The Shining Pyramid (collection)/Happiness and Horror

I suppose there are still many persons left who labour under the delusion that the age in which we live is the most wonderful, the most splendid, the most happy, and the most civilised age that ever has been since the foundation of the world.

Of course, seventy or eighty years ago, any one who had ventured to doubt this proposition would have been thought quite mad. Macaulay's work is permeated by the assumption that the whole history of the ages had been but a long and tiresome though necessary preparation for the First Reform Bill and the triumph of Whiggery in all the departments of life. To begin with the Church: the martyrs had died, we are to presume, that the Church of England, freed from the errors and enthusiasms of Papists and Methodists, might be a moderate and useful branch of the Civil Service. All the architects of the world had painfully toiled at such fantastic trifles as the Parthenon, the Pyramids, Cologne Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey that we, the heirs of all the ages, might have the privilege of gazing at the supreme beauties of Gower Street. The feudal system was a hideous mass of terror and cruelty: we had supplanted it by the factory system, and under that happy régime the whole of England was being rapidly turned into a gigantic ashpit and coal-hole.

One need not go on with the list: everything, in the estimation of Macaulay and the early Victorians, was infinitely better than it had ever been before, and all antiquity—for to Macaulay Greek Philosophy was as foolish as the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages—was in darkness and we were in light. As far as I remember, the one test by which the nineteenth century triumphed over all other ages was its astounding fertility in mechanical invention: on one side Macaulay marshals all art, all architecture, all poetry, all philosophy; and then triumphantly proves that the nineteenth century alone had made the steam-engine—ergo, that the nineteenth century alone is truly civilised! It is, indeed, astounding that any one can ever have talked such outrageous nonsense; it is extraordinary how any one out of a lunatic asylum could have believed that the factory system in crafts, the Civil Service Church in religion, the invention of devices to make men's lives more comfortable and convenient, the absence of all poetry and all imagination from every place and every region of humanity constituted the ideal world for a human being to dwell in.

Of course, such a line of argument would be quite easy to understand if the speaker were not a man, but the Learned Pig.

"What I want," the Learned Pig might very properly say, "is a world in which my sty is warm and comfortable, well sheltered by improved appliances from rain and east wind. All the mountains must, of course, be levelled, the woods (beech woods excepted) must be grubbed up, and cathedrals and all that sort of thing must be cleared right away—because my end and aim in life is WASH; and all the earth is required to grow me meal, cabbages, and potatoes. I do not want Fine Art, or Poetry, or Religion, or Fine Talk of any description: kindly leave off wasting your time in such nonsense and devote your talents to inventing me a new mechanical washtub, with a patent arrangement by which I may suck Wash when I am asleep. When you have done this, it will be the Golden Age."

Now all this would be quite sound sense in the mouth of a Pig: because, as a matter of fact, a Pig's aim in life is to secure as much wash as possible; and the Pig who gets the most wash is the best Pig, the Ideal Pig. Men, however, are not Pigs. Their being, their aims are, in reality, entirely different, and we must not be tempted to confuse those two excellent but quite distinct creatures because they possess certain things, such as stomachs, in common. It seems to me that the whole of modern civilisation, in its amiable as well as its unamiable aspects, is vitiated by this one false premiss—that Man on the whole equals Pig, and that if you see to his material comforts, his bodily ease, he will be quite happy. Conservatives, Liberals, and Socialists are all alike involved in this one error; behind all their widely divergent arguments lies the wholly false proposition that Physical Comfort will bring about happiness, that Physical Comfort is happiness.

