Chapter VIII: Part 8

"What need, O shipmates, to sail for _any_ port? The sailor is not a land animal. How we chafed and stifled when we lived on _terra firma_, pent in those horrible stone dungeons called houses and churches, and compelled to till those inert and filthy clods, year in and year out--a most stupefying existence! Let us sail for the sake of sailing. It was not in putting forth into this infinite sea that we were ill-advised, but only in imagining that we could reach an opposite shore, and that the sea was not infinite but hemmed about by dead land. That was a gross illusion. In reality there is no _terra firma_ at all, but only ships and rafts more or less extensive, covered over with earth and trees, riding on the water. Fancy deceived us, when we supposed that our Earth was anchored in some deeper earth. It floats and drifts upon a bottomless flood, and will dissolve into it. Do not dream of any backward voyage, or of reaching home. You will never find that old home again; it exists no longer. But this good ship of ours, with its wind-blown sails, can never sink and can never stop. If the banners and crosses, which we still fly in deference to custom, have lost their meaning for us, other symbols will take their place. We must not confuse our infinite task with the illusions that may first have prompted us to undertake it. A brave and an endless life awaits us, battling with the storms of winter; in the summer days, leaping over the waves with the dolphins and the porpoises; in the watches of the night hailing the ever-new constellations which, as we sail onward, will rise to greet us, and pass over our heads. For ocean is a river that flows unendingly, and the stars and clouds are exhalations attendant upon it; they rise and soar in great circles perpetually before its course, like loosed doves before the bounding shell of Galatea."

These words were not at all relished by the majority of those who listened to them. They were stay-at-homes by temperament, who had embarked only in the hope of gain, or of finding peace and plenty in some softer climate. They were alarmed and disgusted at what they had just heard, and not being quite sore that it was false, they denied it with some irritation.

"What folly," they cried, "what nonsense you are talking. Of course it is the land that is infinite, since it is much better than the sea; and the sea is no river, or its water would be fresh, and you know how brackish and bitter it is: indeed, but for the rain we have collected in pans and hogsheads, we should already have died of thirst. This sea is nothing but a stagnant lake in the midst of the green earth, one of the myriad salt ponds studded all over it; and as for this leaky little ship, which we were induced to embark in only by fraud, it is not really sea-worthy. The planks and cordage are already rotting, and how shall we replace them, unless we speedily sight land--and God grant it may be a civilized country! And look there! Is not that land on the horizon! Through the clearing mists I can discern a lighthouse, quite distinctly; and beyond lies a low shore, overhung with smoke. Something tells me this is the New Atlantis described by Bacon. A prosperous and populous city, full of docks and factories, where we shall find everything needful--warehouses, shops, inns, theatres, baths, even churches and chapels of every sect and denomination. What joy!"

This sight was so welcome to those heartsick passengers, that they could not wait for the ship to make fast, though they steered her straight for the coast, but jumped over-board and eagerly swam ashore. Their example was contagious. The other party could not bear to be left behind without experiencing the new life, whatever it might bring. They reflected that as the land was really a part of the sea, it was not bad seamanship sometimes to run aground, that in leaving the ship they would, in a higher sense, be continuing their voyage, and that they would not be true to the supreme principle of their philosophy, which was absolute free-will, if they did not often change their principles in minor matters. The chief point was to experience everything. They did not regret the past, as did their narrow-minded positivistic friends, simply because it had involved hardships and errors. Hardships and errors were blessings, if you could only outgrow them; and they, in their splendid vitality, knew how to outgrow everything. Sacred history, classic fable, chivalry, and the cure of one's soul had, in that former age, proved absorbing themes for the fancy, and had exquisitely modulated the emotions; but the fountain of those emotions had always been their own breast, and since after such dramatic adventures their breast remained deeply unsatisfied, it was time to look again narrowly into its depths to discover some newer and truer way of expressing it. Why should not the development of material arts be the next phase in their career? They would not be less free amid the gusts and the billows of politics than they had been in their marine adventure; commerce would offer them glorious opportunities to exercise their will-power and their invention; infinite vistas, here too, were open before them: cities always more populous, possessions always more varied, instruments always more wonderful, and labour always more intense.

The romantic party accordingly joined the lovers of material progress in their new city, called Mechanapolis: but the old opposition in their temperaments remained undiminished. The lovers of adventure wanted machines in order to make war, and the lovers of thrift wanted peace in order to make other machines.

