though it is to their sorrow that they have eaten of the tree of knowledge, are nevertheless the true leaven that leaveneth a wholesome society. However immoderate their language may often be, in their effect they are to be blessed. It is the blatant modernist who is the clog on human progress.
But though this temperament of discontent is a healthful sign, there is another temperament which is a dire disease. I mean that attitude of bitter cynicism, often affected, but often all too real, which finds life wholly uninteresting and all civilisation vanity of vanities. We are all acquainted with this phenomenon, with the pessimist who, after the manner of the king of Brobdingnag, avers " I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth," and yet who lifts no linger towards bettering our condition; who like Byron, has "simplified his politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments," and yet lifts no finger to erect better ones ; who looks upon the world as so bad that it has no right to exist, and who, by implication, recommends that we should all curse God and die. "What is the use of me at Rome ?" asked Juvenal; "I cannot lie." No but he could work to shame lying, and he did so work in the way of which he was best capable. And this is what we should claim of the discontented. Let them set clearly before themselves an ideal of a life worth living of a civilisation worth living in, and let them do their best to realise it. If they recognise such a thing as duty it lies there. Mere negations are valueless.
After deliberately pondering the past and present social conditions of the world, after spending large portions of time and study in realising or trying to realise the life of man in bygone ages in its true essentials, I seem to see that on the side both of praise and dispraise much that is propounded is hasty and ill-digested. Blatant modernism is wrong but the laudatores temporis acti are no less wrong. I find it possible to believe and rejoice in modern days, however much I may at the same time sadly miss a throng of past grandeurs and charms and beauties. I feel that the past would in most respects look more ugly than the present, if we could bring it near and divest it of the factitious iridescence which interesting associations and quaintness and romance have thrown over it. It does not seem to me that because a particular form of faith was more naive, and some forms of art more flourishing, lives were necessarily happier and nobler when men wore chain mail and dispensed with shirts. The golden age is not past. When Rousseau talks of the happy primeval state of nature he relies on no fact of history. When Thoreau has made trial of his hermit hut in Walden, he is not long in finding his way back to nineteenth century civilisation and its comforts. One can have little patience with this affectation of living in a "state of nature." As Hume has it— "Would'st thou return to the raw herbage for thy food, to the open sky for thy covering? Then return also to thy savage manners, to thy timorous superstition, to thy brutal ignorance."
Now, our boasted modern life is far from admirable in many respects. It is, for instance, deficient, if not retrograde, in the preservation and production of the beautiful, in grace and charm of manners, in the spirit of poetry and reverence, in strength of affection and warmth of sympathy It has innumerable shams and lies and hollownesses and monotonies. Let us by all means obey the Delphian oracle and know ourselves. But let our criticism be definite and just. When Mr Henry George at the outset of his writing assumes that in the train of greater material progress there has followed an intenser poverty, that affluence and luxury are bred at one end of the social scale and starvation at the other, we may admit his good faith and sincerity, but we shall be wrong if we too readily accept his fluent assumption. I for one cannot feel that the contrast of Dives and Lazarus is any novelty. The Luculluses and Apiciuses of Rome, who squandered thousands of pounds upon a single dinner had their chariots dogged on the Arician slope by hundreds of starving beggars. The feudal baron, feasting and carousing in his vast castle home, was lord of a herd of half clothed creatures who crouched in smoky hovels and ate their husks in bitterness. What misery was that which Young describes among the peasantry of France before the Revolution ! What gaunt, unkempt, unclothed, and wholly wretched beings rise before us from his pages! And compare these with the opulence of the grande noblesse in its gilded salon and gay chateau. In Elizabethan England we have on the one side an Earl of Leicester feting royalty with a lavish splendour worthy of a bonanza king, while on the other side we have the testimony of good William Harrison that then, as now, there existed numerously the three everlasting classes of the poor, the "poore by impotencie the poore by casualtie, and the thriftless poore," that is to say, the sick poor, the poor by accident, and the improvident. The same worthy tells us of contemporary beggars and vagabonds "that a gentleman hath taken great pains to search out the secret practices of this ungracious rabble, and among other things he setteth down and describeth three and twenty sorts of them." I doubt if to-day we could find more sorts of tramps than these.
No ; extremes of wealth and poverty are no greater or more repellent under a free system of contract than under a feudal system. Material progress has only altered the incidence of poverty ; it has not increased it. I believe it has immensely lessened it. And let me ask the materialist, if machinery and locomotive ease nowadays produce large estates for one man and bare wages for another, is not this better than the state of things when luxury and the large estate were chiefly gained by brute strength in arms, by more or less discreditable services to more or less discreditable monarchs, or by the accident of birth called noble?
