BARBARISM AS AN IDEAL

 

An Examination of a Tendency in World Affairs

By S. M. Melamed, in the “Reflex”

The age old barbardom, which for centuries lay fettered and hidden beneath the rigorous forms of an old culture, is now awakening again, at a time when the cultural process has been completed and that of civilisation begun—that bellicose, virile joy of one’s own strength which only holds in contempt the rationalistic thinking of the epoch which is satiated with literature—that unbroken instinct of the race which wishes to live differently than under the pressure of studied books and theoretical ideals.—Oswald Spengler, “Hours of Decision,” p. 12.

No other generation in the western world has witnessed as many trans valuations as our own. They are of world historic significance not because they jeopardise economic, political and social systems or theological concepts, but because they affect man’s very soul. The startling political events of our time are but the accompanying phenomena of deep spiritual transformations. Many of our most ingrained convictions and deep-rooted beliefs, which grew out of a long and slow evolutionary process, are being destroyed before our very eyes. The speed with which these startling developments have taken place has so anesthetised the Occidental that but few people understand their historical significance. Neither the rise of Christianity, the destruction of the Roman Empire, nor the French Revolution can be compared in significance with the startling drama now being enacted here before our eyes.

The change in the form of government of a great nation is not necessarily a world historic event. Even a new spiritual allegiance of a people need not change the rhythm of the world historic process. But when the conception of man as a spiritual being and as the central figure of life is ruthlessly attacked and he is reduced to a purely economic atom, as in Marxist Russia, or to a purely zoological creature, as in Racial Germany, humanity is faced with the startling drama now being enacted here before our eyes.

For thousands of years the foremost representative of Occidental culture ought to impress upon man that he is the meaning and goal of all life. Religion pictured him as the crown of creation and as the highest peak in the cosmic process. In the making of man, so the religious myth of the Bible goes, God almost exhausted His creativeness. Although fashioned out of dust, man is not a part of nature only but partakes of the divine spirit. In the figure of the Redeemer, the idea of man’s close relationship to God finds its most powerful expression

While religion placed man above brute nature by emphasising his relationship to God, philosophy stressed his spirituality. In foregoing his desire, in modifying his urge and in overcoming his instincts, in order to help his fellow man, man rises above nature and attains true humaneness. This doctrine of man was most impressively pronounced by Socrates and Plato. Forgotten during the Middle Ages, it was given new life by the Renaissance and Reformation and held sway until the World War.

In the plastic arts, too, the appreciation of man’s position in life found its expression in the glorification and idealisation of his figure. The great artists of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance were captivated and inspired not by the phenomena of brute nature but by suffering, aspiring and thinking man. This tendency only reflected the spirit of these respective periods.

It was this concept of man as the central figure of life, and as the crown of creation, which made modern culture possible. He created science in order to free himself from nature; he formulated jurisprudence in order to free himself from the natural instincts and urges of his fellow man; he invented ethics in order to free himself from evil; he conceived politics in order to safeguard his liberty and happiness, and he developed economic and social forms in order to free himself from want. In all his efforts, endeavours, and struggles, he was primarily animated by one desire—to preserve his spiritual individuality. Whether believer or heretic, he was inspired by the thought that he was the crown of creation.

II

“Man is a beast. I will repeat it again and again. All the moralists and social ethicists who seek to escape . . . are only beasts with broken teeth.” Such is the ethical doctrine of Oswald Spengler, the greatest German intellectual figure since the days of Nietzsche, as formulated in his latest book. “Hours of Decision” (p. 14). This conception of the beast-man is an extension of Schopenhauer’s will-man and Nietzsche’s blonde beast. That man is not a creature made in the Image of God but only a part of brute nature become the basic conviction of Marxist Russia, Caesaric Italy, and Racial Germany.

Birth, marriage, and death, the most solemn moments in man’s career, have become of trivial significance in Soviet Russia. Burial is a profane and prosaic act as unsentimental as the disposal of any other worn out mechanism. Marriage is a matter of mere registration and birth a purely animal process. In Fascist Italy, the Government seeks to increase the population so that the cannon fodder of the country be increased. The quantity producing rabbit and the quality developing horse are the symbols and sources of inspiration of this policy. The Italian is taught to think in purely zoological terms upon the most important phenomenon of life. In Nazi Germany the new formula for the birth of a child is “Das Weib Gebirt das Tier" (“The woman gives birth to the animal”). Marriage and birth have not been profaned and secularised in Italy and Germany for reasons of political expediency, but the general tendency is no different than that of Russia.

It is no mere coincidence that in these three countries in which man has been deposed from his pedestal and reduced either to an economic atom or to a zoological creature that the sciences of man, with jurisprudence as their focal point, have been practically abolished and eliminated. The old systems of jurisprudence have been done away with and the new “systems” are merely expressions of the changing moods of arbitrary despots. Not basic laws and juridic principles, but arbitrary decrees prompted by expediency, caprice or ambition or malice are the corpus juris from which justice is drawn. The reintroduction of the torture chambers in Italy, Germany and Russia, as well as the summary executions of mere suspects of political opposition or resentment, testify best to the complete abrogation of the rights of man in these countries. Animals and mechanisms have no right. Since in these countries man is only considered to be beast or machine he cannot be the subject of rights, but like all other things he can only be an object of law.

III.

The most striking feature of the neo-barbaric world concept is its vehement rejection of reason and intellect. The social, political and economical degradation of the scholar and savant in Russia, Italy and Germany is only an expression of a powerful anti-intellectual tendency which originates in emotional mysticism. Even in Russia, with its artificial rationalisation of life and its adoration of applied science, only the Marxist scientist is tolerated. In all three countries the freedom of the mind and its accompanying attributes, such as intellectual honesty, sincerity, and idealism, are considered to be the contemptible legacies of decadent liberalistic and rationalistic regimes which must be uprooted. The position of men of the spirit, such as poets, artists, scientists, religionists, philosophers and scholars, is almost comparable to that of the lower castes of India. Not intellect, but will, not mind, but physical energy, not spiritual, but robust virility, is the standard of cultural life.

In Russia all professional men with the exception of engineers are most exploited by and receive less consideration from the State than any other group. It is almost unknown for working men not to be paid on time, whereas physicians, teachers, and laboratory workers often must wait months for their meagre wages. And when they do receive their wages they cannot buy nearly as much with them as can other groups. But worst of all they are regarded as potential political heretics and are treated accordingly. In Italy, the hotbed of intellectual individualism since the days of the Renaissance, every teacher from the grade school to the university is expected to teach a minimum and preach a maximum. He must constantly bring the message of Mussolini the Redeemer to his pupils. In Germany the granting of academic diplomas is predicated upon at least six months service in a labour camp. When Max Planck, the dean of German science, came to Hitler to plead for his colleagues who were deprived of their positions, he was told that ‘‘scientists being fools should not interfere in matters of the State but should mind their own affairs." As late as May 1934, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Enlightenment, in an article in his paper, "Der Angriff,” said:—

“. . . the intellectuals are an idle and generally worthless lot and in our age which demands real men they are merely in the way,”

And further he says:-—

"The intellectuals are failures and have fallen down at all decisive moments. And now when a simple labourer, an ordinary front soldier, has succeeded in making himself the leader of Germany, they are simply dying of envy and wounded self-conceit.”

It was therefore entirely consistent when some two weeks later Herr Zander, director of schools in the Berlin-Brandenburg province, proposed that the time devoted to the three R's in grammar school be reduced one-third, and that the time thus saved be devoted to physical training.

This contempt for intellectuality and its representatives finds its justification and explanation in the denial of man and in the deification of the State. Only the State has reason and it is omniscient. Consequently the mind of the individual must be subservient to that of the State, and its refusal to do so may forfeit the individual’s right to exist. Such was also the guiding principle of the Inquisition—believe or be killed!

IV.

The profound contempt for human reason so characteristic of the neo-despotism is the cultural legacy of the German Romantic School of Philosophy. Oswald Spengler is the latest powerful tremor of this tendency in German cultural life. His major opus, “The Decline of the West,” is not so much a new philosophy of history as a panegyric to the irrational, emotional, and mystic side of human life. Rationalism to him is akin to original sin. It is the source of all human aberration, the embodiment of all decadence, the clearest symptom of cultural degeneration and the agent which spells ruin to the virility of life. Rationalism to Spengler includes every manifestation of the Western mind of the past 300 years—Puritanism, Idealism, Materialism, and Romanticism. He rejects Rousseau as well as Kant, Voltaire as well as Holbach, Owen as well as Marx. They are all guilty of the crime of attempting to introduce a definite order into life and seeking to divert world history into a definite channel. All the great mottoes of modern times, such as freedom, equality, historical progress, the happiness of the greatest number, and the like, are sheer demagoguery, for human history is only war history. Hence the doctrine of and the will to international peace is an attempt to violate the historical process.

The unadulterated historical process manifests itself with elemental force and sweeps aside the artificialities created by the various rationalistic schools. The highest spiritual reality is not knowledge, but the religious myth. The ancient motto, “I believe because it is absurd," testifies to realistic understanding of the world. The highest political reality is the power of the great conqueror who heralds the coming of a new culture. Hence liberalism and democracy are signs of degeneration. Whenever the masses raise their heads culture is doomed, for only the great individual, privileged with unrestricted freedom, is the source of all culture. The highest social reality is the lord of the manor, the nobleman. It is he who gives life its form and colour. The domination of the myth, conqueror and nobleman form the higher order, and that of reason, masses and peace form the lower order. At present, the lower order prevails, and its continuance spells the inevitable destruction of our present culture and civilisation, says Spengler.

