THAT
this intimate organic treatment of which I speak is really indispensable,
will be clearly established by the annals of ancient Rome. The Romans
were a nation quite unique in the composition and general style of their
character; along with a predilection for practical energy, a purely
material habit of mind, and an indifference to orderly and logical methods
which suggest a strong affinity to the Anglo-Saxon temperament, they
possessed a robust and clear perception, and a strong practical contempt
for methods pronounced by hard experience to be ineffectual, which are
entirely un-English and allied rather to the clarity and impatience
of the Gaul. Moreover their whole character was moulded in a grand style,
such as has not been witnessed by any prior or succeeding age—so
much so that the striking description by which the Greek ambassador
expressed the temper of the Roman Senate, might with equal justice be
transferred to the entire people. They were a nation of Kings: that
is to say, they possessed the gift of handling the high things of life
in a grand and imposing style, and with a success, an astonishing sureness
of touch, only possible to a natural tact in government and a just,
I may say a royal instinct for affairs. Yet this grand, imperial nation,
even while it was most felicitous abroad in the manner and spirit in
which it dealt with foreign peoples, was at home convulsed to a surprising
extent by the worst forms of internal disorder:—and all for the
want of that clear, sane ideal which has so highly promoted the domestic
happiness of France and Athens. At first, indeed, the Romans inexpert
in political methods, were inclined to repose an implicit trust in machinery,
just as the English have been inclined from the primary stages of their
development, and just as we are led to do by the contagious influence
of the Anglomaniac disease. They hoped by the sole and mechanic action
of certain highly lauded institutions to remove the disorders with which
the Roman body politic was ailing. And though at Rome no less than among
ourselves, the social condition of the poor filled up the reform posters
and a consequent amelioration was loudly trumpeted by the popular leaders,
yet the genuine force of the movement was disposed, as is the genuine
force of the present Congress movement, to the minimising of purely
political inequality. But when the coveted institutions were in full
swing, a sense gradually dawned on the people that the middle class
had the sole enjoyment of any profit accruing from the change, as indeed
it is always to the middle class alone that any profit accrues from
the elimination of merely political inequality; but the great Roman
populace untouched by the change for which they had sacrificed their
ease and expended their best and highest energies, felt themselves pushed
from misery to misery and broke out again in a wild storm of rebellion.
But to maintain a stark persistence in unreason, to repose an unmoved
confidence in the bounded potency of a mechanic formula, proved ineffectual
by the cogent logic of hard experience; they had no thought, or if they
had the thought, they being a genuinely practical race, and not like
the English straining after practicality, had not the disposition. Hence
that mighty struggle was fought out with perplexed watchwords, amid
wild alarms and rumours of battle and in a confused medley of blood,
terror and unspeakable desolation. In that horror of great darkness,
the Roman world crashed on from ruin to ruin, until the strong hand
of Caesar stayed its descent to poise it on the stable foundation of
a sane and vigilant policy rigorously enforced by the fixed will of
a single despotic ruler. But the grand secret of his success and the
success of those puissant autocrats who inherited his genius and his
ideals, was the clear perception attained to by them that only by social
equality and the healing action of a firm despotism, could the disorders
of Rome be permanently eradicated. Maligned as they have been by those
who suffered from their astuteness and calm strength of will, the final
verdict of posterity will laud in them that terrible intensity of purpose
and even that iron indifference to personal suffering, which they evinced
in forcing the Caesarian policy to its bitter but salutary end. The
main lesson for us however is the pregnant conclusion that the Romans,
to whom we cannot deny the supreme rank in the sphere of practical success,
by attempting a cure through external and mechanic appliances entailed
on themselves untold misery, untold disorder, and only by a thorough
organic treatment restored the sanity, peace, settled government and
calm felicity of an entire world.
But perhaps Mr. Mehta will tell me "What have we to do with the
ancient Romans, we who have an entirely modern environment and suffer
from disorders peculiar to ourselves?" Well, the connection is
not perhaps so remote as Mr. Mehta imagines: I will not however press
that point, but rather appeal to the instance of two great European
nations, who also have an entirely modern environment and suffer or
have suffered from very similar maladies—and so end my long excursion
into the domain of abstract ideas.
As the living instances most nearly suggesting the diversity of impulse
and method, which is my present subject, I have had occasion to draw
a comparison between these two peoples, whom, by a singular caprice
of antithesis, chance has put into close physical proximity, but nature
has sundered as far as the poles in genius, temper and ideals. Whatever
healthy and conservative effects accrue from the close pursuit of either
principle, whatever morbid and deleterious effects accrue from the close
pursuit of either principle, will be seen operating to the best advantage
in the social and political organism of these two nations. The healthy
effects of the one impulse we shall find among those striking English
qualities which at once catch the eye, insatiable enterprise, an energetic
and pushing spirit, a vigorous tendency towards expansion, a high capacity
for political administration, and an orderly process of government;
the morbid effects are social degradation and an entire absence of the
cohesive principle. The better qualities have no doubt grown by breathing
the atmosphere of individualism and been trained up by the habit of
working under settled and roughly convenient forms; but after all is
said, the original high qualities of the raw material enter very largely
into the credit side of the account. Even were it not so, we are not
likely, tutored by English instruction, to undervalue or to slur over
the successful and imposing aspect of English attainment. Hence it will
be more profitable for us, always keeping the bright side in view, to
concentrate our attention on the unsounder aspects which we do not care
to learn, or if we have learned, are in the habit of carefully forgetting.
