Without Prejudice

by Израэль Зангвилл

  "How do they get to see them?"

  "Oh, as soon as a couple passes the P. D. and receives the P. C. they appear in the illustrated papers-especially the ladies' papers. 'Graduates of the Week' is the heading. And then there is the P. T.-the Pathological Tree."

  I looked at the publisher in perplexity.

  "Gracious! I forget this is your first visit to Ante-land," he said, apologetically." Look! Here are some P.Ts. my lawyer has just been looking over for me, the property of parents whose advertisements for children I have been answering. My friends are rather anxious I should incarnate."

  I surveyed the parchment roll with curiosity. It was a tree, on the model of a genealogical tree, but tracing the hygienic record of the family.

  "In our sect," said Marindin impressively, "it will become the pride of the family to have an unblemished pedigree, and any child who gets himself born into such a family will do so with the responsibility of carrying on the noble tradition of the house and living up to the sanitary scutcheon-sante oblige. When children begin to be fastidious about the families they are born into, parents will have to improve, or die childless. And, as the love of offspring springs eternal in the human breast, this will have an immense influence upon the evolution of the race to higher goals. I do not know any force of the future on which we can count more hopefully than on the refinement resulting from the struggle for offspring and the survival of the fittest to be parents. Undesirable families will become extinct. The unborn will subtly mould the born to higher things. Childlessness will become again what it was in the Orient-a shame and a reproach."

  "Yes," asserted the publisher, smoothing out the P.Ts.; "the old unreasoned instinct and repugnance will be put on a true basis when it is seen that childlessness is a proof of unworthiness-a brand of failure."

  "As old-maidenhood is, less justly, to-day," I put in.

  "Quite so," said Marindin eagerly. "In their anxiety to be worthy of selection by Posterity, parents will rise to heights of health and holiness of which our sick generation does not dream. If they do not, woe to them! They will be remorselessly left to die out without issue.

  "The change has begun; our sect is spreading fast. In the course of a century or two physical and mental deformities will vanish from the earth." His eye flashed prophetic fire.

  "So soon?" I said, with a sceptical smile.

  "How could they survive?" Marindin inquired scathingly.

  "Is it likely any of us would consent to be born hunchbacks?" broke in the publisher; "or to enter families with hereditary gout? Would any sane Antelander put himself under the yoke of animal instincts or tendencies to drink? Ah, here is a bibulous grandfather!" and he tossed one of the P. Ts. disdainfully aside, though I observed that the old gentleman in question had been an English Earl.

  "But, Mr. Fore," I protested, "will all the unborn attach such importance to the pathological pedigree as you do? What power will make them train up their parents in the way they should go?"

  "The greatest power on earth," broke in Marindin; "the power of selfishness, backed by education. Enlightened selfishness is all that is needed to bring about the millennium. The selfishness of to-day is so stupid. Let the unborn care only for their own skins, and they will improve the parents, and be well brought up themselves by the good parents they have selected."

  "But come now, Mr. Fore," I said; "the new system has been partially at work, I understand, for some time. Do you assure me, on your word of honor as an unborn publisher, that the filial franchise has been invariably exercised wisely and well?"

  "Of course not," interrupted Marindin. "Haven't I already told you there has been much fumbling and experimentation, some souls being born for money and some for beauty and some for position? But pioneers must always suffer-for the benefit of those who come after."

  "Certainly there have been rash and improvident births," admitted the publisher. "Hasty births, premature births, secret births, morganatic births, illegitimate births, and every variety of infelicitous intrusion upon your planet. The rash are born too early, the cautious too late; some even repent on the very brink of birth and elect to be stillborn. But in the majority of cases birth is the outcome of mature deliberation; a contract entered into with a full sense of the responsibilities of the situation."

  "But what do you understand by illegitimate birth?" I asked.

  "The selection of parents not possessing the P.C. There are always eccentric spirits who would defy the dearest and most sacred institutions organised by society for its own protection. We are gradually creating a public opinion to discountenance such breaches of the law, and such perils to the commonweal, subversive as they are of all our efforts to promote the general happiness and holiness. Even in your uncivilised communities," continued the publisher, "these unlicensed and illegitimate immigrants are stamped with life-long opprobrium and subjected to degrading disabilities; how much infamy should then attach to them when the sin they are born in is their own!"

