TOPICS OF THE DAY
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THE PREVAILING PESSIMISM.
BUT for the records of history, wo might just now be excused for entertaining a feeling of exasperation almost approaChing to despair. The word is strong, but hardly too strong when one thinks of the way in which people at the present moment go about with long faces and upturned eyes and.talk about the condition of the nation, of the terrible unrest among the working classes, of the demoralization of the rich, and of the signs, of national decadence. Men and women as they eat excellent dinners in super-comfortable houses inveigh against the terrible luxury of modern times and of the inability diSplayed on all sides to live without vast expenditure. In old days Diogenes had at least the decency to preach from a tub. Our modern moralists find nothing inconsistent in being the thing which they profess to despise. They dream of the simple life on the whitest, downiest, and most luxurious of beds and harangue us on the wickedness of soft living from the easiest of easy-chairs. The cant is carried so far, indeed, that we hear surmises that the disaster of the ' Titanic' was the just vengeance of Heaven on those who went to sea in a ship which carried a fives court, a swimming bath, a good deal of florid ornament, and a bloated batterie de cuisine. That the mass of mankind is very foolish and labels as " luxuries " various dreary forms of ostentation which can give pleasure to no sane man we frankly admit. That there is anything new in all this is, however, the purest of delusions. Man has been and always will be as luxurious—we must use the word though it begs the question—as he can be, or, rather, can afford to be. It is, curiously enough, a sort of idealism in him—a tasteless and muddle-headed way of showing that lie cares for something more than a full stomach. He is willing to pay for what he believes to be "pure Louis Seize " decoration, not because he really finds it more pleasant than any other style, but because he is told that it shows good taste. But while these wild enormities of magnificence are as ancient as they are modern, mankind is always prone to belabour his ridiculous idols. There never was an age in our history in which the poets and satirists did not lash the vices and luxuries of the rich of their day and contrast them with the assumed simplicity of our forefathers. Wordsworth, in one of the most poignant of his sonnets, written at the crisis of the Great War, told England that she was a " ton of stagnant avatars," that " the heroic wealth of hall and bower ' had "forfeited their ancient English dower of inward happiness." In another sonnet in the same. year he tells us how he is oppressed by the thought that our life is now only dressed for show " mean handiwork of craftsman, cook or groom." " The wealthiest man among us is the best," he declares. No grandeur in "nature or in book" moves men any more. Expense is the idol that we adore. Gone is " our peace," our " fearful innocence," and our " pure religion."
Yet 1802 is an ago wo now look back upon as compara- tively simple and heroic ! We cannot even say that at any rate it was not frivolous or indifferent to great issues, andthat the violence of its pleasures and debaucheries made them less harmful. In a sense Miss Austen's novels are a more 'terrific indictment of the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth than Wordsworth's sonnets. She depicts a society steeped in selfish luxury— luxury calculated and organized without a thought of `others. Though she wrote during the crisis of the great war, and thoUgh her scenes are obviously meant to be contemporary, we hear nothing of the great national struggle that was going on by land and sea. We hear also no word of the miseries which the war brought to the poor. Except for an occasional admiral and the militia episodes in " Pride and Prejudice," we should not know that the fate of Jane Austen's native land was trembling in the balance, so contented are all the characters in their eating and drinking and the refinements of their flirta- tions. Again, a study of Miss Austen's novels will give no help to those who try to persuade us that the abyss between the classes has been sensibly widened, and that there are no bridges across the gulfs such as there used to be in the happy days of our groat-grandfathers. In all probability the differences between the classes, that is, between 'rich and poor, are very much now what they were then, but if there is any difference it is probably in our favour. So far as we can remember there is not a single poor person, not a single member of the working classes, drawn by Miss Austen, for good or ill, except perhaps the little maid- servant in " Mansfield Park," and she is only one of the accessories used to show the squalor of Fanny's home. Of suggestions of any sympathy or understanding between the rich and poor there is absolutely no trace ; an astonish- ing fact when we remember Miss Austen's natural sweetness of disposition and goodness of heart. It apparently never occurred to her that her characters would look intoler- ably inhuman if there were no indication that they over thought of anything but their own pleasures. Even when the author of " Emma" is in her most serious mood she never suggests that the rich and the intelligent have any duties towards the poor. If we go a little further back we shall find these lessons of history equally strong. We need not take the period at the close of the American War, for then, indeed, there was apparently solid ground for pessimism. Let us take, instead, the society and the politics depicted by Pope. One would gather from him that luxury, selfishness, and indifference had reached such a point that the nation was doomed. He writes, though his language is more grandiloquent, just as the pessimists are talking now. We will quote as an example that remarkable poem which, for want of a better title, is generally headed " Epigram." The lines were written somewhere about 1730, if we remember rightly, when there had been a very hard winter and great distress. This distress, we are told, produced an outburst of charity on so large a scale that Pope was half persuaded not to despair of his country and his countrymen e Yes! 'tis the time (I cried) impose the chain, Destined and duo to wretches self-enslaved ; But when I saw such charity remain, I half could wish this people should be saved.
Faith lost, and Hope, our Charity begins And 'tis a wise design in pitying Heaven, If this can covor multitude of sins,
To take the only way to be forgiven."