It is a bold man who will dispute with Carlyle; it is a profound student who will prove him wrong. Yet when he essays to express the mood and spirit, the very inner life, of the labourer in words like these, " I will venture to believe that in no time since the beginning of society was the lot of these same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched. . . . But it is to live miserable, we know not why; to work sore and yet to gain nothing ; to be heartworn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal laissez-faire ; it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, infinite Injustice"— when he makes this eloquent lament, I can not but think that he is disregarding history, and that we have here another instance of the higher temperament, the higher sensibility, crediting the lower temperament and the lower sensibility with thoughts and feelings which are all its own, and in which these lower have no share. Carlyle yearned as we all should, for a higher life for the toiler and a higher reward for the toil, but the "dumb" millions are something of a myth, and the wretchedness is largely the subjective wretchedness of the latter day prophet.
If we really want to follow truth, and not our preconceptions, we must look without prejudice at history—not battle history, not drum and trumpet history, but culture-history. It is an immense field of study, this ; but it is worth all the labour. Historical study such as I mean would seek to realise from generation to generation the virtues and resources of individuals as well as nations ; the condition of all things that go to make up the life of a man—his intellect his manners, his ideals his sentiments, his material comforts and his social relations. Men are beginning to write and read history in this way. Kings and parliaments and victories are not the things to which we look. We look not so much upon the exterior of man as into his mind.
Yonder Athenian wears a chlamys, goes bareheaded and almost barefooted, lives in a house without glass windows, and eats without knife and fork. What a barbarian ! Yes, but see him as he walks quietly down to the Piræus with his friend. There is no railway it is true, not even an omnibus; but they are in no hurry. They walk unmolested, carrying no weapon for they do not want one, and the law forbids it. They converse as they go and they seem to be in earnest though not without occasional pleasantries. They courteously salute passing acquaintances. They visit, though with no great show of reverence, a superb temple, superb in its simple Ionic beauty, not in its costliness. They call upon a friend, and find him entertaining company like themselves, and spend the evening in a feast of reason and a flow of soul. Suppose us to know the conversation which they thus held twenty three hundred years ago. Let us see other aspects of this life of the Athenians. See them in their law courts, trying cases by jury ; and note that they are all equal in the eye or the law. Let us see them in the Assembly governing themselves voting on budgets electing responsible agents; and suppose us to know the kind of laws they enact, the kind of speeches they make, the arguments they use, and the kind of political and personal morality indicated. Let us follow them home, see the education of their children, and their domestic arrangements and pleasures, not failing to observe that the servants are but slaves and watching how these slaves are treated. Let us inquire into their industries and economic methods, read their letters and books examine their works of art in sculpture, architecture, and painting. So let as proceed upon every line, until we discover their tastes, their habits, their ideal of life, the extent to which they enjoy such a life, the scope of their intelligence, their notions of right and wrong. And let us act similarly with all other civilised peoples in each successive age. We shall soon get accustomed to this task of ignoring the exterior and getting at the soul. It will matter little whether the human being of our study wears a toga or trousers, a himation or an ulster, or a Crimean shirt. These things are largely matters of climate and occupation ; they may even be an indication of a passing fancy for use rather than ornament, or for ornament rather than use, but they represent no fundamental difference of spirit. Says Teufelsdröckh, " Did we behold the German fashionable dress of the fifteenth century we might smile, as perhaps those bygone Germans, were they to rise again and see our haberdashery, would cross themselves and invoke the Virgin." But when dress is largely armour, when we see a rapier forming a regular portion of attire, when later still the belt carries a revolver or a bowie knife, then we are looking at that which is some considerable mark of the civilisation of the time and place.
But upon all this mass of evidence the inquirer must bring to bear largeness of temper and honesty of quest. It is easy to misjudge for either better or worse. We may fancy an epoch better than it really was through mistaking the greater minds—Newtons or Stephensons, Wilberforces or Howards—for average specimens of the intellect or humanity of the time. Not all Romans were Catos, or Virgils, or Thraseas. Not every Athenian was a Socrates or a Pheidius. There have been in all ages a
" Salt of the earth, the virtuous few
Who season humankind;"
and the lives and ideals and works of these few must be distinguished from the practices of the inferior spirits. But, on the contrary, we must not take the vices and follies of the Athenian or Roman rabble as our criteria of the contemporary intellect and morality ; we must not act like the Schmidt who, writing to order on the social results of early Christianity, foolishly endeavours to make out that such virtues as benevolence and friendship had no existence in the pagan world, and draws his illustrations from the exaggerated invective of comedy and satire.
