Part 4 (1/2)
II
PROFESSIONAL POLITICS
”Take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you wish: that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.” These words were written by an irresponsible fellow before the days of ”responsibility” were inaugurated; before politicians had become a race apart, admired or execrated according to the temperament of the beholder; before writers were solemnly divided into men-of-letters, novelists, _littrateurs_, journalists, hacks, and professors; before physicians had become a close corporation of certificated benefactors; not, indeed, before lawyers had learnt to trade on human litigiousness, but before they had won the respect of the public for the disinterested exercise of their talents. The days of specialism have added to the sum-total of human knowledge; but they have diminished intercourse, they have made men more inaccessible to one another, they have promoted new groupings, new atmospheres, new officialdoms, new barriers and water-tight compartments.
The professional spirit has affected and infected the whole of modern society; we see its results in what we call the ”disappearance of wit,” or the ”loss of the conversational faculty,” or the ”didactic habit,” or anything else implying regret for the individualism of the past. It means that our several callings have separated us, have made us into creatures of our profession, have established us on our own particular pedestals on which, as good statues, we must remain, and that our common humanity is an insufficient link between us. Our special knowledge, our special habit, our special highly-esteemed reputation, sets up a barrier which cuts us off from our fellows and destroys community of feeling.
The politician of mediocre capacity may know enough to cut a figure among his political a.s.sociates only by judicious silence, or by talkativeness on those subjects of which others are ignorant. But put him among his non-political friends, and he is an oracle of wisdom upon the law and the Const.i.tution. The doctor, who has forgotten his scientific principles but has picked up some empirical knowledge, has the advantage of experience and authority as against the layman for whom he prescribes. The lawyer, the civil servant, the professional theologian, and the diplomat are in the same position. They all know enough of their subject to be superior to those who know next to nothing of it. They know enough to have pedestals of their own; to be on their guard; to have a reputation to maintain; to conceal the ”dram of folly;” to be, to that extent, artificial in their relations with men. They dare not betray the ”laughable blunder,” which, said Charles Lamb, is the test your neighbour giveth you ”that he will not betray or over-reach you.”
In the case of the chartered accountant, or the stockbroker, or the pedlar, this special knowledge is not so d.a.m.ning a thing. No accountant, be he ever so limited, can be wholly contented with accountancy as an explanation or sum-total of life; nor can the broker, however absorbed in his business, admit to his friends that the manipulating of stocks and shares is the only matter which should consume the interest of mortals. It is otherwise with the politician, the priest, the man of letters, the professional philosopher, and even the lawyer and the soldier. There is nothing human which may not enter into politics, religion or philosophy, or become the subject of literature; the human complexion of the State may be transformed by the professional prejudice of the lawyer or the soldier.
Consider how, for democratic purposes, the Member of Parliament is made. There is no need to pay undue attention to the amusing exaggerations and distortions of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Cecil Chesterton.
The Member of Parliament has been supported in his const.i.tuency by a group of local politicals who have a healthy enthusiasm for the party war-cry. The serious candidate is too experienced, too professional, to share those enthusiasms in precisely that form which they a.s.sume, at election time, in the minds of his supporters. I do not mean that he is less enthusiastic than they, a less whole-hearted backer of his party, but that, from the nature of his political experience, politics presents itself to him under a perspective which cannot be theirs. He leaves his const.i.tuency a specially ordained champion of political truth; he arrives at Westminster a unit in the crowd.
If we follow our member to Westminster we shall soon find that he has fallen into the Parliamentary manner; that his ideas are grouped around the ideas familiar to the House of Commons; that he has taken its tone, and that his habits are becoming gradually a.s.similated to the habits of those few with whom he especially a.s.sociates himself. Let us attend a meeting of some propagandist committee comprising a number of expert politicians--Members of Parliament, or others. We shall find there the bond of a common knowledge, a common sympathy, a common approach towards a given subject, a common jargon. We shall be aware of the fact that we have come into a particular, highly-specialised atmosphere, where the familiar language of ordinary life, the familiar ideas, would be intrusions, meriting nothing but frowns or compa.s.sionate smiles.
