Part 4

Such simple truths are being recognized by a growing multitude of people, and they are felt far more widely than they are clearly recognized. The discontent with elected persons gathers and grows. No politician is any longer a hero to his fellow-countrymen. When Lord Oxford and Lord Birkenhead strike attitudes to remind the world of Gladstone and Palmerston everybody laughs. And the disposition to push aside parliamentary governments spreads daily. Russia has a pretence of representative government entirely and openly controlled by the Communist Party. The Duma, which I visited in January, 1914, and heard debating and dividing and rising to points of order about nothing in the best style, with its Speaker, Opposition, and reporters all complete, has vanished beyond recall. China, after some parliamentary beginnings in Peking, has cast them aside for that remarkable students’ association, the Kuomintang. Italy, in the throes of economic crisis after the war, scrapped and chased away her politicians and gave herself over also to a banded society. Spain has gone back upon parliamentary government. Poland and Hungary have scarcely tried the celebrated mixture before rejecting it. Greece follows on the same lines, and in the new Turkey it is criminal to be in opposition.

We came near to something of the same sort of thing in France last summer, when the rapid fall of the franc so scared the politicians out of their party manœuvres that Herriot, Briand, and Poincaré all took office together. We have the interesting spectacle in France of a country with its party politics largely in suspense. For ten nervous days of general strike it seemed as though Great Britain also might join the comity of nations weary of politicians. For two years Parliament has muddled with the vital question of coal production and done nothing: it has weathered one crisis and learnt nothing from it. The British coal industry goes on, socially and economically wasteful, in scandalous defiance of the Samuel Report and the Sankey Report, and Parliament continues to do nothing. The defeated miners are in the mental state of France in 1871.

Outside of America extraordinarily few people still believe in political democracy at all except as a makeshift to stand in the way of worse things, tyrannies, oligarchies, and the like horrors. Many of those who still believe demand extensive changes of method. A number of us do imagine that democracy might be preserved, as a vastly different and more efficient method of government, if election by proportional representation with the single transferable vote in large constituencies returning many representatives could be substituted for the present bilateral system. Such an electrical method, associated with very much smaller parliamentary bodies, would in practice wipe out the party system, destroy the professional politicians, and hand over the decisive control of things to a body of prominent citizens--whose return would be very largely due to prominence and public confidence won by other than political activities. However, all politicians who have not already arrived at prominence hate the idea, and so, since they constitute the body of political life, there is not the slightest chance of its ever becoming, except perhaps in name and with essential mutilations, the electoral method of any modern state. It can be left out of this present discussion, therefore, and so also can projects for a special Economic Parliament of trade unionists and employers and suchlike collateral developments, or for elections by suddenly and fortuitously appointed jurymen instead of by entire constituencies. Such things can be attained only through political bodies, and though the politician of the existing type can do little or nothing with things when he has them in his hands, he is far too human to let them go out of his hands and legislate himself out of existence in favour of a different kind of ruler altogether--which is the admitted purpose of these novelties.

None of such schemes for making democracy more effective or more truly representative really touches the essential weakness of democracy, which is that the great mass of human beings are not sufficiently intelligent nor sufficiently interested to follow political issues at all. The representative body represents, for nine out of ten of its voters, a vacant mind. At an election the Sovereign People is roused to a temporary sporting interest, and votes according to panic or prejudice. It does not even vote according to its interests, because the ordinary citizen leads so narrow, limited, and purblind a life that he is unable to see--even in such matters as sound money or war--how politics may come home to him.

Every extension of the suffrage in Great Britain has brought in more masses of utterly indifferent people to vote. Half a century ago, when I was a child, the chief English newspapers gave almost verbatim reports of parliamentary debates and political speeches. Such a newspaper would not sell a hundred thousand copies to-day. Now, when every one has a vote, it is almost impossible to tell from the papers every one reads whether Parliament is in session. The more “democratic” democracy has become, the more complete has become its disregard of public affairs.

I put forward these by no means very exhilarating considerations in partial answer to the question with which this paper began. Political democracy is still apparently a going concern in America, least chastened of continents, but elsewhere there seems very little go left in it. And I do not think that we begin yet to realize the significance of those new associations of which Communism and Fascism are the best known types, and the Kuomintang a less thoroughly understood example.

