First and Last (Belloc)/The Old Gentleman's Opinions

I had occasion about a fortnight ago to meet a man more nearly ninety than eighty years of age, who had had special opportunity for discovering the changes of Europe during his long life. He was of the English wealthier classes by lineage, but his mother had been of the French nobility and a Huguenot. His father had been prominent in the diplomacy of a couple of generations ago. He had travelled widely, read perhaps less widely, but had known and appreciated an astonishing number of his contemporaries.

I was interested (without any power of my own to judge whether his decisions were right or wrong) to discover what most struck him in the changes produced by that great stretch of years, all of which he had personally observed: he was born just after Waterloo, and he could remember the Reform Bill.

He surprised me by telling me, in the first place, that the material changes and discoveries, enormous though they were in extent, were not, in his view, the most striking. He was ready to leave it open whether these material changes were the causes of moral changes more remarkable, or merely effects concomitant with these. When I asked him what had struck him most of the great material developments, he told me the phonograph and the aeroplane among inventions; Mendel's observations in the sphere of experimental knowledge; and, in the sphere of pure theory, the breakdown of many things that had been dogmas of physical science in his early manhood.

Since I did not quite understand what he meant by this last, he gave me, after some hesitation, a few examples: That the interior of the earth was molten; that a certain limited number of elements - not all yet isolated, but certainly few in their total - were at the base of all material forms, and were immutable; that the ultimate unit of each of these was a certain indivisible, eternal thing called the Atom; and so forth.

He assured me that views of this sort, extending over a hundred or a thousand other points, were so universally accepted in his time that to dispute them was to be ranked with the unlettered or the fantastic. I asked him if it were so in economics. He said: Yes, in England, where there was a similar dogma of Free Trade: not abroad.

When I asked him why Mendel's published experiments and the theory based upon them had so much impressed him, he said because it was almost the first attempt to apply to the speculative dogmas of biology some standard demonstrably true; and here he wandered off to explain to me why the commonly accepted views upon biology, which had so changed thought in the latter part of his life, were associated with the name of Darwin. Darwin, he assured me, had brought forward no new discovery, but only a new hypothesis, and that only a small and particular hypothesis, whereby to explain the general theory of transformism. This theory, he told me - the unbroken descent of living organisms and their physical connection with one another and with common parents - had been a favourite idea from the beginning of history with many great thinkers, from Lucretius to Buffon and from Augustus of Hippo to Lamarck. Darwin's, the old gentleman assured me, which he had defended with infinite toil, was that the method in which this continuity of descent proceeded was by an infinitely slow process of very small changes differentiating each minute step from the one before and the one after it, and these small changes Darwin's hypothesis referred to a natural selection. Nothing else in Darwin's work, he assured me, was novel, and yet it was the one thing which subsequent research had rendered more and more doubtful. Darwin (he said) said nothing new that was also true.

At this point I was moved to contradict the old gentleman, and to say that one unquestioned contribution to science of Darwin, as novel as it was secure, was his patient discovery of the work of earthworms, and of its vast effect. The old gentleman was willing to admit that I was right, but he said he was only speaking of Darwin in connection with transformism and the whimsical way in which his private name (and his errors) had become identified with evolution in general.

I asked him, since he had such a knowledge of men from observation, why this was so.

"It seems at first sight," he said, "as ridiculous as though we should associate the theory of light with the name of Newton, who inclined to the exploded corpuscular hypothesis, or the general conception of orbital motion in the universe to the great Bacon, who, in point of fact, rudely repudiated the Copernican theory in particular."

"Did he, indeed?" said I, interested.

"I believe so," said the old gentleman; "at any rate you were asking me why Darwin, with his single contribution to the theory of transformism, and that a doubtful one - or, to be accurate, an exploded one - should be associated in the popular mind with the invention of so ancient a theory as that of evolution. The reason is, I think, no more than that he came at a particular moment when any man doing great quantities of detailed work in this field was bound to stand out exaggeratedly. The society in which he appeared had, until just before his day, accepted a narrow cosmogony, quite unknown to its ancestors. Darwin's book certainly exploded that, and the mind of his time - ignorant as it was of the past - was ready to accept the shattering of its father's idols as a new revelation."