This deep-seated attraction to the mythical and repulsion from the rational expressed itself in Spengler's construction of the philosophy of history. All cultures are distinguished from one another by definite border lines which cannot be crossed. The ancient Babylonian culture had nothing in common with the Hindu or Chinese and the Arab had nothing in common with the Germanic. All these cultures arise within a certain landscape upon which they flourish, decay, and die like living organisms. Occidental culture, having been weakened and undermined by rationalistic rust, is about to collapse. The only culture visible on the horizon, capable of replacing the dying culture of the West, is the Russian. That the latter is overwhelmed with Marxistic rationalism which he elsewhere pronounces to be the embodiment of decadence, does not deter him from visualising a glorious coming Russian culture. For not that he hates rationalism less, but that he loves the mailed fist more. The complete suppression of democratic rule in Russia, the permanent degradation of reason, the absolute domination of the subjugator, and the idealisation and worship of might, appeal powerfully to Spengler’s romantic senses.

There is something sadistic in Spengler's conception of political history just as there is something fatalistic and arbitrary in his conception of the philosophy of history. When the masses are chained, oppressed, maltreated, tortured, and whipped by the rod of the despot, it is the normal order of things, but when they are free and happy and masters of their own destiny, history is moving with seven league boots towards catastrophe. When reason prevails, science flourishes, and life moves along an even keel, decadence is already to be seen on the horizon. But when the mind is enveloped in myth, and culture is only the privilege of the few, life attains its highest peak. If this Spenglerian doctrine is valid, Occidental history of the past three centuries is only an uninterrupted, typographical error of destiny.

There is nothing universal in man’s culture, says Spengler. All the great cultures have their own truths, logic, science, art, etc., which have no meaning or value to any other culture. A great culture is a spiritual individuality which absolutely excludes and denies any other personality. Modern man would be no worse off if the civilsations of classical and Oriental antiquity had never existed, for the languages and symbols of each culture can be understood only by its own period and people.

This cultural determinism bordering on fatalism is no less theology than is the economic determinism of Marxism. The great cultures of history, far from being encased in Chinese walls, actually empty into one another. Thus modern man derived his geometry from ancient Egypt, his foundations of algebra from the Arabs, his philosophy and art from ancient Greece, his jurisprudence from ancient Rome, his religious world picture from ancient Palestine, etc.

This theory of isolated cultures has many implications. Its presumptions are first a denial of one humanity, second, a division of the human race into aristocratic and non-aristocratic peoples, and third the supremacy of blood over mind. These presumptions have no foundation in fact. As a matter of fact all men are governed by the same laws of the mind. The history of science, philosophy and religion are replete with instances of simultaneous but independent discoveries by men of different cultures. Thus the atomic theory was discovered contemporaneously in ancient India and in ancient Greece. The conception of one God was also evolved simultaneously in ancient Egypt, Judea, and China. Gunpowder and glass were developed in China and in Europe independently of one another. Nothing, however, testifies more powerfully to the oneness of the human consciousness than the history of numerals which were developed independently of one another in all the ancient centres of civilisation.

Nor is the second presumption of aristocratic and plebeian peoples and cultures to be accepted without qualifications. Spengler’s own countryman, Felix von Luseban, one of the greatest anthropologists of modern times, completely denies the existence of superior and inferior peoples. So do those savants such as Montesquieu, Taine, Buckle, Darwin, and Lamarck, who maintain that the environment primarily gives a people its character and creativeness. Thus far, Spengler as a scientist has not discovered any concrete facts which may make the theories of his adversaries obsolete.

The same may be said of Spengler’s third presumption of the supremacy of blood over mind. Here again another great countryman of Spengler, Goethe, who was also a great scientist in his own right, maintained that the human mind cannot lay bare the innermost secrets of nature. Whether and how blood influences mind ethnically man has no means of discovering. All that man can detect is that the environment influences the mind, especially in art, religion, and science.

 The cultural clannishness with its absolute lines of demarcation of Spengler is only a glorified form of barbarism. Every barbarian considers the members of every other tribe to be the enemy which must be annihilated. The barbarian delights in the gleaming sword and the mailed fist and worships the conqueror. He surrenders to his instincts and is guided by his emotions, and when in quest of food, shelter, etc., his conduct is indistinguishable from that of the beast. But it is in these very manifestations of man's urges, instinct and emotions that Spengler sees the height of life and the source of all creativeness. His entire philosophy thus becomes a pæan to barbarism.

V.

The history of Western Europe coincides and is interlinked with the history of Christianity. Since the destruction of the Roman Empire, the great spiritual and artistic movement of Europe, whether mystical or rationalistic in form, was deeply anchored in the Christian world picture. It is only since the middle of the 18th century that the representatives of the natural and social sciences began to disregard Christian thought, although many of them continued their adherence to the church. By the beginning of the 20th century the representatives of the science were sharply divided into two camps —religious and anti-religious. This is especially true of Germany, where the Monistic Society represented the anti-Religious and the Kepler Society the religious groups. This division, although it stirred the educated groups, did not affect the masses. Not the onslaughts of science upon religion but those of Marxism estranged a great part of the city populace from the church, which now became not anti-religious but simply non-religious. Even in the Marxist camps defenders of religion were not lacking.

It was only with the rise of Nazidom that an anti-Christian wave swept the country. As early as 1921 the life of the priests in the villages of Catholic Bavaria began to become uncomfortable. In the large cities the representatives of Christianity became objects of attack and derision. Even the figure of Christ was subjected to scorn and humiliation. Hundreds of thousands of vociferous Nazis, jingoists, extreme nationalists, racialists, and neo-pagans suddenly discovered that Christianity is a foreign plant which has been sown upon German soil, and that Jesus was only a son of a foreign people which can never fathom the German mind. This anti-Christian movement won such adherents as General von Ludendorff, who served to legitimate this tendency in the eyes of the populace. It gained in strength in proportion to the success of National Socialism. When the latter finally triumphed, a bold attempt was made not only to dechristianise the church, but to introduce in its stead Germanic paganism of old. The figure of Jesus, symbolising meekness, piety, charity, and goodness was considered to be suitable only for slaves. A powerful and dominating people like the Germans require the inspiration of Wotan, who radiates might, energy, bellicosity, and severity.

This anti-Christian, pagan movement which assumed such ugly forms was fathered by Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. Nietzsche was the first to teach the Germans that Christianity is slave morality, which was born out of a rebellion of slaves against lords. His ideals of the blonde beast and of the superman were incompatible with the basic concepts of Christianity. “The Christian God Concept,” he says in his “Anti-Christ,” “God as the God of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit, is one of the most corrupt God concepts that has ever come upon this earth.” In thus declaring war against Christianity, Nietzsche called into being those latent heretic forces which began to spread with the industrialisation of Germany.

But Oswald Spengler, even more than Nietzsche, has contributed to the development of the anti-Christian movement in Germany. In describing Christianity as a phenomenon of the so-called Magian or Arabic culture, which died with the rise of the German culture, Spengler impressed upon his country men that Christianity is not only a strange plant upon German soil, but actually belongs to a lost and petrified world. Preferring the world of action to the world of the spirit, Spengler sides with Pilatus and not with Jesus. World history is a realm of action and not of dreams, of facts and not of sentiments. "Since Christianity represents the second it must be rejected.

Spengler’s “Decline of the West” was read and accepted by millions of his countrymen in the Fatherland. Coincident with the spread of Spenglerism, such anti-Christian publicists of previous generations as Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner, experienced great revivals. So charged was the German air with anti-religious sentiments that Fritz Mauthner’s monumental “Atheism and its History in the West,” in four large volumes totalling 2,200 pages, ran through five editions in five years. So was the ground prepared in German literature, philosophy, theology, and historiography for the growth of pagan tendencies culminating in Nazi religious profaneness and barbarism.

In the cities of the English speaking world one very seldom finds such streets as Hume Street, Beacon Street, Milton or Shakespeare Avenue. But in Germany every city and town has its Goethe Strasse, Schiller Strasse, Kant Strasse, Hegel Strasse, Fichte Strasse and Schopenhauer Strasse. The memory of almost every German poet, scientist, philosopher and artist of note is perpetuated for the populace by streets named after him. No other country in the West has as many statues in bronze and marble erected to its great representatives of the spirit. The people considered the men of the spirit to be the true heroes of the nation, holding them in greater esteem than conquerors, warriors and statesmen. Every German took pride in his being associated with the "people of poets and thinkers."

 The respect for intellectual achievement or even for mere intellectual occupation is traceable to the influence of Immanuel Kant, Germany's greatest philosopher, who made reason the source of all reality. His philosophical theories created social values in Germany by making the intellectual the centre of social life. Just as no popular meeting in England can be successful unless graced by the presence of a prince of the blood, so could no popular meeting in Germany be of importance unless addressed by an outstanding intellectual. For over a hundred years the intellectual was the axis of social life in Germany, until the Nazis rose to power and decreed that the intellectual was a superfluous being who contributed nothing to German strength and might. From the present hostile attitude towards the intellectual in Germany, one can readily appreciate the great position he must have held in former days.