I find the Communist Party a very wonderful and instructive fact in my world. I want to be quite plain here in what I am writing; I have recently produced what I consider a very complete and destructive analysis of Communist dogma, and here, though it may seem egotistical, I am obliged to insist upon that fact. But a severely critical and sceptical attitude towards these doctrines in theory and action is one thing, and participation in the fear, hostility, and insane abuse with which those who hold them are treated, is quite another. Economic and social doctrine apart, I recognize very enviable and admirable qualities in the Communist Party both in Russia and in England. In Russia not one person in fifty is a member of the party; in all Great Britain I doubt if there are three thousand members. In our British way we try to believe that the Communist Party consists of unwashed and extremely bearded ruffians flourishing (God knows why they do it!) bombs. But really it is very largely composed of quite young people who give themselves to an astonishing extent to what they believe to be the social, political, and economic rebirth of the world. They are, the most of them, animated by an intense, essentially religious passion. They toil mentally and make great sacrifices. They shape their lives to fit their faith. They study with an immense devotion what my critical conscience compels me to describe as dull, dogmatic, and misleading literature. They co-operate with one another with a remarkably willing discipline. “Religious” is the only word I know to describe their enthusiasm, and there is not a religious teacher in the world who would not gladly inoculate the youth of his congregation with the courage, spirit, and energy these Communists display--if he could get it separated from the mind and spirit of Marx. There they are, a numerically quite small organization. And they hold Russia against all comers with the acquiescence of the general population. They stand up to quite lively persecutions in most Western countries. They go to prison and even, in some Eastern countries, to death very courageously.

And if you are loth to hear so much good of the Communist Party, perhaps the Fascists are more to your taste. I have already criticized them for stupidity, brutality, cruelty, injustice, and so forth. I have no respect for their idol, Mussolini. But there, too, in bands of no very considerable multitude, is a devotion and a spirit that can give over a great country into their hands.

I want to suggest that we may be only in the opening phase of this sort of political religiosity, both on the left side and on the right side, and that in its development lies the answer to the question of what is to come after democracy. There is an immense fund of unsatisfied seriousness in the young people of our Western communities to-day, and not only in the young. These movements of Communism and Fascism may be mere first attempts of that unsatisfied seriousness to make a new world out of our present disorders. What is called the decay of faith and the discrediting and fading of many old loyalties have not destroyed the serious type; they have merely let it loose for new experiments. These experiments seem to show already quite new possibilities of concentrated directive power. If once we get control of our present obsession about votes, we may discover that it is not necessary to convert a majority of the “electorate” before a new world begins.

_20 March, 1927._

V

DEMOCRACY UNDER REVISION

_A Lecture Delivered at the Sorbonne on March 15th, 1927_

In the face of this audience, in the presence of so many distinguished men and women, I feel in a very apologetic state to-night.

I am not accustomed to make public addresses. I am not used to being entertained in this flattering fashion. But the invitation I received to come here was so tactfully and charmingly conveyed, and did me so much honour, that I could scarcely do otherwise than obey and come.

I come, if you will permit me to say so, less for the great compliment that your attention does me personally than because this gives me an opportunity of saluting France, the custodian of the world’s artistic conscience, the exponent of intellectual freedom, the mighty mother of valiant and liberal thought for all mankind. The name of the Sorbonne is a very magical name to every intellectual worker, and I do not disguise from myself that to speak here to-night is the highest distinction that is ever likely to fall to me.

You receive me to-night as a man of letters. And as a man of letters I know I am not very easy to define. I am something of a romancer, something of a novelist, something of a publicist. I have written essays and social speculations. I have stolen and dressed myself up in the plumage of the historian. I have written schoolbooks and a scientific handbook. For my own part, I fall back upon _Journalist_ as the least misleading description of my use in the world.

But let me disabuse your minds of any idea that it is out of modesty or as a pose of modesty that I call myself a Journalist and my very miscellaneous mass of work Journalism, and that I am conceding a superiority in kind and quality, as an iron pot might concede a superiority to a porcelain vessel, to the novelist, the romancer, the social philosopher, or the political essayist. I am not doing that. I am not raising that sort of issue. I am not thinking of rank and order and precedence. What I am doing is trying to express, in as bright and hard a manner as possible, a very definite view of the value of all literary effort, all literary and artistic effort. I am trying to express, in so far as my own activities go, my sense of the temporary nature, the transitory and personal nature, of every statement made by science and philosophy and of every beauty revealed by art.