We may perhaps realise the nature of that unsounder aspect, if we amplify
Matthew Arnold's phrase:—an aristocracy no longer possessed of
the imposing nobility of mind, the proud sense of honour, the striking
pre-eminence of faculty, which are the saving graces—nay, which
are the very life-breath of an aristocracy; debased moreover by the
pursuit, through concession to all that is gross and ignoble in the
English mind, of gross and ignoble ends:—a middle class inaccessible
to the influence of high and refining ideas, and prone to rate every
thing even in the noblest departments of life, at a commercial valuation:—and
a lower class equally without any germ of high ideas, nay, without any
ideas high or low; degraded in their worst failure to the crudest forms
of vice, pauperism and crime, and in their highest attainment restricted
to a life of unintelligent work relieved by brutalising pleasures. And
indeed the most alarming symptoms are here; for it may be said of the
aristocracy that the workings of the Time-Spirit have made a genuine
aristocracy obsolete and impracticable, and of the middle class, that,
however successful and confident, it is in fact doomed; its empire is
passing away from it; but with the whole trend of humanity shaping towards
democracy and socialism, on the calibre and civilisation of the lower
class depends the future of the entire race. And we have seen what sort
of lower class England, with all her splendid success, has been able
to evolve—in calibre debased, in civilisation nil. And after seeing
what England has produced by her empiricism, her culture of a raw energy,
her exaltation of a political method not founded on reason, we must
see what France has produced by her steady, logical pursuit of a fine
social ideal: it is the Paris ouvrier with his firmness of grasp on
affairs, his sanity, his height of mind, his clear, direct ways of life
and thought,—it is the French peasant with his ready tact, his
power of quiet and sensible conversation, located in an enjoyable corner
of life, small it may be, but with plenty of room for wholesome work
and plenty of room for refreshing gaiety. There we have the strong side
of France-, a lucid social atmosphere, a firm executive rationally directed
to insure a clearly conceived purpose, a high level of character and
refinement pervading all classes and a scheme of society bestowing a
fair chance of happiness on the low as well as the high. But if France
is strong in the sphere of England's weakness, she is no less weak in
the sphere of England's strength. Along with and militating against
her social happiness, we have to reckon constant political disorder
and instability, an alarming defect of expansive vigour, and entire
failure in the handling of general politics. France, unable to conceive
and work out a proper political machinery, has been reduced to copy
with slight variations the English model and import a set of machinery
well suited to the old English temper, but now unsuited even to the
English and still more to the vehement French character. Passionate,
sensitive, loquacious, fond of dispute and apt to be blown away by gusts
of feeling, the Gaul is wholly unfit for that heavy decorum, that orderly
process of debate, that power of combining anomalies, which still exist
to a great extent in England, but which even there must eventually grow
impossible. Hence the vehement French nation after a brief experience
of each alien manufacture has grown intensely impatient and shipped
it back without superfluous ceremony to its original home. Here is the
latent root of that disheartening failure which has attended France
in all her brief and feverish attempts to discover a stable basis of
political advance,—of that intense consequent disgust, that scornful
aversion to politics which has led thinking France to rate it as an
indecent harlequin-show in which no serious man will care to meddle.
But if this were all, a superficial observer might balance a defect
and merit on one side by an answering merit and defect on the other,
and conclude that the account was clear; but social status is not the
only department of success in which England compares unfavourably with
France. There is her fatal incoherency, her want of political cohesion,
her want of social cohesion. A Breton, a Basque, a Provencal, though
no less alien in blood to the mass of the French people than the Irish,
the Welsh, the Scotch to the mass of the English people, would repel
with alarm and abhorrence the mere thought of impairing the fine solidarity,
the homogeneity of sentiment, which the possession of an agreeable social
life has developed in France. And we cannot sufficiently admire the
supreme virtue of that fine social development and large diffusion of
general happiness, which has conserved for France in the midst of fearful
political calamities her splendid cohesive-ness as a nation and as a
community. In England on the other hand we see the sorry spectacle of
a great empire lying at the mercy of disintegrating influences, because
the component races have neither been properly merged in the whole nor
persuaded by the offer of a high level of happiness to value the benefits
of solidarity. And if France by her injudicious choice of mechanism,
her political incapacity, her refusal to put her best blood into politics,
has involved herself in fearful political calamities, no less has England
by her exclusive pursuit of machinery, her social incompetence, her
prejudice against a rational equality, her excessive individualism,
entered on an era of fearful social calamities. It is a suggestive fact
that the alienation of sympathy, the strong antipathetic feelings of
Labour towards Capital, are nowhere so marked, the quarrel between them
is nowhere so violent, sustained and ferocious as in the two countries
which are proudest of their institutions and have most systematically
neglected their social development—England and America. It is
not therefore unreasonable to conclude—and had I space and leisure,
I should be tempted to show that every circumstance tends to fortify
the conclusion and convert it into a certaint—that this social
neglect is the prime cause of the fearful array of social calamities,
whose first impact has already burst on those proud and successful countries.
But enough has been said, and to discuss the matter exhaustively would
unduly defer the point of more direct importance for ourselves:—I
mean the ominous connection which these truths have with the actual
conditions of politics and society in India.
Indu
Prakash, November 13, 1893
- Sri Aurobindo
