Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / The Passionate Friends Chapter 8 - This Swarming Business of Mankind Parts 1-2

Transcript

The Passionate Friends Chapter 8 - This Swarming Business of Mankind Parts 1-2 · The H. G. Wells Library

0:00
Speaker 1: Chapter eight, Parts one to two of The Passionate Friends
0:04
Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the
0:08
Speaker 1: public domain recording by Peter Eastman, Chapter the eighth, This
0:16
Speaker 1: Swarming Business of Mankind one. I do not think I
0:23
Speaker 1: could now arrange into a consecutive history my travelings, my
0:27
Speaker 1: goings and returnings, and my wandering effort to see and
0:31
Speaker 1: comprehend the world. And certainly, even if I could arrange
0:36
Speaker 1: my facts, I should still be at a loss to
0:39
Speaker 1: tell of the growth of ideas that is so much
0:42
Speaker 1: more important than any facts. To trace the increasing light
0:46
Speaker 1: to its innumerable sources, to a chink here, to a
0:51
Speaker 1: glowing reflection, there, to a leap of burning light from
0:54
Speaker 1: some long inner darkness close at hand. But steadily the
0:59
Speaker 1: light grew, and this vast world of man, in which
1:04
Speaker 1: our world little sun is, the world of a limited
1:07
Speaker 1: class on a small island, began to take on definite forms,
1:12
Speaker 1: to betray broad, universal movements. What seemed at first chaotic,
1:18
Speaker 1: a drift and tangle of passions, traditions, foolish ideas, blundering hostilities,
1:24
Speaker 1: careless tolerances, became confusedly systematic, showed something persistent and generalized
1:32
Speaker 1: at work among its multitudinous perplexity. I wonder now if
1:38
Speaker 1: I can put before you very briefly the main generalizations
1:42
Speaker 1: that were growing up in my mind during my exile.
1:45
Speaker 1: The simplified picture into which I translated the billions of
1:49
Speaker 1: sights and sounds and smells, for every part of the
1:53
Speaker 1: world has its distinctive olfactory palette as much as its
1:57
Speaker 1: pallett of colors that rained daily and nightly upon my mind.
2:04
Speaker 1: Before my eyes again, as I sit here in this
2:07
Speaker 1: quiet walled French garden, the great space before the Jumna
2:11
Speaker 1: Mustard at Delhi reappears as I saw it in the
2:15
Speaker 1: evening stillness, against a glowing sky of gold, and the
2:19
Speaker 1: memory of countless worshipers within praying with a devotion no
2:24
Speaker 1: European displays. And then comes a memory of that long
2:29
Speaker 1: reef of staircases and temples and buildings, the gots of
2:33
Speaker 1: Benares in the blazing morning sun, swarming with a vast
2:38
Speaker 1: multitude of multicolored people, and the water also swarming with
2:43
Speaker 1: brown bodies. It has the colors of a bed of
2:47
Speaker 1: extravagantly splendid flowers, and the light that is Indian alone.
2:54
Speaker 1: Even as I sit here these places are alive with happening.
2:59
Speaker 1: It is just most past midday. Here at this moment
3:03
Speaker 1: the sun sinks, and the skies of India, the Jumna
3:07
Speaker 1: Mustid flushes again with a glow of sunset. The smoke
3:11
Speaker 1: of evening fires streams heavenward against its subtle lines. And
3:17
Speaker 1: upon those steps at Panaris that come down the hillside
3:20
Speaker 1: between the conquering mosque of Rongzeb and the shining mirror
3:23
Speaker 1: of the Ganges, a thousand silent, seated figures fall into meditation,
3:31
Speaker 1: and other memories recur and struggle with one another. The
3:35
Speaker 1: crowded river streets of Canton, the rafts and houseboats and
3:39
Speaker 1: junks innumerable riding over inky water, begin now to twinkle
3:44
Speaker 1: with a thousand lights. They are ablaze in Osaka and
3:49
Speaker 1: Yokohama and Tokyo, and the swarming staircase streets of Hong
3:54
Speaker 1: Kong glitter with a wicked activity. Now that night has come,
4:00
Speaker 1: I flash a glimpse of Burmese temples of villages in Java,
4:05
Speaker 1: of the somber purple masses, of the walls of the
4:08
Speaker 1: Tartar city, Yappe King with squat pagoda guarded gates. How
4:14
Speaker 1: those great outlines lowered at me in the twilight, full
4:18
Speaker 1: of fresh memories and grim anticipations of baseness and violence
4:23
Speaker 1: and bloodshed. I sit here recalling it, feeling it all
4:28
Speaker 1: out beyond the trellised, fine clad wall that bounds my
4:32
Speaker 1: physical vision, vast crowded world that I have seen, going
4:39
Speaker 1: from point to point, seeking for clues, for generalities, until
4:43
Speaker 1: at last it seems to me that there emerges something understandable.