In spite of all our experience since the days of Macaulay, we have not yet got this nonsense out of our heads. It was only the other day that I read in a daily paper that in a year or two happiness all around was bound to come—bound to come with a rush on the wings of flying machines, in the intestines of turbine engines and reciprocating machinery. As one meets this rubbish in popular journalism, I suppose that the populace still clings to the gospel of Macaulay, to the theory which flings all philosophy and all art and all religion on one side as irrelevant, because philosophy and art and religion have no "fruit"—in other words, do not lead to the invention of machinery. But the newspaper on one side; I think that one comes across this notion of modern superiority in quarters very remote from popular journalism. It is my business occasionally to look through books of modern theology, and I find in almost all of them the suppressed premiss that "modern thought," or the "modern mind," is somehow or other vastly superior to the ancient mind, or the mediæval mind. So far as I can remember, this premiss is usually, at all events, a suppressed one—it is something to be taken for granted—and again and again I have wondered why it should be taken for granted, I have desired, all in vain, to see the conclusion of our superiority argued and demonstrated. I suppose, however, that the divines are really moved by much the same reasons as Macaulay and the newspaper writers. They know that we can get to Manchester about five times as fast as was possible a hundred years ago; ergo we are five times happier and better and wiser than our great-grandfathers—to say nothing of our remoter ancestors, who may have taken weeks on the journey. I admit the fact of this higher speed of travelling, but I deny the minor. I say that the length of time in which it is possible to get to the cotton-factories from London is not of the smallest consideration in estimating the sum of human happiness, and I think' that if the cost of this rapid transit were fairly accounted for and reckoned up we should find that we were paying for our corridor express train a most hideous sum, with interest calculated at the rate of about ten thousand per cent. per diem. For, you see, the fact is that Manchester—as modern conditions have made it—is not worth going to at all; on the contrary, any man not a maniac would pay heavily to be transported to some region where Manchester and places like Manchester were impossible, unheard of, and wholly out of the question.

But now there comes the rather important point as to what does constitute happiness—that is, real civilisation. Churchmen can have no difficulty here, for Churchmen cannot deny that all the aims of "modern civilisation"—the real aims, not the sometimes loudly-expressed aims— are, from the point of view of Christianity, entirely and utterly damnable. For the real aims of our day are entirely directed towards the increase of bodily comfort, convenience, and pleasure, towards the increase and improvement of all material goods. It is, of course, demonstrable that the first Christians were exhorted to take no thought at all for any such matters, to purge their souls utterly of the notion that happiness of any sort or kind is obtainable through physical or material channels. It is clear, beyond contradiction, that the first Christians were taught a gospel which is in direct contradiction to all the common precepts of the present time. They were to take example by the lilies, to avoid saving money, to disregard, and indeed shudder at, material wealth, and never to bother about their material prospects in the future. I know that there is a party calling itself Christian which, somehow or other, escapes this conclusion as to the unimportance, or rather nullity, of material comforts in the Christian system. I have listened to a lecture which made the  into a sort of Socialist Programme. Frankly, I cannot understand this point of view; I see no room for it on any reading of the early Christian documents. The rich are denounced in these, certainly; but there is no word said in favour of moderate prosperity all round as the way of happiness. Park Lane is dangerous to the soul, doubtless; but there is nothing to show that salvation dwells in Peckham.

But this is a side-issue. What I have to prove is that man is not the Learned Pig, and that measures which would ensure the happiness of the latter will not at all advance the happiness of the former. Well, I have mentioned Socialism; I have declared my disagreement with its positive statement that the equalisation of wealth would make us all much happier. Now I want to declare my adhesion to its negative statement, its declaration that in modern civilisation, so-called, there is not merely a lack of happiness, but a great and ever-increasing horror, misery, ugliness, and degradation. I call the Socialists into the witness-box especially because I am not on their side, because they are under no suspicion of being the praisers of the bygone time, the friends of Toryism, or Religionism, or Reaction (as it is called) of any kind. If I said I once knew a country parson and a Tory squire who thought the whole modern system of things rotten and abominable, the witnesses might be suspected. But one cannot say that such men as Shaw and Wells and the rest of them are either parsons, squires, or under the thumb of either parson or squire; and so, with all confidence, I cite their opinions as to the machinery and conditions of modern life. It is Mr. Wells, I believe, who pictures humanity in modern times under the figure of a man struggling in a hideous swamp, and, with his very efforts to escape, sinking deeper and deeper into the foul, abhorred slime. And this is the result of our "civilisation"—that is, of our theory that man is the Learned Pig, that the more machines you give him the happier he will be. In a word, the Socialist conclusion is in direct contradiction to the Macaulay and daily paper conclusion, which is, briefly, the more machines the more happiness.