Meantime Peter the captain, with much grumbling and shaking of his grey beard, had got the old _Saint Christopher_ afloat again, and accompanied still by a faithful boatswain and cook, and some nondescript recruits that he had got together, set out again to sea, in search of that other land beyond the ocean which is called heaven. And every evening with a trembling finger he pointed to it in the setting sun, not seeing that heaven was above his head.

40

CLASSIC LIBERTY

When ancient peoples defended what they called their liberty, the word stood for a plain and urgent interest of theirs: that their cities should not be destroyed, their territory pillaged, and they themselves sold into slavery. For the Greeks in particular liberty meant even more than this. Perhaps the deepest assumption of classic philosophy is that nature and the gods on the one hand and man on the other, both have a fixed character; that there is consequently a necessary piety, a true philosophy, a standard happiness, a normal art. The Greeks believed, not without reason, that they had grasped these permanent principles better than other peoples. They had largely dispelled superstition, experimented in government, and turned life into a rational art. Therefore when they defended their liberty what they defended was not merely freedom to live. It was freedom to live well, to live as other nations did not, in the public experimental study of the world and of human nature. This liberty to discover and pursue a natural happiness, this liberty to grow wise and to live in friendship with the gods and with one another, was the liberty vindicated at Thermopylae by martyrdom and at Salamis by victory.

As Greek cities stood for liberty in the world, so philosophers stood for liberty in the Greek cities. In both cases it was the same kind of liberty, not freedom to wander at hazard or to let things slip, but on the contrary freedom to legislate more precisely, at least for oneself, and to discover and codify the means to true happiness. Many of these pioneers in wisdom were audacious radicals and recoiled from no paradox. Some condemned what was most Greek: mythology, athletics, even multiplicity and physical motion. In the heart of those thriving, loquacious, festive little ant-hills, they preached impassibility and abstraction, the unanswerable scepticism of silence. Others practised a musical and priestly refinement of life, filled with metaphysical mysteries, and formed secret societies, not without a tendency to political domination. The cynics railed at the conventions, making themselves as comfortable as possible in the rôle of beggars and mocking parasites. The conservatives themselves were radical, so intelligent were they, and Plato wrote the charter of the most extreme militarism and communism, for the sake of preserving the free state. It was the swan-song of liberty, a prescription to a diseased old man to become young again and try a second life of superhuman virtue. The old man preferred simply to die.

Many laughed then, as we may be tempted to do, at all those absolute physicians of the soul, each with his panacea. Yet beneath their quarrels the wranglers had a common faith. They all believed there was a single solid natural wisdom to be found, that reason could find it, and that mankind, sobered by reason, could put it in practice. Mankind has continued to run wild and like barbarians to place freedom in their very wildness, till we can hardly conceive the classic assumption of Greek philosophers and cities, that true liberty is bound up with an institution, a corporate scientific discipline, necessary to set free the perfect man, or the god, within us.

Upon the dissolution of paganism the Christian church adopted the classic conception of liberty. Of course, the field in which the higher politics had to operate was now conceived differently, and there was a new experience of the sort of happiness appropriate and possible to man; but the assumption remained unchallenged that Providence, as well as the human soul, had a fixed discoverable scope, and that the business of education, law, and religion was to bring them to operate in harmony. The aim of life, salvation, was involved in the nature of the soul itself, and the means of salvation had been ascertained by a positive science which the church was possessed of, partly revealed and partly experimental. Salvation was simply what, on a broad view, we should see to be health, and religion was nothing but a sort of universal hygiene.

The church, therefore, little as it tolerated heretical liberty, the liberty of moral and intellectual dispersion, felt that it had come into the world to set men free, and constantly demanded liberty for itself, that it might fulfil this mission. It was divinely commissioned to teach, guide, and console all nations and all ages by the self-same means, and to promote at all costs what it conceived to be human perfection. There should be saints and as many saints as possible. The church never admitted, any more than did any sect of ancient philosophers, that its teaching might represent only an eccentric view of the world, or that its guidance and consolations might be suitable only at one stage of human development. To waver in the pursuit of the orthodox ideal could only betray frivolity and want of self-knowledge. The truth of things and the happiness of each man could not lie elsewhere than where the church, summing up all human experience and all divine revelation, had placed it once for all and for everybody. The liberty of the church to fulfil its mission was accordingly hostile to any liberty of dispersion, to any radical consecutive independence, in the life of individuals or of nations.

