Part 11

I wonder whether this artist, as he stood and drew, felt as a European feels when he stands and draws in any one of our immemorial sites: by the Pool of London, or at the top of the rue St. Jacques, or in the place of the Martyrdom at Toulouse, or looking at the most ancient yellow dusts of Toledo from over the tumbling strength of the Tagus? He may have felt it ... perhaps ... for all his work, even the little introduction that he has written shows that astonishing adaptability and exceedingly rapid intelligence which are the marks of the Japanese to-day. But if he felt it he must have felt it by education. For us it is in our blood. We stand upon those sites and we feel ourself in and part of a stream of life that seems almost incapable of ending. And that brings me back to where I began, How much longer will our civilisation endure?

Will it end? It has many enemies, most of them unconscious, has modern Europe.

It has men within it who imagine that the correction of some large abuse and the withdrawal of some considerable part of its fabric in the correction of that abuse, is a matter concerning only their one generation. These men visibly put in peril the balance of that civilisation by their very enthusiasm.

It has a lesser number of other enemies within itself; enemies more dangerous, who do believe that some quite new thing wholly alien to the soul of Europe can be imposed upon that soul. These men are always for anarchy; they delight in emphasising all that seems to diminish the responsibility and the freedom of citizens, and it is their pleasure to accelerate every tendency which may destroy, from whatever side, our permanent solution of domestic and of natural things: families, properties, armies.

The common faith which was, as it were, the cement of our civilisation has been hit so hard that some do ask themselves openly the question that was only whispered some little time ago--whether the cement still holds. It is quite certain that if that last symbol and reality disintegrates, if the Catholic Church leaves it, Europe has come to an end.

But these questions are not yet to be met by any reply. And when I ask myself those questions, and I always do when I see the Seine going by the walls that were Cæsar's parleying ground with the chiefs, Dionysius's prison, Julian's office, Dagobert's palace, and which have been subject to everything from Charlemagne to the Bourbons, and which have (within the memory of men whom I myself have known) ended the Monarchy and seen passing by a wholly new society--when I ask myself those questions, I answer less and less with every year.

Time was, in the University, say twenty years ago, one would have said: "It is all over. Everything that can destroy us has triumphed." Time was, say ten years ago, in the heat of a particular struggle which raged all over the West, one could have said with the enthusiasm of the fight, that continuity would win. But to-day, whether because one has accumulated knowledge or because things are really more confused, it is difficult to reply.

* * * * *

A man with our knowledge and our experience of what Europe has been and is, standing in the grey and decayed Roman city of the Fifth Century, and watching the little barbarian troop riding into Lutetia, might have said that a gradual darkness would swallow us all, especially since he knew that just beyond the narrow seas in Eastern Britain a dense pall then covered the corpse of the Roman civilisation.

A man working on the Tour St. Jacques, the last of the Gothic, might have seen nothing but anarchy and the end of all good work in the change that was surging round him: the Huguenots, the new Splendour, the cruelty and the making of lies.

Certainly those who were present in Paris _before_ the 10th of August,'92, thought an end had come, and believed the Revolution to be a most unfruitful and tempestuous death; imagining Europe to have no hope but in the possible extinction of the flame.

All three judgments would have been wrong. And when one takes that typical Paris again, and handles it and looks at it and thinks of it as the example and the symbol of all our time; just as one is beginning to say "The thing is dying," the memory of similar deaths that were not deaths in the past returns to one and one must be silent.

Never was Europe less conscious of herself, never did she more freely admit the forces that destroy, than she admits them to-day. Never was evil more insolently or more glaringly in power; never had it less fear of chastisement than in the whirlwind of our time. If that whirlwind is mechanical, and if this vast anarchic commerce, these blaring papers, these sudden fortunes, these frequent and unparalleled huge wars, are the breaking up of all that once made Europe, then the answer to the question is plain: but it may be that these are things not mechanical but organic: seeds surviving in the ruin which will grow up into living forms. We shall see.

XXXI

THE HUMAN CHARLATAN

It is curious that the Scientific Spirit has never tabulated any research, even superficial, upon the human type of charlatan.

It is the essence of a charlatan that he aims at the results of certain excellences in the full consciousness that he does not possess those excellences. The material upon which he works is twofold: the ignorance and the noble appetite for reverence in his fellow men.

Where animals are concerned the Scientific Spirit has tabulated a good deal of careful research in this department. We know fairly well the habits of the Cuckoo. What seemingly harmless organisms are poisonous to us, and why, we have discovered and can catalogue. The successful deception practised for purposes of secrecy or greed by such and such a creature, we can discover in our books. But no one has tabulated the human charlatan.

