Study, reasoning and care in judgment are unknown to them . . . .'
'In the foregoing pages,' the author adds at the end of the a rticle, 'we have dealt more with Owen's life than with his teachings; we desired to express our sympathy with the practical good which he brought about, and at the same time to announce our complete disagreement with his theories. The story of his life is more interesting than his writings. While the former may be useful and entertaining (amuse), the latter can only bewilder and bore the reader. But here, too, we feel that he lived too long: too long for himself; too long for his friends, and even longer for his biographers! '
The shade of the mild old man hovered before me: there were bitter tears in his eyes and, mournfully shaking his old, old head he seemed to try to say: 'Have I deserved this?' but he could not, and fell sobbing on his knees, and it was as though Lord Brougham hastened to screen him once more and made a sign to Rigby for him to be carried back as quickly as possible to the graveyard, before the frightened crowd had time to come to its senses and upbraid him with everything, everything that to him was dear and sacred, and even \vith having lived so long, with spoiling the lives of others, with unnecessarily taking up room by the fire. In fact, Owen, I think, was of the same age as
·wellington, that sublime incompetent in time of peace.
'In spite of his mistakes, his pride, his fall, Owen deserves our recognition.'-vVhat more could he expect?
Yet how is it that the curses of a Bishop of Oxford, Winchester or Chichester, damning Owen, are easier for us to bear than this requital of his services? It is because on that side there is passion, outraged faith, and on this, narrow dispassionatenessthe dispassionateness not simply of a man but of the judge in the court of first instance. In the court of ecclesiastical jurisdiction it is all very easy to judge the behaviour of some ordinary libertine, but not of such a man as Mirabeau or Fox. With a folding foot-rule it is easy to measure cloth with great accuracy, but it is very inconvenient for estimating sidereal space.
It is possible that for correctness in judging affairs which are outside the competence of either a police court or arithmetical verification, partiality is more necessary than justice. Passion may not only blind, but may also penetrate more deeply into the
England
493
object, embrace it in its own fire and be blind to everything else.
Give a pedantic schoolmaster, if only he is not endowed by nature with aesthetic understanding-give him to analyse anything you like-Faust, Hamlet-and you will see how the 'fat'
prince of Denmark wastes away, crumpled up by a secondaryschool doctrinaire. With the cynicism of Noah's son he will display the nakedness and deficiencies of dramas which are the delight of generation after generation.
There is in the world nothing great or poPtical that could endure the gaze-not of stupidity, and not of wisdom-either: I mean the gaze of ordinary, vital intelligence. The French have hit the mark so accurately with their proverb that no man is a hero to his valet.
'If a beggar gets hold of a horse,' as people say and as the critic of the Westminster Review repeats, 'he'll hop on to its back and gallop off to the devil. . . . An "ex-linen-draper" ' (this expression is used several times) 13 'who has suddenly become' (mark: after twenty years of unremitting toil and colossal success) 'an important personage, on a friendly footing with dukes and ministers, must naturally become puffed up and make himself ridiculous, since he has not much moderation and not much sense.' The ex-linen-draper became so puffed up that his village was too cramped for him and he wanted to reconstruct the world ; with these pretensions he ruined himself, failed in everything and covered himself with ridicule.
But this is not all. If Owen had preached only his economic revolution, that folly would have been forgiven him, the first time, in the classic land of madness. This is proved by the fact that ministers and bishops, parliamentary committees and congresses of mill-owners sought his advice. The success of New Lanark attracted everyone: not a single statesman, not a single learned man left England without having travelled to see Owen ; even (as we have seen) Nicholas Pavlovich himself vis.ited him, and wanted to entice him to Russia and his son into the army.
Crowds of people filled the passages and vestibules of the halls where Owen was speaking. But Owen, with his audacity, destroyed at one blow, in a quarter of an hour, this colossal popularity which was based on colossal incomprehension of what he 13 Fourier began by being an assistant in a shop of his father's where cloth was sold. Proudhon was the son of an illegitimate peasant. \Vhat a base beginning for socialism! Is it from such demi-gods and semi-robbers that dynasties draw their origins?
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
494
was saying; he saw this, and dotted the i, and the most dangerous i, too.
It happened on 2 1 st August, 1 8 1 7. The Protestant hypocrites, the most troublesome and glutinously boring, had long been plaguing him. 0\ven declined disputing with them, so far as he was able, but they gave him no peace. A certain inquisitor and ovmer of a paper-mill, Philips by name, went so far in his ecclesiastical fury that, in a parliamentary committee, suddenly, out of the blue, in the middle of an important discussion, he started badgering Owen with a cross-examination on what he believed and what he did not believe.
Instead of answering the paper-mill-owner with any such subtleties as Faust uses with Gretchen, Owen, the ex-linendraper, preferred to reply from the height of a platform, before a huge gathering of people, at a public meeting in England, in London, in the City, in the London Tavernf14 On this side of Temple Bar, near the umbrella of the cathedral under which the old City clings together, in the neighbourhood of Gog and Magog, within sight of Whitehall and of the secular cathedralsynagogue of the Bank, he announced clearly and unequivocally, loudly and extraordinarily simply, that the chief obstacle to the harmonious development of a new society was-religion. 'The absurdities of fanaticism have made of man a feeble, crazy beast, an insane bigot, a canting hypocrite. With the existing religious concepts,' Owen concluded, 'not only will the communal villages proposed by me not be built, but with them Paradise would not long continue to be Paradise.'15
Owen was so convinced that this act of 'folly' was an act of honour and apostleship, the inevitable consequence of his teaching, that he was compelled by probity and candour, by his whole life, to promulgate his opinion thirty years afterwards, \vhen he 14 Owen's speech of 21st August, 1 8 1 7, to which Herzen refers, was printed at the same time, with the title 'A l\'ew State of Society.' (A.S.) 15 Herzen's quotation of Owen's words is not exact. ( A.S.) Frank Podmore in Robert Owen . . . ( Hutchinson, 1 906) . I, 2%-7, quotes this passage of Owen's speech as follows: 'Then. my friends, I tell you, that hitherto you have been prt>vented from Hen knowing what happiness really is. solely in consequence of the errors-gross errors-that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to man. And, in consequence, they have ma,Je man the most incompetent, the most miserable being in existence. By the C'rrors of these systems he has been made a weak, imbecile animal ; a furious bigot and fanatic; or a miserable hypocrite ; and should these qualities be carried, not only into the projected villages, but into Paradise itself, a Paradise would no longer be found! . . .' (R.)