The Shining Pyramid (collection)/New Lamps for Old
NEW LAMPS FOR OLD
As a belated reader of Mr. Wells's "New Worlds for Old" and a confirmed anti-Socialist, I should like to say, quite unofficially, how much I appreciate the moderation and the genial reasonableness with which the author puts the case for a partial reconstruction of the social order. I say "partial" advisedly, since Mr. Wells is careful not to promise any new heavens or new earth; and while he argues that the great majority of people would be much more comfortable and more free from worry under the new system, he is also honest and sensible enough to admit that with many of us it would be practically "as you were." Authors who did not please large numbers of people would be no better off than now, and as for that vision of municipalities contending for the honour of publishing our books—well, I for one cannot realise it, cannot believe in it at all, unless it is presumed that the mere readjustment of economic conditions would so change the hearts of aldermen that London would become as ancient Athens or as mediæval Florence. Still, "New Worlds for Old" is an interesting, an amiable, and a suggestive book. One knows how the Socialist position is presented by certain other writers in the same cause—I am perfectly sober at the moment of writing, I beg to say—and one is thankful for Mr. Wells's good nature and moderation.
But there is a root-idea behind his arguments which we would like to have more fully elucidated—that is, his doctrine of the Universal Good Will and of its issue in a constant upward progress. Is it really proven that the Universal Good Will is any more real than the Universal Evil Will; is "Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord" a fact, while "Crucify Him" is an illusion? I know Mr. Wells's point of view is the popular one; it is the thing to dance a kind of world-dance to the accompaniment of a cosmic "For we are jolly good fellows." Dr. Horton danced this dance in a recent book; to him the universe seemed to consist of summer seas, cooing doves, skipping lambs, and Hampstead Congregationalists. He forgot the storms and the water-floods, the cobras and the devil-fish, and the Roman Catholics. Surely a good many of us are jolly bad fellows, and unfortunately we often get the upper hand and give the good fellows the very devil's own time. I am not aware that any deep thinker of the past has ever maintained this doctrine of the Universal Good Will of men; and even if there has been such a thinker, I would respectfully submit that the proposition is against the weight of evidence. Rabelais occurs to me; he certainly made "Do as you please" the motto of the great Abbey of Thelema, on the ground that well-born and wellbred people of liberal education will always do the right thing; but then, unfortunately, that is not true. And if it were true, there are so many of us who are neither well-born, well-bred, nor well-educated. I think we might go so far with Mr. Wells as to say that it is somewhat easier to be a great saint than a great sinner—by "a great sinner" is not meant l'homme moyen sensuel—but I do not see how this is to help us, since true sanctity and true sin are fine arts, only for a few men in any age. Frankly, I fail to see that the predominance of Good Will has been established; on the contrary I should be inclined to say that on the whole, in temporal matters only, the Evil Will has had the upper hand. Eternity is beyond Mr. Wells's purview, so here I say nothing of that. But in Syria, and in Middlesex, and in the United States of America the prophets are mostly stoned.
And then there is the corollary to the Universal Good Will proposition—the universal progress upwards. Now are there any solid reasons for believing in anything of the kind? I am sure that Mr. Wells does not limit the sense of the word "progress" to mere bodily ease and security; it would be an injustice to attribute such a folly as that to any unconvicted human being. I should even doubt whether Mr. R. J. Campbell of the City Temple really believes this ichthyosaurus of a fallacy, though he seems to now and then. Mr. Wells would certainly not commit himself to such a definition, since, both as artist and thinker, he has every reason to know better, to know that man is an extraordinary complex, who is sometimes quite unaffected by physical conditions. St. Thomas Aquinas was absolutely unaffected by the splendours and delicacies of the King's banquet; St. Polycarp was happy in the flames; Cervantes, old and hungry and neglected, was certainly happy in his "Don Quixote"; and I am sure that the man who carved the "Lincoln Imp" was happy, in spite of bad water, bad food, and the entire absence of sanitation. These people may have been very silly, but that has nothing to do with it. They were men and they count, as I am sure Mr. Wells would be the first to allow. Indeed his book makes it plain that he does not sum up everything desirable under the headings of Shelter and Dinner.
This being allowed, is it certain that progress is so constant as he would have us believe? The other day I saw a bit of very simple jewellery made by some black fellow in Central Africa. The materials were gold and a few hairs from an elephant's tail; the result was a quaint and delightful bracelet, made delicately, fancifully, with originality. I compared it in my mind with nine-tenths of the work in the average jeweller's shop in London; the horrible barbarism of the latter was too painfully manifest. Then it seems to me that qua his craft the London jeweller has not progressed beyond the black "savage"; on the contrary, he is hundreds of years behind the negro; he is thousands of years behind the old Celt, the Roman, the Egyptian, the Trojan. And as for other things, what evidence is there to show that tram-cars, and slate roofs, and adulterated food, and Russian Spirit weigh down the balance on the side of progress? In other words, why should we be certain that the working jeweller of London or Birmingham is a happier man than his black brother? There may, of course, be a certain joy in fastening an enormous diamond into a ring of "cast-iron" pattern; I am sure it is not to be compared with the joy of making a queer but delightful jewel out of one's own head, a little gold, and some elephant-hairs. And the negro race is proverbially backward; it has never made any figure in the arts; and we are the most "progressive" of nations. But can we altogether congratulate ourselves on our progress?