And the same thing is true of most corporate journalism and most corporate religion. The atmosphere is highly specialised; it is binding; and those who live in it believe it to be co-extensive with the whole of life. Let us bind ourselves by Tolstoy; let us agree to loosen ourselves by Nietzsche; but, in any case let us agree to love our neighbour on the principle of a close corporation. The main influences which shape the modern world operate, for the most part, through intellectual groups; each group can only be appealed to in a language familiar to it; it can only act on principles (consciously accepted or presupposed) which are its very special property; you can never touch it to the quick, in its corporate and active capacity, without accepting or appearing to accept its collective prejudices.
Its differentia is that which separates it from the unit of common humanity.
Thus we come to something more difficult to a.n.a.lyse than specialisation of work--a specialisation of sentiment, habits and morals, which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere which they have appropriated, and so limited as to be blind in the broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken. And yet it is through these groups, keen-eyed in one direction, blind in others, that the intellect, the reforming zeal, the earnestness, the idealism of the age, have to pa.s.s before ideas and vague aspiration can be transformed into action or effective influence. These groups are the main-drainage-system of modern life; they are the ordinary channels through which the business of the world has to pa.s.s, and its organised thought be directed. Take any one of these groups, and consider its differential character, its mode of apperception, its _thos_, and you find it something deformed, twisted, strained in one direction, like a tree by the sea-sh.o.r.e. But take a few score of them, and imagine their qualities fused together, and the result would accord with the ideals of common humanity--ideals vaguely conceived, perhaps, but generous.
It is just because the qualities of these groups, in politics, religion, social work, and to a lesser extent in literature, are not and cannot be fused together, but on the contrary, stand apart in water-tight compartments, so that the whole is like an elaborate system of checks to make each part inoperative, that, at a time when the whole community is strangely alive with good will, the actual social achievement is beyond measure disappointing.
The test of success or failure is the degree of satisfaction afforded to the common man. By the ”common man” I do not mean the inferior man, but the man who has not specialised himself out of his common humanity. If there is any interest which an honest lawyer can share with an honest fisherman, a decent c.o.c.kney with a decent Bedouin Arab, he does it in virtue of this n.o.bler ”commonness;” it may include the interests of good fellows.h.i.+p, of delight in song or nature, of a belief in G.o.d, and a host of indescribable interests which do not belong to the mechanism and compulsory organisation of life; it includes some ”dram of folly,” some capacity for ”laughable blunder”
in intercourse between men. Culture may break in upon this ”commonness” and destroy it. But it need not be so. Shakespeare has this commonness in a high degree; so have Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Lamb; all great artists have had it when their culture has not crazed them, or when they have not lifted themselves into an almost mystical absorption in exercising some gift of austere, monumental expression; in which case, like Milton, they scarcely belong to the category of humans; their food is ambrosial, and their wine is nectar.
The task of the inspired politician has become harder in proportion as the problem of government has become more intricate and more specialised. He must work through his machinery, which includes not only the administrative machine, but all those groups, in and out of Parliament, limited by their ethical and sentimental specialities. He must be professional enough to appreciate the ground of their excellences, and ”common” enough to discard their limitations. It is only when there are several such men, powerful enough to leaven politics and lead politicians, that modern democracy can have any shadow of reality--men who understand the rank and file of humanity, conversant also with the complicated machine and the contending groups of narrowly defined ideals, men fired with that constructive imagination which crystallises in common sense.
III
SPECIALISM IN RELIGION
It is significant that the name ”Religion of Humanity” was given to a set of tenets which strictly speaking contained no religion at all.