Of all ages alike it may be said that the ideals and opinions and laws have been better than the practice. If we wish to assert our civilisation from a moral point of view, we adduce our ordinances and our social axioms of humanity, justice, and purity. These are our ideals. Good. But imagine all the walls that separate man from the vision of his fellow man suddenly swept clean away. Imagine some far-reaching eye to behold by day and by night the abominations that are done among us, dishonesties and meannesses of public and private business, miseries and unholinesses of domestic life, indulgences in every form of vice and villainy. Make the most savage Hogarthian picture of all this, maintain that it is a fair portraiture of our "civilisation," and you will be acting about as justly as do certain divines who draw us sketches of pagan life, in order, as they think, to heighten the value of Christianity in our eyes.
The history of mankind, as a whole, has been a record of advance from savagery to barbarism, from barbarism to culture, from lower forms of culture to higher and ampler conditions of social union. Tho primeval European, contemporary with the mammoth and the rhinoceros, chipped a rough flint for his tool or weapon, gnawed raw flesh of man and beast, and disputed with bears the possession of the cave which was his only shelter. In times more recent he has the germs of art, he seeks to beautify his flint to the best of his poor power ; he learns to make himself a hut, which for security's sake he builds on piles out in a lake ; he scoops out for himself ill-shaped vessels of earthenware; and he aspires to leave memorials of himself in cromlechs and Stonehenges. Next he discovers the use of metal, and first with tools of bronze, and later with tools of iron, he begins to get at the latent re sources of nature. Then come greater powers of steam and electricity, and heaven knows what to follow. And all this time, as his first natural requirements are better satisfied, new requirements come into being. His more human part, his intellect, his moral sense, his æsthetic instincts, evolve them-selves. Man, in gentler and more helpful intercourse with man, learns to discipline his passions and adapt himself to the social state the conditions of which he adjusts and readjusts to more and more convenience and power. And this progress is called the civilisation of man.
The word "civilisation" means both a progress and a state. As a progress it is taking the world as a whole, perpetual. There is not a particle of reason for fearing that mankind is rushing down any steep place into any sea. It is, indeed a fact that in particular respects particular countries may deteriorate. It has been deplorably so with Greece measurably so with Italy ; it has been so on the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile. There may be also in particular countries a long Chinese stagnation. Yet no one can deny the onward march of mankind as a whole ; while even in much-pitied Greece we may find advance in at least one grand essential of true civilisation, in the absence of the slave, and in the dignity of the labourer.
I have used the word essential. What are the essentials of perfect civilisation? They can assuredly be none other than the essentials of perfect social and perfect individual life. Etymologically civilisation means the making of a man civilus, fit to be a fellow-citizen, fit to assist the public good, fit for the grace and amenities of social intercourse. It is a trite saying of Aristotle that man differs from beast in being an animal adapted to social life ; and of Burke that without civil society "man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable." Pray think of this for a moment. Civil society is a necessity to the best human life ; and what is the foundation upon which soundness of social spirit and social organisation must depend? It is the character and culture of the individual. "The true test of civilisation," says Emerson, "is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no but the kind of man the country turns out." It is therefore with reason that the word "civilisation" is used, not only of a nation in regard to its material re sources and its political and economic institutions but also of the individual in regard to his domestic life and pursuits, his inner self, his capacities and tastes and ideals.
It would be easy to analyse social union into its various departments of trade, politics, religion, justice, and so forth. It would be easy to take man in society and discuss the various manifestations of his culture and influence. But this we need not do. There is a shorter way to the truth of the matter. Let us lay down the indisputable basis that the most perfectly civilised people is that which lives the most perfect life. Let us further lay it down that this most perfect life cannot result from accident, but must be the outcome of a corresponding perfection in the members of the society. To what do these assumptions bring us? Someone may answer, "They bring us to the question what individual perfection is." A true reply, but one which, to my mind, raises in great difficulty. If we all set to work zealously to clear and crystallise our notions is it probable that our ideals of a perfect life would differ much essentially ? I fancy not. Is it a question of morality? Well let us grant with Mr Lecky, that the standard and the relative value of virtues are liable to shift, nevertheless, in the main all men, Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, the Stoic, and the Christian, believe and have believed in truth and justice, in purity, in benevolence and charity. We shall not be wrong in holding that perfect man must be true and just, pure and benevolent. Is it a question of enjoyment and happiness ? Men may indeed, in practice, seek lower forms of sensual pleasure; they may find most delight when drunk, or when gambling furiously, or, as was said of Rabelais, when merely "rolling about on a dunghill thinking no evil." Yet, even these are fain to admit that they only "follow after the worse while seeing the better;" and the immense majority of thinking men will acknowledge that the truest happiness lies in the pleasures of intellect and sentiment and taste, in "a certain energy of contemplation." And as with morality and happiness, so with all else that goes to perfection, we should find the ideals of men, whatever their practices, agreeing fairly well.