"But you were saying," said I, when he had thus dealt harshly with a great name, "that not the material but the moral changes of your time seemed to you the greatest. Which did you mean?"

"Why, in the first place," said the old man thoughtfully and with some hesitation, "the curiously rapid decline of intelligence, or if you will have it differently, the clouding of thought that has marked the last thirty years. Men in my youth knew what they held and what they did not hold. They knew why they held it or why they did not hold it; but the attempt to enjoy the advantages of two contradictory systems at the same time, and, what is worse, the consulting of a man as an authority upon subjects he had never professed to know, are intellectual phenomena quite peculiar to the later years of my life."

I said we of the younger generation had all noticed it, as, for instance, when an honest but imperfectly intelligent chemist was listened to in his exposition of the nature of the soul, or a well-paid religious official was content to expound the consolations of Christianity while denying that Christianity was true.

"But," I continued, "we are usually told that this unfortunate decline in the express powers of the brain is due to the wide and imperfect education of the populace at the present moment."

"That is not the case," answered the old man sharply, when I had made myself clear by repeating my remarks in a louder tone, for he was a little deaf.

"That is not the case. The follies of which I speak are not particularly to be discovered among the poorer classes who have passed through the elementary schools. These" (it was to the schools that he was alluding with a comprehensive pessimism) "may account for the gross decline apparent in the public manners of our people, but not for faults which are peculiar to the upper and middle classes. It is not in the populace, but in those wealthier ranks that you will find the sort of intellectual decay of which I spoke."

I asked him whether he thought the tricks it was now considered cultured to play with mathematics came within the category of this intellectual decay. The old gentleman answered me a little abruptly that he could not judge what I was talking about.

"Why," said I, "do you believe that parallel straight lines converge or diverge?"

"Neither," said he, a little bewildered. "If they are parallel they cannot by definition either diverge or converge."

"You are, then," said I, "an old-fashioned adherent of the theory of the parabolic universe?" At which sensible reply of mine the old man muttered rather ill-temperedly, and begged me to speak of something else.

I asked him whether the knowledge of languages had not declined in his time. He said, somewhat emphatically, yes, and especially the knowledge of French, assuring me that in his early years many a Fellow of a College at Oxford or at Cambridge was capable of speaking that tongue in such a fashion as to make himself understood. On the other hand, he admitted that German and Spanish were more widely known than they had been, and Arabic certainly far more widely diffused among those officials of the Empire who took their work seriously.

When I asked him whether politics were more corrupt as time proceeded, he said No, but more cynical; and as to morals he would not judge, for he was certain that as one vice was corrected another appeared in its place.

What he told me he most deplored in the social system of his country was the power of the police and of the statistician by whom the policeman was guided. This he ascribed to the growth of great towns, to civic cowardice, and to a new taboo laid upon uniformed and labelled public authorities, who are now regarded as sacred, and also inordinately feared.

"In my youth," he said, "there was a joke that every man in Paris was known to the police. Today that is universally true, and no joke with regard to every man in London. Our movements are marked, our earnings, our expenses, and our most private affairs known to the innumerable officials of the Treasury, our records of every sort, however intimate, are exactly and correctly maintained. The obtaining of work and a livelihood is dependent upon strong organizations. There is hardly an ailment or a domestic habit, from drinking wine to eating turnips, which some crank who has obtained the ear of a politician does not control or threaten in the immediate future to control."

"As for doctors!" he began, his voice cracking with indignation, "their abominable...." but here the old gentleman fell into so violent a fit of coughing that he nearly turned black in the face, and when I respectfully slapped him on the back, in the hopes of granting him relief, he made matters worse by shaking himself at me with an energy worthy of 1842. His nurse rushed in, clapped him upon his pillows, and was prepared to vent her wrath upon me for having caused this paroxysm, when the old man's exhaustion and laboured breathing captured all her attention, and I had the opportunity to withdraw.