An admirable example upon which one can test the whole theory of charlatanism is the ridiculous Lombroso.

To begin with you have the name. He was no more of an Italian than Disraeli, or than the present Mayor of Rome: but his Italian name deceives and is intended to deceive, not necessarily that it was assumed, but that it was paraded as national. Hundreds of honest men thought themselves praising the Italian character and Italian civilisation when the newspapers (themselves half duped) had persuaded them to blow the trumpet of Lombroso.

One of the characteristics of the charlatan is that he parades the object with which he desires to dupe you, and simultaneously hides his methods in pushing the thing forward. The purveyor of cheap jewellery in Whitechapel does this. He lets you have the glitter of his article full and strong. Where he got it, of his own connection with it, and what it is, you learn last in the business or not at all. The whole process is one of suggestion, or, as our forefathers called it, "hoodwinking." Lombroso was true to type in this regard.

The European Press was deluged one day with notices, praise, reviews of a book which was called _Degeneration_. It was a tenth-rate book, but we were compelled to hear of it. No words were fine enough to describe its author. We learnt that his name was Nordau. There was no process of logic in the book, there was no labour. Where it asserted (it was a mass of assertions) it usually trespassed on ground which the author could not pretend to any familiarity with. Those who are already alive to the international trick were suspicious and upon their guard from the very moment that they smelt the thing. The infinitely larger number who do not understand the nature of international forces were taken in. For one man who read the farrago a hundred were taught to magnify the name of Nordau. Only when this process of suggestion had well sunk in did the public casually learn that the said Nordau was a connection of Lombroso's.

A book of greater value (which is not saying much) proceeded from the pen of one Ferrero. It proposed an examination of the Roman Empire and the Roman people. Its thesis was, of course, a degradation of both. For one man who so much as saw that book, a hundred went away with the vague impression that a certain great Ferrero dominated European thought. He gave opinions (among other things) upon the polity of England so absurd and ignorant that, had the process of suggestion not run on before, those opinions would only have attained some small measure of notoriety from their very fatuousness. But the international trick had reversed the common and healthy process of human thought. We were not allowed to judge the man by his work; no, we must accept the work on the authority of the man; only after the trick had been successfully worked did it come out that Ferrero was a connection of Lombroso's.

Lombroso's own department of charlatanry was to attack Christian morals in the shape of denying man's power of choice between good and evil.

In another epoch and with other human material to work upon his stock-in-trade would have taken some other form, but Lombroso had been born into that generation immediately preceding our own, whose chief intellectual vice was materialism. A name could be cheaply made upon the lines of materialism, and Lombroso took to it as naturally as his spiritual forerunners took to rationalist Deism and as his spiritual descendants will take to spurious mysticism. We shall have in the near future our Lombrosos of the Turning Table, the Rapping Devil, and the Manifesting Dead Great Aunt--indeed this development coincided with his own old age--but as things were, the easiest charlantry in his years of vigour was to be pursued upon Materialist lines, and on Materialist lines did the worthy Lombroso proceed. His method was childishly simple, and we ought to blush for our time or rather for that of our immediate seniors that it should have duped anybody--but it was far from childishly guileless.

When the laws are chiefly concerned in defending the possessions of those already wealthy, and when society, in the decline or depression of religion, takes to the worshipping of wealth, those whom the laws will punish are generally poor. Such a time was that into which Lombroso was born. No man was executed for treason, few men were imprisoned for it. Cheating on a large scale was an avenue to social advancement in most of the progressive European countries. The purveying of false news was a way to fortune: the forestaller and the briber were masters of the Senate. The sword was sheathed. The popular instinct which would repress and punish cowardice, oppression, the sexual abominations of the rich, and their cruelties, had no outlet for its expression. The prisons of Europe were filled in the main with the least responsible, the weakest willed, and the most unfortunate of the very poor. We owe to Lombroso the epoch-making discovery that the weakest willed, the least responsible, and the most unfortunate of the very poor often suffer from physical degradation. With such an intellectual equipment Lombroso erected the majestic structure of human irresponsibility.

Two hundred men and women are arrested for picking pockets in such and such a district in the course of a year. The contempt for human dignity which is characteristic of modern injustice permits these poor devils to be treated like so many animals, to be thrashed, tortured, caged, and stripped: measured, recorded, dealt with as vile bodies for experiment. Lombroso (or for that matter any one possessed of a glimmering of human reason) can see that of these two hundred unfortunate wretches, a larger proportion will be diseased or malformed, than would be the case among two hundred taken at random among the better fed or better housed and more carefully nurtured citizens. The Charlatan is in clover! He gathers his statistics: twenty-three per cent. squint, eighteen per cent. have lice--what is really _conclusive_ no less than ninety-three per cent. suffer from metagrobolisation of the hyperdromedaries, which is scientist Greek for the consequences of not having enough to eat. It does not take much knowledge of men and things to see what the Charlatan can make of such statistics. Lombroso pumps the method dry and then produces a theory uncommonly comfortable to the well-to-do--that their fellow-men if unfortunate can be treated as irresponsible chattels.