Thus far have we got, that the most perfect civilisation is that in which a man lives the most perfect human life, getting most out of life and putting most into it. And in order to do this we must have, as Matthew Arnold insists, a life " corresponding to man's true aspirations and powers." All the powers and faculties of the individual he says, after Humboldt, must receive harmonious development and expansion. Give him this expansion and man is happy. I wish to avoid being tedious, but it is necessary that I should be entirely clear upon this point. Man in order to lead his highest and happiest life, must neglect none of his powers and faculties, none of his natural requirements. The Stoic and the ascetic neglected the body ; the average materialist neglects many vital portions of the soul. Our life is a synthesis of senses,heart, and intellect. A man should not strive to become the passionless sage of stoicism ; he should not strive after impossible Nirvanas. He should recognise and harmonise the three divisions of himself. The complete man is he of Shakspeare's lines—
"His life was gentle and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ' This was a man.' "
If we give ourselves up to the gratification of sense, the best life is not ours. If our aspirations are limited to material comforts personal safety, ease of locomotion, and similar advantages of which this age can well boast, the highest civilisation is not ours. If we go further, and cultivate our intellects by universal education and lavish spread of knowledge, but neglect the cultivation of the sensibilities and tastes, the highest life and the highest civilisation are still not ours.
Now the test-question to ask of any state of civilisation is this—How fully does the society allow of and encourage the best expansion of its men and women in all these elements of themselves ? It is a principle of mine, when a thing has been already well said, to quote the words of him who said it, and not to disguise it in other and probably inferior words of my own. And Matthew Arnold has said just the thing I want. He has said that the powers which go to make up human life are "the power of conduct the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty and the power of social life and manners." This division is both clear and complete; it covers morals feeling, science, learning, art, imagination and social intercourse. The truest civilisation is that in which all these powers most clearly manifest harmonious cultivation. Are we as a people moral but ignorant ? Are we learned but unfeeling ? Are we moral and learned but rude and careless of art and beauty ? Then is our civilisation sadly unsound. It seems to me that this is the way we must look at the civilisation of ourselves, and of other peoples past and present. We must find out the exact point at which an incompleteness lies. And I hope yet to say wherein especially I think our nineteenth century state falls short of attainable perfection. I rejoice in the swiftness and comfort of railway trains, and in the safety of gaslighted streets ; I rejoice that I am not called upon to be burned at the stake for my lack of some belief or other ; I rejoice in all the advantages that industry and science have taught, and if I venture to point out defects in the life we call our civilisation, I shall not mean that I would rather have lived in any previous generation.
Let us look for a few moments at some phases of past civilisations. Ancient Egypt is the first to rise before us with its violent contrasts, on the one hand its splendid and huge conceptions in architecture and sculpture, its pyramids, pylons, and obelisks, and on the other side its gross superstitions, its grovellings before cats and dogs and ichneumons and crocodiles ; on the one side a vast construction of engineering like the reservoir of Moeris and of building like the Temple of Karnak, and on the other side an ignorant and enslaved multitude performing their sad and ceaseless corvées under the lash and goad ; on the one side sumptuous living amid rich fabrics and precious stones, and on the other a wretched fellaheen starving on byblus-pith. All is not dark among them. The priests do not share the popular idolatries. Their god is Nuk-pu-Nuk— " I am that I am;" but they keep their light to themselves; they do not feel that all men are brothers worthy to entertain such lofty conceptions. Their Sphinx is the symbol of strength and intelligence, but intelligence is for the caste of the priests, and strength for the caste of the soldiers. All is not evil among them. Their moral code is much the same as the Decalogue. It prescribes universal love and charity and justice ; and the Book of the Dead, which was buried with every mummy, and which contains the formulas to be used by the defunct in pleading their cause at the judgment-seat, bids them end with a thrice repeated " I am pure, I am pure, I am pure."
The faults of a civilisation like this are many; but the greatest is the system of caste, maintaining a barrier between man and man, and rendering advance impossible for that great mass which forms the real people and determines the real character of the social whole. The grandeur of art was felt by a few ; its misery was all that was understood by the many. Religion was en-lightened for the few, left abominable for the multitude. Intelligence and liberty were the possessions of privileged bodies, the many groped in ignorance and slavery.
It was the same in Babylon and Assyria, much the same in India and Persia. Of the Hebrews, it is enough to say that, for all their pure morality, keen intelligence, and the vitality of their peculiarly spiritualised religion, they neglected to cultivate that side of art and beauty and the social graces which is required to round off the perfect human life.
