Chapter 6
"Remember!" We hear again the solemn tone, warning of mortality. We see again the mummy, drawn between tables struck silent in their revelry. We listen to the slave whispering in the ear while the triumph blares. "Remember!" he whispers. "Remember thou art man. Thou shalt go! Thou shalt go! Thy triumph shall vanish as a cloud. Time's chariot hurries behind thee. It comes quicker than thine own!" So from the iron bracelet a voice tells of the transitory vision. All shall go; the jewelled altars and the dim roofs fragrant with incense; the palaces, the towers, and domed cathedrals; the refined clothing, the select surroundings, the courteous receptions of the great; the comfortable health, the noble presence, the satisfactory estimation of the world--all shall go. They shall fade away; they shall be removed as a vesture, and like a garment they shall be rolled up. Press the spikes into thy mouldering flesh. Remember! Even while it lives, it is corrupting, and the end keeps hurrying behind. Remember! Remember thou art man.
But below that familiar voice which warns the transient generations of their mortality, we may find in those sharpened spikes a more profound and nobler intention. "Remember thou art man," they say; but it is not against overweening pride that they warn, nor do they remind only of death's wings. "Remember thou art man," they say, "and as man thou art but a little lower than the angels, being crowned with glory and honour. This putrefying flesh into which we eat our way--this carrion cart of your paltry pains and foolish pleasures--is but the rotten relic of an animal relationship. Remember thou art man. Thou art the paragon of animals, the slowly elaborated link between beast and god, united by this flesh with tom-cats, swine, and hares, but united by the spirit with those eternal things that move fresh and strong as the ancient heavens in their courses, and know not fear. What pain of spikes and sharpened points, what torment that this body can endure from cold or hunger, from human torture and burning flame, what pleasure that it can enjoy from food and wine and raiment and all the satisfactions of sense is to be compared with the glory that may be revealed at any moment in thy soul? Subdue that bestial and voracious body, ever seeking to extinguish in thee the gleam of heavenly fire. Press the spikes into the lumpish and uncouth monster of thy flesh. Remember! Remember thou art God."
"Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" We have grown so accustomed to the cry that we hardly notice it, and yet that the cry should ever have been raised--that it should have arisen in all ages and in widely separated parts of the world--is the most remarkable thing in history. Pleasure is so agreeable, and none too common; or, if one wanted pain for salt, are there not pains enough in life's common round? Does it not take us all our time to mitigate the cold, the heat, and hunger; to escape the beasts and rocks and thunderbolts that bite and break and blast us; to cure the diseases that rack and burn and twist our poor bodies into hoops? Why should we seek to add pain to pain, and raise a wretched life to the temperature of a torture-room? It is the most extraordinary thing, at variance alike with the laws of reason and moderation. Certainly, there is a kind of self-denial--a carefulness in the selection of pleasure--which all the wise would practise. To exercise restraint, to play the aristocrat in fastidious choice, to guard against satiety, and allow no form of grossness to enter the walled garden or to drink at the fountain sealed--those are to the wise the necessary conditions of calm and radiant pleasure, and in outward behaviour the Epicurean and the Stoic are hardly to be distinguished. For the Epicurean knows well that asceticism stands before the porch of happiness, and the smallest touch of excess brings pleasure tumbling down.
But mankind seems not to trouble itself about this delicate adjustment, this cautious selection of the more precious joy. In matters of the soul, man shows himself unreasonable and immoderate. He forgets the laws of health and chastened happiness. The salvation of his spirit possesses him with a kind of frenzy, making him indifferent to loss of pleasure, or to actual pain and bodily distress. He will seek out pain as a lover, and use her as a secret accomplice in his conspiracy against the body's domination. Under the stress of spiritual passion he becomes an incalculable force, carried we know not where by his determination to preserve his soul, to keep alight just that little spark of fire, to save that little breath of life from stifling under the mass of superincumbent fat. We may call him crazy, inhuman, a fanatic, a devil-worshipper; he does not mind what we call him. His eyes are full of a vision before which the multitude of human possessions fade. He is engaged in a contest wherein his soul must either overcome or perish everlastingly; and we may suppose that, even if the soul were not immortal, it would still be worth the saving.