There is the beginning and end of the whole humbug.

With the characteristic lack of reason which is at once the weakness and the strength of this vicious clap-trap, a totally disconnected--and equally obvious--series of facts is dragged in. If men drink too much, or if they have inherited insanity, or are in any other way afflicted, by their own fault or that of others, in the action of the will, they will be prone to irresponsibilities and to follies; and where such irresponsibilities and follies endanger the comfort of the well-to-do, the forces of modern society will be used to restrain them. Their acts of violence or of unrestrained cupidity being unaccompanied by calculation will lead to the lock-up. And so you have another stream of statistics showing that "alcoholism" (which is Scientist for drinking too much) and epilepsy and lunacy do not make for material success.

On these two disparate legs poses the rickety structure which has probably already done its worst in European jurisprudence and against which the common sense of society is already reacting.

Fortunately for men Charlatanry of that calibre has no very permanent effect. It is too silly and too easily found out. If Lombroso had for one moment intended a complete theory of Materialist morals or had for one moment believed in the stuff which he used for self-advertisement, he would have told us how physically to distinguish the cosmopolitan and treasonable financier, the fraudulent company-worker, the traitor, the tyrant, the pornographer, and the coward. These in high places are the curse of modern Europe--not the most wretched of the very poor. Of course Lombroso could tell us nothing of the sort; for there is nothing to tell.

Incidentally it is worthy of remark that this man was one of those charlatans who are found out in time. Common sense revolted and in revolting managed to expose its enemy very effectively while that enemy was still alive. A hundred tricks were played upon the fellow: it is sufficient to quote two.

After a peculiarly repulsive trial for murder in Paris, a wag sent the photograph of two hands, a right hand and a left hand, to the great criminologist, telling him they were those of the murderer, and asking for his opinion. He replied in a document crammed with the pompous terms of the scientific cheap-jack, hybrid Greek and Latin, and barbarous in the extreme. He discovered malformations in the fingers and twenty other mysteries of his craft, which exactly proved why these hands were necessarily and by the predestination of blind Nature the hands of a murderer. Then it was that the wag published his letter and the reply with the grave annotation that the left hand was his own (he was a man of letters) and the right hand that of an honest fellow who washed down his carriage.

The other anecdote is as follows: Lombroso produced a piece of fatuous nonsense about the Political Criminal Woman. He based it upon "the skull of Charlotte Corday"--which skull he duly analysed, measured, and labelled with the usual regiment of long and incomprehensible words. Upon the first examination of the evidence it turned out that the skull was no more Charlotte Corday's than Queen Anne's--a medical student had sold it to a humble Curiosity Shop, and the dealer, who seems to have had some intellectual affinity with the Lombroso tribe, had labelled it for purposes of sale, "The Skull of Charlotte Corday." Lombroso swallowed it.

The Ass!

XXXII

THE BARBARIANS

The use of analogy, which is so wise and necessary a thing in historical judgment, has a knack of slipping into the falsest forms.

When ancient civilisation broke down its breakdown was accompanied by the infiltration of barbaric auxiliaries into the Roman armies, by the settlement of Barbarians (probably in small numbers), upon Roman land, and, in some provinces, by devastating, though not usually permanent, irruptions of barbaric hordes.

The presence of these foreign elements, coupled with the gradual loss of so many arts, led men to speak of "the Barbarian invasions" as though these were a principal cause of what was in reality no more than the old age and fatigue of an antique society.

Upon the model of this conception men, watching the dissolution of our own civilisation to-day, or at least its corruption, have asked themselves whence those Barbarians would come that should complete its final ruin. The first, the least scholarly and the most obvious idea was that of the swamping of Europe by the East. It was a conception which required no learning, nor even any humour. It was widely adopted and it was ridiculous. Others, with somewhat more grasp of reality, coined the phrase "that the barbarians which should destroy the civilisation of Europe were already breeding under the terrible conditions of our great cities." This guess contained, indeed, a half-truth, for though the degradation of human life in the great industrial cities of England and the United States was not a cause of our decline it was very certainly a symptom of it. Moreover, industrial society, notably in this country and in Germany, while increasing rapidly in numbers, is breeding steadily from the worst and most degraded types.

