The Role of the Prophet
Grant Allen
[Chapter VIII from the book, Post-Prandial
Philosophy, published 1894 in London by Chatto & Windus]
One great English thinker and artist once tried the rash experiment
of being true to himselfof saying out boldly, without fear or
reserve, the highest and noblest and best that was in him. He gave us
the most exquisite lyrics in the English language; he moulded the
thought of our first youth as no other poet has ever yet moulded it;
he became the spiritual father of the richest souls in two succeeding
generations of Englishmen. And what reward did he get for it? He was
expelled from his university. He was hounded out of his country. He
was deprived of his own children. He was denied the common appeal to
the law and courts of justice. He was drowned, an exile, in a distant
sea, and burned in solitude on a foreign shore. And after his death he
was vilified and calumniated by wretched penny-a-liners, or (worse
insult still) apologised for, with half-hearted shrugs, by lukewarm
advocates. The purest in life and the most unselfish in purpose of all
mankind, he was persecuted alive with the utmost rancour of hate, and
pursued when dead with the vilest shafts of malignity. He never even
knew in his scattered grave the good he was to do to later groups of
thinkers. It was a noble example, of course; but not, you will admit,
an alluring one for others to follow.
"Be true to yourself," say the copy-book moralists, "and
you may be sure the result will at last be justified." No doubt;
but in how many centuries? And what sort of life will you lead
yourself, meanwhile, for your allotted space of threescore years and
ten, unless haply hanged, or burned, or imprisoned before it? What the
copy-book moralists mean is merely thisthat sooner or later your
principles will triumph, which may or may not be the case according to
the nature of the principles. But even suppose they do, are you to
ignore yourself in the interimyou, a human being with emotions,
sensations, domestic affections, and, in the majority of instances,
wife and children on whom to expend them? Why should it be calmly
taken for granted by the world that if you have some new and true
thing to tell humanity (which humanity, of course, will toss back in
your face with contumely and violence) you are bound to blurt it out,
with childish unreserve, regardless of consequences to yourself and to
those who depend upon you? Why demand of genius or exceptional
ability a gratuitous sacrifice which you would deprecate as wrong and
unjust to others in the ordinary citizen? For the genius, too, is a
man, and has his feelings. The fact is, society considers that in
certain instances it has a right to expect the thinker will martyrise
himself on its account, while it stands serenely by and heaps faggots
on the pile, with every mark of contempt and loathing. But society is
mistaken. No man is bound to martyrise himself; in a great many cases
a man is bound to do the exact opposite. He has given hostages to
Fortune, and his first duty is to the hostages. "We ask you for
bread," his children may well say, "and you give us a noble
moral lesson. We ask you for clothing, and you supply us with a
beautiful poetical fancy." This is not according to bargain. Wife
and children have a first mortgage on a man's activities; society has
only a right to contingent remainders.
A great many sensible men who had truths of deep import to deliver to
the world must have recognised these facts in all times and places,
and must have held their tongues accordingly. Instead of speaking out
the truths that were in them, they must have kept their peace, or have
confined themselves severely to the ordinary platitudes of their age
and nation. Why ruin yourself by announcing what you feel and believe,
when all the reward you will get for it in the end will be social
ostracism, if not even the rack, the stake, or the pillory? The
Shelleys and Rousseaus there's no holding, of course; they will run
right into it; but the Goethesoh, no, they keep their secret.
Indeed, I hold it as probable that the vast majority of men far in
advance of their times have always held their tongues consistently,
save for mere common babble, on Lord Chesterfield's principle that "Wise
men never say."
The rôle of prophet is thus a thankless and difficult one. Nor
is it quite certainly of real use to the community. For the prophet is
generally too much ahead of his times. He discounts the future at a
ruinous rate, and he takes the consequences. If you happen ever to
have read the Old Testament you must have noticed that the prophets
had generally a hard time of it.
