Mental Eugenics

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Title:     Mental Eugenics
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

It is horrible. We are being overpopulated with spirits. Day by day, hundreds of newly-created ghosts issue into the world--not the poor relics and incorporeal shadows of the dead, but real living ghosts, who never had any other existence except as they now appear. They are creations of the mind--figments they are sometimes called--but they have as real an existence as any other created thing. We love them or hate them, we talk about them, we quote them, we discuss their characters. To many people they are much more alive than the solid human beings whom in some respects they resemble. Obviously they are more interesting, else the travellers in a railway carriage would converse instead of reading. Some minds cannot help producing them. They produce them as easily as the queen bee produces the eggs that hatch into drones. And both the number and productivity of such minds are terribly on the increase. A few years ago Anatole France told us that, in Paris alone, fifty volumes a day were published, not to mention the newspapers; and the rate has gone up since then. He called it a monstrous orgy. He said it would end in driving us mad. He called books the opium of the West. They devour us, he said. He foresaw the day when we shall all be librarians. We are rushing, he said, through study into general paralysis.

Does it not remind one of the horror with which the wise and prudent about a century ago began to regard the birth-rate? They beheld the geometrical progression of life catching up the arithmetical progression of food with fearful strides. Mankind became to them a devouring mouth, always agape, like a nestling's, and incessantly multiplying, like a bacillus. What was the good of improving the condition of Tom and Sal, if Tom and Sal, in consequence of the improvement, went their way and in a few years produced Dick, Poll, Bill, and Meg, who proceeded to eat up the improvement, and in a generation produced sixteen other devourers hungrier than themselves? It was an awesome picture, that ravenous and reduplicating mouth! It cast a chill over humanity, and blighted the hope of progress for many years. To some it is still a bodeful portent, presaging eternal famine. It still hangs ominously over the nations. But, on the whole, its terrors have lately declined; one cannot exactly say why. Either the mouth is not so hungry, or it gets more to eat, or, for good or evil, it does not multiply so fast. And now there are these teachers of Eugenics, always insisting on quality.

The question is whether some similar means might not check the multiplication of the ghosts that threaten to devour the mind of man. The progression of man's mind can hardly be called even arithmetical, and the increase of ghosts accelerates frightfully in comparison. If Paris produced fifty books a day some years ago, London probably produces a hundred now. And then there is Berlin, and all the German Universities, where professors must write or die. And there are New York and Boston. Rome and Athens still count for something, and so does Madrid. Scandinavia is no longer sterile, and a few of Russia's mournful progeny escape strangulation at their birth. Not every book, it is true, embodies a living soul. Many are stillborn; many are like dolls, bleeding sawdust. But in most there dwells some kind of life, hungry for the human brain, and day by day its share of sustenance diminishes, if shares are equal. They are not equal, but the inequality only increases the clamour of the poor among the ghosts.

Take the case of novels, which make up the majority of books in the modern world. We will assume the average of souls in a novel to be five, the same as the average of a human family. Probably it is considerably higher, but take it at five. Let us suppose that fifty novels are produced per day in London, Paris, New York, Berlin, and other large cities together, which I believe to be a low estimate. Not counting Sundays and Bank holidays, this will give us rather more than 75,000 newly created souls a year--cannibal souls, ravening for the brains of men and women similar to the brains that gave them birth, and each able to devour as many brains as it can catch. It is no good saying that nearly all are short-lived, dying in six months like summer flies. The dead are but succeeded by increasing hordes. They swarm about us; they bite us at every turn. They sit in our chairs, and hover round our tables. They speak to us on mountain tops, and if we descend into the Tube, they are there. They absorb the solid world, making it of no account beside the spirit world in which we dwell, so that we neither see nor hear nor handle the realities of outward life, but perceive them only, if at all, through filmy veils and apparitions, the haunting offspring of another's mind. And remember, we are now speaking of the spirits in novels alone. Besides novels, there are the breeding grounds of the drama, the essay, the lyric, and every other kind of spiritual and imaginative book. In every corner the spirits lurk, ready to spring upon us unaware. We are ghost-ridden. The witches tear us. Our life is no longer our own. It has become a nebula of alien dreams. O wretched men that we are! Who shall deliver us from the body of these shades?

