E.Belfort Bax

From The Religion of Socialism, pp.164-177.

THE inability referred to in the text, to envisage the past otherwise than with the atmosphere of the present, is apparent in all popular notions of past ages. Exceedingly funny is the unsuspecting guilelessness with which the ordinary politician talks of the English Parliament as having been instituted by Simon de Montfort, as though Simon’s war-council were an institution essentially the same, after all, as our House of Commons; or of the compact wrung, for their own purposes, by a band of semi-independent barons, or territorial potentates, from their feudal overlord, called Magna Charta, with the, unquestioning belief that he is referring to a great popular “measure” similar in kind to Mr. Gladstone’s latest Franchise Act only “more so”. These belong to a class of historical misconceptions for which language is largely responsible. The same name is used for the most diverse things, simply because there is a thread of historical continuity running through them. This continuity between the things becomes, in popular conception, confounded with likeness, or even identity. The term “parliament” or “Commons Assembly” being used both for the casual assembling of feudal estates, for the purpose of supplying their feudal superior with the means of carrying on a war, and also for the modern “representative” institutions of constitutional government, has led the ordinary mind to conceive the two things as closely connected, if not identical; whereas, of course, there is hardly an appreciable point in common between them. The same class of misconception attaches to the words “money,” “merchant,” “usury,” “trade,” etc. The ordinary newspaper-reading intellect has little notion that these words, in past periods of the world’s history, when economical conditions were totally unlike the present, connote different things to what they do to-day. The popular conceptions of ancient history and quasi-history, especially the Bible, are of course the most flagrant illustrations of what we speak of: these sometimes take a comical form, such as the Anglo-Israel craze. In this case of course there is the additional fact that the story of the rise and fall of the Jewish state is viewed through the distorting lenses of a theology which has passed through a long development, and been fundamentally modified several times, before arriving at that perfect adaptability to the needs of middle-class Philistinism presented in orthodox Protestant Christianity. The special unhistorical twist for which this theology is responsible is, we may mention, often quite as noticeable in those who reject it – should they happen to be persons without much culture, such as the average Secularist lecturer, – as in those who accept it. An instance of this latter is afforded by what until quite recently passed for the “Bible-smashers” special text-book, and which we were all brought up to regard as the abomination of desolation, – albeit, to-day its theology is suggestive of little more, barring its specially eighteenth century characteristics, than the discourse of a mild Unitarian divine with evangelical leanings, – to wit, Paine’s Age of Reason, – and more or less of all writings of which that is the type. The Bible, to the critical student of history, contain the indications of a growth of a few loosely connected Phoenenician or Canaanitish tribes of nomads into a coherent “people,” and thence into a little state; the ancestral and tribal cults gradually succumbing to the civic or national cult which became identified with the worship of Jaho or Yahveh, established at Jerusalem, the “sacred” city; the struggle of this cult to maintain its supremacy over the other indigenous religions as well as over those imported from without; its varying success until curiously enough at became associated with the great introspective ethical movement of the prophets, and merged finally into the later Judaism; the whole, with the exception, perhaps, of the last point named, in which the special race individuality comes into play, forming simply a story a thousand times repeated in all essential features in early ages, wherever a “people” has developed: civilisation of any kind. But by the “uncritical” man, whether his bias be theological or anti-theological, the Bible, in its present form, is regarded pretty much as the work of good or bad individual authors, and the whole narrative portion much as the history of a modern state, the prominent actors in which are to be respectively praised or blamed as though they were Lord Salisburys or Mr. Gladstones. It is little suspected that the nearest analogue to-day to the Hebrews in their legendary period is to be found in the tribes of the Lebanon or the Soudan. Again, what orthodox English Nonconformist has any suspicion that the Founder of Christianity was other than a kind of sublimated Samuel Morley, in appropriate costume. Could the messianic prophet of the first century, lying hidden beneath the mythical “Jesus,” revisit the “glimpses of the moon” in mufti, and give his impressions of “the young man preparing for the ministry “ it would be certainly edifying. Only the pen of Heine could have given us a suggestion of the result.

The inability of man to interpret the past otherwise than in terms of the world in which he lives has been till the present century universal. Albrecht Dürer paints his Virgin and Apostles as the maiden and burghers of a medieval German town. So with all the other painters of the Middle Ages. In Shakespeare’s “historical plays” the characters live and speak in the world of the sixteenth century. Racine, it has been said, introduced the “manners of Versailles to the camp of Aulis.” The suspicion that contemporary manners and customs or at least contemporary sentiment and ethics, did ever not prevail has first seriously dawned upon mankind in the nineteenth century. The part cause and part consequence of this flash of insight has been modern “critical” history and “realistic” art. But it is as yet mainly the property of the literary class. To the lack of the historical sentiment is largely due the objection sometimes expressed respecting Socialism on the score of certain a priori view on “Human Nature.” The man whose sole intellectual stock-in-trade consists in so-called “common sense” (that commodity which is, when highly developed, so very difficult to distinguish from its opposite) finds it even harder to conceive the future save in terms of the present than he does the past. Such a man will sometimes boldly assure you that certain things are opposed to “human nature,” the “human nature” he has in his mind being his own, his son’s, his next door neighbour’s, his wife’s, and marriageable daughter’s nature. Human nature of course to the student of anthropology and history implies something which has been modified, to a virtually indefinite extent, in the past before it attained the sublimity of smug self-satisfaction expressed in British common sense, and will be still further indefinitely modified in the time that is to come, after British common sense shall have gone to its last rest. “As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be” may be a very good motto for the bourgeois Philistine, for whom both past and future are merely a reduplicated present; but it won’t pass muster with any one ungifted with the sound “common sense” and comprehensive ignorance of that individual.