  "A lesser degree of illegitimacy," added Marindin, "is to be born into a family already containing the full number it is licensed for. This happens particularly in rich families, introductions into which are naturally most sought after. It is still a moot point whether the birth should be legitimatised on the death of one of the other children."

  "But it is the indirect results that I look forward to most," he went on after a pause. "For example, the solution of Nihilism in Russia."

  "What has that to do with the unborn?" I asked, quite puzzled.

  "Don't you see that the czarship will die out?"

  "How so?"

  "No one will risk being born into the Imperial family. I should say that birth within four degrees of consanguinity of the Czar would be so rare that it would come to be regarded as criminal."

  "Yes, that and many another question will be solved quite peaceably," said the publisher. "You saw me reject a noble grandfather; the growth of democratic ideals among us must ultimately abolish hereditary aristocracy. So, too, the question of second marriages and the deceased wife's sister may be left to the taste and ethical standards of the unborn, who can easily, if they choose, set their faces against such unions."

  "You see the centre of gravity would be shifted to the pre-natal period," explained Marindin, "when the soul is more liable to noble influences. The moment the human being is born it is definitely moulded; all your training can only modify the congenital cast. But the real potentialities are in the unborn. While there is not life there is hope. When you commence to educate the child it is already too late. But if the great forces of education are brought to bear upon the unformed, you may bring all Itigh qualities to birth. Think, for instance, how this will contribute to the cause of religion. The unborn will simply eliminate the false religions by refusing to be born into them. Persuade the unborn, touch them, convert them! You, I am sure, Mr. Fore," he said, turning to the worthy publisher, "would never consent to be born into the wrong religion!"

  "Not if hell-fire was the penalty of an unhappy selection," replied Mr. Fore.

  "Of course not," said Marindin. "Missionaries have always flown in the face of psychology. Henceforward, moreover, Jews will be converted at a period more convenient for baptism."

  "We hope to mould politics, too," added the publisher, "by boycotting certain races and replenishing others."

  "Yes," cried Marindin; "it is my hope that by impregnating the unborn with a specific set of prejudices, they might be induced to settle in particular countries, and I cannot help thinking that patriotism would be more intelligent when it was voluntary; self-imposed from admiration of the ideals and history of a particular people. Indeed this seems to me absolutely the only way in which, reason can be brought to bear on the great war question, for in lieu of that loud eloquence of Woolwich infants there would be exercised the silent pressure of the unborn, who could simply annihilate an undesirable nation, or decimate an offensive district by refusing to be born in it. Surely this would be the most rational
way of settling the ever-menacing Franco-Prussian quarrel."

  "I observe already a certain anti-Gallic feeling in Ante-land," put in the publisher. "A growing disinclination to be born in France, if not a preference for being made in Germany. But these things belong to la haute politique"

  "My own suspicion is," I ventured to suggest, "that there is a growing disinclination to be born anywhere, and this new privilege of free choice will simply bring matters to a climax. Your folks, confronted by the endless problem of choosing their own country and century, their own family and their own religion, will dilly-dally and shilly-shally and put off birth so long that they will never change their condition at all. They will come to the conviction that it is better not to be born; better to bear the evils that they know than fly to others that they know not of. What if the immigration of destitute little aliens into our planet ceased altogether?"

  Marindin shrugged his shoulders, and there came into his face that indescribable look of the hopeless mystic.

  "Then humanity would have reached its goal: it would come naturally and gently to an end. The euthanasia of the race would be accomplished, and the glorified planet, cleansed of wickedness at last, would take up its part again in the chorus of the spheres. But like most ideals, I fear this is but a pleasant dream." Then, as the publisher turned away to replace the P.Ts. in a safe, he added softly: "Intelligence is never likely to be so widely diffused in Ante-land that the masses would fight shy of birth. There would always be a sufficient proportion of unborn fools left who would prefer the palpabilities of bodily form to the insubstantialities of pre-natal existence. Between you and me, our friend the publisher is extremely anxious to be published."

  "And yet he seems intelligent enough," I argued.