 The startling anti-intellectual movement culminating in the worship of ignorance and vulgarity is the product of a slow historical process which has but recently come to a head. One need only page the major works of German poetry and philosophy of the last generation to appreciate that the German attitude towards life was undergoing a radical change. Since Nietzsche's battle cry of the transvaluation of values, even his adversaries began to adopt a critical attitude towards the old order and old concepts. In the first decade of the 20th century, there was already visible in German thought a growing enmity towards the values of the nineteenth century, viz., intellectualism, mechanism, historicism, and all those life concepts which spring from a rationalistic understanding of the world. By 1930 German poetry and German philosophy reflected an ever growing irrationalism and mysticism. In the 19th century the motto of cultured Germany was reason—in the 20th century it was life. Not concepts but instincts, not ideas but urges, not definitions but sentiments are now considered to be the sources of truth. In modern German philosophy figures like Wilhelm Dilthey, Nicolai Hartmann, Friedrich Grave, Mueller Freienfels, and Oswald Spengler give powerful expression to this tendency. This forte chord in German contemporary spiritual life became fortissimo at the end of the war, when the Germans realised that great world historic decisions are made not by superior thought but by superior deeds. The cult of reason was transformed into the cult of instinct.

This anti-intellectual tendency was not confined to Germany alone. In Russia, where intellectual life was less developed than it was in Germany, but where, nevertheless, the representatives of the spirit were held in high esteem, a new attitude towards the old values became noticeable at the conclusion of the abortive revolution of 1905-06. This revolution was engineered in large measures by the intellectuals and academic youth. Some of them, like Gorki, Audrieff and Trotsky were notable figures in Russian letters. The entire Socialist Revolutionary party deduced its programme of action from purely intellectual theories. The failure of their revolution compromised the faith of the Russian youth in intellectualism. Almost overnight a swing from intellectualism to mysticism, and from rationalism to sensualism took place. The hitherto esteemed Russian classics of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy were relegated to the background, and Artzibaskeff, the author of the highly pornographic novel “Sanine,” became the literary hero of the day. Not spiritual depth or intellectual truth but urges and instincts became the ideal.

From 1906-14 one of the main tasks of the Russian Minister of Education was to suppress sexual orgies in the secondary schools of the country. Within a very short time the idealistic clan of the Russian youth vanished and paganism became the order of the day. Might became the greatest object of adoration, and the great man was identified with the powerful man.

This demoralisation of Russian life, culminating in the figure of Rasputin, enabled a determined group of Bolshevists to ride into power and to maintain it ever since. So did the manifestation of purely psychological forces pave the way for paganism and barbarism in important European centres.

That this neo-paganism in central and eastern Europe which has degenerated into economic and political barbarism is not a mere caprice of history can best be seen from the reception which Spengler’s “Decline of the West” has received in these countries. In Germany alone over 300.000 copies of this work were sold during the first six years after publication. In Austria it received the greatest popular reception since Weininger's “Sex and Character” appeared in 1906. It was read with equally great gusto in Hungary, Russia and Italy. Only in France, England and America did it fail to impress the reading public, and was politely rejected in all these countries.

Oswald Spengler, the apostle of the new Caesarism, has impressed himself upon peoples who were vanquished either politically or psychologically. Their defeat developed in them a veritable hunger for might. In power they saw their only salvation. To attain it, it was necessary to transvaluate life from reason to will, from intellect to instinct, from idea to urge. Guided by these forces, the order of the jungle settled upon the major part of the European continent. Barbarism became the ideal.

Australian Jewish Herald (Melbourne, 1936, ) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article260975975

DETERIORATION OF MORAL STANDARDS

"But I'll do my, best a gude wife to

be,

For Auld Robin Grey is very kind

to me,"

—Auld Robin Gray.

If anyone wants to comprehend in a single example the deterioration in the moral standard of present-day literature as compared with older schools, one need only take the lines quoted above. They express, of course, the attitude of a woman misled by force of circumstances into an unwished-for marriage, and the attitude is that of courageous resignation. It shows respect for the moral law even at the cost of individual suffering, and the same feeling permeates the world of letters at every period of its greatness, the time of Shakespeare, the time of Scott, or the time of Tennyson and Browning. Very few real exceptions can be quoted—Byron was not one, for he never even pretended to set up a new morality of his own in theory. Shelley did, and hence, very largely, his significant unpopularity.

*   *     *

But consider how nowadays, in a era of little writers, the most popular of them would treat the "Auld Robin Gray" situation : What ravings about "brides in the sight of Heaven," what demands that inclination and desire, be made the only laws. The real modernist, whether styled Shavian, Feminist, or what not, has nothing but scorn for such "old-fashioned" words as "duty' and "principle" ; and there are scores of the Messalina type to-day who would resent the very idea of doing their best "a gude wife to be." and sincerely consider themselves infinitely superior to the humble heroine of Lady Ann Barnard's well-known poem

*   *     *

For there is no mistaking the decline in the standard of decency, as well as of interest, maintained by British women novelists, and therefore, presumably demanded by their readers, the great majority of whom, as every librarian can testify, are women. Away back in the seventies there were far fewer lady novelists than to-day, and the girls of the period risked the grave displeasure of their mothers in order to read surreptitiously the latest novel by Miss Braddon or Rhoda Broughton, or even "Ouida," who had acquired the reputation of being "desperately wicked." But judged by the standards of to-day, those women-writers of the past generation wrote stories which were not only far more interesting, but also far more innocuous than the horrible examples of sex-morbidness that occupy so much room on the shelves of the booksellers at the present time. Miss Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret" and "Aurora Floyd" were at least stories, and they depended for their success upon other qualities than meticulous descriptions of illicit passion. So, too, were Rhoda Broughton's "Not Wisely But Too Well." "Cometh Up as a Flower." and "Nancy," over which young ladies were wont to weep wholesome tears of girlish sympathy. And even "Ouida," banned and excommunicated as she was in many houses when people were more straight-laced than they are now, seems quite healthy-minded when we mentally compare her most popular books with the hectic eroticism that passes for novel-writing among so many of the women authors of to-day. "Strathmore," "Under Two Flags," and even "Moths"—in which the heroine's mother was a decidedly improper old lady and the heroine herself, after marrying a brutal Russian to please her mother, ran away with a golden-voiced tenor to please herself—are all quite harmless when put alongside the "works" of several much-read lady novelists of to-day. This progressive fall in the standard of decency in fiction is a very unpleasant portent. Garbage-fiction should be stopped at the Customs, a proceeding that would practically abolish the evil in this country, for happily, it is not produced in Australia.

Cairns Post (Qld. : 1909 - 1954), Saturday 12 July 1913, page 3

CHAPTERS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY

Mr. W. S. Lilly, who has written "Chapters in European History" (Chapman and Hall), appears to be an English Catholic, with very strong and original opinions of his own, that is to say with many prejudices. These, however, are so picturesque and stated with so much frankness, not to say simplicity, as to be very interesting. His object seems to be to maintain that in spite of movements which the rest of the world has hitherto considered to be progressive, humanity has not progressed. His meaning of progress, however is a little different from that which is commonly attached to the word. Progress means the advance of mankind in the recognition of certain teachers commissioned to reveal new truths. The modern theory of evolution he scouts with a fervour which sometimes becomes amusing. His Renaissance, under which title Mr. Lilly apparently includes the Reformation, is roundly denounced as a movement the most fatal to intellectual and moral growth. In art, in literature, in religion and in philosophy it was not a new birth but an eclipse and an obscuration of vitality. The men and the events which do not square with this theory Mr. Lilly disposes of by a very summary process. They were not of the Renaissance, but the last of the old and heathen age. The Sixteenth Century, which other historians have held to be the beginning of a new epoch, to Mr. Lilly was but the brilliant close of the old era. Shakespeare and Michael Angelo were of the mediaeval type, not of the modern and newly awakened school. All that came of the Renaissance was bad and poisonous, including the French Revolution, which is the special object of Mr Lilly's aversion. Of this great movement and of its influence on Frenchmen Mr. Lilly writes with amusing abhorrence. "I know the country well," says he, "and every time I visit it I discern terrible evidence of ever increasing degeneracy. The man seems to be disappearing. There is a return to the simious type. The eye speaks of nothing but dull esuriency. The whole face is prurient. The voice has lost the virile ring, and has become shrill, gibberish, baboon-like. Go into the Chamber of Deputies, the chosen and too true representative of the people. The looks, the gestures, the cries remind you irresistibly of the monkey house in Regent's-park." It is needless to say that Rousseau, as one of the apostles of the Revolution, comes in for a full share of Mr Lilly's wrath. He scarcely allows him to be a serious thinker. He avers that there never was a contrat social, that men are not born free and equal, and that the "noble savage" is a pernicious humbug, the degraded specimen, not the primitive type, of humanity. As for England, if she has escaped from the evil influences of the Renaissance, it was because she was never wholly controlled by them as her neighbours were, and has always clung to the faith in the supernatural. The one true and always pure influence has been the Papacy, which has secured for the modern world the rights of free speech and free thought, and remains the consistent champion of liberty. These ideas—little in accordance with the spirit of modern history— Mr Lilly propounds with perfect candour, and maintains with great spirit, in a singularly bright and lucid style.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 12 June 1886, page 13

ILLUSTRIOUS LUNATICS.