When it came to full fruition this orthodox freedom was far from gay; it was called sanctity. The freedom of pagan philosophers too had turned out to be rather a stiff and severe pose; but in the Christian dispensation this austerity of true happiness was less to be wondered at, since life on earth was reputed to be abnormal from the beginning, and infected with hereditary disease. The full beauty and joy of restored liberty could hardly become evident in this life. Nevertheless a certain beauty and joy did radiate visibly from the saints; and while we may well think their renunciations and penances misguided or excessive, it is certain that, like the Spartans and the philosophers, they got something for their pains. Their bodies and souls were transfigured, as none now found upon earth. If we admire without imitating them we shall perhaps have done their philosophy exact justice. Classic liberty was a sort of forced and artificial liberty, a poor perfection reserved for an ascetic aristocracy in whom heroism and refinement were touched with perversity and slowly starved themselves to death.

Since those days we have discovered how much larger the universe is, and we have lost our way in it. Any day it may come over us again that our modern liberty to drift in the dark is the most terrible negation of freedom. Nothing happens to us as we would. We want peace and make war. We need science and obey the will to believe, we love art and flounder among whimsicalities, we believe in general comfort and equality and we strain every nerve to become millionaires. After all, antiquity must have been right in thinking that reasonable self-direction must rest on having a determinate character and knowing what it is, and that only the truth about God and happiness, if we somehow found it, could make us free. But the truth is not to be found by guessing at it, as religious prophets and men of genius have done, and then damning every one who does not agree. Human nature, for all its substantial fixity, is a living thing with many varieties and variations. All diversity of opinion is therefore not founded on ignorance; it may express a legitimate change of habit or interest. The classic and Christian synthesis from which we have broken loose was certainly premature, even if the only issue of our liberal experiments should be to lead us back to some such equilibrium. Let us hope at least that the new morality, when it comes, may be more broadly based than the old on knowledge of the world, not so absolute, not so meticulous, and not chanted so much in the monotone of an abstracted sage.

41

GERMAN FREEDOM

There is a fine theory of Hegel's that the universe exists in order to realize freedom. In Oriental despotisms, he tells us, only one man was free. In ancient republican cities a minority, the aristocracy of citizens, obtained freedom. Now at last freedom has extended to all; not, however, as we might fondly suppose, in free and casual America, but under the perfect organization of the Prussian monarchy. For freedom in the mouth of German philosophers has a very special meaning. It does not refer to any possibility of choice nor to any private initiative. It means rather that sense of freedom which we acquire when we do gladly and well what we should have to do anyhow, as when in passing from a close room into the open air we say we breathe freely at last. German freedom is like the freedom of the angels in heaven who see the face of God and cannot sin. It lies in such a deep love and understanding of what is actually established that you would not have it otherwise; you appropriate and bless it all and feel it to be the providential expression of your own spirit. You are enlarged by sympathy with your work, your country, and the universe, until you are no longer conscious of the least distinction between the Creator, the state, and yourself. Your compulsory service then becomes perfect freedom.

For liberal freedom, for individualism, these philosophers have a great contempt. They say a man is nothing but the sum of his relations to other things, and if he should throw off one after another these constitutive bonds, he would find his private residuum of a self to be a mathematical point and a naked cipher, incapable of willing or of choosing anything. And they further say that a dutiful soul is right in feeling that the world it accepts and co-operates with is its own work; for, according to their metaphysics, the world is only an idea which each man makes after his own image, and even as you are, so is the world you imagine you live in. Only a foolish recalcitrant person, who does not recognize the handiwork of his own spirit about him, rebels against it, and thereby cancels his natural freedom; for everywhere he finds contradictions and closed doors and irksome necessities, being divided against himself and constantly bidding his left hand undo what his right hand is doing. So that, paradoxical as it may seem, it is only when you conform that you are free, while if you rebel and secede you become a slave. Your spiritual servitude in such a case would only be manifesting itself in a phenomenal form if the government should put you in prison.

The national expression of this kind of freedom is what the Germans call _Kultur_, a word not well understood in other countries. Every nation has certain characteristic institutions, certain representative writers and statesmen, past and present, certain forms of art and industry, a certain type of policy and moral inspiration. These are its _Kultur_, its national tradition and equipment. When by education the individual is brought to understand all these things, to share their spirit and life, and to be able to carry them forward faithfully, then he has absorbed the _Kultur_ in his own person. _Kultur_ is transmitted by systematic education. It is not, like culture, a matter of miscellaneous private attainments and refined tastes, but, rather, participation in a national purpose and in the means of executing it. The adept in this _Kultur_ can live freely the life of his country, possessing its secret inspiration, valuing what it pursues and finding his happiness in those successes which he can help it to attain. _Kultur_ is a lay religion, which includes ecclesiastical religion and assigns to it its due place.