It is true that in this happy country examples of ascetic frenzy are comparatively rare. There is little fear of overdoing the mortification of the flesh. We practise a self-denial that takes the form of training for sport, but, like the spectators at a football match, we do our asceticism chiefly by proxy, and are fairly satisfied if the clergy do not drink or give other cause for scandal. It is very seldom that Englishmen have been affected by spiritual passion of any kind, and that is why our country, of all the eastern hemisphere, has been least productive of saints. But still, in the midst of our discreet comfort and sanity of moderation, that spiky bracelet of steel, eating into the flesh of the courtly and sumptuous Archbishop, may help to remind us that, whether in war, or art, or life, it is only by the passionate refusal of comfort and moderation that the high places of the spirit are to be reached. "Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground!" is the song of all pioneers, and if man is to be but a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour, the crown will be made of iron or, perhaps, of thorns.
IX
"THE IMPERIAL RACE"
"The public are particularly requested not to tease the Cannibals." So ran one of the many flaming notices outside the show. Other notices proclaimed the unequalled opportunity of beholding "The Dahomey Warriors of Savage South Africa; a Rare and Peculiar Race of People; all there is Left of them"--as, indeed, it might well be. Another called on the public "not to fail to see the Coloured Beauties of the Voluptuous Harem," no doubt also the product of Savage South Africa. But of all the gilded placards the most alluring, to my mind, was the request not to tease the Cannibals. It suggested so appalling a result.
I do not know who the Cannibals were. Those I saw appeared to be half-caste Jamaicans, but there may have been something more savage inside, and certainly a Dahomey warrior from South Africa would have to be ferocious indeed if his fierceness was to equal his rarity. But the particular race did not matter. The really interesting thing was that the English crowd was assumed to be as far superior to the African savage as to a wild beast in a menagerie. The proportion was the same. The English crowd was expected to extend to the barbarians the same inquisitive patronage as to jackals and hyenas in a cage, when in front of the cages it is written, "Do not irritate these animals. They bite."
The facile assumption of superiority recalled a paradoxical remark that Huxley made about thirty years ago, when that apostle of evolution suddenly scandalised progressive Liberalism by asserting that a Zulu, if not a more advanced type than a British working man, was at all events happier. "I should rather be a Zulu than a British workman," said Huxley in his trenchant way, and the believers in industrialism were not pleased. By the continual practice of war, and by generations of infanticide, under which only the strongest babies survived, the Zulus had certainly at that time raised themselves to high physical excellence, traces of which still remain in spite of the degeneracy that follows foreign subjection. I have known many African tribes between Dahomey and Zululand too well to idealise them into "the noble savage." I know how rapidly they are losing both their bodily health and their native virtues under the deadly contact of European drink, clothing, disease, and exploitation. Yet, on looking round upon the London crowds that were particularly requested not to tease the cannibals, my first thought was that Huxley's paradox remained true.
The crowds that swarmed the Heath were not lovely things to look at. Newspapers estimated that nearly half a million human beings were collected on the patch of sand that Macaulay's imagination transfigured into "Hampstead's swarthy moor." But even if we followed the safe rule and divided the estimated number by half, a quarter of a million was quite enough. "Like bugs--the more, the worse," Emerson said of city crowds, and certainly the most enthusiastic social legislator could hardly wish to make two such men or women stand where one stood before. Scarlet and yellow booths, gilded roundabouts, sword-swallowers in purple fleshings, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enough. Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them. But in themselves and in mass the crowds were drab, dingy, and black. Even "ostridges" and "pearlies," that used to break the monotony like the exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say nothing of the East and Africa, could so colourless a crowd be seen--a mass of people so devoid of character in costume, or of tradition and pride in ornament.
But it was not merely the absence of colour and beauty in dress, or the want of national character and distinction--a plainness that would afflict even a Russian peasant from the Ukraine or a Tartar from the further Caspian. It was the uncleanliness of the garments themselves that would most horrify the peoples not reckoned in the foremost ranks of time. A Hindu thinks it disgusting enough for a Sahib to put on the same coat and trousers that he wore yesterday without washing them each morning in the tank, as the Hindu washes his own garment. But that the enormous majority of the Imperial race should habitually wear second, third, and fourth-hand clothes that have been sweated through by other people first, would appear to him incredible. If ever he comes to England, he finds that he must believe it. It is one of the first shocks that strike him with horror when he emerges from Charing Cross. "Can these smudgy, dirty, evil-smelling creatures compose the dominant race?" is the thought of even the most "loyal" Indian as he moves among the crowd of English workpeople. And it is only the numbing power of habit that silences the question in ourselves. Cheap as English clothing is, second-hand it is cheaper still, and I suppose that out of that quarter-million people on the Heath every fine Bank Holiday hardly one per cent. wears clothes that no one has worn before him. Hence the sickening smell that not only pervades an English crowd but hangs for two or three days over an open space where the crowd has been. "I can imagine a man keeping a dirty shirt on," said Nietzsche, "but I cannot imagine him taking it off and putting it on again." He was speaking in parables, as a philosopher should; but if he had stood among an English working crowd, his philosophic imagination would have been terribly strained by literal fact.