So far as I understand Mr. Wells, he is content after all to rest his case on material advantages, especially on those which proceed from humanitarian emotion. He confesses that the intrusion of the sign of some quack medicine into a pleasant landscape is an outrage; but he adds, very truly, that it is a better sight than that of a wretched malefactor hanging in chains. I quite admit this; but is Mr. Wells sure that this decided improvement in externals proceeds from a true improvement in the human heart? It must be remembered that there are many cruel and wicked people who faint at the sight of blood; there are many gluttons and good diners who would not like to see the pig's throat cut or the ox felled to the ground. I do not think that I am the more humane, being an eater of lobsters, because I should not like to plunge the wretched creature into boiling water. Is it quite certain that this outward improvement that we are talking about is not very largely due to a mere nervous sensibility, to a dislike of horrid sights and sounds? I suppose there are many people who hear with relief—with satisfaction even—that some cruel and malignant ruffian has been hanged, and yet these people would fall fainting with horror if they were made to witness that last awful scene. And then again we congratulate ourselves that our state is infinitely better than that of the Borgias. But is it really better? Were the Borgias, the poisoners of the exalted, so much worse than the persons who come to honour and great fortune by selling poisonous provisions to the helpless poor? We do not burn people alive now (save in the highly "civilised" United States of America); we do not sack cities. But how many people in the last ten years have been brought to ruin, misery, starvation, anguish, and suicide by financial operations? To see with the eyes of the flesh a human being burned alive must be an unspeakably awful sight; but perhaps it would not be less awful in reality if we could see with the eyes of the spirit the sum of human agony caused in one year by the Holy Office of the Prospectus. And as to what may be called our modern sanitary advantages, I quite agree that if other things were equal they would be real advantages. If life were happy it would be better to have a reasonable prospect of living to eighty instead of a reasonable prospect of dying of the Black Death at thirty. But if the other things are not equal? If modern life, as seen by its expression in art, is not so happy as ancient or mediæval life, if it is on the whole and demonstrably an ugly—that is, an unhappy—life, then where is the immense benefit of prolonging it? One can certainly have too much of a bad thing. The maxim as to Cathay and Europe is perhaps of doubtful truth in the instances selected; but no one doubts the soundness of the general principle. Most men would prefer one exquisite dish before ten courses of insipidity or nastiness. I have never heard a really sober art-critic express a wish that Mr. Collier's pictures were ever so much larger, and literary men do not long for a sequel to the "Sorrows of Satan." Indeed, it seems to me that all the contrivances to prolong life and to make it more comfortable, from good drains to improved surgery and anæsthetics, have been more than counterbalanced by a certain influence that I do not remember to have seen noted in this connection. The fact is that the modern world is profoundly cowardly, with the anxious, incessant, ever-gnawing cowardice that allows the patient no rest. To be quite familiar, we are in "a blue funk." We know the names of diseases, we know their symptoms, we know all about our own insides; we are in a perpetual terror lest something should be mortally wrong with us. It is possible that the bodily terrors of the average modern man who attains the average length of days, if added together, would surpass all the torments and the terrors of the poor wretch who swung from the cart at Tyburn. To take the case of malignant disease: today the sufferer from carcinoma experiences in spirit, in dread, in foreknowledge, ten times the inevitable anguish of the body; of old such a person would die after great physical pain assuredly, but not after months or years of unspeakable mental agony. And of old the torments of the body might, and often did, become transmuted into the joys of the spirit; now "progress" has in many cases made this impossible. In this "progress" the poet in "Bel Ami" saw nothing but ever-increasing woe and misery, with that awful grande culbute death as a close. He argued acutely and philosophically that as the sense of things became keener, the intellect more refined, so much deeper and more profound would become the wretchedness of man, so much more horrible the dread of the black pit of extinction. In all honesty and frankness I cannot believe for a moment that Mr. Wells has proved his proposition of a constant, steady, and universal progress to better—that is, happier—things. Slavery is, theoretically, a bad state, for instance; and I am sure that the average slave in Virginia was a much happier man than is the average millionaire in New York to-day. Theoretically the former was a wretch, lacking every opportunity of happiness, liable to every extremity of woe; theoretically the latter is the Overman, the being who can command every advantage and every bliss. In honest fact it is the millionaire who deserves our profound pity, while the slave was often the merriest of men. In other words, the happiness of man, whether it be of a high or low degree, depends on facts which are in nowise related to the physical and material sphere. The new lamp may be of superior shape and elegance to the old; it will never summon the genie, it will never build the magical palace wherein the soul of man can dwell in peace and in delight.