German _Kultur_ resembles the polity of ancient cities and of the Christian church in that it constitutes a definite, authoritative, earnest discipline, a training which is practical and is thought to be urgent and momentous. It is a system to be propagated and to be imposed. It is all-inclusive and demands entire devotion from everybody. At the same time it has this great advantage over the classic systems, that it admits variations. At Sparta, in Plato's Republic, and in the Catholic church the aims and constitution of society were expected to remain always the same. The German ideal, on the contrary, not only admits evolution, but insists upon it. Like music, it is essentially a form of movement. According to the philosophers, however, the form of this movement is fixed by the absolute genius of the composer, and prescribes the way in which the changes shall go on. Evolution thus introduces life into this ideal, but does not admit ambiguities. In this sense the German law of progression is as inexorable as the classic model of form.

The more reasonable theorists of German _Kultur_ introduce another qualification, which, if admitted, is of the greatest importance, namely, that German _Kultur_ is not to be extended to other nations. Some make a special point of contrasting the universal claims of the Roman and Napoleonic empires and of the Catholic church with the aspirations of German genius, which, they say, is infinite inwardly, being capable of endless growth and modification by men of Teutonic blood, yet is limited externally or in space, in that it is not communicable to other races. Non-Teutons should never be summoned, therefore, to acquire the German spirit, which they would only pollute. Their proper rôle is rather to stand by, no doubt overawed and filled with admiration, but left without hope or fear of being assimilated. Yet as the church could admit that there might be unconscious and virtual Christians among the heathen, who might by exception be saved, so there may be sporadic manifestations of Teutonic genius in unforeseen quarters. Shakespeare, Dante, and Christ were virtual and unconscious Germans.

There is, of course, a less indulgent Germanism, which has on its side the authority of Fichte and Hegel, the enthusiasm of the pan-Germans and that lust for boundless ascendancy which enterprise and war naturally foster in anybody who has carried them on passionately and successfully. According to this stricter view, the whole world is to be subjugated and purified by the German nation, which alone inherits the undefiled language and religion of Eden, and must assign to the remaining creole races, descended from savages and ultimately perhaps from monkeys or devils, such tasks as they are capable of. The masters, being by nature generous and kind, will allow their slaves, after their work is done, to bask in despicable happiness, since happiness is all that slaves are capable of living for; but they will be proudly commanded by a race of hard, righteous, unhappy, heroic German experts, with blue eyes fixed on the eternal ideal.

The admission that German _Kultur_ is merely national, which might seem to promise peace and goodwill, may be turned in this way into a sinister claim to absolute dominion. The ancients and the church had supposed that all men, though endowed with talent and goodness in the most various degrees, had qualitatively the same nature. The same passions, the same arts, and the same salvation were proper to them all. The servant, in furthering the aims of his betters, served what his own soul potentially loved and was capable of appropriating; there could be religion and love in his subordination. Reciprocally the master could feel respect and affection for his servants, who were his wards and his god-children. The best things in classic life--religion, poetry, comradeship, moral sagacity--were shared by the humblest classes and expressed their genius. The temple, the church, the agora, the theatre, Socrates, and the saints were of the people.

German _Kultur_, on the contrary, boasts that it is not the expression of diffused human nature, but the product of a special and concentrated free will. It is therefore incommunicable, unrepresentative. It is not felt by any one else to realize his ideal, but seems foreign to him, forced and unamiable. Every nation loves its idiosyncrasies and, until it reflects, thinks its own balance of faculties, like its language, more natural than other people's. But the prophets of Germanism have turned this blameless love of home and its sanctities into a deliberate dogma that everything German has a divine superiority. This dogma they have foisted on a flattered and trustful nation, with the command to foist it on the rest of the world. The fatuity of this is nothing new, many nations and religions having shared it in their day, and we could afford to laugh at it, if by direct and indirect coercion it did not threaten to trespass upon our liberties.

What is universally acceptable in German _Kultur_ is what it contains that is not German but human, what with praiseworthy docility it has borrowed from the ancients, from Christianity, from the less intentional culture of its modern neighbours. The Teutonic accent which these elements have acquired is often very engaging; it adds to them a Gothic charm for the lack of which mankind would be the poorer. But the German manner, in art, in philosophy, in government, is no better--in its broad appeal to human nature we may fairly say it is worse--than the classic manner which it hopes to supersede. It is avowedly a product of will, arbitrary, national, strained; it is not superior to what other nations possess or may create but only different, not advanced but eccentric. To study it and use it for a stimulus may be profitable in times and places of spiritual famine or political chaos, but to impose it as normal, not to say as supreme, would be a plain invasion of human liberty.