4:50
Speaker 1: I think I have got something understandable out of it all.
4:56
Speaker 1: What a fantastically courageous thing is this mind of our
5:01
Speaker 1: My thoughts seem to me at once presumptuous and inevitable.
5:06
Speaker 1: I do not know why it is that I should
5:08
Speaker 1: dare that any of us should dream of this attempt
5:11
Speaker 1: to comprehend. But we who think, are every one impelled
5:17
Speaker 1: to this amazing effort to get it altogether into some
5:20
Speaker 1: simple generality. It is not reason, but a deep seated
5:25
Speaker 1: instinct that draws our intelligence towards explanations, that sets us
5:30
Speaker 1: perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements that will fit into infinite,
5:36
Speaker 1: incessantly interweaving complexities and be true of them all. There is,
5:42
Speaker 1: I perceive, a valiant and magnificent stupidity about the human mind,
5:48
Speaker 1: a disregard of disproportion and insufficiency. Like the ferret, which
5:54
Speaker 1: will turn from the leveret, it has ceased to attack
5:57
Speaker 1: even man if he should interfere by these desperate feats
6:01
Speaker 1: of thinking. It is that our species has achieved its
6:05
Speaker 1: victories by them. It survives by them. It must stand
6:11
Speaker 1: the test of ultimate survival. Some forgotten man in our ancestry,
6:18
Speaker 1: for every begetting man alive was in my individual ancestry
6:22
Speaker 1: and yours. Three thousand years ago, first dared to think
6:27
Speaker 1: of the world as round an astounding temerity. He rolled
6:33
Speaker 1: up the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains, and
6:36
Speaker 1: broad horizons that stretched beyond his can that seemed to
6:41
Speaker 1: common sense, to go on certainly forever, into a ball,
6:46
Speaker 1: into a little ball like an orange, magnificent feet of
6:51
Speaker 1: the imagination, outdoing Thor's deep draft of the sea. And
6:57
Speaker 1: once he had done it, all do it, and no
7:00
Speaker 1: no one falters out the deed. You are not yet seven,
7:04
Speaker 1: as I write, and already you are serenely aware that
7:08
Speaker 1: you live upon a sphere, and in much the same manner.
7:12
Speaker 1: It is that we who are sociologists and economists publicists
7:17
Speaker 1: and philosophers and what not, are attempting now to roll
7:21
Speaker 1: up the vast world of facts which concern human intercourse,
7:26
Speaker 1: the whole indeed of history and archaeology, into some similar,
7:31
Speaker 1: imaginable and manageable shape that presently everyone will be able
7:36
Speaker 1: to grasp. I suppose there was a time when nobody
7:42
Speaker 1: bothered at all about the shape of the Earth, when
7:45
Speaker 1: nobody had even had the idea that the Earth could
7:48
Speaker 1: be conceived as having a shape. And similarly, it is
7:52
Speaker 1: true that it is only in recent centuries that people
7:55
Speaker 1: have been able to suppose that there was a shape
7:58
Speaker 1: to human history. It is indeed not much more than
8:03
Speaker 1: a century since there was any real emergence from theological
8:07
Speaker 1: assumptions and pure romanticism and accidentalism in these matters, Old
8:13
Speaker 1: Adam Smith it was probing away at the roots of
8:17
Speaker 1: economics who set going the construction of ampler propositions. From
8:23
Speaker 1: him spring all those new interpretations which have changed the
8:28
Speaker 1: writing of history from a record of dramatic reigns and
8:32
Speaker 1: wars and crises to an analysis of economic forces. How
8:38
Speaker 1: impossible it would be for any one now to write
8:41
Speaker 1: that great chapter of Gibbons, in which he sweeps together
8:45
Speaker 1: into one contempt the history of sixty emperors and six
8:49
Speaker 1: hundred years of time. His note of weariness and futility
8:55
Speaker 1: vanishes directly one's vision penetrates the immediate surface. Those Heracleians
9:02
Speaker 1: and Assurians and Cumneni were not history. A schoolboy nowadays
9:07
Speaker 1: knows that their record is not history, knows them for
9:11
Speaker 1: the mere scum upon the stream. And still to day
9:17
Speaker 1: we have our great interpretations to make. Ours is a
9:21
Speaker 1: time of guesses, theories, and provisional generalizations. Our face corresponds
9:28
Speaker 1: to the cosmography that was still a little divided between
9:32
Speaker 1: disks and domes, and spheres and cosmic eggs, that was
9:37
Speaker 1: still a thousand years from measuring and weighing a planet.