Mr. J. Corbet, a recognised authority on insanity and kindred questions, contributes to The Arena a most interesting article on "Illustrious Lunatics," from which we quote the following extracts : —

At a moment when the grave sociological problem of the insane engages so much public attention and excites so much anxiety, and scientists and specialists are busy discussing the pros and cons on both sides, it may be interesting to bring to mind a few of the most remarkable personages who were either actually mad or whose mental deformity and moral depravity were such as to qualify them for place amongst the abnormal classes. At any rate, notwithstanding the "divinity" that, it is said, hedges kings, some plain speaking on the subject may have its uses.
 The verity of the aphorism expressed in the line " Great wits are sure to madness near allied," has many striking examples.
 One of the most remarkable instances of illustrious lunacy of a hereditary character in ancient times is that furnished by the family of the Cæsars. It would seem as if the insane taint originated with the great founder of the dynasty, who was afflicted with epilepsy, and, according to some writers, abandoned himself in his younger days to vice and intemperance. The youthful Caesar would have been more than mortal if he did not yield to the temptations by which he was surrounded on every side. He, moreover, when forced to fly from Rome, while yet in his teens, resided for a considerable time at the corrupt Court of Nicomedus, King of Bithynia, where immorality was rampant, and riotous living the rule.
 Cæsar's daughter Julia is said to have been a woman of the worst character. She had a son who was idiotic ; and several others of the immediate descendants and collateral branches of the family were hereditarily infected. It is unnecessary to go much further in this direction to show how moral brain-poisoning brought down the curse of insanity upon the Julian race, and how, even in the case of pagans, the sins of the parents were visited upon the children "to the third and fourth generation" and beyond.
 Alexander of Macedon furnishes another example of how the exercise of absolute power and the unrestrained indulgence of sensuality act upon the brain, destroy the faculty of self-control, harden the human heart, impair the understanding, and finally overthrow the reason. Numerous instances are recorded of Alexander's senseless savagery and bloodthirstiness. History credits him with sighing for more kingdoms to conquer, but his insanity was of the homicidal type, and his longing was not so much for more kingdoms to conquer as for more people to massacre. It is related of him that after the capture of Tyre he caused an immense number of persons, including non-combatants, to be put to death in cold blood. Nearly 20,000 inhabitants of Sangala were butchered by his orders after the city had surrendered, and his barbarities at the taking of Gaza were diabolical.
To come down to our own days, it is notorious that most of the Royal families of the present day have "the mad drop" in them—notably the Russian, German, Austrian, Danish, English, Portuguese, and Bavarian. The conservation and hereditary transmission of the insane taint in all these is assured by frequent consanguineous marriages. In fact, it may be said that all the Royalties of Europe are so married and intermarried amongst each other that there is considerable difficulty about fixing the degrees of relationship between their numerous members. Uncles, aunts, and cousins are jumbled up in a tangle that only the Herald's College could be expected to unravel. Those who are responsible for the making of such matrimonial alliances seem to ignore the fact that consanguineous marriages, especially where mental disturbance has already manifested itself on either side, are not only fraught with danger to posterity, but are certain to produce evil results, psychical or somatical The offspring of such marriages are rarely perfectly sound. If not mentally unbalanced they are not mentally vigorous, or else they are afflicted with physical imperfections, malformation of the limbs, scrofula, defective organs of speech, hearing, and the like.
 The Imperial House of Russia furnishes some examples.
 Ivan, called the Terrible, was nothing less than a violent lunatic. If an ordinary mortal he would undoubtedly have been shut up and ended his days in an asylum for the insane.
 Peter the Great was an epileptic, a drunkard, and a bloodthirsty tyrant. He left a legacy of all his evil qualities to his daughter Elizabeth, who was so dissolute and corrupt that her actions could only be accounted for by mental aberration, of which moral depravity was the outcome. So in the case of Catherine, generally known as the Great, who lead a life so shockingly debased, that, looking back on it from this distance, she also must be regarded as having been morally insane. Her son Paul, who succeeded her, became in the end a violent lunatic, and his subjects, wearied by his acts of cruelly and oppression, put him to death. His son and successor, Alexander, was, towards the end of his life, a victim of melancholia, and died in that state. Nicholas was of such an ungovernable temper that at times his frenzy amounted to temporary insanity. The mind of the late Emperor was supposed to be quite unhinged from fear of the Nihilists, and it is said his death was caused by his fears.
 The terrible tragedies in the Austrian and Bavarian Royal houses are so recent as to be within the memory of all. With regard to Bavaria, what the responsible statesmen could have been thinking about in allowing a madman like Louis II. to squander the substance of his people to the extent of millions upon licentious men and women, and in building palaces and castles in out of the way places, is inconceivable. 
 England also can supply many types and instances not only of hereditary ruthlessness and moral depravity in her sovereigns, but of insanity. The life of Henry VIII. was an uninterrupted career of crime, cruelty, lust, and murder. A gross sensualist and voluptuary ; his conduct towards his many queens, who he did not hesitate to put to death one after another when he grew tired of them, was such as to qualify him, if sane, for the hands of the executioner, and, if not, for a cell in a criminal lunatic asylum. His daughter, Elizabeth, despite her conspicuous abilities as a sovereign, showed clearly the hereditary taint. Her relations with men, and especially with Essex, and his subsequent fate, proved her to be "her father's own daughter," while her savagery in beheading the hapless Mary Queen of Scots, after keeping her in prison for twenty years, can only be attributed to the ruthless and sanguinary disposition inherited from her vicious and depraved parents.
 It is well known the Royal family of England is tainted on both sides. George I. and George II. drank to excess. There can do no doubt what ever their intemperance sowed the seeds which developed into positive insanity in George III.
 The mantle of the man-slayers, to whom reference have been already made, seems to have fallen upon the shoulders of another Eastern potentate, the modern lycanthrope, or wolfman, whose wholesale massacre of his own subjects have excited the horror and indignation of the whole world. It goes without saying that the army or fleet of any one of "the high contracting Powers," as they are pompously called, could stop the Imperial madman's career, and put him into a straight waistcoat at once. The only wonder is why they don't do it. The question may be asked, Is Abdul Hamid mad? Judged by his life, one of sensual excesses, and by his savage treatment of his Christian subjects, he is not only insane, but a criminal lunatic, qualified in every way to rank with the inhuman monsters of antiquity. Taking all these things into account, he may be set down as the most illustrious lunatic that has appeared upon earth from the days of Nero to the present time.

Burrowa News (NSW : 1874 - 1951), Friday 28 July 1899, page 1

THE VOICE OF "THE HOOLIGAN."

——<>——     

 THE LAMENT OF A MODERN JEREMIAH.

To the Contemporary Review for December Mr. Robert Buchanan contributes a striking piece of denunciation under the title of "The Voice of the Hooligan." He says:—
" As the years advance which ' bring the philosophic mind,' or at least the mind which we fondly flatter ourselves is philosophic—in other words, as men of thought and feeling approach the latter end of their pilgrimage, there is a tendency among them to under-reckon the advance which the world has made in the course of their experience, and to discover in the far-off days of their youth a light which has almost ceased to shine on earthly things. Laudatores temporis acti, they look askance at all the results of progress, and assert, more or less emphatically, that men were wiser and better when they themselves were young. They forget, of course, that distance lends enchantment to the view, and that the very splendour in which the world once appeared came rather from within than from without; and, forgetting this, they do scant justice to the achievements of later generations. A little sober reflection, nevertheless, may convince them that the world does advance, though per-haps not so surely and satisfactorily as they would wish to believe, and that, even if there is some occasional retrogression, inevitable under the conditions of human development, it is only after all temporary and due to causes which are inherent in our imperfect human nature. From time to time, however, the momentum towards a higher and more spiritual ideal seems suspended altogether, and we appear to be swept centuries back, by a great back-wave as it were, in the direction of absolute barbarism.

A BACK-WAVE TO BARBARISM.

"Such a back-wave, it appears to me, has been at work during the last few decades, and the accompanying phenomena, in public life, in religion, in literature, have been extraordinary enough to fill even a fairly philosophical mind with something like despair. Closer contemplation and pro founder meditation, however, may prove that in all possibility the retrogression is less real than superficial, that the advance forward of our civilisation has only been hampered, not absolutely and finally hindered, and that in due time we may become stronger and wiser through the very lessons hardly learned during the painful period of delay.

THE DRIFT FROM HUMANITARIAN TRADITIONS.

