SOCIAL INTERSTICES.
CIVILISED society has a tendency to subdivide, and the tendency has been hitherto ineradicable. Class dis- tinctions would seem to answer to some instinct of human nature. Blow them away with powder and shot, and in a few years they reappear in a new form. Run away from them to a new country, and in an incredibly short time there they are again as real as ever. Against them reason cannot prevail. All the preaching in the world has so far done nothing more than lower the barriers to a height climbable by persons of exceptional stature or agility. The world likes them, and it is by no means certain but that they make for happiness. The love of limitatiens is as natural to man as the love of freedom. Most people desire to live more or less exclusively among those who have the same habits of life as themselves ; and as the exigencies of civilisation seem to forbid that all men should have the same occupations, a classless world is hardly conceivable. Given good health and fair luck, a very happy life, perhaps an equally happy life, may be lived in every class except the lowest,—and the dregs of the population, however they may disgrace or endanger the country, cannot well be described as a class at all. But the world is not mechanically arranged. The social sub- divisions do not fit into one another like the cells of a bee- hive, and the tendency of to-day is to make them less and less geometric in their relation to each other. There have been a good many slight shocks of social earthquake since the year 1S3'2, and the component parts of the English hive have shifted appreciably. Between many of the demarcations inter- stices occur, and in these days of overcrowding the interstices are becoming inhabited. As yet this new population is sparse, and has not formed itself into a regular society. Those who live within the classes converging upon it know little about it, yet it is a population with which before many years • are over they will have to count.
Perhaps the largest and most important of these regions lies just outside the enclosure of the intellectual middle Class. In it live a set of book-fed men and women who are intellectually very strong, but too many of whom lead a lonely life without any of the pleasures of con- genial companionship, and whose minds develop inevitably at the expense of their sympathies. The spirit of the time leads all men everywhere to criticise the social fri brie, and those who criticise that fabric from without are often dangerous, and sometimes destructive, critics. Compulsory education until now has not had any very startling effect upon the mass of the people. Boys and girls in all classes have up to the age of fourteen a surprising power to resist instruction, but to this rule there are of course exceptions. Learning is a passion which in certain peculiar natures develops very early, and if he or she be born among simple people it mentally isolates the learner. An educated and able lad coming from an uneducated milieu cannot go back to seek his friends among 'them. It is absurd to call him a snob, to tell him that they are as good as he, or that in reality we are all just alike. It may be true, but it is beside the point. Very likely he feels quite certain that the crowd from whom he has come out are as good as, and better than, himself, but his mind is full of things they know nothing about. They have ceased to have any interests in common with him. Very near him, yet across an impassable barrier, he sees men and women who think and talk about what he thinks and would like to talk about. They read the books that he reads, but they do not speak of them to him. Should chance throw them in his way, they do not make friends. The cultivated speak a language in which be is but partially at home. He does not—it stands to reason that he cannot—express himself as easily and as simply as the men to whom a certain recognised method of expression is either hereditary or has become as second nature. Yet often he cannot help being aware that he has more in his mind to express than they have. He talks like a man who has only talked to himself. All such talk has something repellent about it, and that repellent something is felt in all the classes which converge upon his interstice. Possibly he has little humour,—humour of a genial sort comes of human intercourse. Very likely be
does not leave his interlocutor a fair share of the conversa- tion,—he has not learned the rights of interlocutors, he has known too few. Again, he is probably ignorant of the relative weight of words. He knows their meanings and their deriva- tions; he is not familiar with their current use. He does not know that a correct sentence may be terribly cumbrous, and may by its unconscious pedantry create in a man of more accomplished speech or a smaller vocabulary an almost irresistible sensation of amusement. His inferiors, whether they live above or below him, ridicule his strange tongue, and take no great pains to conceal their mockery. He sees be is shut out from their society, and unless he is a specially gracious character, he becomes bitter, and his mind feeds upon itself.
No doubt the exceptional man finds as he grows older a way to remove all obstacles. He finds out how to shut his
mind and open his heart to ignorant people, and by the alchemy of simplicity be dissolves the adamantine social shell of the most sophisticated. But this sort of grace is the gift of the gods, and they give it rarely. As a rule he gets to feel that every man's hand is against him. Envy and contempt taint his disposition. He sees the good things of life falling to men of half his ability, and he resents it. What do they know which be does not know ? Some secret only to be learned within barriers impassable to him. Instinctively he longs to sweep them all away. Hunger makes men fierce, and the hunger for social sympathy is as real as the hunger for food. Of necessity he carries about with him an atmosphere of strange- ness far colder than the one which envelops the man who has left one class and gone to live in another. To the Londoner all towns are something alike and each is a key to all. He will soon find his way in Liverpool or Glasgow, though the keen air of those Northern centres may never suit him as well as his native climate. But to one who has lived long enough in the wilderness all cities are equally confusing. Without a guide he is lost.
In social matters it is a sheer impossibility for any thinker to come to the truth by the way of logic alone—as well expect to understand the mind of man by dissecting his brain—and this is the only way open to the thinker living outside all social enclosures. At the bar of his own bookish imagination he cross-examines and classifies afresh all those who come across his path, and the conclusion he draws from the results he obtains is that the social fabric must be re-formed upon a basis of reason alone. This conclusion colours his whole outlook upon life, and even tinges the pages of his books. Standing as he does far from the central hearth of every class, he is in a bad position to judge of human nature, and consequently he reckons without his host. In the most literal sense of the word, he is an eccentric and cannot gauge the common good.
The upshot of the matter is that the man who lives in a social interstice is an essentially ignorant man. Yet not infrequently he is the only man qualified to do certain pieces of the world's work. If a country desires that its children should be taught to read—we do not mean only to decipher print—it must seek a well-read man to teach them, and must take such men from wherever they are to be found. Teaching is, perhaps, the most important piece of work which is often done by those who live between the classes. The dangers of the situation are too evident to need recapitula- tion. It is not the fault of these highly taught eccentrics that their ignorance renders their knowledge dangerous. It is the fault of those who have kept them outside. If the world at large living comfortably in classes is alarmed as to the results of its action, let it go before it is too late into the interstices and compel them to come in.
Previous page