Scrubby coat and trousers, dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine" or mangy "boa"--such is accepted as the natural costume for the heirs of all the ages. Prehistoric man, roaming through desert and forest in his own shaggy pelt, was infinitely better clad. So is the aboriginal African with a scrap of leopard skin, or a single bead upon a cord. To judge by clothing, we may wonder to what purpose evolution ever started upon its long course of groaning and travailing up to now. And more than half-concealed by that shabby clothing, what shabby forms and heads we must divine! How stunted, puny, and ill-developed the bodies are! How narrow-shouldered the men, how flat-breasted the women! And the faces, how shapeless and anaemic! How deficient in forehead, nose, and jaw! Compare them with an Afghan's face; it is like comparing a chicken with an eagle. Writing in the _Standard_ of April 8, 1912, a well-known clergyman assured us that "when a woman enters the political arena, the bloom is brushed from the peach, never to be restored." That may seem a hard saying to Primrose Dames and Liberal Women, but the thousands of peaches that entered the arena (as peaches will) on Hampstead Heath, had no bloom left to brush, and no political arena could brush it more.
Deficient in blood and bone, the products of stuffy air, mean food, and casual or half-hearted parentage, often tainted with hereditary or acquired disease, the faces are; but, worse than all, how insignificant and indistinguishable! It is well known that a Chinaman can hardly distinguish one Englishman from another, just as we can hardly distinguish the Chinese. But in an English working crowd, even an Englishman finds it difficult to distinguish face from face. Yet as a nation we have always been reckoned conspicuous for strong and even eccentric individuality. Our well-fed upper and middle classes--the public school, united services, and university classes--reach a high physical average. Perhaps, on the whole, they are still the best specimens of civilised physique. Within thirty years the Germans have made an astonishing advance. They are purging off their beer, and working down their fat. But, as a rule, the well-fed and carefully trained class in England still excels in versatility, decision, and adventure. Unhappily, it is with few--only with a few millions of well-to-do people, a fraction of the whole English population--and with a few country-bred people and open-air workers, that we succeed. The great masses of the English nation are tending to become the insignificant, indistinguishable, unwholesome, and shabby crowd that becomes visible at football matches and on Bank Holidays upon the Heath.
It is true that familiarity breeds respect. It is almost impossible for the average educated man to know anything whatever about the working classes. The educated and the workpeople move, as it were, in worlds of different dimensions, incomprehensible to each other. Very few men and women from our secondary schools and universities, for instance, can long enjoy solemnly tickling the faces of passing strangers with a bunch of feathers, or revolving on a wooden horse to a steam organ, or gazing at a woman advertised as "a Marvel of Flesh, Fat, and Beauty." The educated seldom appreciate such joys in themselves. If they like trying them, it is only "in the second intention." They enjoy out of patronage, or for literary sensation, rather than in grave reality. They are excluded from the mind to which such things genuinely appeal. But let not education mock, nor culture smile disdainfully at the short and simple pleasures of the poor. If by some miracle of revelation culture could once become familiar from the inside with one of those scrubby and rather abhorrent families, the insignificance would be transfigured, the faces would grow distinguishable, and all manner of admired and even lovable characteristics would be found. How sober people are most days of the week; how widely charitable; how self-sacrificing in hopes of saving the pence for margarine or melted fat upon the children's bread! They are shabby, but they have paid for every scrap of old clothing with their toil; they are dirty, but they try to wash, and would be clean if they could afford the horrible expense of cleanliness; they are ignorant, but within twenty years how enormously their manners to each other have improved! And then consider their Christian thoughtlessness for the morrow, how superb and spiritual it is! How different from the things after which the Gentiles of the commercial classes seek! On a Bank Holiday I have known a mother and a daughter, hanging over the very abyss of penury, to spend two shillings in having their fortunes told. Could the lilies of the field or Solomon in all his glory have shown a finer indifference to worldly cares?