"It would be quite beyond the scope of the present article to point out in detail the divers ways in which modern society, in England particularly, has drifted little by little, and day by day, away from those humanitarian traditions which appeared to open up to men, in the time of my own boyhood, the prospect of a new heaven and a new earth. At that time, the influence of the great leaders of modern thought was still felt, both in politics and in literature; the gospel of humanity, as expressed in the language of poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, and in the deeds of men like Wilberforce and Mazzini, had purified the very air men breathed; and down lower, in the humbler spheres of duty and human endeavour, humanists like Dickens were translating the results of religious aspiration into such simple and happy speech as even the lowliest of students could understand. It was a time of immense activity in all departments, but its chief characteristic, perhaps, was the almost universal dominance, among educated men, of the sentiment of philanthropy, of belief in the inherent perfectibility of human nature, as well as of faith in ideals which bore at least the semblance of a celestial origin. Not quite in vain, it seemed, had Owen and Fourier laboured, and Hood sung, and John Leech wielded the pencil, and Dickens and Thackeray used the pen. The name of Arnold was still a living force in our English schools, and the name of Mazzini was being whispered in every English home. The first noticeable change came, perhaps, with the criminal crusade of the Crimean war, and from that hour to this, owing in no little degree to the rough-and-ready generalisations of popular science, and the consequent discrediting of all religious sanctions, the enthusiasm of humanity among the masses has gradually but surely died away. Sentiment has at last become thoroughly out of fashion, and humanitarianism is left to the care of eccentric and unauthoritative teachers. Thus, while a few despairing thinkers and dreamers have been trying vainly to substitute a new Ethos for the old religious sanctions, the world at large, repudiating the enthusiasm of humanity altogether and exchanging it for the worship of physical force and commercial success in any and every form, has turned rapturously towards activities which need no sanction whatever, or which, at any rate, can be easily sanctified by the wanton will of the majority. Men no longer, in the great civic centres at least, ask themselves whether a particular course of conduct is right or wrong, but whether it is expedient, profitable, and certain of clamorous approval. Thanks to the newspaper press —that "mighty engine," as Mr. Morley calls it, "for keeping the public intelligence on a low level"—they are fed from day to day with hasty news and gossip, and with bogus views of affairs, concocted in the interests of the wealthy classes. Ephemeral and empirical books of all sorts take the place of serious literature; so that while a great work like Mr. Spencer's "Justice" falls still-born from the press, a sophistical defence of the status quo like Mr. Balfour's "Foundations of Belief" is read by thousands. The aristocracy, impoverished by its own idleness and luxury, rushes wildly to join the middle class in speculations which necessitate new conquests of territory and constant acts of aggression. The mob, promised a merry time by the governing classes, just as the old Roman mob was deluded by bread and pageants panem et circenses — dances merrily to patriotic war tunes, while that modern monstrosity and anachronism, the Conservative working man, exchanges his birth right of freedom and free thought for a pat on the head from any little rump-fed lord that steps his way and spouts the platitudes of cockney patriotism. The Established Church, deprived of the conscience which accompanied honest belief, supports nearly, every infamy of the moment in the name of the Christianity which it has long ago shifted quietly overboard. It is sad to read in this connection the poem contributed to the Times, at the outbreak of the South African struggle, by no less a person than the Ven. Dr. Alexander, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland :—

They say that "War is Hell," the "great accursed,"
The sin impossible to be forgiven—
Yet I can look upon it at its worst,
And still find blue in heaven !

And as I note how nobly natures form
Under the war's red rain, I deem it true,
That He who made the earthquake and the storm,
Perchance made battles too!

God help the Church, indeed, if this is the sort of oracle she delivers to those who rested their faith in God on the message of the Beatitudes. There is an universal scramble for plunder, for excitement, for amusement, for speculation, and above it all the flag of a Hooligan Imperialism is raised, with the proclamation that it is the sole mission of Anglo-Saxon England, forgetful of the task of keeping its own drains in order, to expand and extend its boundaries indefinitely, and, again in the name of the Christianity it has practically abandoned, to conquer and inherit the earth. "It may be replied that this is an exaggerated picture, and I will admit at once that there is justice in the reply, if it is granted at the same time that the picture is true so far as London itself and an enormous majority of Englishmen are concerned. Only if this is granted can the present relapse back to barbarism of our public life, our society, our literature, be explained. Now that Mr. Gladstone has departed, we possess no politician, with the single exception of Mr. Morley (whose sanity and honesty are unquestionable, though he lacks, unfortunately, the dæmonic influence), who demands for the discussion of public affairs any conscientious and unselfish sanction whatever; we possess instead a thousand pertinacious counsellors, cynics like Lord Salisbury or trimmers like Lord Rosebery, for whom no one in his heart of hearts feels the slightest respect. Our fashionable society is admittedly so rotten, root and branch, that not even the Queen's commanding influence can impart to it the faintest suggestion of purity or even decency. As for our popular literature, it has been in many of its manifestations long past praying for; it has run to seed in fiction of the baser sort, seldom or never with all its cleverness touching the quick of human conscience; but its most extraordinary feature at this moment is the exaltation to a position of almost unexampled popularity of a writer who, in his single person, adumbrates, I think, all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless and uninstructed Hooliganism of the time."
Mr. Buchanan then indulges in a vigorous assault on "Kiplingese." Proceeding, he says:—

THE PRESS AND PUBLIC OPINION.

"So much, however, for the voice of the Hooligan as reverberating in current literature. It is needless to say that it would hardly have been necessary to seriously discuss such literature, if the object was merely to protest on intellectual grounds against its popularity; one might as well examine seriously the current contributions to Answers and the Sporting Times, or hold up to artistic execration the topical songs in a Drury Lane pantomime. But even a straw may indicate the direction in which the wind is blowing, and the vogue of Mr. Kipling, the cheerful acceptance of his banalities by even educated people, is so sure a sign of the times that it deserves and needs a passing consideration. Behind that vogue lies, first and foremost, the influence of the newspaper press, and I cannot do better than quote in this connection some pregnant words contained in a recent work by a writer of undoubted insight, Mr. George Gissing:—' A wise autocrat might well prohibit newspapers altogether, don't you think?' says one of Mr. Gissing's characters. 'They have done good, I suppose, but they are just as likely to do harm. When the next great war comes, newspapers will be the chief cause of it. And for mere profit, that's the worst! There are newspaper proprietors in every country who would slaughter half mankind for the pennies of the half who were left, without caring the fraction of a penny whether they had preached war for a truth or a lie.' 'But doesn't a newspaper,' demands another character, 'simply echo the opinions and feelings of the public ' I'm afraid,' is the reply, 'it manufactures opinions and stirs up feeling. . . . The business of newspapers in general is to give a show of importance to what has no real importance at all, to prevent the world from living quietly, to arouse bitterness, when the natural man would be quite indifferent. . . I suppose I quarrel with them because they have such gigantic power and don't make anything like the best use of it.' If this statement is accepted as true, and few readers who have studied the recent developments of journalism will be inclined to doubt it, it will be understood at once how the popularity of Mr. Kipling has been accelerated by ' that mighty engine,' the newspaper press.

HOOLIGANISM IN LITERATURE.

"It is no purpose of mine, in the present paper, to touch on political questions, except so far as they illustrate the movements of that back-wave towards barbarism on which, as I have suggested, we are now struggling. I write neither as a Banjo-Imperialist nor as a Little Englander, but simply as a citizen of a great nation who loves his country and would gladly see it honoured and respected wherever the English tongue is spoken. It will scarcely be denied, indeed it is frankly admitted by all parties, that the Hooligan spirit of patriotism, the fierce and quasi-savage militant spirit as expressed in many London newspapers and in such literature as the writings of Mr. Kipling, has measurably lowered the affection and respect once felt for us among European nation. Nor will any honest thinker combat the assertion that we have exhibited lately, in our dealings with other nationalities, a greed of gain, a vainglory, a cruelty, and a boastful indifference to the rights of others, of which in days when the old philanthropic spirit was abroad we should simply have been in capable. " But it is not here, in the region of politics and militarism, that I wish to linger. My chief object in writing this paper has been to express my sorrow that Hooliganism, not satisfied with invading our newspapers, should already threaten to corrupt the pure springs of our literature. These noisy strains and coarse importations from the music-hall should not be heard where the fountains of intellectual light and beauty once played, where Chaucer and Shakespere once drank inspiration, and where Wordsworth, Hood, and Shelley found messages for the yearning hearts of men. Anywhere but there; anywhere but in the speech of those who loved and blest their fellows. And let it be remembered that those fountains are not yet dry. Poets and dreamers are living yet to resent the pollution. Only a little while ago the one living novelist who inherits the great human tradition tore out his very heart, figuratively speaking, in revolt against the spirit of savagery and cruelty which is abroad; though when Thomas Hardy wrote "Jude the Obscure," touching therein the very quick of divine pity, only a coarse laugh from the professional critics greeted his protest. Elsewhere, too, there are voices not to be silenced by the clamour of the crowd; as near as our own shores, where Herbert Spencer is still dwelling, as far away as South Africa, where Olive Schreiner has sought and found human love in the dominion of dreams; and there are others, shrinking away in shame from the brazen idols of the mart, and praying that this great empire may yet be warned and saved. To one and all of these has been brought home the lesson—' Woe to you when the world speaks well of you !' and they have elected to let the world speak ill of them rather than bow down in homage to its calves of gold. For to speak the truth as we see it, to confront the evil and folly of the hour, is as dangerous to-day as when Socrates drank his hemlock-cup.

THE NOBLE IMPERIALISM.