And one does not need to take any man's word for the misery and horror and hideousness of our time. It is not necessary to go to Mr. Wells; we can look for ourselves. We can go to Manchester direct and see what it is like, and wonder that human beings have allowed themselves to be brought to such a pass. I do not know how many square miles of abomination and horror that city contains; but when I think of it its existence seems incredible to me. We used to take all this sort of thing for granted, of course, in the Victorian days; we were proud of our great industrial centres; we reckoned them a mark of civilisation, and a country such as Spain, which does not possess industrial centres, or possesses very few of them, we called uncivilised, retrograde, unhappy. I have never seen a bull-fight—it is a cruel sport, doubtless—but I have no hesitation in declaring that the Spanish peasant in his poor hut, with his Sunday Mass, and his crust of bread, and draught of wine that owes nothing to the chemist, is very much nearer to true civilisation than a cotton-spinner or steel-worker in Manchester or Sheffield; and of the latter one does not know that there is much to choose between the fate of the master and of the man. We have accepted all those miles of horrors, we have been pleased with the infinite subdivision of labour in our factories, and we see the result—the modern manufacturing town, which is hideous, its suburbs which are more hideous still, and its industrial slave population which is most hideous of all, since by the very conditions of its existence, by the fact of its daily mechanical work, without interest, without invention, without the trace of art, without a drop of the most joyful cup of creation, it is fast losing the resemblance of humanity, it is fast parting with the differentia which distinguishes a man from a beaver or a bee. I do not insist on the fact that while wealth abounds in a few hands most of the workers are poor, and some are wretched; that, as a manufacturer's wife has observed, the better the iron-trade, the more miserable the people seem to become. This is to be noted: that a scheme of things which has for its only excuse the production of money and material comfort has in practice worked out as a scheme which deprives the greater number of money and plunges them into the acutest material discomfort. That is amusing enough, but it is not my chief point, because, as I have said, I think happiness is a state which exists independently of material things. Probably—certainly—there have been many happy men much poorer than Lancashire or Yorkshire millhands ever have been, just as there are millionaires more wretched than the wretchedest slave in all the Black Country. Here is a chief part of the whole squalid tragedy; the poor fellows who turn themselves into machines for ten or twelve hours every day doubtless imagine that if they could get more money they would be happy. This, I say, is the tragedy, since we know that they would be not in the least happy if each man had a thousand a year. What is the good of presenting the purple-nosed drunkard at the corner public-house with the key of a cellar well stocked with the purest vintages of Bordeaux? Suppose that he once possessed a palate, many years of the chemical drench called four-ale and the poisonous corn-spirit called whisky have ruined that palate for ever; to him the noblest magnum of Lafite were but sour wash. I will not say that no man can turn himself into an unintelligent machine and be happy; I do say that there is not one man in ten thousand who can accomplish this feat. There is, of course, the point of view which makes happiness consist in doing what one likes; but this position was confuted a long time ago by Socrates. He pointed out that if the fulfilment of desire, quâ desire, constituted bliss, then the man with the itch was ideally happy, since he desired to scratch himself, and did so—all day long.

So far as I remember, Oscar Wilde, in his De Profundis, deplored the evils of the Renaissance—the ugliness to which it inevitably led. Candidly, I agree with him. I think that the Renaissance had in it all the seeds of death; that in spite of its infinite technical perfection, its wonderful knowledge of anatomy, its musical skill, its sense of beauty in colour, its rapture over the Classics raised like young men that had been dead from the tomb, its delight (in England, at all events) in its discovery that the vulgar tongue was in itself an exquisite instrument of prose and poetry, its sense of release as from a long, dark imprisonment, its wonder over the new world beyond the seas, its dreams of strange things, yet to be made known—in spite of all these things, in the heart of the Renaissance lurked the architecture of Gower Street and Camden Town, the "poetry" of Pope and of Pope's indifferent imitators, the life that Smollett and Hogarth have illustrated, the worse life that followed, the music of Stainer and Barnby, the painting—of many worthy persons. It is odd enough; but the Renaissance, starting out, no doubt, with an immense sense of escape and liberty, with the exultation of one who has freed himself from weary loads, with a determination to be original, ended, in most of the arts, as a servile tenth-rate ape of antique models, wearying the world with imitations of architecture of which the world was weary in the sixth century, tiring the reader with stuff about nymphs and shepherds which was third or fourth hand when Virgil and Horace made use of it. Credite posteri, says Horace, with reference to some preposterous statement of his concerning fauns or satyrs; and we know that posterity has never believed in those fauns, and that Horace himself, if he had really thought that he saw a faun or a satyr would have gone on the voyage to Anticyra—where they sent lunatics. And yet that brave, original, daring Renaissance brought back these weary, worn-out "stock" nymphs and fauns and shepherds into literature, and if one wanders in desolate northern quarters of London one may see the influence of the Parthenon brooding, a shabby stucco ghost, over horrible little semi-detached villas. Well, the end of the Renaissance was death, as I say, in most of the arts at all events; and yet we must confess that at the beginning of the putrefaction, and for many years after it had begun, the hues were very splendid. The châteaux of Touraine, the dome of St. Paul's, the work of Shakespeare—these are not things to be despised.