But the truth is that no such mechanical explanation will suffice to set forth the causes of a civilisation's decay. Before the barbarian in any form can appear in it, it must already have weakened. If it cannot absorb or reject an alien element it is because its organism has grown enfeebled, and its powers of digestion and excretion are lost or deteriorated; and whoever would restore any society which menaces to fall, must busy himself about the inward nature of that society much more than about its external dangers or the merely mechanical and numerical factors of peril to be discovered within it.

Whenever we look for "the barbarian," whether in the decline of our own society or that of some past one whose historical fate we may be studying, we are looking rather for a visible effect of disease than for its source.

None the less to mark those visible effects is instructive, and without some conspectus of them it will be impossible to diagnose the disease. A modern man may, therefore, well ask where the barbarians are that shall enter into our inheritance, or whose triumphs shall, if it be permitted, at least accompany, even if they cannot effect, the destruction of Christendom.

With that word "Christendom" a chief part of the curious speculation is at once suggested. Whether the scholar hates or loves, rejects or adopts, ridicules or admires, the religious creed of Europe, he must, in any case, recognise two prime historical truths. The first is that that creed which we call the Christian religion was the soul and meaning of European civilisation during the period of its active and united existence. The second is that wherever the religion characteristic of a people has failed to react against its own decay and has in some last catastrophe perished, then that people has lost soon after its corporate existence.

So much has passion taken the place of reason in matters of scholarship that plain truths of this kind, to which all history bears witness, are accepted or rejected rather by the appetite of the reader than by his rational recognition of them, or his rational disagreement. If we will forget for a moment what we may _desire_ in the matter and merely consider what we _know_, we shall without hesitation admit both the propositions I have laid down. Christendom was Christian, not by accident or superficially, but in a formative connection, just as an Englishman is English or as a poem is informed by a definite scheme of rhythm. It is equally true that a sign and probably a cause of a society's end is the dissolution of that causative moral thing, its philosophy or creed.

Now here we discover the first mark of the Barbarian.

Note that in the peril of English society to-day there is no positive alternative to the ancient philosophic tradition of Christian Europe. It has to meet nothing more substantive than a series of negations, often contradictory, but all allied in their repugnance to a fixed certitude in morals.

So far has this process gone that to be writing as I am here in public, not even defending the creed of Christendom, but postulating its historic place, and pointing out that the considerable attack now carried on against it is symptomatic of the dissolution of our society, has about it something temerarious and odd.

Next look at secondary effects and consider how certain root institutions native to the long development of Europe and to her individuality are the subject of attack and note the nature of the attack.

A fool will maintain that change, which is the law of life, can be presented merely as a matter of degree, and that, because our institutions have always been subject to change, therefore their very disappearance can proceed without the loss of all that has in the past been ourselves.

But an argument of this sort has no weight with the serious observer. It is certain that if the fundamental institutions of a polity are no longer regarded as fundamental by its citizens, that polity is about to pass through the total change which in a living organism we call death.

Now the modern attack upon property and upon marriage (to take but two fundamental institutions of the European) is precisely of this nature. Our peril is not that certain men attack the one or the other and deny their moral right to exist. Our peril rather is that, quite as much as those who attack, those who defend seem to take for granted the relativeness, the artificiality, the non-fundamental character of the institution which they are apparently concerned to support.

See how marriage is defended. To those who would destroy it under the plea of its inconveniences and tragedies, the answer is no longer made that, good or ill, it is an absolute and is intangible. The answer made is that it is convenient, or useful, or necessary, or merely traditional.

Most significant of all, the terminology of the attack is on the lips of the defence, but the contrary is never the case. Those opponents of marriage who abound in modern England will never use the term "a sacrament," yet how many for whom marriage is still a sacrament will forego the pseudo-scientific jargon of their opponents?

The threat against property is upon the same lines. That property should be restored that most citizens should enjoy it, that it is normal to the European family in its healthy state--all this we hear less and less. More and more do we hear it defended, however morbid in form or unjust in use, as a necessity, a trick which secures a greater stability for the State or a mere power which threatens and will break its opponents tyrannously.

The spirit is abroad in many another minor matter. In its most grotesque form it challenges the accuracy of mathematics: in its most vicious, the clear processes of the human reason. The Barbarian is as proud as a savage in a top hat when he talks of the elliptical or the hyperbolic universe and tries to picture parallel straight lines converging or diverging--but never doing anything so vulgarly old-fashioned as to remain parallel.

The Barbarian when he has graduated to be a "pragmatist," struts like a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to the gift of reason, or free to maintain that definition, limit, quantity and contradiction are little childish things which he has outgrown.