In Europe itself the civilisation of Greece stands out with special attraction. "The name of Greek seems to stand for intelligence itself " boasts Isocrates. "We cannot yet afford to drop Homer, nor Æschylus, nor Plato, nor Aristotle," says Emerson. The Greeks are a people in dealing with whom familiarity does not breed contempt. Never have art, letters and social life been more highly cultivated than at Athens. There are many respects in which we suffer by contrast. The feeling for the beautiful, the clear intelligence that moderation and sobriety are the keynotes of art and life, do not prevail among us as among those ancient citizens of the violet crowned city. Their amusements were generally nobler than ours there were no "hells" at Athens. They did not hideously choke the condemned man with a rope, they let him die the peaceful death of hemlock among his friends. Their conception of the gentleman, of kalokagathia, was more complete than ours; it embraced alike moral virtue, intellectual power and social gifts. Neither the narrow puritan nor the polished libertine could be a "gentleman" with them. The higher minds of Greece were no more satisfied with their mythology than we are ; they are not to be judged by Lempriere's Dictionary. It is not so much in its paganism that the civilisation of Greece was faulty ; its great defects lay in the existence of slavery, the contempt of work, the cultivation of the intellect to the neglect of the heart. Liberty existed only for the few ; fraternity was a sentiment undreamed of, " The title of citizen, said Aristotle, be longs only to him who need not work to live." It was this egoism, this intellectual and æsthetic self-centring of a class, which cramped the civilisation of the most amiable state of antiquity.
The chief vice of the civilisation of Imperial Rome was this same inequality, this same overwhelming egoism ; but it had other vices which Athens had not. It had no true feeling for art and little for letters. It lay beneath a more crushing despotism of the state. It intensified the extremes of insensate luxury and helpless beggary, almost killing out the middle classes, and pampering with largesses and brutal and bloody amusements the contemptible paupers who should have formed the strength of the free population.
Into these incomplete pagan civilisations new spirit was infused by Christianity— Christianity in its earliest and purest form, before it was corrupted by the mysticism and dogmatism which have since largely destroyed its clearness and thwarted its action. That spirit was the spirit of humanity, of charity—a spirit which for the first time properly understood the brother-hood of man, the dignity of his labour, the duty of sympathy and of respect for human life. An intensification of this spirit is one of the stimulants we chiefly require to-day.
If the views I have expressed as to the meaning of civilisation are true—if it is true that the most perfect civilisation means the fullest perfection of society, and of man in society, in respect to all the best capacities of intellect and morals and sensibilities—then it will be easy to estimate how far we have advanced and wherein we have still to advance. Wherein have we progressed ? In machinery, in industries, in material comforts—there is no need to dwell upon so obvious and trite a theme as this. We all realise the difference between this age and a time when there were no railways, newspapers, telegraphs, electric lights, or even lucifer matches ; no macadamised roads or penny posts. I need draw no picture of early Britain, or Gaul, or Germany or of the uncouth lives led in those huts of wood and clay, where the table was a rough board and the bed a heap of straw. I need not trace the steady increase of comfort to that time when, in the England of Elizabeth, chimneys were considered a new-fangled luxury. This material progress no one denies. But it is an unhappy sign, that it is chiefly to these things that men point when they shriek in jubilation over modern progress. If modern progress means progress toward the life most worth our living, we must point to less dubious tokens than the steam engine and the torpedo. We may better found our self congratulations upon the social advances we have made—advances in knowledge and reason and liberty. The boons of steam and electricity, the impressing of the powers of nature into man's service, may indeed, and should, become instruments to a higher civilisation, but they do not themselves form civilisation ; they might even be made to precipitate an altogether horrible barbarism. But intellectual and moral improvements are of the very essence of civilisation in its proper sense, and it is to these we may best appeal.
And such improvements have been many and great. The social union is pervaded with increasing equality and justice. The orders of society are being brought into closer relation. There are no adscripti globo, no swineherd Gurths wearing the collar of Cedric. We work under contract, and not under compulsion. In civilised countries men do not work at corvees any longer. Women have ceased to be mere slaves and puppets. The insolvent debtor is not, as he was at Rome and in early France and Britain, made into a slave, nor even imprisoned in the Fleet. All our modern history is a record of charters and emancipations towards government by laws and not by man. Again, the social union is pervaded by increasing reason and intellect and knowledge. We no longer decide the justice of a case by the issue of battle in the lists by ordeal, or by "judgment of God ;" the idiocy of duelling has practically ceased ; it is not thought that the way to extract true evidence is by the torture of the rack and the thumbscrew. The spread of knowledge, first secured by men, now claimed by women, shows its effect in the gradual vanishing of priestcraft, superstitious, and narrow prejudices. We should not now seek to convert heretics by butchering 60,000 persons on some fine Bartholomew's Day. If I were asked for a solid token of progress, I could think of none more readily than of Lord Mansfield's speech at the last trial of a poor old witch—"My opinion is that this good woman be suffered to return home, and whether she shall do this walking on the ground or riding through the air must be left entirely to her own pleasure, for there is nothing contrary to the laws of England in either." Once more society is becoming increasingly pervaded with humanity and respect for life. War, which was once looked upon an an end in itself, is now regarded at best as a disagreeable and illogical means ; inter national congresses and arbitrations are growing frequent ; in the actual conduct of war civilised peoples do not indulge in the indiscriminate butchering and pillage and ravishment of Attila or Genghis Khan. In the punishment of criminals we should shudder at the Roman atrocities of crucifixion, burning alive, and disembowelling. The pillory, with its gratification and incitement of base passions in the vulgar, has been swept away. The insane are treated with care and by sympathy.