Mankind, as we know, in the lump is bad, but that it is not worse remains the everlasting wonder. It is not the squalor of such a crowd that should astonish; it is the marvel that they are not more squalid. For, after all, what is the root cause of all this dirt and ignorance and shabbiness and disease? It is not drink, nor thriftlessness, nor immorality, as the philanthropists do vainly talk; still less is it crime. It is the "inequality" of which Canon Barnett has often written--the inequality that Matthew Arnold said made a high civilisation impossible. But such inequality is only another name for poverty, and from poverty we have yet to discover the saviour who will redeem us.
X
THE GREAT UNKNOWN
There are strange regions where the monotony of ignoble streets is broken only by an occasional church, a Board School, or a public-house. From the city's cathedral to every point of the compass, except the west, they stretch almost without limit till they reach the bedraggled fields maturing for development. They form by far the larger part of an Empire's capital. Each of them is, in fact, a vast town, great enough, as far as numbers go, to make the Metropolis of a powerful State. Out of half a dozen of them, such as Islington, Bethnal Green, or Bermondsey, the County Council could build half a score of Italian republics like the Florence or Pisa of old days, if only it had the mind. Each possesses a character, a peculiar flavour, or, at the worst, a separate smell. Many of them are traversed every day by thousands of rich and well-educated people, passing underground or overhead. Yet to nearly all of us they remain strange and almost untrodden. We do not think of them when we think of London. Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the English soul. Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs. Not one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their inhabitants. To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more familiar.
At elections, even politicians remember their existence. From time to time a philanthropist goes down there to share God's good gifts with his poorer brethren, or to elevate the masses with tinkling sounds or painted boards. From time to time an adventurous novelist is led round the opium-shops, dancing-saloons, and docks, returning with copy for tales of lust and murder that might just as well be laid in Siberia or Timbuctoo. When we scent an East End story on its way, do we not patiently await the battered head, the floating corpse, the dynamiter's den, or a woman crying over her ill-begotten babe? Do we not always get one or other of the lot? To read our story-tellers from Mr. Kipling downward, one might suppose the East End to be inhabited by bastards engaged in mutual murder, and the marvel is that anyone is left alive to be the subject of a tale. You may not bring an indictment against a whole nation, but no sensational writer hesitates to libel three million of our fellow-citizens. Put it in Whitechapel, and you may tell what filthy lie you please.
About once in a generation some "Bitter Cry" pierces through custom, and the lives of "the poor" become a subject for polite conversation and amateur solicitude. For three months, or even for six, that subject appears as the intellectual "_rôti_" at dinner-tables; then it is found a little heavy, and cultured interest returns to its natural courses of plays, pictures, politics, a dancing woman, and the memorials of Kings. It is almost time now that the poor came up again, for a quarter of a century has gone since they were last in fashion, and men's collars and women's skirts have run their full orbit since. Excellent books have appeared, written with intimate knowledge of working life--books such as Charles Booth's _London_ or Mr. Richard Free's _Seven Years Hard_, to mention only two; but either the public mind was preoccupied with other amusements, or it had not recovered from the lassitude of the last philanthropic debauch. Nothing has roused that fury of charitable curiosity which accompanies a true social revival, and leaves its victims gasping for the next excitement. The time was, perhaps, ripe, but no startling success awaited Mr. Alexander Paterson's book, _Across the Bridges_. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge or restraint are the insensate sensations of fashion reached.
Mr. Paterson's experience lay on the south side of the river, and the district possesses peculiarities of its own. On the whole, I think, the riverside streets there are rather more unhealthy than those in the East End. Many houses stand below water-level, and in digging foundations I have sometimes seen the black sludge of old marshes squirting up through the holes, and even bringing with it embedded reeds that perhaps were growing when Shakespeare acted there. The population is more distinctly English than on the north side. Where the poverty is extreme it is more helpless. Work as a whole is rather steadier, but not so good. The smell is different and very characteristic, partly owing to the hop-markets. Life seems to me rather sadder and more depressing there, with less of gaiety and independence; but that may be because I am more intimate with the East End, and intimacy with working people nearly always improves their aspect. It is, indeed, fortunate for our sensational novelists that they remain so ignorant of their theme, for otherwise murders, monsters, and mysteries would disappear from their pages, and goodness knows how they would make a living then!