To what can we look? Prudence may save us in the end, for if the spirits utterly devour us, they will find they cannot live themselves. In the end, Nature may adjust their birthrate. But at what cost, after how cruel a struggle for existence! Might not teachers of eugenics do something drastic, and at once? Critics are the teachers of spiritual eugenics. Could not a few timely words from them hold the productive powers of certain brains in check? It is easily said, but the result is very doubtful. Mr. Walkley, in an unintentionally despairing article in the _Times_, once maintained that the critics were powerless to stem the increasing flood that pours in upon us, like that hideous stream of babies that Mr. Wells once saw pouring down some gutter or rain-pipe. Mr. Walkley said no real and industrious artist ever stops to listen to criticism. He said the artist simply cannot help it; the creature is bound to go on creating, whatever people say. Mr. Walkley went further, and told us the critic himself is an artist; that he also cannot help it, but is bound to create. So we go on from bad to worse, the creative artist not only producing shadows on his own account, but the shades of shadows through the critics. Our state is becoming a bewildered horror; and yet we cannot deny that Mr. Walkley was right, though we may regard his pessimism as exaggerated. There are one or two cases on record in which criticism, or the fear of it, has really checked the production of peculiarly sensitive and fastidious minds. I will not mention Keats, for after the savage and Tartarly article he went on producing in greater quantity and finer quality than ever before, and would have so continued but for a very natural death. Robert Montgomery, whom Macaulay killed, is a happier instance. And there may here and there also have been a poet or novelist like that "Pictor Ignotus" of Browning's, who cried:

"I could have painted pictures like that youth's
Ye praise so!"

He would have had a painter's fame:

"But a voice changed it. Glimpses of such sights
Have scared me, like the revels through a door
Of some strange house of idols at its rites!
This world seemed not the world it was, before:
Mixed with my loving, trusting ones, there trooped
... Who summoned those cold faces that begun
To press on me and judge me? Though I stooped
Shrinking, as from the soldiery a nun,
They drew me forth, and spite of me ... enough!"

Unhappily, there are few souls so humble, so conventual as that. George Eliot, as Mr. Walkley recalled, was terrified lest ill-judged blame or ill-judged praise should discourage her production; but then she made it a strict rule never to read any criticism, so that, of course, it had no restraining effect upon her. Wordsworth seems to have read his critics, but though they did their utmost to restrain or silence him, he paid no heed. "Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet," he called them:

"Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and
too feeble to grapple with him;--men of palsied
imagination and indurated hearts; in whose minds
all healthy action is languid, who therefore feed
as the many direct them, or, with the many, are
greedy after vicious provocatives;--judges, whose
censure is auspicious, and whose praise ominous!"

In them there was no restraining power for such a man, any more than in Christopher North for Tennyson:

"When I heard from whom it came,
I forgave you all the blame;
I could not forgive the praise,
Rusty Christopher!"

On this line, then, there is not much to be hoped from the critics. Over-sensitive writers are too rare, and the productive impulse of the others is too self-confident for prudence to smother. Obviously, they care no more for the critics than Tom and Sal a century ago cared for Malthus. They disregard them. The most savage criticism only confirms their belief in the beauty and necessity of their progeny, just as a mother always fondles the child that its aunts consider plain. Against such obstinacy, what headway can the critics make? May we not advise them to drop the old method of frontal attack altogether? Let them adopt the methods of these new teachers of Eugenics, whom we have described as insisting on quality. For the teachers of Eugenics, as I understand, do not go about saying, "O parents, what inferior and degenerate children you have! How goose-faced, rabbit-mouthed, lantern-jawed, pot-bellied, spindle-shanked, and splay-footed they are! It was a most anti-social action to produce these puny monstrosities, and when you found yourselves falling in love, you ought to have run to opposite antipodes." That, I believe, is no longer the method of the Eugenic teacher. He now shows beforehand wherein the beauty and excellence of human development may lie. He insists upon quality, he raises a standard, he diffuses an unconscious fastidiousness of selection. He does not prevent Tom and Sal from falling in love, but he makes Tom, and especially Sal, less satisfied with the first that comes, less easily bemused with the tenth-rate rubbish of a man or girl.

By similar methods, it seems to us, the critics might even now relieve humanity from the oncoming host of spirits that threatens to overwhelm us. They find it useless to tell creative writers how hideous and mis-begotten their productions are--how deeply tainted with erotics, neurotics, hysteria, consumption, or fatty degeneration. Either the writers do not listen, or they reply, "Thank you, but neurotics and degeneracy are in the fashion, and we like them." Let the critics change their method by widely extending their action. Let them insist upon quality, and show beforehand what quality means. Let them rise from the position of reviewers, and apply to the general thought of the world that critical power of which Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote:

"The best spiritual work of criticism is to keep man
from self-satisfaction which is retarding and
vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection by
making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in
itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things."

Such criticism, if persisted in by all critics for a generation, would act as so wholesome and tonic a course of Eugenic instruction, would so strongly insist upon quality, and so widely diffuse an unconscious fastidiousness of selection, that the locust cloud of phantoms which now darken the zenith might be dissipated, and again we should behold the sky which is the home of stars. For we may safely suppose that excellence will never be super-abundant, nor quality be found in hordes. No one can tell how fine, how fit, and few the children of our creative artists might then become. But, as in prophetic vision, we can picture the rarity of their beauty, and when they come knocking at our door, we will share with them the spiritual food that they demand from our brains, and give them a drink of our brief and irrevocable time.

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: Mental Eugenics

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