A Man Who Does Not Exist

The Speaker, April 12, 1902

I once compiled a monumental work in twelve folio volumes entitled "Things that do not exist." The subject was treated copiously, not only with notes and appendices, but with illustrations, maps, plans, facsimile letters, photogravure portraits, and everything calculated to combine the character of a great work of reference with the character of an edition de luxe. I will not at this time go at length into the long list which I then dealt with of famous and remarkable things that do not exist. They included such things as Realism, the Liberal Unionist Party, the Average Man, the Pessimist, the Orange River Colony, the Duke of Devonshire, the New Woman, the Bacon-Shakespeare Cypher, the Inevitable, and the Practical Man. But two things stood out in a great degree of prominence in the work, two things of somewhat kindred meaning and of which I have since heard a great deal. One was "The Man in the Street" and the other "Public Opinion." When seriously contemplated and properly understood, the very phrase "public opinion" may be regarded as a joke of no little humour and subtlety. The idea of ten million people coming by strict intellectual processes at the same moment to the same opinion is ridiculous in itself. Opinion is nothing if it is not an individual matter, and to talk about the public forming its opinion is like talking of the public lighting its pipe. It calls up a wild picture (a picture which did indeed occur in the exhaustive volume to which I have already referred) of an endless crowd, an illimitable sea of human beings, every one of whom had his head on one side at the same meditative angle, his face raised to Heaven with the same growing smile, and his eyes shining with the sudden inspiration at the same thought. Who can imagine the populace- that is to say, the populace in bulk- expressing an opinion? It would be like a scene from some farcical dream. Imagine a mob choking the streets,surging up the steps of the Palace, and shouting with one deafening voice: "After serious consideration we have been logically forced to the conclusion that resistance to the Government, always an evil in any civilised country, has now become the lesser of two evils." That is what I should call an opinion, and it was never held by any populace that ever existed in the world. Imagine a constitutional monarch coming out upon his balcony, and his loyal subjects shouting out their opinion of him. Conceive the roar going up from the market place and taking the form of the words "God Save the King, so long as his activities, strictly restrained in the area of political disputes and decisions, tend to represent the social unity of the Commonwealth." No, the thing is not easy to picture. That which binds a people together is not opinion, but something much deeper and more mysterious- no two men since the creation of the world have ever had exactly the same opinion.

The case is the same with that remarkable being of whom we now hear so much, the Man in the Street. In the sumptuous illustrations attached to the book of Things that do not exist he was depicted as a weird and solitary figure standing in the streets under the moon; the birds had nested on his hat, and a mighty cob-web connected him with a neighbouring lamp-post; he had remained for immemorial ages in the street. He is a myth, perhaps a beautiful myth, but still a myth. This Man in the Street, this being by whose arbitrament politics, literature, and ethics are now tested and decided, is as fabulous as the Hydra; he is a thing that does not exist. My friend the Pessimist, to whom I have alluded in a previous article, and who is naturally disposed to take a somewhat gloomy view of things, declares that the Man in the Street does exist. But then my friend the Pessimist does not exist himself, so, he cannot be held to be a sound judge of all the niceties of the question, and may even be considered as having a certain bias. The essential proof that the Man in the Street does not exist is very simple. No one ever met anyone who believed himself to be the Man in the Street. No one ever met anyone who believed anyone else whom he knew intimately to be the Man in the Street. The sage who goes on the hopeless hunt after the average man will be endlessly disappointed as his researches exhibit endless variety and individuality. It will be more and more discovered that the Man in the Street only happens to be in the street, just as we happen to be in the street. Beyond that he resolves himself variously into the Man in the Cathedral, the Man in the Public-House, the Man in the National Gallery, the Man in the Penitentiary, the Man in the Fabian Society, the Man in the Divorce Court, the Man in Khaki- and the Man in Holy Orders. Among all the millions whom we summarise as men in the street there is not one who bears the least resemblance to any other man the moment we really understand his private memories, hopes, and conceptions. If we had to advise one man in the street how he should conduct himself in a definite crisis towards definite persons, our advice would be quite different to that which we should offer to another man in the street. No doubt there is a common human basis for all these men, but that common human basis includes the cultivated and exceptional quite as much as it includes these people. The dilemma, therefore, is simply this: either there is no such thing as the Man in the Street or else Maeterlinck is the Man in the Street and Mr. W. B. Yeats is the Man in the Street.

The matter, indeed, is far deeper and more essential than this. A serious and disastrous alteration is made the moment the speaker or writer or leader of men leaves off regarding the ordinary man as a man, and therefore one like himself, and begins to treat him as a strange beast, whose whims must be studied and pampered without being explained or shared. We are much under the shadow of this error at present in journalism, in art, and in politics. The modern statesman, for instance, uses his intellectual faculties, not to discover a new and important conception which he thinks would please the people, but to discover what the people at present think would please them, which is quite a different thing. Even practically the method is a ruinous mistake: it would not be adopted by any business man who had the least initiative. Take a random example. Suppose that you or I wanted to make a fortune, like Mr. Pears, out of soap. We should study the chemistry of the matter; we should produce, with good scientific advice, what we believed to be a good soap, and then we should advertise it far and wide as a good soap. But the new Rosebery "going-with-the-tide" philosopher would not do this. He would go from house to house, asking grim landladies and meek householders how they thought a good cake of soap should be compounded. He would try to find out what sort of soap (if any) they used at the time and try and imitate it; and he would be as deservedly sold up as any bankrupt that ever was born. Statesmen like Gladstone were not mere idealists; they tried to please and excite the people; but they tried to do it by giving the people ideas which they, the statesmen, thought pleasant and exciting, and thereby created a real bond between themselves and their audiences, similar to the bond which connects an artist with his admirers, the bond, in fact, that both are enjoying themselves. It is one thing, after the manner of Gladstone, to produce a thrilling drama which you think the pit will enjoy. It is another thing, after the manner of Lord Rosebery, to send the manager before the curtain at every interval to ask the pittites how they would like the next act to end.

The truth is that nothing can be worse than this serving of the Average Man as if he were a mysterious and capricious god: there is no religion so base as the serving of a deity whom we both fear and despise. And there is nothing more characteristic of the really great men of history than that they treated the average man as a man who would naturally understand their gospel. The small man believes in the cleverness of his utterances, the great man believes in their obviousness. By the divine paradox of things it is always the superior man who believes in equality. To take the loftiest of all examples, no one can read the great sayings of the New Testament without feeling that they are dominated by an appeal to a cosmic common sense. Their characteristic note is a reasonable surprise. "What man of you having a hundred sheep-"; "What man of you, having a son-"- these are the utterances of a Dvine equality.