42

LIBERALISM AND CULTURE

Modern reformers, religious and political, have usually retained the classic theory of orthodoxy, namely, that there is one right or true system--democracy and free thought, for instance--which it is the reformer's duty to establish in the place of prevalent abuses. Certainly Luther and Calvin and the doctrinaires of the French revolution only meant to substitute one orthodoxy for another, and what they set forth they regarded as valid for all men and forever. Nevertheless they had a greater success in discrediting the received system than in establishing their own, and the general effect of their reforms was to introduce the modern conception of liberty, the liberty of liberalism.

This consists in limiting the prescriptions of the law to a few points, for the most part negative, leaving it to the initiative and conscience of individuals to order their life and conversation as they like, provided only they do not interfere with the same freedom in others. In practice liberal countries have never reached this ideal of peaceful anarchy, but have continued to enforce state education, monogamy, the vested rights of property, and sometimes military service. But within whatever limits, liberty is understood to lie in the individual being left alone, so that he may express his personal impulses as he pleases in word and action.

A philosopher can readily see that this liberal ideal implies a certain view about the relations of man in the universe. It implies that the ultimate environment, divine or natural, is either chaotic in itself or undiscoverable by human science, and that human nature, too, is either radically various or only determinable in a few essentials, round which individual variations play _ad libitum_. For this reason no normal religion, science, art, or way of happiness can be prescribed. These remain always open, even in their foundations, for each man to arrange for himself. The more things are essentially unsettled and optional, the more liberty of this sort there may safely be in the world and the deeper it may run.

Man, however, is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but hates to stand alone in his opinions. And he is so imitative that what he thinks he most wishes to do is whatever he sees other people doing. Hence if compulsory organization disappears a thousand free and private organizations at once take its place. Virginal lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people retain their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample any and every other form of life. Liberalism does not go very deep; it is an adventitious principle, a mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind which Matthew Arnold called culture.

Primitive, dragooned, unanimous ages cannot possess culture. What they possess is what the Germans call a _Kultur_, some type or other of manners, laws, implements, arts, religion. When these national possessions are perused and relished by some individual who does not take them for granted and who understands and judges them as if from outside, his acquaintance with them becomes an element in his culture; and if he is at home in many such forms of life and thought, his culture is the more perfect. It should ideally be culled from everywhere. Culture is a triumph of the individual over society. It is his way of profiting intellectually by a world he has not helped to make.

Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice. Out of the public disarray of beliefs and efforts it gathers its private collection of curiosities, much as amateurs stock their museums with fragments of ancient works. It possesses a wealth of vicarious experience and historical insight which comforts it for having nothing of its own to contribute to history. The man of culture abounds in discriminating sentiments; he lives under the distant influence of exalted minds; his familiar thoughts at breakfast are intimate appreciations of poetry and art, and if his culture is really mellow, he sometimes smiles a little at his own culture.

Culture came into the modern world with the renaissance, when personal humours and remote inspiration broke in upon the consecrated mediaeval mind. Piety and learning had their intrinsic charms, but, after all, they had been cultivated for the sake of ulterior duties and benefits, and in order to appropriate and hand down the revealed wisdom which opened the way to heaven. Culture, on the contrary, had no ulterior purpose, no forced unity. It was an aroma inhaled by those who walked in the evening in the garden of life. Far from being a means to religion, it threw religion also into the context of human experience, and touched its mysteries and quarrels with judgement and elegance. It liberated the studious mind from obligatory or national discipline, and as far as possible from all bonds of time, place, utility, and co-operation, kindling sympathies by preference with what was most exotic, and compensating the mind for the ignominious necessity of having to be, in practical matters, local and partisan. Culture was courteous, open, unconscious of self; it was the joy of living every life but one's own. And its moral side--for everything has its moral side--lay in the just judgements it fostered, the clear sense it awakened of the different qualities and values of things. The scale of values established by the man of culture might sometimes be fanciful or frivolous, but he was always most scrupulous, according to his lights, in distinguishing the better from the worse. This conscientiousness, after all, is the only form of morality that a liberal society can insist upon.