If I find any difference between my mind and the minds of most of the people I meet, it is that my perception of time is rather more detached than is usual from the dimensions of the individual life; that my mind is, as it were, a small-scale map of wide range; that I think with less detail and in longer stretches; that the race process as a whole has come home to me with unusual vividness, and that future things and our relationship to future things have an abnormal reality for me. And consequently it is natural for me to think that the man of letters, the artist, the scientific worker, and the philosopher live first and foremost for their own time and for the times immediately following their own, and that thereafter their real value diminishes.

Tradition and educational pressure may mask this process to a certain extent, but only mask it. We belong to our own times and have significance only in relation to our own times. And this is as true of those we call “Immortals,” of Homer, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo or Leonardo or Voltaire, in the measure of their scale, as it is of you and me who are thinking and discussing here to-night. Great or little, we work, we serve our purpose, we pass. Into the night or into the museum of antiquities at last go one and all. Art, poesy, philosophy, literature, are not permanent things. They change in their methods, their function, their essential nature...

And when I say that, I do not belittle them, but glorify them. They are living processes like ourselves who breed and pass, and not dead things like crystals or cut gems to be treasured for ever in the vaults of the classical temple. All of them but the mere bric-à-brac I would sweep into one living mortality as Journalism in its widest sense. The picture, the music, the book, the research that does not arise out of actual current things--and does not bear upon what we are doing or what we intend to do--does not in reality exist. It is a phantom. It is a pretension. It is Nothing. Science, art, literature, philosophy, all alike record Humanity’s impression of the present and its attempt to adjust itself for a future. They express the thought and embody the will--the growing changing thought, the developing will--of mankind. They are not a beautiful excrescence upon human life; not mere pearls secreted by the effort and suffering of mankind; they are the very core of the life of mankind--its chief directive function.

Now, after this much of self-introduction, I will put before you certain speculations that occupy me very much. I put them before you not as something thought out and presented to you in a finished state, but as something about which I find myself greatly exercised--something that may evoke kindred operations going on in your minds also, and so interest you this evening.

I propose to launch a generalization, a generalization about the probable forms of expression prevalent now and in the immediate future--expression in political, social, literary, and artistic life. I am going to suggest that we are in the beginning of an age whose broad characteristics may be conveyed some day by calling it The Age of Democracy Under Revision. That title I have chosen by way of defining its relation to the age which has been drawing to its close under our eyes: the Age of Democracy Ascendent.

Let us begin by exploring common ground. It would be easy to find quite a large number of intelligent and well-instructed people who would agree that the sixteenth century saw the germination, the seventeenth and the eighteenth the birth struggles, the nineteenth the rise and prevalence of something called Modern Democracy. Something not merely political, but social, and profoundly differentiating the literature and art of this time--quite as much as the political life--from those of any previous period. That Ascendency of Democracy has culminated; and like some wave that breaks upon a beach, its end follows close upon its culmination.

Now what do we mean by this word Democracy? We are apt to say that such words as Democracy and Socialism may mean anything or nothing. But the truth is, that, in spite of many variations and convolutions, both these words retain very definite meanings indeed. One might compare them to little bags given to a multitude of children to collect anything they liked from a pebble beach. In such bags, you might find at the end of the day a great variety of things; in no two bags would you find exactly the same things, and yet for all that in nearly all the bags would you find very much the same content.

I suppose we should, nearly all of us, be in agreement that what we meant by Democracy--in the modern sense--was expressed morally by the statement:

_All human beings are of equal value in the sight of God_; or legally:

_All men are equal before the law;_

or practically:

_One man’s money is as good as another’s._

This implies a repudiation of caste, of inherent rank and function, of all privileges and all fixed subordinations. It is equalitarian or rebellious. And it is mildly paradoxical in the fact that, by insisting upon the importance of _all_ individualities, it tends to restrain the exaltation of particular individuals, and by exalting all individuals to an equal level, it subordinates all individuals to the mass.

The democratic idea is no doubt very deeply rooted in the competitive and insurgent heart of man. It is implicit in Christianity and in Islam. But it was only in the sixteenth century, with the progressive decay of Feudalism, that it began to be effective in the literary, political, and artistic expression of mankind. If you reflect, I think you will agree that its appearance was everywhere associated with the breakdown of outworn or outpaced systems, with processes of release and liberation, and generally also with processes of disintegration. Democracy to many minds will also involve the challenging and repudiation of authority. Some Catholic Democrats may question that, but I believe I shall have the general feeling with me in accepting that relaxation also as an aspect of Democracy.

Now as Democracy became ascendent in our world, its spirit produced new forms in political life, in literature, in art, in music. Let us consider these distinctive forms.