  "Ah, well, it cannot be denied that there are some lives decidedly worth living, and our friend Fore will probably bring up his parents to the same profession as himself."

  "No doubt there would always be competition for the best births ," I observed, smiling.

  "Yes," replied Marindin sadly; "the struggle for existence will always continue among the unborn."

  Suddenly a thought set me a-grin. "Why, what difference can the choice of parents make after all?" I cried. "Suppose you had picked my parents-you would have been I, and I should be somebody else, and somebody else would be you. And there would be the three of us, just the same as now," and I chuckled aloud.

  "You seem to have had pleasant dreams, old man," replied Marindin. But his voice sounded strange and far away.

  * * * * *

  I opened my eyes wide in astonishment, and saw him buried in an easy-chair, with a book in his hand and two tears rolling down his cheeks.

  "I've been reading of Tiny Tim while you snoozed," he said apologetically.

  * * * * *

  XXIII. PATER AND PROSE

  It seems only yesterday-and it is only yesteryear-since Walter Pater sat by my side in a Club garden, and listened eloquently to my after-lunch causerie, and now he is gone

  To where, beyond the Voices, there is Peace.

  You grasp that his eloquence was oracular, silent. He had an air. There was in him-as in his work-a suggestion of aloofness from the homespun world. I suspect he had never heard Chevalier. I should not wonder if he had never even heard of him. He was wrapped in the atmosphere of Oxford, and though "the last enchantments of the Middle Ages" in no wise threw their glamour over his thought, there was a cloistral distinction in his attitude. He reminded me of my friend the Cambridge professor, who, when the O'Shea business was filling eight columns daily of the papers that deprecate honest art, innocently asked me if there was anything new about Parnell. Pater did not probably carry detachment from the contemporary so far as that, but he was in harmony with his hedonistic creed in permitting only a select fraction of the cosmos to have the entry to his consciousness. A delightful, elegantly-furnished consciousness it was, with the latest improvements, and with every justification for exclusiveness. But there is in men of Mr. Pater's stamp something of what might be termed the higher Pod-snappery. They put things aside with the wave of a white-gloved hand: this and that do not exist, Mr. Podsnap himself-O the irony of it!-among them. Like Mr. Podsnap, though on a different plane, they take themselves and their view of life too seriously. When I told Mr. Pater that there was a pun in his "Plato and Platonism," he asked anxiously for its precise locality, so that he might remove it. This I could not remember, but I told him I did not see why he should remove one of the best things in the book. But my assurances that the pun was excellent did not seem to tranquillise him. Now, why should not a philosopher make a pun? Shakespeare was an incorrigible punster. Why should a man's life be divided into little artificial sections, like the labelled heads in the phrenologist's window? I do not want to see a man put on his Sunday clothes to talk about religion. But a congenital inelasticity is fostered in the atmosphere of common-rooms, there where solemn-footed serving-men present the port with sacerdotal ceremonies, and where, if the dons are no longer (in the classic phrase of Gibbon) "sunk in port and superstition," the port is still a superstition. This absence of humour, this superhuman seriousness bred of heavy traditions peculiarly English, this sobriety nourished by sacerdotal port, give the victim quite a wrong sense of values and proportions. He mistakes University for Universe. His tastes become the measure of a creation of which he is the centre. Hence an abiding gravity that is ever on the brink of dulness. The Englishman cannot afford to be grave, the bore is so close at hand.

  And yet, if one did not take oneself seriously, I suppose nothing would ever be done. A kindly illusion about their importance in the scheme of things is Nature's instrument for getting work out of men. "Don't you think Flaubert took himself too seriously?" I heard a lady novelist ask a gentleman practitioner. Certainly his correspondence with George Sand reveals an anchorite of letters, who tortured the phrase and sacrificed sleep to the adjective, and the brothers De Goncourt-themselves very serious gentlemen-have recorded how he considered his book as good as finished because he had invented the "dying falls" of the music of his periods. But if Flaubert had sufficiently contemplated the infinities, the immense indifference of things, if, like the astronomer in search of a creed, he had concentrated his vision on the point to which the whole solar system is drifting, French prose would have lost some of its most wonderful pages; and had the late Mr. Pater been less troubled by the rose-leaf of style and more by the thorns of the time, English prose would have been the poorer by harmonies and felicities unsurpassed and unsurpassable. This is to ignore Pater the Philosopher and Pater the Critic. Of these persons there will be varying estimates. They have even in a sense, through the extravagances of a disciple, been subjected to the verdict of a British jury-a sufficiently ironic revenge upon the fastidious shrinker from the Philistines; and though, of course, it was not theories of art and philosophy that were being "tried by jury," yet these side-issues contributed to prejudice the twelve good men and true. But it is only congruous with the trend of democratic thought that everything should come under the censorship of the crowd, and the only wonder is that long ere this the vexed questions of our troubled time have not been solved by plebiscite .