The days of liberalism are numbered. First the horrors of competition discredited it, and now the trial of war, which it foolishly thought it could elude. The vogue of culture, too, has declined. We see that the man whose success is merely personal--the actor, the sophist, the millionaire, the aesthete--is incurably vulgar. The rightness of liberalism is exactly proportional to the diversity of human nature, to its vague hold on its ideals. Where this vagueness and play of variation stop, and they stop not far below the surface, the sphere of public organization should begin. It is in the subsoil of uniformity, of tradition, of dire necessity that human welfare is rooted, together with wisdom and unaffected art, and the flowers of culture that do not draw their sap from that soil are only paper flowers.

43

THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together. Liberals believe that free inquiry, free invention, free association, and free trade are sure to produce prosperity. I have no doubt they are right in this; the nineteenth century, that golden age of liberalism, certainly saw a great increase in wealth, in science, and in comforts. What the ancients had before them was a different side of the question; they had no experience of liberalism; they expected to be state-ridden in their religion, their customs, and their military service; even in their personal and family morals they did not begrudge the strictest discipline; their states needed to be intensely unified, being small and in constant danger of total destruction. Under these circumstances it seemed clear to them that prosperity, however it might have been produced, was dangerous to liberty. Prosperity brought power; and when a people exercises control over other peoples its government becomes ponderous even at home; its elaborate machinery cannot be stopped, and can hardly be mended; the imperial people becomes the slave of its commitments. Moreover, prosperity requires inequalities of function and creates inequalities of fortune; and both too much work and too much wealth kill liberty in the individual. They involve subjection to _things_; and this is contrary to what the ancients, who had the pride of noble animals, called freedom. Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.

I often wonder, looking at my rich friends, how far their possessions are facilities and how far they are impediments. The telephone, for instance, is a facility if you wish to be in many places at once and to attend to anything that may turn up; it is an impediment if you are happy where you are and in what you are doing. Public motor-vehicles, public libraries, and public attendants (such as waiters in hotels, when they wait) are a convenience, which even the impecunious may enjoy; but private automobiles, private collections of books or pictures, and private servants are, to my thinking, an encumbrance: but then I am an old fogy and almost an ancient philosopher, and I don't count. I prize civilization, being bred in towns and liking to hear and to see what new things people are up to. I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Perhaps what liberalism aspires to marry with liberty is not so much prosperity as progress. Progress means continued change for the better; and it is obvious that liberty will conduce to progress in all those things, such as writing poetry, which a man can pursue without aid or interference from others: where aid is requisite and interference probable, as in politics, liberty conduces to progress only in so far as people are unanimous, and spontaneously wish to move in the same direction. Now what is the direction of change which seems progress to liberals? A pure liberal might reply, The direction of liberty itself: the ideal is that every man should move in whatever direction he likes, with the aid of such as agree with him, and without interfering with those who disagree. Liberty so conceived would be identical with happiness, with spontaneous life, blamelessly and safely lived; and the impulse of liberalism, to give everybody what he wants, in so far as that is possible, would be identical with simple kindness. Benevolence was one of the chief motives in liberalism in the beginning, and many a liberal is still full of kindness in his private capacity; but politically, as a liberal, he is something more than kind. The direction in which many, or even most, people would like to move fills him with disgust and indignation; he does not at all wish them to be happy, unless they can be happy on his own diet; and being a reformer and a philanthropist, he exerts himself to turn all men into the sort of men he likes, so as to be able to like them. It would be selfish, he thinks, to let people alone. They must be helped, and not merely helped to what they desire--that might really be very bad for them--but helped onwards, upwards, in the _right_ direction. Progress could not be rightly placed in a smaller population, a simpler economy, more moral diversity between nations, and stricter moral discipline in each of them. That would be progress backwards, and if it made people happier, it would not make the liberal so. Progress, if it is to please him, must continue in the direction in which the nineteenth century progressed, towards vast numbers, material complexity, moral uniformity, and economic interdependence. The best little boy, for instance, according to the liberal ideal, desires to be washed, to go to school, to do Swedish exercises, and to learn everything out of books. But perhaps the individual little boy (and according to the liberal philosophy his individuality is sacred, and the only judge of what is good or true for him is his own consciousness) desires to go dirty, to make mud-pies in the street, and to learn everything by experience or by report from older boys. When the philanthropist runs up to the rescue, this little ingrate snivels at him the very principle of liberal liberty, "Let me alone." To inform such an urchin that he does not know what is good for him, that he is a slave to bad habits and devilish instincts, that true freedom for him can only come of correcting himself, until he has learned to find happiness in virtue--plainly that would be to abandon liberalism, and to preach the classical doctrine that the good is not liberty but wisdom. Liberalism was a protest against just such assumptions of authority. It emphatically refused to pursue an eventual stoical freedom, absurdly so called, which was to come when we had given up everything we really wanted--the mock freedom of service. In the presence of the little boy liberal philosophy takes a middle course. It is convinced--though it would not do to tell him so prematurely--that he must be allowed to go dirty for a time, until sufficient experience of filth teaches him how much more comfortable it is to be clean; also that he will go to school of his own accord if the books have pictures enough in them, and if the teacher begins by showing him how to make superior mud-pies. As to morals and religion, the boy and his companions will evolve the appropriate ones in time out of their own experience, and no others would be genuine.