In politics it produced government by elected representative assemblies--elected by an ever-widening constituency of voters. We have Chambers of Representatives, Parliaments, spread throughout the world, and we have seen the franchise extend until manhood, and at last womanhood, suffrage seems everywhere in sight. It is strange to us nowadays to imagine a fully organized country without a constitution, a Parliament and periodic appeals to the mass of voters to endorse an elected Government periodically replaceable. Yet six hundred years ago such a way of managing public affairs would have seemed fantastic. The Ancient World knew nothing of such devices. There were assemblies then, but not representative assemblies. The Greek democracies and Republican Rome assembled all their citizens. Even countries like France and England before the sixteenth century, which had Parliaments of a sort, did not conceive of them for a moment as governing bodies and kept the elected element in a minor position. I doubt if many of us fully realize the significance of the fact that the current political methods and assumptions of the world to-day, prevalent from China to Peru, would have been almost inconceivable even to highly intelligent human beings until twelve or fifteen generations ago.

So much for the political expression of Democracy. In literature the democratic spirit found its natural vehicle in the Novel. That too was new and distinctive. The tale, the story of adventures, mankind has had always--most usually of kings, princes, and heroic leaders--but it was only with the ascent of Democracy that stories of characters, histories of common individual lives detached from politics, detached from any sense of social function, getting loose from any subordination or any responsibility, rose towards dominance in literature. At the very outset of the ascent of Democracy came the great master Cervantes with his “Don Quixote,” scoffing at aristocracy, scoffing at privileged responsibility, mocking at the final futility of chivalrous mastery, putting his wisest words into the mouth of a clown and letting the flour mills of the common bread-eater overthrow his knight in armour. As modern Democracy rose to its climax, the novel rose to its climax. The common characteristic of almost all the great novels of the nineteenth century, and up to our own time, is that they represent great crowds of individuals who follow trades, professions, and so forth, and who have either no public function or, if they have a public function, are not so differentiated by it that it is of any serious importance to the story and the values of the novel. The crowd of individuals and its interplay have become everything. Great ideas that bind people together into any form of collective life are disregarded. Great religious ideas, great political ideas and developments are not there in any living, fermenting, debatable form--are even challenged and forbidden by the critics as having no place there. Consider Balzac, Dickens, Turgeniev, Zola, and suchlike representative giants of this closing age. You think at once of a picture of humanity like a market-place, like a fair, like the high-road to anywhere on a busy day. When political life appears, it appears just as any other sort of life. Here is a novel about elections and their humours, and here is one about peasants or fishermen. Just different scenery and costumes for the common story.

It strikes one at first as paradoxical that a period in which the exaltation of the individual has tended to make every one a voter, a fractional sovereign of the whole world, should lead in the literary expression of the time to the disappearance, so to speak, of the whole world in a crowd of people. But the paradox involves no real inconsistency. What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. The literature of the period of Democracy Ascendent displays what its political developments mask only very thinly--that Modern Democracy is not a permanent form of political and social life, but a phase of immense dissolution.

I think it would be comparatively easy to call the drama of the last three centuries to confirm the evidence of the novel. With the beginning of the period under consideration the Miracle Play which gave you Everyman and related him to God and Heaven and Hell gave place to Falstaff and his jolly companions, to the jealousy of Othello and the social aspirations of Monsieur Jourdain. If we turn to painting or to music we find all over this period the same effect of release--if you like--detachment, anyhow, from broad constructive conceptions and any sort of synthesis. There was very little detached painting in the old world. It was a part of something else. It decorated a building, it subserved a religious or political as well as a decorative purpose. If paintings were ever detachable, it was that they might be carried from a studio to an altar or a palace elsewhere. But with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries painting became more and more liberated, said good-bye to the altar-piece and the palace, and set out upon a life of its own. Now our painters are pure anarchists. They paint what pleases them for the sake of painting. They paint with a total disregard of any collective reality, and they are extremely offended when we build our houses with insufficient accommodation for their bright irrelevant observations upon the beauty of this and that.

So, too, music has broken loose. In the old world it was relevant and generally subordinate. I can imagine nothing more astonishing to a revenant from the ancient to our present world--not even a general election!--than a visit to a large concert-hall during the performance, let us say, of Debussy’s “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” or Ravel’s “Septette,”--this gathering of fortuitous people with no common function, to listen to music which, apart from its beauty, has no sort of collective meaning, no social object at all.