9:42
Speaker 1: For a long time, my mind hovered about the stimulating
9:46
Speaker 1: theories of socialism, and particularly about those more systematic forms
9:51
Speaker 1: of socialist teaching that center about Karl Marx. He arose
9:56
Speaker 1: quite naturally out of those early economists who saw all
10:00
Speaker 1: the world in terms of production and saving. He was
10:04
Speaker 1: a necessary step for me, at least on the way
10:08
Speaker 1: to understanding. For a time, I did so shape the
10:12
Speaker 1: world in my mind that it seemed to me no
10:15
Speaker 1: more than a vast enterprise for the organization and exploitation
10:20
Speaker 1: of labor. For a time I thought human life was
10:24
Speaker 1: essentially a labor problem, that working and controlling work, and
10:29
Speaker 1: lending and selling and speculating made the essential substance of
10:33
Speaker 1: human life, over which the forms of politics ran, as
10:38
Speaker 1: the stripes of a tiger's skin run and bend over
10:41
Speaker 1: its living muscles. I followed my period in thinking that
10:47
Speaker 1: you will find in Ferrero's Roman Decline, which was published
10:51
Speaker 1: early in this century, and which waits for you in
10:54
Speaker 1: the library, almost exactly the method of interpretation that was
10:59
Speaker 1: recommending itself to me in nineteen o four and nineteen
11:02
Speaker 1: o five. Well, the labor problem concerns a great substantial,
11:09
Speaker 1: shall I say, in human society. It is only, I think,
11:14
Speaker 1: the basis and matter of society, not its shape and
11:18
Speaker 1: life and reality. But it had to be apprehended before
11:23
Speaker 1: I could get on to more actual things. Insensibly, the
11:28
Speaker 1: idea that contemporary political forms mattered very fundamentally to men
11:33
Speaker 1: was fading out of my mind. The British Empire and
11:37
Speaker 1: the German Empire, the unity of Italy and Anglo Saxon ascendancy,
11:43
Speaker 1: the Yellow Peril, and all the other vast phantoms of
11:47
Speaker 1: the world. Politician's mythology were fading out of my mind
11:51
Speaker 1: in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have faded
11:55
Speaker 1: from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the
11:59
Speaker 1: days of Heraclitis, and I revised my history altogether. In
12:05
Speaker 1: the new light, the world had ceased to be chaotic
12:08
Speaker 1: in my mind. It had become a vast, if as
12:13
Speaker 1: yet a quite inconclusive drama between employer and employed. It
12:20
Speaker 1: makes a wonderful history, this history of mankind, as a
12:24
Speaker 1: history of labor, as a history of the perpetual attempts
12:28
Speaker 1: of an intelligent minority to get things done by other people.
12:34
Speaker 1: It does not explain how that aggression of the minority arose,
12:38
Speaker 1: nor does it give any conception of a primordial society
12:42
Speaker 1: which corresponds with our knowledge of the realities of primitive communities.
12:47
Speaker 1: One begins rather in the air with a human society
12:51
Speaker 1: that sells and barters, and sustains contracts, and permits land
12:55
Speaker 1: to be privately owned, and having as hastily as possible,
12:59
Speaker 1: got away from that difficulty of beginnings, having ignored the
13:03
Speaker 1: large areas of the world which remain under a pacific
13:07
Speaker 1: and unprogressive agriculture to this day. The rest of the
13:11
Speaker 1: story becomes extremely convincing and illuminating. It does, indeed give
13:16
Speaker 1: a sustaining explanation to a large part of recorded history.
13:21
Speaker 1: This generalization about the proclivity of able and energetic people
13:25
Speaker 1: to make other people do things. One ignores what has
13:29
Speaker 1: been done as if that mattered nothing, and concentrates upon
13:34
Speaker 1: the use and enslavement of men. One sees that enslavement
13:40
Speaker 1: to labor, progressing from crude directness to the most subtly
13:44
Speaker 1: indirect methods. The first expedient of enterprise was the sword,
13:50
Speaker 1: and then the whip. And still there are remote and
13:53
Speaker 1: ugly corners of the world in the Mexican Vaa Nazionale,
13:57
Speaker 1: or in Portuguese South Africa, where the whip whistles still
14:02
Speaker 1: and the threat of great suffering and death follows hard
14:05
Speaker 1: upon the reluctant toiler. But the larger part of our
14:09
Speaker 1: modern slavery is past the stage of brand and whip.