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs. If you refuse to move in the prescribed direction, you are not simply different, you are arrested and perverse. The savage must not remain a savage, nor the nun a nun, and China must not keep its wall. If the animals remain animals it is somehow through a failure of the will in them, and very sad. Classic liberty, though only a name for stubborn independence, and obedience to one's own nature, was too free, in one way, for the modern liberal. It accepted all sorts of perfections, animal, human, and divine, as final after their kind, each the seat of a sufficient virtue and happiness. It was polytheistic. Between master and slave, between man and woman, it admitted no moral advance or development; they were, or might be, equally perfect. Inequality was honourable; amongst the humblest there could be dignity and sweetness; the higher snobbery would have been absurd, because if you were not content to be what you were now, how could you ever be content with anything? But the transcendental principle of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own house; no one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same unhomely destination. The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns. In the interval, happiness is not to be found in being a fixed star, as bright and pure as possible, even if only for a season; happiness is to flow and dissolve in sympathy with one's higher destiny.

The motion of progress is thus merged with that of universal evolution, dropping the element of liberty and even of improvement. Nevertheless, in the political expression of liberalism, liberty took the first innings. Protestants began by asserting the right of private Judgement in interpreting scripture; transcendentalists ended by asserting the divine right of the individual to impose his own spirit on everything he touched. His duty to himself, which was also his deepest instinct, was to suck in from the widest possible field all that was congenial to him, and to reject, down to his very centre, whatever might thwart or offend. Sometimes he carried his consistency in egotism to the length of denying that anything he could not digest could possibly exist, or that the material world and foreign nations were more than ideal pawns in the game he played with himself for his self-development. Even when not initiated into these transcendental mysteries, he was filled with practical self-trust, the desire to give himself freedom, and the belief that he deserved it. There was no need of exploring anything he was not tempted to explore; he had an equal right to his opinion, whatever the limits of his knowledge; and he should be coerced as little as possible in his action. In specific matters, for the sake of expediency, he might be willing to yield to the majority; but only when his vote had been counted, and as a sort of insurance against being disturbed in his residual liberty.

There was a general conviction behind all these maxims, that tradition corrupts experience. All sensation--which is the test of matters of fact--is somebody's sensation; all reasoning is somebody's reasoning, and vitally persuasive as it first comes; but when transmitted the evidence loses its edge, words drop their full meaning, and inert conventions falsify the insights of those who had instituted them. Therefore, reform, revision, restatement are perpetually required: any individual, according to this view, who honestly corrected tradition was sure to improve upon it. Whatsoever was not the fresh handiwork of the soul and true to its present demand was bad for that soul. A man without traditions, if he could only be materially well equipped, would be purer, more rational, more virtuous than if he had been an heir to anything. _Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist_! Blessed are the orphans for they shall deserve to have children; blessed the American! Philosophy should be transcendental, history romantic and focussed in one's own country, politics democratic, and art individual and above convention. Variety in religious dogma would only prove the truth--that is, the inwardness--of inspiration.

Yet if this transcendental freedom had been the whole of liberalism, would not the animals, such of them at least as are not gregarious, have been the most perfect liberals? Are they not ruled wholly from within? Do they not enjoy complete freedom of conscience and of expression? Does Mrs. Grundy interfere with their spontaneous actions? Are they ever compelled to fight except by their own impulse and in their private interest? Yet it was not the ideal of liberalism to return to nature; far from it. It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, "it is their nature to." Dogs, according to transcendental philosophy, ought to improve their nature, and to behave better. A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort, and general information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal. I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man to be free and autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of life which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal system has ever liked it.