  A leading New York paper is commended for its patronage of literature, because it offers large prizes for stories, the prizes to be awarded by the votes of its readers. If the crowd is capable of appraising literature, there is no reason why it should not take science and art similarly into its hands, nor why the counting of heads should not replace the marshalling of arguments in philosophy and ethics. In politics the mob has a right to be heard, because it has a right to express its grievances. Could an aristocracy be trusted to do justly by Demos, democracy would have no reason to be. But this right of the many-headed monster to a control of the governmental agencies that affect its own happiness, does not involve the ability to decide less selfish problems; and when, as rarely happens, abstract problems find themselves in the witness-box, then the "Palladium of British
liberty" becomes a mockery of justice. "Legal judgment of his peers," says Magna Charta; but when an exceptional man blunders into the dock, is he ever accorded a panel of his equals? Things are no better in France. When Flaubert was arraigned for his "Madame Bovary," he did not get a box of men of letters, though there is so much more sense of art in the citizens of Paris, that even by the bourgeois jury he was acquitted without a stain on the character of his book. The central figure of our English episode had nothing so creditable as an immoral book to his charge, but indirectly the relations of art and morality came into question, and he declared that he followed Pater, the one critic he recognised, in believing that there were no relations between art and morality, that a book could not be immoral, but might be something worse-badly written. Now, this is the favourite doctrine of Chelsea, and doubtless something may be said for it; but to put it forth, as the doctrine of Pater is a libel-almost a criminal libel-on that great writer. These young men who live for the Beautiful have only understood as much of Pater as would justify epicurean existence.

  Let us examine this pretension of the prophet of the importance of being flippant, to be a disciple of Pater.

  No doubt Pater was something of an Impressionist in his philosophy of life. An eloquent expounder of the Heracletian flux, [Greek lettering], of the relativity of systems of thought and conduct, and of the duty of seizing the flying moments-"failure in life is to form habits,"-he did not omit, like his one-sided disciples, to consider the quality of those moments. It was the highest quality you were to give to your moments as they passed; to fail to do this was "on this short day of frost and sun to sleep before evening." ("The Renaissance.") "Marius the Epicurean" was not an Epicurean in the sense in which the doctrines of Epicurus have been travestied through the ages: he turned away sickened from the barbarities of the gladiatorial combats, longing for the time when the forces of the future would create a heart that would make it impossible to be thus pleasured. If "Carpe diem" is Pater's motto, the hour is not to be plucked ignobly; if style is his watchword in art, style alone cannot make great Art, though it may make good Art. The distinction, between good Art and great Art depends immediately not on its form but on its matter. "It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as 'The Divine Comedy,' 'Paradise Lost,' 'Les Miserables,' the English Bible, are great art." ("Essay on Style.") Your Chelsea manikin would never dream of these things as great art: his whole soul is expressed in ballads and canzonets, in strange esoteric contes, in nocturnes and colour-symphonies, in the bric-a-brac of aesthetics. Furthermore let the soi-disant disciples ponder this explicit statement of the Master: "Given the conditions I haye tried to explain as constituting good art,-then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will also be great Art." Yes, if Pater protested against "the vulgarity which is dead to form," he was no less contemptuous of "the stupidity which is dead to the substance." ("Postscript to Appreciations.") If he fought shy of the Absolute, if he denied "fixed principles," and repudiated "every formula less living and flexible than life" ("Essay on Coleridge"), he could still sympathise passionately with Coleridge's hunger for the Eternal.