14:14
Speaker 1: We have fallen into methods at once more subtle and
14:17
Speaker 1: more effective. We stand benevolently in front of our fellow man,
14:23
Speaker 1: offering almost as if it were food and drink, and
14:26
Speaker 1: shelter and love the work we want him to do,
14:31
Speaker 1: and behind him we are acutely aware is necessity, sometimes
14:36
Speaker 1: quite of our making, as when we drive him to
14:39
Speaker 1: work by a hut tax or a poll tax or
14:41
Speaker 1: a rent that obliges him to earn money, and sometimes
14:46
Speaker 1: not so obviously of our making, sometimes so little of
14:50
Speaker 1: our making that it is easy to believe we have
14:53
Speaker 1: no power to remove it. Instead of flicking the whip,
14:57
Speaker 1: we groan at last, with Harriet Martineau at the inexorable
15:01
Speaker 1: laws of political economy, the condemn us to comfort and direction,
15:06
Speaker 1: and those others to toil and hardship and indignity. And
15:13
Speaker 1: through the consideration of these latter later aspects, it was
15:17
Speaker 1: that I came at last to those subtler problems of
15:20
Speaker 1: tacit self, deception of imperfect and unwilling apprehension of innocently
15:26
Speaker 1: assumed advantages, of wilfully disregarded unfairness, and also to all
15:33
Speaker 1: those other problems of motive, those forgotten questions of why
15:37
Speaker 1: we make others work for us long after our personal
15:41
Speaker 1: needs are satisfied, why men aggrandize and undertake, which gradually
15:47
Speaker 1: have become in my mind the essential problems of human relationship,
15:52
Speaker 1: replacing the crude problems of labor altogether in that position,
15:56
Speaker 1: making them at last only questions of contrivance and management
16:02
Speaker 1: on the way to greater ends. I have come to
16:07
Speaker 1: believe now that labor problems are problems merely by the
16:11
Speaker 1: way they have played their part in a greater scheme.
16:16
Speaker 1: This phase of expropriation and enslavement, this half designed and
16:21
Speaker 1: half unconscious driving of the duller by the clever of
16:25
Speaker 1: the Pacific, by the bolder of those with weak appetites
16:29
Speaker 1: and imaginations by those with stronger appetites and imaginations, has
16:34
Speaker 1: been a necessary phase in human development. With my innate,
16:39
Speaker 1: passionate desire to find the whole world purposeful, I cannot
16:44
Speaker 1: but believe that. But however necessary it has been, it
16:50
Speaker 1: is necessary. No longer strangest of saviors, there rises over
16:55
Speaker 1: the conflicts of mankind, the glittering angular promise of the machine.
17:02
Speaker 1: There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised.
17:07
Speaker 1: We do not need slaves, nor toilers, nor mere laborers anymore.
17:13
Speaker 1: They are no longer essential to a civilization. Man has
17:18
Speaker 1: ridden on his brother man out of the need of servitude.
17:22
Speaker 1: He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of release,
17:27
Speaker 1: a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom is possible
17:31
Speaker 1: to every human being is possible. And it is there
17:38
Speaker 1: one halts, seeing that splendid possibility of aspiration and creation
17:43
Speaker 1: before mankind, and seeing mankind, for the most part, still downcast,
17:51
Speaker 1: quite unaware or incredulous, following the old rounds, the grooves
17:56
Speaker 1: of ancient and superseded assumptions and subjections. But here I
18:03
Speaker 1: will not trace in any detail the growth of my
18:06
Speaker 1: conviction that the ancient and heavy obligation to work hard
18:10
Speaker 1: and continually throughout life has already slipped from man's shoulders.
18:16
Speaker 1: Suffice it that now I conceive of the task before
18:19
Speaker 1: mankind as a task essentially of rearrangement, as a problem
18:24
Speaker 1: in relationships, extremely complex and difficult, indeed, but credibly solvable.
18:32
Speaker 1: During my Indian and Chinese journey, I was still at
18:35
Speaker 1: the Marxist stage. I went about the east looking at labor,
18:41
Speaker 1: watching its organization and direction. Seeing great interests and enterprises
18:46
Speaker 1: replaced the diffused life of an earlier phase. The disputes
18:51
Speaker 1: and discussions in the Transfall, which had first opened my
18:54
Speaker 1: mind to these questions, came back to me, and steadily
18:59
Speaker 1: I lost my interest in those mere political and national
19:03
Speaker 1: issues with her paraphernalia of kings and flags and governments
19:07
Speaker 1: and parties that had hitherto blinded me to these more
19:12
Speaker 1: fundamental interactions. Two, it happened that in Bombay, circumstances conspired
19:22
Speaker 1: to bring the crude facts of labor enslavement vividly before me.