"I have left myself no space, I find, to draw a final contrast between the coarse and soulless patriotism of the hour and that nobler Imperialism in which all true Englishmen, to whatever political camp they may belong for the time being, must still believe. In the federation of Great Britain and her colonies, and in the slow and sure spread of what is best and purest in our civilisation, there was indeed hope and inspiration for our race and a message of freedom for all the world. But true Imperialism has nothing in common with the mere lust of conquest, with the vulgar idea of mere expansion, or with the in crease of the spirit of mercenary militarism; its object is to diffuse light, not to darken the sunshine; to feed the toiling millions, not to immolate them; to free man, not to enslave him; to consecrate and not to desecrate the great temple of humanity. Some of its ways, like the ways of nature herself, must inevitably be destructive; the weaker and baser races must sooner or later dissolve away; but the process of dissolution should be made as gentle and merciful as possible, not savage, pitiless, and cruel. True Imperialism should be strong, but the strength should be that of justice, of wisdom, of brotherly love and sympathy; for the power which is bred of a mere multitude equipped with the engines of slaughter will, in the long run, avail nothing against the eternal law which determines that the righteous only shall inherit the earth. We are a people still, though we seem for the time being to be forgetting the conditions on which we received our charter, and deep in the heart of England survives the sentiment of a world-wide nationality, as expressed in the passionate lines of a modern poet:

Hands across the sea!
Feet on British ground!
The motherhood means brotherhood the whole world round!
From the parent root,
Sap, and stem, and fruit
Grow the same, or soil or name—
Hands cross the sea!

"There sounds the true Imperial feeling, which will survive, I think, long after the repulsive school of patriotism which I have called (for want of a better name) the Hooligan school, is silent and forgotten. Let me at least hope that it may be so— that Englishmen, after their present wild orgy of militant savagery, may become clothed and in their right minds. There is time to pause yet, although they are are already paying the penalty in blood, in tears, in shame. Let them take warning by the fate of France; let them try to remember the old sanctions and the old enthusiasms, for if they continue to forget them, they are in danger of being swept back into the vortex of barbarism altogether."

West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 - 1954), Saturday 27 January 1900, page 10

GENIUS AND CONVENTION.

Maxim Gorki, the great Russian revolutionary writer, was requested to leave a big American hotel because the lady accompanying him was not legally his wife. The facts of the case are that Gorki was legally divorced from his first wife, but the Czar-bossed Greek church in Russia refused to declare his second marriage legal ; though it is so regarded by his divorced wife, his present wife, and all their friends. The Russian authorities not daring to send Gorki to Siberia, appear to have used their power through the church to wound and handicap a dangerous opponent. And the plutocratic press of America, which has never said an unkind word about the wealthy Chicago sausage-makers, howled in unison that Gorki was 'not respectable.'  
A. M. Thompson, in the CLARION (Eng.), deals with the question interestingly:
 Not even the terrible calamity of San Francisco has sobered the fury of plutocratic America against poor Maxim Gorki. The American millionaires, 'prodigies of turpitude,' as Lombroso calls them, 'anomalous creatures reared in the hotbed of poverty and ignorance, and urged along by an insatiable thirst for gain,' have been outraged to spluttering madness by the discovery that the great Russian writer lives with a lady who is not his wife.
 'Rend him ! tear him ! spit on him !' they scream. Nothing will do for them but that the whole 'putrid cancer' of the fallen hero's work shall be cut off from the public knowledge for ever.  'He has never written a wholesome sentence,' shrieks one; 'poison lurks in everything that he has said,'  screams another. Which is certainly not true, as those who attended the performance at Gorki's 'Bezsemenovs' at Terry's Theatre on Monday will enthusiastically testify.
 And it is worth while to point out that if great literary works are to be expunged because of their author's offences against conventional standards of morality, the interdict must destroy not only the bulk of the Greek and Latin classics, but the works also of Clement, J. J. Rousseau, Diderot, Richard Wagner, etc.  The American literary critics, in denouncing Gorki, seem to have forgotten Virgil, Martial, Catullus, Anacreon, and Socrates.
 Yet it was worth while to hear them tear the air, if only for the delight of hearing them splash softly back afterwards into the oozy slush of their respectable self-righteousness. As thus :
    Happily for America the superiors of our country have not been 'degenerates.'  Never were there healthier minds, minds freer from every form of taint or morbidity, than those of Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and Grant, or those of Irving, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell. Whether we turn to public affairs or to literature, our men of genius have been singularly free from every form of degeneracy.

 This list of 'men of genius,' it will be observed, prudently omits the only two 'men of genius' American literature has produced. Walt Whitman is ignored because his evidence might not support the tenor of the argument ; and Edgar Allan Poe because neither his work nor his life could be described as 'free from every form of taint or morbidity.'
 But in the matter of ordinary 'morality,' there are many of the 'truly great' whose lives will not bear inspection. We learn of deeply philosophical woman-hating Schopenhauer's subjugation by a little ballet-dancer. We read of Petrarch's sonnets to the eyebrows of a portly married woman, the mother of a large family, and recall how utterly he neglected his own wife and daughter.
 Sallust's exposure of the vices and follies of Rome is admirable and improving; but his own debauchery, corruption, and felony are not edifying.
 Seneca's refined sentiments and virtuous precepts leave nothing to be desired ; but there are writers who pretend that it was Seneca who initiated Nero in those unspeakable vices which have made that Emperor's name notorious for ever.
 Casanova, the friend of Rousseau, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Catherine, was a charlatan and swindler, with strong 'convictions' from the Courts.

    If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,
   The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,    

Scarron, the husband of Madame de Maintenon, and author of the 'Roman Comique,' led so licentious a life that it shocked even his dissolute age. Francois Villon, 'the prince of all ballade-makers,' is said in his fifteen years' career to have contrived to win more fame and more infamy than a whole generation of lesser poets.'  And Byron was not the sort of character to whose constant companionship a careful wife would care to entrust her husband.
 From archbishops up to plough-boys we all worship Shakespeare, but would it have pleased the American Shakespearolatics to choose Will Shakespeare, the creator of 'Jack Falstaff,' to direct their children's studies ?
   Amongst the Elizabethan poets there was indeed one of habitual chastity of diction and absolute sobriety of deportment.  Meres, Lodge, Carew, Drummond, Harrington, and Spenser, all commend his strictly proper Muse, and he himself wrote, saying :—

 I know I shall be read among the rest,
 So long as men speak English, and so long
 As verse and virtue shall be in request
 Or grace to honest industry belong.

 But Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that 'Daniel was a good, honest man, had no children, but was no poet.'  And Daniel, the 'admirable Daniel,' as Coleridge calls him, is now forgotten.
 Is there any rector in Britain, though he were as Scotch as Sir Walter himself, would be content to trust his Sunday school to the unguarded charge of Bobby Burns?
 Alas! alas ! there is no greater illusion extant than the young ladies' boarding-school notion that great men must be 'nice men' !
 As one poet has prudently exclaimed:—

 Ah ! spare your idol ! think him human still.
 Charms he may have, but he has frailties too;
 Dote not too much, nor spoil what ye admire.

 Yet many great men have told the people the truth of this matter.  Walter Scott wrote : —

I have read books enough, and observed and conversed with enough, of eminent and splendidly cultivated minds too, in my time ; but I assure you I have heard higher sentiments from the lips of poor, uneducated men and women, when exerting the spirit of severe, yet gentle, heroism under difficulties and afflictions, or speaking their simple thoughts as to circumstances in the lot of friends and neighbors, than I ever yet met with, except in the pages of the Bible.

 Perhaps Moreau de Tours was right when he formulated the sentence that 'le génie est une névrose.'  At any rate it is a fact that the exquisitely strung nervous system indispensable to genius is more readily subject to derangement than the placid, turbid slab of grey matter which regulates the comings and goings of Wordsworth's multimonial hero : —

A primrose on the river's brim
 A yellow primrose was to him,
 And it was nothing more.

 'Common sense' says Mirabeau, 'is the absence of too vivid passion ; it marches by beaten paths, but genius never.  Only men with great passions can be great.'
 ' Extreme mind,' says Pascal, 'is close to extreme insanity.'
 Says Dryden :

 Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

 Diderot says the same thing.  'How close the insane and the genius touch,' says he ; 'they are imprisoned and enchained, or statues are raised to them.'
 And Democritus declares that 'insanity is an essential condition of poetry.' Which is probably the reason why I, alone among the CLARION men, never write any. [Q.E.D.]
 Aptitude for literary work more or less resembles intoxication. The dull mind may be whipped into the frenzy of invention by strenuous self-torture, or it may counterfeit the genuine rapture with the aid of musical, narcotic, or alcoholic inebriation.
 We owe Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner' and much, doubtless, of Poe's work and De Quincey's to opium.  How many other masterpieces, I wonder, must we set down to the credit of alcohol ?
 'I am compelled to believe,' says Tasso, 'that my insanity is caused by drunkenness and by love ; for I know well that I drink too much.'

 And Socrates the wise, they say, of yore,
 Amongst boon blades, the palm of drinking bore.
 And of the elder Cato it is said
 He often went with a hot pate to bed.

 Was Dick Steele always sober when he wrote?  Was the author of the 'Vicar of Wakefield ' ?  Was Addison?  Sheridan?  Savage?  Jas. Thompson? Chas. Lamb?  Burns?  Alfred de Musset?  or— place aux dames— Madame de Stael?  How much did Jan Steen and Morland Turner owe to artificial inspiration?  how much Gluck and Handel?  how much Alexander the Great? and how much Bismarck?
 'Great men should drink,' says Shakespeare, 'with harness on their throats.' and the caution has been in all ages and all countries sorely needed ; teetotal poets are as rare in history as midsummer snow.
 No, it is not true that :

 Lives of great men all remind us
 We can make our lives sublime ?