I think that here is the distinction between the Renaissance and that illegitimate child of the Renaissance—modern civilisation, properly so-called. Not only are the ends bad, but the means are bad; not only is there hell at the bottom of the descent, but the descent itself is by steps of pit-refuse and burning marl. Perhaps the Renaissance people were excessive in their joy over the rediscovery of the Greek classics; but at all events the "Odyssey" is something and somewhat: it is not mere blatant nonsense, as are the modern discoveries that all men are born free and equal; that government should be by the people, through the people, for the people; that commercial prosperity leads to happiness; that adulteration is a form of competition; that the drink traffic is a great evil; that factory-chimneys are better than cathedral spires; that unlimited education is a pure boon and blessing to everybody. It is one thing to worship false gods or even devils—deplorable practices both, I am sure—but if we must serve demons, at least let us do so in a reasonably artistic temple, not in such a piece of tomfoolery as the Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court Road.

But we have chosen to worship our false gods in squalid temples indeed; witness America, which, I take it, is the most acute epitome of all modern ideals and methods. I think a system called New Thought is the latest result of American liberty. It is a religion entirely suited to the parent soil: it does not promise the joys of Paradise, but I believe it guarantees a handsome income, if the directions are faithfully carried out. America, then, is the representative of modern civilisation in its purest form; but America is only a very violent example of what our modern civilisation brings about. We ourselves in England are a little better; but how have we fallen from what we once were! Go to an old farmhouse in the country: you will see a dwelling-place which had no more important designer than the local mason, which is yet altogether lovely and pleasant, and suited to its purpose. Inside there may be oak chests which the village carpenter made; and to have such a house and such chests now we must employ an artist who will design for us copies of them more or less good as the case may be. And the tavern hard by will, likely enough, have a sign swinging from curiously scrolled ironwork—the art of the blacksmith over the way; to get such work now it would be necessary to go to an Art Guild, which would make a copy of sorts. And go into some of the old churches, and if you are fortunate you will see carved angels about the roofs, and grinning monsters and strange fantasies; and then you can think of the workmen who made these things and compare them with the workmen of our days—compare their lives, compare their thoughts.

Or perhaps this is too high-flown. Well; think of what we eat and drink in this "advanced" age, in this age of material progress, with its everlasting "gas" about sanitation, its fine contempt for the dirty old times. How many children are poisoned every year with filthy milk? How much nauseous muck have we swallowed with our beer—under the pleasing style of "substitutes"? It is hard indeed that Man in modern times, having made up his mind that he is a Pig, and having acted accordingly, should be poisoned in his wash, should be given unmentionable filth instead of his legitimate tub of potatoes and cabbage. It is not without amusement that I think of an age which, having scoffed at the bread of angels, cannot get an unadulterated cottage loaf, which, having refused the wine of Heaven, can scarcely obtain a decent glass of common beer for love or money.

And we cannot even contrive to be robbed with decency. I should think Robin Hood was a horrible nuisance. It must be quite unpleasant to be captured by a Sicilian brigand. But Robin did not pose as the benefactor of the people whom he despoiled, and the brigands, when they relieve you of your gold watch, do not say that they are promoting your commercial prosperity or developing your natural resources. Robin was a scoundrel I am sure, but he was not a company promoter. And real happiness, the real moyen de parvenir? Well; there was once a Frenchman who uttered a remarkable aphorism: "The philosopher, the good man, and the saint are all happy, but the saint is by far the happiest, so much is man made for sanctity."