What about liberty in love? If there is one ingenuous and winged creature among the immortals, it is Eros; the freer and more innocent love is, the more it will flutter, the farther it will range, and the higher it will soar. But at the touch of matter, of conditions, of consequences, how all its freedom shrivels, or turns into tragedy! What prohibitions, what hypocrisies, what responsibilities, what sorrows! The progress of civilization compels love to respect the limits set to it by earlier vows, by age, sex, class, race, religion, blood relationship, and even fictitious relationship; bounds of which the impertinent Eros himself knows nothing. Society smothers the imp altogether in the long christening-clothes of domestic affection and religious duty. What was once a sensuous intoxication, a mystic rapture, an enchanted friendship, becomes all a question of money, of habit, of children. British liberalism has been particularly cruel to love; in the Victorian era all its amiable impulses were reputed indecent, until a marriage certificate suddenly rendered them godly, though still unmentionable. And what liberty does even the latest radicalism offer to the heart? Liberty to be divorced; divorced at great expense, with shabby perjuries and public scandal, probably in order to be at once married again, until the next divorce. Was it not franker and nobler to leave love, as in Spain, to the poets; to let the stripling play the guitar as much as he liked in the moonlight, exchange passionate glances, whisper daily at the lattice, and then, dressing the bride in black, to dismiss free fancy at the church door, saying: Henceforth let thy names be charity and fidelity and obedience?

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy; but liberalism may bring large opportunities for achievement in a man's outward life. It intensifies--because it renders attainable--the lure of public distinction, of luxury, of love surrounded by refined pleasures. The liberal state stimulates the imagination of an ambitious man to the highest degree. Those who have a good start in the universal competition, or sharp wits, or audacity, will find plenty of prizes awaiting them. With the pride of wealth, when it is great, there comes the pride of munificence; in the suburbs of wealth there is culture, and in its service there is science. When science can minister to wealth and intelligence to dominion, both can be carried on the shoulders of the plutocracy which dominates the liberal state; and they can fill it with innumerable comforts and marvellous inventions. At the same time, nothing will hinder the weaker members of rich families from becoming clergymen or even scholars or artists; or they may range over the five continents, hunt whatever wild beasts remain in the jungle, and write books about savages.

Whether these prizes offered by liberal society are worth winning, I cannot say from experience, never having desired them; but the aspects of modern life which any one may observe, and the analytic picture of it which the novelists supply, are not very attractive. Wealth is always, even when most secure, full of itch and fear; worry about health, children, religion, marriage, servants; and the awful question of where to live, when one may live anywhere, and yet all seems to depend on the choice. For the politician, politics are less important than his private affairs, and less interesting than bridge; and he has always a party, or a wicked opposition, on which to throw the blame if his careless measures turn out badly. No one in office can be a true statesman, because a true statesman is consistent, and public opinion will never long support any consistent course. What the successful man in modern society really most cares about is love; love for him is a curious mixture of sensuality, vanity, and friendship; it lights up all the world of his thought and action with its secret and unsteady flame. Even when mutual and legal, it seems to be three-quarters anxiety and sorrow; for if nothing worse happens to lovers, they grow old. I hear no laughter among the rich which is not forced and nervous. I find no sense of moral security amongst them, no happy freedom, no mastery over anything. Yet this is the very cream of liberal life, the brilliant success for the sake of which Christendom was overturned, and the dull peasantry elevated into factory-hands, shopkeepers, and chauffeurs. When the lists are open to all, and the one aim of life is to live as much as possible like the rich, the majority must needs be discouraged. The same task is proposed to unequal strengths, and the competition emphasizes the inequality. There was more encouragement for mediocre people when happiness was set before them in mediocrity, or in excellence in some special craft. Now the mass, hopelessly out of the running in the race for wealth, falls out and drifts into squalor. Since there is liberty, the listless man will work as little and drink as much as he can; he will crawl into whatever tenement he can get cheapest, seek the society in which least effort is demanded and least shame is felt, have as many children as improvidence sends him, let himself out, at a pinch, for whatever service and whatever wages he can obtain, drift into some syndicated servitude or some great migration, or sink in solitude into the deepest misery. He then becomes a denizen of those slimy quarters, under the shadow of railway bridges, breweries, and gas-works, where the blear lights of a public-house peer through the rain at every corner, and offer him the one joy remaining in life; for joy is not to be mentioned in the same breath as the female prowling by the door, hardly less befuddled and bedraggled than the lurching idlers whom she endeavours to entice; but perhaps God does not see all this, because a pall hangs over it perpetually of impenetrable smoke. The liberal system, which sought to raise the individual, has degraded the masses; and this on so vast a scale and to so pitiable a degree, that the other element in liberalism, philanthropic zeal, has come again to the fore. Liberty go hang, say the new radicals; let us save the people. Liberal legislation, which was to have reduced government to the minimum of police control, now has undertaken public education, social reform, and even the management of industry.