Whether there exists a Higher inward morality or not, it is beyond doubt that com pared with the times of Charles II, of Elizabeth, of Chaucer, of the Roman Empire, or with the Athens of Aristophanes, our age allows a far higher exterior decorum. Our women dare not, even in comedy, talk in the broad language of Shakspere's Beatrice. Buckle asserts that improvement has been intellectual only, and not moral. Yet one can hardly separate operations so interlaced. It is true that impulses to decency are universal, that everywhere man has esteemed his sensual part as an interior and unworthy part ; but it has been reserved for the last century to put the severest conventional and legal checks upon the public exhibition of the baser passions. And who shall say that this discipline does not ultimately change even the inner man? We do not tolerate the licentiousness of the older writers. We are coming to look upon drunkenness with disgust, and no gentleman nowadays would dare to say what the Duke quoted by De Quincey used to say, "Next Friday, by the blessing of Heaven, I purpose to be drunk."
We need not prolong this enumeration of indisputable elements of progress; much might be added. For my purpose I shall be satisfied it it is clear that in most of the domains of civilised life we have, in modern times, been going in the right direction, and not in the wrong. To have advanced in equity, in knowledge, in intellectual breadth and clearness, and at least in outward con duct, is to have progressed along more than half the line.
But there is the other side to the picture. In the language of Scripture, this ought we to have done, and not to have left the other undone. Hear me with patience while I set forth very briefly some few of our still surviving barbarisms, and at least one new form of error into which we are falling.
My first complaint is that amid our material onrush, and in consequence of it, we are forgetting how to live, losing the art of living. In the fierce and gasping scramble to " get on " we begin propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. All is haste and high pressure, wearing out the physical and the menial man. As a society our legal and moral relations are more healthily fixed, but our individual domestic lives are less healthy, less worth living. To live is a very different thing from getting the best value out of life. " Nature, says Aristotle, "demands that we should not only be able to work well, but also to use leisure well." The laborum dulce lenimen, the charms of leisure, are wanting to us. "The mass of men,' cries Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation " "Your middle class man," says Arnold, "thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it nothing that the trains only carry him from a dismal illiberal life at Islington to a dismal illiberal life at Camberwell, and that the letters only tell him that such is the life there." Thus it comes that thousands upon thousands feel that they are labouring for that which satisfieth not. The prize of their exertions proves but a Dead Sea fruit. And so one class of them becomes bitter and weary and blasé, while another class often falls to wondering whether it is not after all true that " there is nothing better for a man underneath the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry. " Life is not yet made more beautiful or effective or expansive, but in some respects less so. Yet will not men sooner or later shake off this grim infatuation ? Will they not come to see, as the Creator saw, that the earth is good? Assuredly they will. True civilisation, with its cultivation of all the human powers, will not be reached till all men work indeed at something, but work shorter hours at that something till they retire earlier from toiling and moiling; till they find time for more sympathetic intercourse, more elevated thinking, more expansive conversation ; till they fill up the demands of their being for all that is beautiful in nature and art and life. The dreariness which depresses the better spirits of the age lies chiefly in this— that myriads of so called educated men and women pass through life apparently unconscious of the resources for happiness which are so abundant around them in candid communion with the minds and feelings of their fellowmen, and in the understanding con temptation of things of beauty and intellectual delight.
We may further complain of a decrease in the reverential instinct and consequently in delicacy of manners. Hurry leaves no time for ceremony, material prosperity begets self-worship, the struggle for position results in audacity and self-assertiveness, the notion of the equality of man, understood in a wholly wrong sense, destroys discipline. We do not admire superiority ; we are jealous of it.
Furthermore, we have no firm hold upon an ideal. A people without ideals is like the bones of the valley in Ezekiel, "and lo ! they were very dry." Or, if we have ideals, they are ignoble ones. Mammon is our chief divinity. Our aristocracy is composed not of the aristoi, the best, but of the richest—
The learned pate
Ducks to the golden fool ; all is oblique.