19:28
Speaker 1: I found a vigorous agitation raging in the English press
19:32
Speaker 1: against the horrible sweating that was going on in the
19:35
Speaker 1: cotton mills. I met the journalist most intimately concerned in
19:39
Speaker 1: the business on my second day in India, and before
19:43
Speaker 1: a week was out, I was hard at work getting
19:46
Speaker 1: up the question and preparing a memorandum with him on
19:49
Speaker 1: the possibility of immediate legislative intervention. The very name of Bombay,
19:56
Speaker 1: which for most people recalls a spacious and dignified landfall
20:00
Speaker 1: Latin sails, green islands and jutting precipices, a long city
20:06
Speaker 1: of trees and buildings, like a bright and various breakwater
20:10
Speaker 1: between the great harbor and the sea. And then exquisite
20:14
Speaker 1: little temples, painted bullock carriages, towers of silence, parsies, and
20:20
Speaker 1: an amazingly kaleidoscopic population is for me a reminder of narrow, fetid,
20:28
Speaker 1: plague stricken streets and tall insanitary tenement houses, packed and
20:33
Speaker 1: dripping with humanity, and of terrible throbbing factories working far
20:39
Speaker 1: into the night, blazing with electric light against the velvet
20:43
Speaker 1: black night sky of India, damp with the steam clouds
20:47
Speaker 1: that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming with emaciated,
20:52
Speaker 1: overworked brown children. For even the adults spare and small
20:58
Speaker 1: in those mills seem children to a Western eye. I
21:04
Speaker 1: plunged into this heated, dreadful business with a passionate interest,
21:09
Speaker 1: and went back to the yacht club. Only when the
21:11
Speaker 1: craving for air and a good bath and clean clothes
21:15
Speaker 1: and space and respect became unendurable. I waded deep in labor,
21:21
Speaker 1: in this process of consuming humanity for gain, chasing my
21:26
Speaker 1: facts through throbbing, quivering sheds, reeking of sweat and excrement
21:31
Speaker 1: under the tall, black, smoking chimneys, chasing them in very truth.
21:36
Speaker 1: Because when we came prying into the mills after the
21:39
Speaker 1: hour when child labor should cease, there would be a
21:43
Speaker 1: shrill whistle, a patter of feet, and a coffing and
21:46
Speaker 1: hiding of the naked little creatures we were trying to rescue.
21:51
Speaker 1: They would be hidden under rugs, in boxes, into most
21:55
Speaker 1: impossible places, and we dragged them out, scared and lying.
22:00
Speaker 1: Many of them were perhaps seven years old at most,
22:04
Speaker 1: and the adults men and women of fourteen. That is
22:08
Speaker 1: to say, we could not touch at all. And they
22:12
Speaker 1: worked in that Indian heat, in a noisome air, drenched
22:15
Speaker 1: with steam, for fourteen and fifteen hours a day. And
22:20
Speaker 1: essential to that general impression is a memory of a slim,
22:25
Speaker 1: parsy mill manager luminously explaining the inherited passion for toil
22:30
Speaker 1: in the Indian weaver, and a certain bulky Hindoo with
22:34
Speaker 1: a lemon yellow turban and a strip of plump brown
22:37
Speaker 1: stomach showing between his clothes, who was doing very well,
22:41
Speaker 1: he said, with two wives and five children in the mills.
22:47
Speaker 1: That is my bombay. That and the columns of crossed
22:53
Speaker 1: circles marking plaque cases upon the corners of houses, and
22:57
Speaker 1: a peculiar acrid smell, and the polychromatic stir of crowded
23:03
Speaker 1: narrow streets between cliffs of architecture with carved timbers and
23:08
Speaker 1: heavy ornamentation into which the sun strikes obliquely and lights
23:13
Speaker 1: a thousand vivid hues. Bombay, the gateway of what silly
23:19
Speaker 1: people were still calling in those days, the Immemorial East. Bombay,
23:26
Speaker 1: which is newer than Boston or New York. Bombay which
23:30
Speaker 1: has grown beneath the Englishman's shadow out of a Portuguese
23:34
Speaker 1: fort in the last two hundred years. End of Chapter eight,
23:42
Speaker 1: Parts one to two,