This is not the indignant old courtier of Catherine's time who, passed over for promotion at Court, grumbles at the younger generation, runs down the Winter Palace and cries up the Hall of Facets. No: this man, full of energy, long versed in affairs of state and theories deeply thought out, accustomed to regard the
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world calmly, like an Englishman and a thinker-this man at least could bear it no longer and, exposing himself to the wrath of the registrars of civilisation \vho live on the Neva and the bookmen with a Western education by the lVIoscow River, cried:
'V\'e are drowning!'
He was horrified by the constant deterioration of personalities, taste and style, by the inanity of men's interests and their absence of vigour; he looks closely, and sees clearly that everything is becoming shallow, commonplace, shoddy, trite, more
'respectable,' perhaps, but more banal. He sees in England (what Tocqueville observed in France) that standard, indistinguishable types are being evolved and, gravely shaking his head, he says to his contemporaries: 'Stop! Think again! Do you know where you are going? Look : rour soul is ebbing away.'
But why does he try to wake the sleepers? \Vhat path, what
\vay out has he devised for them? Like John the Baptist of old he threatens them with \vhat is coming and summons them to repentance; people will hardly be got moving a second time with this renunciatory lever. Mill n·ies shame on his contemporaries as Tacitus cried shame on his: he will not halt them by this means any more than Tacitus did. A few sad reproaches will not stem the ebbing of the soul, nor perhaps will any dam in the world.
'Men of another stamp,' he says, 'made England what it has been, and only men of another stamp can prevent its decline.'
But this deterioration of individuality, this want of temper, are only pathological facts, and admitting them is a very important step towards the way out; but it is not the way out. !\till upb1·aids the sick man and points to his sound ancestors: an odd sort of treatment, and hardly a magnanimous one.
Come: are we now to begin to reproach the lizard with the ant�diluvian ichthyosaurus? Is it the fault of one that it is little and the other was .big? Mill, frightened by the moral worthlessness, the spiritual mediocrity of his environment, cried out passionately and sorro\\·fully, like the champions in our old tales: 'Is there a man alive in the field ?'
V\'herefore did ht> summon him ? To tell him that he was a degenerate descendant of mighty forebears, and consequently ought to try to make himself like them.
For what? -Silence.
Robert Owen, too, was calling upon people for seventy years running, and equally to no purpose; but he was summoning thPm for something. \Vhethl·r this something was Utopia, phantasy or the truth is nut our business nO\v; what is important to us
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is that his summons had an object ; but Mill, smothering his contemporaries in the grim, Rembrandtesque shadows of the time of Cromwell and the Puritans, wants shopkeepers who are everlastingly giving short weight and short measure to tum from some poetic necessity, by some spiritual gymnastics, intoheroes!
We could likewise call up the monumental, menacing figures of the French Convention and set them beside the past, future and present French spies and espiciers, and begin a speech like Hamlet's:
Look here, upon this picture, and on this . .
Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars . . .
Look you now, what follows:
Here is your husband . . .
This would be very just, and even more offensive; but would this make anyone leave his vulgar but comfortable life, and that in order to be majestically bored like Cromwell or stoically take his head to the block like Danton?
It was easy for them to act as they did because they were ruled by a passionate conviction-une idee fixe.
Catholicism was such an idee fixe at one time, then Protestantism, science in the age of the Renaissance, revolution in the eighteenth century.
Where is that sacred monomania, that magnum ignotum, that riddle of the Sphinx of our civilisation? Where is the mighty conception, the passionate belief, the burning hope, which could temper the body like steel and bring the soul to such a pitch of feverish obduracy as feels neither pain nor, privation but walks with a firm step to the scaffold or the stake?
Look about you: what is capable of heartening individuals, uplifting peoples, shaking the masses? The religion of the Pope with his Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, or the religion with no Pope and its abstention from beer on the Sabbath Day? The arithmetical pantheism of universal suffrage or the idolatrous worship of monarchy? Superstitious belief in a republic or in parliamentary reform? . . . No, no: all this pales, ages and is bundled away, as once the gods of Olympus were bundled away when they descended from heaven, dislodged by new rivals risen from Golgotha.
Unfortunately our blackened idols do not command these sources of inspiration, or at all events Mill does not point them out.
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On the one hand, tht> English genius finds repellent an abstract generalisation, a bold, logical consistency; with his scepticism the Englishman feels that the extremes of logic, like the laws of pure mathematics, are not applicable without the introduction of the factor of the living environment. On the other hand, he has been accustomed physically and morally to do up all the buttons of his overcoat and turn up his collar, which protects him from damp winds and harsh intolerance. In that samP book of Mill's we see an example of this. With two or three blows of unusual dexterity he overturned Christian morality, somewhat unsteady on its feet, without saying anything in his whole book about Christianitv.
Instead of suggesting any way out Mill suddenly observes: 'In the development of peoples there is a limit, it seems, after which the people stands still, and becomes a China.'
When does this happen?
It happens, he replies, \vhen individualities begin to be effaced. to disappear among the masses; when everything is subjected to received customs, when the conception of good and evil is confused with the conception of conformity or non-conformity with what is accepted. The oppression of custom halts development, which properly consists in aspiration towards what is better, away from what is customary. The whole of history is made up of this struggle and, if the greater part of humanity has no histor�·, this is because its life is utterly subjected to custom.
Now let us see ho\v our author regards the present state of the educated world. He says that, in spite of the intellectual excellence of our times, everything is moving towards mediocrity, that faces are being lost in the crowd. This 'conglomerated mediocrity' hates everything that is sharply defined, original, outstanding: it imposes a common level upon everyone. And, just as in an average section of people there is not much intelligence and not many desires, so the miscellaneous mediocrity, like a viscous bog, submerges, on the one hand, everything that desires to extricate itself and, on the other, forestalls the disorderliness of eccentric individuals by educating new generations in the same flaccid mediocritv. The moral basis of behaviour consists principillly in living ilS other people do: '"\Voe to the man, and especially to the woman, who thinks of doing what nobody docs; but woP a lso to those \vho do not do what cvcrr one does.' For this sort of morality no intelligence nor <1ny particular will