And because of this want of ideal we have no true love of art, which is beauty. We do not understand it, and we do not really want it. Man will not be civilised till he becomes acutely conscious of the moral effect of beautiful surroundings, till he takes care to provide himself with those beautiful surroundings, beautiful because eternally true, in his house, in his gardens, in his streets.
The same lack of ideal makes what is called English society mostly a hollow sham, reducing the gatherings which might be banquets of delight to dull monotonies, where indifference or weariness masquerades as enjoyment. The Greek society, gathering in its porticoes or symposia, had its idea— intellectual expansion. Old and "Merrie" England had its idea of good fellowship The French salon had, and perhaps has its idea— brilliant and witty conversation. But, so far as I can see, we ourselves recognise no particular object in meeting at assemblages called social.
One who seeks to find yet other defects in our civilisation whereat to throw his stone need not seek far. They lie all around us. There are some for which imperfect intellectual processes are to blame. We boast of Tel-el-Kebir and shudder at murder. We punish rigorously the theft of sixpence, and condone disgraceful financial crashes which ruin thousands. We make a just and injured man liable to pay heavily at law for defending himself or claiming his rights. And in these democratic days we are committing an unpardonable sin against humanity, killing all individual excellence, by establishing a public service in which talent remains ignored and unrewarded, and in which adhesiveness—the virtue of a postage stamp at best—is the guarantee of promotion.
Do not misunderstand me. I have indicated a few, though only a few of our short-comings. But I do not say they are all new vices of our age. When I say that in beauty and in social life and manners we have much leeway to make up, I do not mean that previous ages have everywhere been better in these respects. Some ages of some countries, Greece, Italy, and France, have indeed been so, but, if we speak of English society alone, we are the better age and not the worse. Do we gamble? We do not more so than they did in Queen Anne's day. Poker is, perhaps, not worse than ombre, nor is the totalisator worse than the lottery-machine. Do men sneak shamefacedly to prize-fights? These are at least better than bull baiting and cockfighting. Have we larrikins and hoodlums ? There were mohocks nearly two hundred years ago. Are our streets ugly and our buildings mean? Well, at the beginning of this century Baker street was the architectural show-street of London, whereas that same Baker street seems now to be two rows of very hideousness in comparison with streets of more modern build. No, the vice which is most our own is, I seem to find, the vice of hard, material, hurried, unideaed living.
I trust that so far our view of social progress is the past, however brief and incomplete,has been just. If so, one may hope to forecast and help in determining the future. Are we to be optimists, or the contrary ? The earth, it is said, will some day become a barren desolate asteroid. Is humanity tending towards a similar barrenness and desolation ? Is to-day some wonderful turning point where man bends his course backward along the cycle fancied by Polybius ? Surely not. The motto of humanity is " onwards, " ohne Hast ohne Rast. "We think our civilisation near its meridian," says Emerson, "but we are yet only at the cockcrowing and the morning star." Wordsworth and Coleridge both assert that "faith in the perpetual progression of human nature toward perfection will in some shape or other always be the creed of virtue." Even Carlyle prophesies new El Dorados, and promises us celestial guiding stars ever shinning from the bosom of eternity.
We may be quite sanguine about progress in the future. How may we best assist it ? There is a class of persons who fly always to legislation and state action. They seem, like some self appointed German professors of sociology, to fancy that it is possible for the state to decree the millennium; " to decree the abolition of misery, to decree cheap beer and the perfection of dramatic literature, to decree virtue and happiness." They would make the state interfere with the individual as much as Calvin's institutes did with the Genevans, who were forbidden to wear long hair or to give presents to their wives. They forget, as Herbert Spencer warns them, that proposed organisations and institutions have rarely secured the purpose expected of them, and have frequently bred unexpected evils. We may grant that the state should make it a chief care to promote individual perfection and happiness ; but it the zealous reformer of civilisation, instead of crying, "Were I only the Government, " would reflect that millions of other persons have a right to raise the same cry, and that each individual of these millions would make a different governor—if our zealous reformer would reflect upon this, he would see that, as the state is an aggregate of individuals, and as the character of its action depends upon their character, the only safe method of reform is to reform the training of those individuals. His duty lies there, close to his hand.