 The inflammable constitution and sensitive minds in which genius subsists have been commonly a prey to passions which have left colder, harder natures untouched ; have been always more or less defiant, sometimes needlessly defiant, of conventional standards of morality ; have been daringly apt to lead their own lives in their own way, and to make their ethical codes for themselves to the measure of their own requirements ; and have in many cases bred as luxuriant a crop of rankest weeds as of wholesome flowers.
 But outraged American plutocracy has nothing to do with that. The millionaire, according to Lombroso, is destitute of moral sense, kindliness or justice.  A successful money-getter 'must not mind ruining his friends, or breaking his wife's heart.  'He makes gain from other people's ruin, and he is only removed from the commonplace type of man by his near approach to the criminal.'
 But, thank God, the plutocrats have a religion, which, as Charles Dickens puts it, 'is a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that never were their own, offered up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions.'


The Clipper 16 June 1906

SOCIALISM V. DARWINISM

The social instinct appears primitively in the very lowest forms of animal life. With many of these forms it is, no doubt, merely a fortunate result of such circumstances as inferior powers of locomotion and the occurrence of the species in immense numbers. Later, with increasing complexity of organism, come more complex and multifarious factors in social relations. There arises the need of mutual defence and companionship. We find many instances of these motives toward socialism in all branches of the higher vertebrata. The former even appears strongly in the communities of the hymenoptera, of which order the bees head the insect kingdom in intelligence as we head the mammalia. The quadrumana, notably the dog-faced baboons of South Africa, develop instances of surprising self-sacrifice for the sake of even unrelated members of the same community. And most of us have seen cases of animals pining for companions, remote from any sexual considerations whatever. This idea of mutual love and protection seemingly arises, in the case of the mammals, from the intense maternal devotion which is shown by the order for its young. And that devotion undoubtedly arises as an indirect result of the law which Charles Darwin promulgated, the law of natural selection. For it is obvious that those species which took the greatest care of their young and showed the greatest fierceness or cunning in the defence or concealment of their offspring from raiding foes would stand a better chance of survival than those who were careless or unskilful. Of course there are other causes of survival protective mimicry of surroundings, extreme swiftness or strength, or immense numbers. But among the higher vertebrates this care of the young is perhaps the strongest cause to that desirable end. This maternal instinct, then, evolves by means of the sympathy and affection inherent to it into the, wider and broader sympathy for the whole race. And, although most of the primates have this larger view to a certain extent, man, in consequence of his undoubtedly superior mental endowment, his greater grasp of abstract ideas and future possibilities, has by far outstripped the other genera of his order in his full appreciation of its importance. Alone he knows himself weak, but in thousands, in millions, he takes pride that he is the strongest power in the animal kingdom.

In perfect mutual love and sympathy, therefore, our race might seem able at least to attain to that degree of socialism which is seen amongst the little workers amid the flowers. But the ideals of socialism fall piecemeal among men. Each unit of the community is powerfully impelled directly towards individualism. And this individualism, this selfishness is, according to the leaders of the socialist movement, a thing to he deplored as retarding the advance and unification of the human race. 

But examined in an unbiassed and careful manner, one must come to quite a different conclusion. For, although it is true that combination was a necessary factor in preserving our half-human and later our human ancestors against the attacks of monstrous feral beasts which would otherwise have exterminated them after they had lost the natural protection of the tree-climbing habit; yet it was the sudden brain efforts of the individual, rather than the fact of communism, which lifted them by slow degrees to their mental pre-eminence above the anthropomorphous apes. Dawnings of new things which were transmitted to their offspring with co-related dexterity of hand. One man, ingenious above his fellows, found that the club upon which he leaned was better adapted for defence and offence if he sharpened the end. The tribe copied the idea, and his son inherited a modification of some particular brain sulcus. His father had become a great chief; he resolved to emulate him. Some other genius discovered that the fire which warmed him would also make his meat more palatable. And now we cook our food in many ways by means of elaborate gas and electric apparatus. in each of these instances It must be fairly evident that individual effort was responsible, first as a mere selfish desire of personal luxury which the tribe copied, later as a more or less intellectual ambition, still selfish in essence, plus the desire of wealth through patents. Self, self, always self, drove the inventor to improve upon existing methods. Even scientific research, art, music, literature, spring from a selfish, because personal, desire. Always the individual first, the community afterwards. We must, in no way discount these personal motives as unworthy, for they have given us new knowledge, and have proved beneficial to our race. And upon individualism has the race so far evolved.

We see, therefore, that his instincts will prevent man from ever forming a socialistic community similar to the beehive, and that his consequent individualism has been the impelling cause of his progress. But the socialist rightly observes that the lot of the less fully endowed members of the Commonwealth is a mere painful existence, while that of the capitalist employer and the competent brain-worker is a never ending round of luxury. Without pausing to question this statement—and it might well be questioned—it must be admitted that the socialist's attempt to equalise the living conditions of the skilled and unskilled, the strong and the weak, does more honour to his heart than to his head. For Nature has clearly decreed that all men shall neither be equal at birth nor by any effort of their own. Nature is no doubt harsh, brutal. But there is the fact. She sends men into the world with   brains which differ in their convolutions as one leaf differs in its arrangement of nervures from another. She sends men into the world predestined, hopeless, with constitutions fatally liable to disease, through no fault of their own. She manufactures criminals, lunatics, congenital idiots. Besides her good material for race-building, there is an infinity of poor waste, for her method is so reckless in waste that a human chemist or engineer would stand aghast at a suggestion that he should model his work upon Nature's. She can afford lavishness; he cannot. As to whether she is justified by results we may not question, for most of her machinery is marvellously perfect, and besides, what use in questioning?

So the socialist, seeing this waste, seeing the unfit remorselessly weeded out by the competition of abler units, allows the pity which all feeling men must experience to bias his Judgment. As to whether a sympathetic heart is more admirable than a clear head must remain a by-issue, to be threshed out as such by those who find joy in profitless discussion. We here confine ourselves strictly to facts. Unless man's laws prove stronger than the law of natural selection this waste will ever continue. And most reasonable men have their doubts as to human law. We see every day instances of the battle 'twixt natural and artificial law—the divorce courts, the red passion of the murderer, the cold desire of unlawful gain. And just now, to men who think, occurs a particularly instructive case. A Court has been elected to deal with the issues which continually recur in dispute between master and man. It has given a decision in favour of the master; to be met with flat defiance by the man. This latter will fight in his own way, he will accept no dictation. Curiously enough, he fol lows the great leader of socialism in these colonies. When the socialists break their own laws there would seem a lurking fallacy. Perhaps, even though no doubt can exist as to the leader's sincerity, this follower is merely a socialist for selfish motives of self betterment.

Let us consider for one moment the ideals of socialism as effected. As in the case of a fleet, the advance of the weakest unit is the measure of the common advance, the strength of the weakest link in the chain is the strength of the chain. For, instead of casting out the obsolete cruiser or the strained link, as nature ordains, the stronger members are kept back by certain artificial laws so that they may in no manner encroach upon the equal rights of the weaker. A pernicious doctrine this, and inimical to that greatest human interest, the evolution of the race. The socialist, indeed, aiming at the curtailment of the individual right of competition, is doing incalculable harm to human progress, in the same manner as did the mediaeval Church by its persecution and extinction of the independent thinkers of that time. For as competition is checked, as the weakest has the same advantages as the strongest, the latter will lose that ambition which would have spurred him to emulation of those men whose brains, in happier periods, had placed them in the topmost places. Instead of taking a pride in his work as a matter personal to himself, he will find himself a mere cog in the great epicycloidal gear of the State mechanism. He will lose his vanity, and with it his ambition.

But our socialist leader has arranged all that. He would stimulate the brains and ambitions of these men by reward and competition. Apart from the inconsistency of deliberately cultivating individuality in a Socialistic community, it is seriously to be questioned whether an arranged competition would be sufficiently fascinating. There is a pleasure in the struggle for life, In the overcoming of dreaded rivals, in the ruthless exercise of growing power, a primitive and savage pleasure which would be absent in these trials of skill. And again the big man as a rule is not content that his work should be judged by a committee of his inferiors. It is, unless want actually pinches, the mediocre man who competes in such manner. The big man keeps wisely aloof, and as, under a perfect socialism, want would not be felt by any member of the community, that spur would be absent. It is doubtful whether Shakespeare's plays or Newton's laws could have been evolved from such conditions of intellectual slavery. And socialism, as interpreted by its leaders, is certainly a slavery of the most soul-crushing description.

Now the great man has in an open market the disposal of his brains. He crushes smaller men; he beats down opposition. He is bound by no petty rules. And, great as is his success, it Is conceivable that he looks upon the time when he was fighting desperately for bare existence as the finest and most interesting period of his career. To attempt to hold back this type of man to the level of mediocrity seems not only ill-advised but impossible. Even were such restraint effected, where would be the gain to the race? A level plain is always uninspiring by its very sameness, but at present the mountain ranges stand out blue and desirable in the distance, a welcome haven to those of strenuous habits who would attain something beyond the inglorious monotony of little minds.