Positivism gained ground in middle-Victorian England not merely because Science and the theory of Evolution were in the ascendant, but still more because it was recognised that the orthodox Churches were out of harmony with modern life; that they were ministering neither to modern humanitarian feeling nor to humanity. Positivism survives to this day in the person of Mr. Frederic Harrison and a few others (including several of the leaders of the Young Turkish party); but it would by this time have been a powerful creed if it had been really a creed, if it had anything spiritual and _credible_ to offer to those who are outraged by the professional neglect, self-absorption, and intellectual insincerity of the Churches. Everyone is aware of the failure of the Churches to touch modern life; to escape from their grooves; to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations of old-fas.h.i.+oned formul instead of finding vital, human, developing expressions of the spiritual craving of man. Even Mr. George Cadbury is aware of this failure, as he showed by his zeal for the inquiry into church attendance some years ago, an inquiry which has been repeated this year with results unsatisfactory to the Churches. The question has been debated again and again, and inquirers have been unable to make up their minds whether it is the Churches that are not good enough for the people, or the people who are not good enough for the Churches. It is a question of the priority of the chicken or the egg. It is not known whether public sentiment is depraved because it is alienated from the Churches, or whether the Churches are depraved because they have excluded so many of the most powerful moral forces of the time. Certain it is that they have offended by their exclusiveness; by the narrowing down of interest; by the cliquishness of those who are specialists in piety or ritual. We may observe their habit of mind in that narrow Victorian sect which converted Mr.
Gosse's strong-willed and in many ways lovable father into an intolerant tyrant (as set forth in _Father and Son_); that lax and sn.o.bbish branch of the Anglican Church which failed to capture Mr.
Bernard Shaw in his youth, because it stood only for a ”cla.s.s prejudice;” and those strange types of Christianity which, as Mr.
Lowes d.i.c.kinson expresses it, find no disharmony between belief in a ”Power that is supposed to have created the stars and the tiger” and ”the sentimental, almost erotic character of many Christian hymns:
Jesu, lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly.”
The evidence of those who have been estranged from the Churches is worth considering. We see that Mr. Gosse was driven from them in his youth by their sectarian narrowness and unwillingness to face intellectual inquiry; Mr. Shaw by the flippancy of the Irish Church, its cla.s.s prejudice, its false respectability; Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson, among other reasons, because at a time when men are learning to adapt the processes of Nature to their ends, when it becomes them to ”dwell less and less upon their weaknesses and more and more upon their strength,” the orthodox Christians a.s.sert that we are ”miserable sinners,” that ”there is no health in us,” when they ”ought to be too busy demonstrating in fact the contrary.” Members of the general public in one way and another have become accustomed to regard religion with an uneasy constraint; there are harmless things which must not be said in the presence of a priest; there is a pastorality about the minister which implies a flock and a coterie; and Englishmen seldom mention the name of G.o.d without an appearance of apology or secret shame. Religion has become largely a matter of cliques, coteries, a.s.sociations--of specialism in codes and casuistry.
I will not press the question whether the history of the Christian Church has not been the history of the perversions of Christianity. A distinguished Chinese author not long ago indicted the alleged un-Christian methods of our missionaries in China; Dr. Halil Halid, a Turk, has pointed out that it is in the Christian countries that the Christian virtues of humility and disdain of wealth are least in evidence. What concerns us now is the feeling in formally Christian countries that in spite of Christianity the Christian Churches have not taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is on earth; they have not taught toleration and love; they have urged us to ignore the present world in the interests of the next; and because their own followers have refused to do anything of the kind they have isolated religion from practical life. I agree that many Churches, seeking to adapt themselves to modern needs, have organised social clubs, carried on political crusades, and rendered useful service in ”rescue work;” but even so they have rather tended to distinguish between themselves in their spiritual capacity and themselves in their secular capacity. The majority of people do not seem to find in the religious services of the Churches a note that touches their practical needs or their spiritual ideals. The most successful popular appeal has been made by those organisations which have endeavoured to add to the zest of life by exciting music, tuneful hymns, and buoyant rhetoric.