And so we come back again to the doctrine which one need never tire to promulgate, that the cure for our social blemishes and the means to social perfection lie in the best culture of each man and woman. And by culture I mean, as I have said before, the development of all our capacities for intellectual and spiritual growth. The modern state makes a certain kind of education compulsory, and offers it to us freely. True ; but the attainment of mere items of elementary knowledge, and of the power to read and write and count, is not culture. It may, indeed, serve as a first step to an intellectual culture ; but then, again, it may be made to serve only as the instrument to a more potent roguery. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is not the fruit of the tree of life, unless we accept "knowledge" in a more generous sense than we are apt to do, and include in it moral and æsthetic knowledge. The fault of our state directed education to-day is that it concerns itself wholly with knowledge of facts and processes, in the somewhat sordid economic view of producing an instrument of industrial advance. It neglects that cultivation of the moral and æsthetic powers which should make a citizen an instrument of social ennoblement and happiness. The culture civilisation requires is one which shall combine the clearest judgment with the warmest sympathies, the most serious recognition of facts with the noblest ideal, the most solid skill of work with the highest spiritual refinement and delicacy of taste. As it is, "knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and whereas of wisdom it is ever true that her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace, our onesided knowledge, which is not wisdom, is neither pleasant nor peaceful. And another fault of our educational machinery is that it aims too much at uniformity. We do not want uniform men and women. Society should be one immense dovetailing. The best culture is that which enables a man to develop his peculiar excellences, to " express his best self." I am not here to propose a model educational system, to urge that this or that catechism or system of morality should be taught in state schools. I will only throw out the hint, which I may on some future occasion follow up, that our education is soulless, that it contains nothing spiritual, no spark of warmth for sympathies or conscience, no revelations of the good and beautiful to young and ardent minds. It gives our youth no guiding conception of the world and of life. And how should it, with its barbarous arrangements of payment by results and estimation of culture by percentages of marks?
If we are dissatisfied with civilisation, and would help it along, our duty is to act as individuals upon our neighbours. Though we do not "cry" we may "strive."
" What good thing have my brothers but it came
From search and strife and loving sacrifice ?"
"The world only grows better," says Mr John Morley, "even in the moderate degree in which it does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right steps to make it better "
We may, for instance, do our individual parts towards bringing about the greater mental equality of man. Civilisation can never be complete so long as any remnant of the spirit of caste still operates. I do not mean anything so foolish as that each man has just as much right and ability to govern as any other man. In a perfect organisation there would necessarily be an aristocracy in its proper sense, a "rule of the best." But I mean that all endeavours should be made to abolish such distinctions as depend only on wealth, or birth, or occupation ; that our distinctions should be only those of intellectual, moral, and social merits ; and that recognising this as the true principle of distinction, we should labour to elevate our fellows to the same ideal standard of culture, of intellect, taste, feelings, and manners. The rich in money might well spend less on diamonds and more in efforts to improve the minds of the less fortunate classes by setting constantly before them all manner of helps to cultivation. The rich in learning might give more liberally of the best results of their thought. We require in fact a fresh infusion of love and charity, of philanthropia, into our social sentiments. Hear Carlyle :— "Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under laws of war, named 'fair competition' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility." There is too much of the maxim, "the devil take the hindmost." I would readily undertake to prove that each successive breaking down of the barriers of inequality has been a marked step in civilisation, and that each step in civilisation has been a step towards equality. And I take leave to believe that, to labour to exalt and enrich the lives of the masses with culture of mind and heart, is to exhibit a very true, if not the truest, form of humanity.
And with this effort goes another. The lofty spirit who is discontented with society around him, doubtless has his ideal, if he would but make it definite to himself. When he surveys with pained and wearied eye the hurry and bustle, the shams and lies and cant, the heartlessness and sordidness and monotony and ugliness of life, he doubtless has some conception of what life ought to be. Has he such a conception and ideal ? Then he must not sit and deplore—he must rise and labour to implant his ideal in the soul and conscience of society. If his conception contains the divinæ particula auria—the vital germ of heaven sent truth—society will be as ready to receive it as he is to impart it. The conceptions of the Ascetic, of the Hedonist, of the Puritan, were each fairly taken up, and only laid down again because each was found wanting. The conception of the materialist will be laid aside too. And when once an idea seizes on a people it is a most potent force. Some time ago, in speaking upon the teachings of history, I gave instances of the startling power of an idea. I need not repeat them I will end here, and I will end by saying that we need a conception such as this :—That life deserves to be lived well; that it can only be lived well when we give full scope to all the best capacities of our natures, that we can only find that scope when men and women around us sympathise with us through using their best capacities also; that these best capacities can only be brought out by complete culture of intellect and heart and taste ; and that therefore we require above all things a less one sided culture of ourselves, and a more hearty and loving cultivation of our fellow-men.
I may be charged with Positivism. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I do not perhaps rightly understand the difference between one ism and another, but if to believe steadily in the possible perfection of mankind, and to strive to obtain it, is to be a Positivist, then I hope we are all Positivists, and I for one shall not shrink from any opprobrium the name may bring.
Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 10 May 1890, page 13