So far, besides the Arbitration Act which has just been considered, we have had decreed for us that a man shall not be paid less than a certain sum, whether his labour be worth it or not. Wherefore the better workman has his pay reduced to make up to his employer the loss upon incompetents. And the shops are to close at certain hours, lest perchance in the war between big and small shopkeepers the little men should suffer, and the employees of the big ones should die. It is a hard thing to have to say, but the fear intrudes that these employees must, in large numbers, still die. But the more able and skilful of them will survive to better conditions, for that labour which will not keep two men comfortably will suffice for one. And, as the unfit are eliminated, the fit will be able to ask their own terms, as they do now. But they will also be able to obtain their just demands, as they certainly do not now. And as for population, the needs of the times will settle that question. We are at present just a little over populated, principally by the unfit. It seems possible that the present decline of the birth-rate is due to that fact.

In conclusion, a quotation from Darwin's "Descent of Man" may show his views as to the destiny of the race, and the means by which it must work out that destiny. Although he was liable to the errors which afflict mankind, his judgment cannot be said to be partisan; the opinions of men of real intellect are, indeed, rarely so.

"Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent upon his rapid multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle. Otherwise he would sink into indolence, and the more gifted man would not be more successful in the battle of life than the less gifted. Hence our natural rate of increase, though leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by any means. There should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws and customs from succeeding best and raising the largest number of offspring."

This passage is inexorably true. And though the truth may be unpalatable, yet it must prevail in the long run over our finest theories and our most lovingly cherished illusions. This transcendental talk of the "brotherhood" and "equality" of man, Nature has shown again and again to be fallacious, and she may be trusted to work out our destiny in spite of the various "isms" and "ologies" of well-meaning but painfully futile dreamers. H.A.

The Sydney Morning Herald 21 January 1905


 TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD. 

Sir,-The article on the above subject in your issue of Saturday last is not lacking in interest, nor its argument in vigour and ingenuity. The question is important, and there is certainly another side to it, which I trust I may be permitted to put forward. Your able correspondent is a thorough-going individualist, but he unfortunately builds his sociological argument on a single principle in the evolutionary process. This is all the more surprising seeing that he fully and freely acknowledges that there are two principles at work. Writing of the devotion of animals for the young he says, "Such devotion undoubtedly arises as an indirect result of the law which Charles Darwin promulgated, the law of natural selection." He then adds that this instinct of devotion, through sympathy and affection, evolves into the wider and broaden sympathy of the whole race, and that it is developed most highly in man. Here he recognises the second principle in Nature—not only the principle of the struggle for existence, but the struggle for the existence or life of others, as another scientist calls it. Now one might expect after the expression at such truths the advocacy of an Individualism, at least, on broad and moderate lines. Practically your correspondent says, "Go to Nature and learn from her," for in one part he says, instead of doing one thing "as Nature ordains," another thing based on "socialism" is done. And instead of an argument for Individualism on broad and reasonable lines, in his anxiety to combat a certain type of socialism, individualistic teaching of the most extreme kind imaginable is advanced. The principle underlying' the historic phrase "struggle for existence" alone colours his argument, and the other principle, which Darwin does not overlook, is as though it were not.

According to "H. A." it is the instinct of Individualism, i.e., of selfishness, of competition, of self-assertion, "through which the race has so far evolved." It is difficult to reconcile this with former statements of his, but it is this principle that must prevail throughout organised social life. Now, Individualism in its true sense, as defined by Huxley and others, is the liberty for everyone to act in every way which does not limit the corresponding freedom of his fellow men, but after carefully reading the article in question Individualism may be defined as the liberty of each one to fight for himself without regard to his neighbour. It is unnecessary to take up space by giving lengthy extracts in proof of this, but it will be clearly enough shown by references to certain passages. Having referred to the "curtailment of the individual right of competition" aimed at by the socialist, he contrasts with it his own ideal in which "the great man in open market crushes smaller, men, beats down opposition, is bound by no petty rules;" and just previously he points out that "there is a pleasure in the struggle for life" that is in contradistinction to some 'socialistic arranged competition,' in the overcoming of dreaded rivals, in the ruthless exercise of growing power, a primitive and savage pleasure which would be absent in these trials of skill." And then comes an argument which seems to favour the elimination of the unfit with regard to shop employees, and the fit will survive to better conditions. And, finally, no room for doubt is left as to the ruthless spirit of the whole argument by a quotation in substantiation on it from Darwin, which we are told is "inexorably true," and though "unpalatable must prevail in the long run over our most lovingly cherished illusions." Expressed briefly, it is just the would be application of the old adage, "Let each look out for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost." For, so far as one can gather from the article, each one, great and small, fit and unfit, must enter the prize-ring for a fight to a finish. There will be no quarter. There must be no interference. The great men crush the smaller, beat down opposition, are bound by no petty rules. The poor may be plundered, the weak driven to the wall, and there is pleasure in it—the kind of pleasure presumably that the prize fighter experiences in giving a knock-out blow. Is this too harsh a presentation of the case? Is there no pity, no tenderness, no mercy for the small man, the weak, the unfit? Only so much as they can derive from the following: "So the socialist, seeing this waste, seeing the unfit remorselessly weeded out by the competition of abler units, allows the pity which all feeling men must experience to bias his judgment. As to whether a sympathetic heart is more admirable than a clear head must remain a by-issue, to be threshed out as such by those who find joy in profitless discussion." And, again, considering what he calls "the ideals of socialism," and drawing a parallel from a fleet or a chain in which there is a weak unit or link, "instead of casting out the obsolete cruiser or the strained link, as Nature ordains, the stronger members are kept back by certain artificial laws so that they may in no manner encroach upon the equal rights of the weaker. A pernicious doctrine this," he adds, "and inimical to that greatest human interest, the evolution of the race." The science of medicine must indeed be the black art.

If all this is based upon Darwinism as opposed to socialism, then heaven defend society from it; and no wonder a keen thinker and scientist once said that the first step in the reconstruction of sociology is to escape from the spirit of Darwinism.

Now, it has been again and again pointed out that Darwin meant no exclusive interpretation, to be put upon his phrase, "Struggle for existence." In his great chapter bearing the title he says:—"I should premise that I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." If, then, we are to go and learn from Nature, why emphasise only one principle in the evolutionary process the principle of struggle for existence? Why, if another principle exists, and which, in fact, is part and parcel of the other principle, disregard it? "Study evolution on its working side," wrote Professor Henry Drummond, by whom this whole idea is worked out in his "Ascent of Man," "and you will find that "nearly all the phenomena of social and national life are phenomena of these two principles—the struggle for life and the struggle for the life of others. Hence one must betake oneself in earnest to see what these mean in Nature. What gathers round them as they ascend, how each acts separately, how they work together, and whither they seem to lead. More than ever the method of sociology must be biological," and as Nature is carefully studied it will be found that she, too, who says "mind thyself," also says "look not everyone on his own things, but also on the things of others."

Now Huxley, although one would not expect him to subscribe to this view, yet, referring to the question of individual liberty, he uses these words:-"It appears to me that the amount of freedom which incorporate society may fitly leave to its members is not a fixed quantity, to be determined a priori by deduction from the fiction called 'natural rights'; but that it must be determined by and vary with circumstances. I conceive it to be demonstrable that the higher and more complex the organisation of the social body the more closely is the life of each member bound up with that of the whole; and the larger becomes the category of acts which cease to be merely self-regarding, and which, interfere with the freedom of others, more or less seriously." Such words as these are a wholesome corrective to the kind of individualism that H. A. seems to favour.

Summing up the whole question, your correspondent says:-"This transcendental talk of the 'brotherhood' and 'equality' of man Nature has shown again and again to be fallacious, and she may be trusted to work out our destiny in spite of the various 'isms' and 'ologies' of well-meaning but painfully futile dreamers."

"Dreamers," of course, there may be, "well-meaning" some may charitably believe. But "painfully futile," it is to be hoped these dreamers are not. And as for "transcendental talk," Bishop Westcott, in whose footsteps many a dreamer follows, has taught that that which is "transcendental" is practical as a motive and an inspiration. For, my own part, the "equality" that I recognise is an "equal" spiritual brotherhood; not that there can be any "equality," moral, intellectual, or physical; nor that there can be "equal participation in wealth, or in any 'concrete' good consistent with due regard to the various capacities of men." But neither this fact nor the study of the evolutionary process in Nature, even if she must be gone to for methods, should justify any callous type of Individualism such as is advocated in the article on socialism versus Darwinism. The two principles in Nature must be combined, and any sociological teaching based on one only is false. What is needed is not a weakening but a strengthening of the social bond, and with the qualities of energy and strength and self-assertion and courage and intellectual capacity there must be what Huxley calls the quality of sympathetic humanity. This is the force that restrains unbridled competition, and must go on restraining it; and in any enduring form of society it must prevail, even though according to H. A. it is "inimical to that greatest of human interests, the evolution of the race." There is at least some satisfaction in the reflection that the application of the principles of Individualism only does not come within the region of practical politics, nor could it, without the break-up of all social relations.

I am, etc, S. W.

The Sydney Morning Herald 28 January 1905