But though even a superficial knowledge of the history and literature of the past will forbid us to fall into a pessi- mistic mood merely because tastelessness and folly combined with great mechanical ingenuity have produced a great amount of what people call luxury, we admit that there are just now apparent one or two very disquieting symptoms. First among those we put the excessive and thoughtless sentimentality of so many well-to-do people. They seem to glory in a morbid depreciation of themselves, or, rather, of their personal and material well being. They delight in asking themselves whether they have any right to their property and its enjoyment, and even those who realize that divesting themselves of their worldly goods would be of no avail to raise the material condition of the mass of mankind still feel that somehow or other private wealth is a kind of treason against humanity. They are ashamed, they say, of being so well off while others are so badly off. At first sight this may seem rather a wholesome sentiment. As a matter of fact it is a, form of moral and intellectual drain-drinking which atrophies the conscience far worse than the simpler and manlier attitude of those who say that they have a right to their property, and mean not only to keep it, but to enjoy it as long as they do not take it by force or fraud from others and make no ignoble or degrading use of it for themselves. Most of this self-depreciation by the rich is, we may note, entirely verbal. It practically never leads the men and women who indulge in it to divest themselves of any of the wealth which they assert is so undeserved. But even if it were genuine instead of fictitious this self-depreciation would be quite as much to be condemned. We feel inclined, indeed, to say to the rich people, who are always asking for a white sheet to stand in, that they lay far too much stress upon their money and their material prosperity. Wealth is a much less important thing than they imagine. It is a delusion to suppose that mere wealth gives either power or pleasure; or, again, that it is anything like the source of envy which its possessors often imagine. Strange as it may seem to Orcesiis with a conscience, he bulks far less largely in the eye of the poor and of , the working classes than one is led to suppose. They do not spend their time thinking about him, or dwelling upon his magnificence. The notion that they are planning a terrible Jacquerie, and that in order partly to save his soul and partly to save his money-bags he had better throw some of his gold out to the wolves, has no foundation in fact. No doubt this delusion is supported by the fact . that the halfpenny newspapers fill their columns with accounts of the doings of millionaires, but this is more a fashion or a convention than a reality. Bacon tells us that the stage is more beholden to love than life. Cer- tainly the popular Press is a great deal more beholden to the millionaire than life is. But the fact remains, excuse it as we may, that there is something exceedingly unwholesome and morbid in the attitude which many well-to-do people adopt. They are as sick through self-depreciation as ever Malvolio was through self-love. If instead of wondering whether they have a right to what they have got they would take the trouble to learn a few elementary lessons in economics and realize that if they want to turn moralists they will do much more harm by scattering their money than by keeping it they would be infinitely better citizens than they are. If the hysterical sentimentality of a portion of the well- to-do is enervating and disgusting, so is the self-pity which shows. itself among what is, we fear, a largo section of the poor. By a kind of contagion or by following the mental fashions of the rich many working men have come to talk as if poverty were indeed a crime, though a crime for which the perpetrators were not responsible. They deplore the miseries and sufferings of their own class in a way which, we suppose, we shall be called harsh and unmerciful for describing as unmanly, but which, nevertheless, can only be so described. Curiously enough, men who do not claim pity for themselves, for the very good reason that they do not need it and know they do not need it, claim it for their fellows who are in the same condition. A miner who is himself perfectly ready and willing to work under- ground, and who realizes that, in his own case, it is not an unhealthy life or a horrible life, or a life half so much exposed to physical evils as many above-ground trades, will nevertheless tell you that he does not feel sure whether society has a right to use coals, since in order to get them millions of unfortunate men have to pass their ' lives imprisoned in the bowels of the earth. He knows in reality that working in the bowels of the earth may be far pleasanter than working in the bowels of a basement, factory, or shop, but he has so drugged himself with rhetorical phrases that he quite forgets that in another mood he ' would consider hewing coal a far less irksome way of getting his livelihood than sitting scribbling all day on a stool. To sum up, we are not the least afraid of the so-called Super-luxury and extravagance of the times ruining the nation—provided, of course, that it is not of the kind which renders men soft and effeminate, but is merely a foolish or over-ingenious adaptation of the arts and sciences to increasing the so-called conveniences of life. What we are afraid of and what we believe may indeed ruin the nation is the sophistical self-depreciation on one side and the unctuous self-pity on the other of which we have spoken. These are, indeed, cankers which may oat into our vitals. They are utterly inconsistent with manliness and energy. Ste7enson, in one of the best of his fables, tells us of a mail who meets another weeping and asks him what is the :natter. The weeper replies that he is weeping for his s. -is. Some time afterwards he meets :him again in tears, 1,nd asks the reason. This time the at iswer is that the n Ai is weeping for want of bread, " I ieought it would come to that," says the first speaker. If w go on too long weeping over our supposed sins or pitying ourselves because life is hard, we shall find that real miseries will soon take us by the throat. The balance at the moinent inclines towards prosperity in all classes, but it would not take much to got rid of those advantages and push the balance the other way. Then we may learn in real suffering what we have been teaching in sophistry.
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