The leader is a very different stamp of person. He stands well
abreast of his contemporaries, and just half a pace in front of them;
and he has power to persuade even the inertia of humanity into taking
that one half-step in advance he himself has already made bold to
adventure. His post is honoured, respected, remunerated. But the
prophet gets no thanks, and perhaps does mankind no benefit. He sees
too quick. And there can be very little good indeed in so seeing. If
one of us had been an astronomer, and had discovered the laws of
Kepler, Newton, and Laplace in the thirteenth century, I think he
would have been wise to keep the discovery to himself for a few
hundred years or so. Otherwise, he would have been burned for his
trouble. Galileo, long after, tried part of the experiment a decade or
so too soon, and got no good by it. But in moral and social matters
the danger is far graver. I would say to every aspiring youth who sees
some political or economical or ethical truth quite clearly: "Keep
it dark! Don't mention it! Nobody will listen to you; and you, who are
probably a person of superior insight and higher moral aims than the
mass, will only destroy your own influence for good by premature
declarations. The world will very likely come round of itself to your
views in the end; but if you tell them too soon, you will suffer for
it in person, and will very likely do nothing to help on the
revolution in thought that you contemplate. For thought that is too
abruptly ahead of the mass never influences humanity."
"But sometimes the truth will out in spite of one!" Ah,
yes, that's the worst of it. Do as I say, not as I do. If possible,
repress it.
It is a noble and beautiful thing to be a martyr, especially if you
are a martyr in the cause of truth, and not, as is often the case, of
some debasing and degrading superstition. But nobody has a right to
demand of you that you should be a martyr. And some people have often
a right to demand that you should resolutely refuse the martyr's crown
on the ground that you have contracted prior obligations, inconsistent
with the purely personal luxury of martyrdom. 'Tis a luxury for a few.
It befits only the bachelor, the unattached, and the economically
spareworthy.
"These be pessimistic pronouncements," you say. Well, no,
not exactly. For, after all, we must never shut our eyes to the
actual; and in the world as it is, meliorism, not optimism, is the
true opposite of pessimism. Optimist and pessimist are both alike in a
sense, seeing they are both conservative; they sit down contentedthe
first with the smug contentment that says "All's well; I have
enough; why this fuss about others?" the second with the
contentment of blank despair that says, "All's hopeless; all's
wrong; why try uselessly to mend it?" The meliorist attitude, on
the contrary, is rather to say, "Much is wrong; much painful;
what can we do to improve it?" And from this point of view there
is something we can all do to make martyrdom less inevitable in the
end, for the man who has a thought, a discovery, an idea, to tell us.
Such men are rare, and their thought, when they produce it, is sure to
be unpalatable. For, if it were otherwise, it would be thought of our
own typefamiliar, banal, commonplace, unoriginal. It would
encounter no resistance, as it thrilled on its way through our brain,
from established errors. What the genius and the prophet are there for
is just thatto make us listen to unwelcome truths, to compel us
to hear, to drive awkward facts straight home with sledge-hammer force
to the unwilling hearts and brains of us. Not what you want to hear,
or what I want to hear, is good and useful for us; but what we don't
want to hear, what we can't bear to think, what we hate to believe,
what we fight tooth and nail against. The man who makes us listen to
that is the seer and the prophet; he comes upon us like Shelley, or
Whitman, or Ibsen, and plumps down horrid truths that half surprise,
half disgust us. He shakes us out of our lethargy. To such give ear,
though they say what shocks you. Weigh well their hateful ideas. Avoid
the vulgar vice of sneering and carping at them. Learn to examine
their nude thought without shrinking, and examine it all the more
carefully when it most repels you. Naked verity is an acquired taste;
it is never beautiful at first sight to the unaccustomed vision.
Remember that no question is finally settled; that no question is
wholly above consideration; that what you cherish as holiest is most
probably wrong; and that in social and moral matters especially (where
men have been longest ruled by pure superstitions) new and startling
forms of thought have the highest a priori probability in their
favour. Dismiss your idols. Give every opinion its fair chance of
successespecially when it seems to you both wicked and
ridiculous, recollecting that it is better to let five hundred crude
guesses run loose about the world unclad, than to crush one fledgling
truth in its callow condition. To the Greeks, foolishness: to the
Jews, a stumbling-block. If you can't be one of the prophets yourself,
you can at least abstain from helping to stone them.
Dear me! These reflections to-day are anything but post-prandial. The
gnocchi and the olives must certainly have disagreed with me. But
perhaps it may some of it be "wrote sarcastic." I have heard
tell there is a thing called irony.
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