Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  The early years of the nineteenth century produced quite a number of eminent poets, especially in England. Russia’s best-known national poet, Pushkin, also lived then. He died young as the result of a duel. There were several poets in France also, but I shall mention only two French names. One is that of Victor Hugo, who was born in 1802 and lived, like Goethe, to the age of eighty-three and, also like Goethe, became a kind of demi-god of literature in his own country. He had a varied career both as a writer and as a politician. He started life as an aggressive royalist and almost a believer in autocracy. Gradually he changed step by step till he became a republican in 1848. Louis Napoleon, when he became President of the short-lived Second Republic, exiled him for his republican views. In 1871 Victor Hugo favoured the Commune of Paris. From the extreme right of conservatism he had moved gradually but surely to the extreme left of socialism. Most people grow conservative and reactionary as they become older. Hugo did the exact opposite. But we are concerned here with him as a writer. He was a great poet, novelist and dramatist.

  The second French name I shall mention to you is that of Honoré de Balzac. He was a contemporary of Victor Hugo’s, but was very different from him. He was a novelist of tremendous energy, and wrote a huge number of novels during a fairly short life. His stories are connected with one another; the same characters often appear in them. His object was to mirror the whole of the French life of his day in his novels, and he called the whole series La Comédie Humaine. It was a very ambitious idea, and although he worked hard and long, he could not complete the enormous task he had set himself.

  In England three brilliant young poets stand out in the early years of the nineteenth century. They were contemporaries, and they all died young within three years of each other. These three were Keats, Shelley and Byron. Keats had a hard tussle with poverty and discouragement, and when he died in Rome in 1821 at the age of twenty-six he was little known. And yet he had written some very beautiful poetry. Keats belonged to the middle classes, and it is interesting to note that if lack of money was an obstruction in his way, how much more difficult must it be for the poor to become poets and writers. Indeed, the present Cambridge Professor of English Literature has some pertinent remarks to make about this: “It is”, he says,

  certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools,—we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.

  I have given this quotation because we are apt to forget that poetry and fine writing, and culture generally, are monopolies of the well-todo classes. Poetry and culture have little place in a poor man’s hut; they are not meant for empty stomachs. So our present-day culture becomes a reflection of the well-to-do bourgeois mind. It may change greatly when the worker takes charge of it in a different social system where he has the opportunities and leisure to indulge in culture. Some such change is being watched with interest in Soviet Russia today.

  This also makes it clear to us that a great deal of our cultural poverty in India during the last few generations is due to our people’s excessive poverty. It is an insult to talk of culture to people who have nothing to eat. This blight of poverty affects even those few who happen to be relatively well-to-do, and so unhappily even these classes in India are today singularly uncultured. What a host of evils foreign rule and social backwardness have to answer for. But even in this general poverty and drabness, India can still produce splendid men and magnificent exemplars of culture like Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

  I have drifted away from my subject.

  Shelley was a most lovable creature; full of fire from his early youth and the champion of freedom in everything. He was expelled from his college at Oxford for writing an essay on The Necessity of Atheism. He (and Keats also) went through his brief life as a poet is supposed to do, living in his imagination and in the air and regardless of worldly difficulties. He was drowned near the Italian coast a year after the death of Keats. I need not tell you of his famous poems as you can easily find them out for yourself. But I shall give you one of his shorter poems. It is by no means among his best, but it brings out the awful fate of the poor worker in our present civilization. He is in almost as bad a condition as the old slaves were. It is more than hundred years since the poem was written, and yet it applies to present-day conditions. It is called The Mask of Anarchy.

  What is Freedom?—ye can tell

  That which slavery is, too well—

  For its very name has grown

  To an echo of your own.

  ’Tis to work and have such pay

  As just keeps life from day to day

  In your limbs, as in a cell

  For the tyrant’s use to dwell.

  So that ye for them are made

  Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,

  With or without your own will bent

  To their defence and nourishment.

  ’Tis to see your children weak

  With their mothers pine and peak,

  When the winter winds are bleak—

  They are dying, whilst I speak.

  ’Tis to hunger for such diet

  As the rich man in his riot

  Casts to the fat dogs that lie

  Surfeiting beneath his eye.

  ’Tis to be a slave in soul

  And to hold no strong control

  Over your own wills, but be

  All that others make of ye.

  And at length, when ye complain

  With a murmur weak and vain,

  ’Tis to see the tyrant’s crew

  Ride over your wives and you—

  Blood is on the grass like dew.

  Byron has also written fine poetry in praise of freedom, but it is national freedom, and not economic freedom, as in Shelley’s poem. He died, as I have told you, in the Greek national war of liberation against Turkey, two years after Shelley. I am rather prejudiced against Byron as a man, and yet I have a fellow-feeling for him, for did he not go to Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge—my school and college? Unlike Keats and Shelley, fame came to him in his youth, and he was lionized by London society, only to be dropped later.

  There were two other well-known poets about this time, both much longer-lived than this youthful trio. Wordsworth, who lived for eighty years from 1770 to 1850, is considered one of the great English poets. He was very fond of Nature, and much of his poetry is Nature-poetry. The other was Coleridge; a few of his poems are very good.

  The early nineteenth century also saw three famous novelists. Walter Scott was the eldest of these, and his Waverley novels were very popular. I suppose you have read some of them. I remember liking them when I was a boy, but tastes change as one grows up, and I am sure they would bore me now if I read them. Thackeray and Dickens were the two other novelists. Both, I think, are far superior to Scott. I hope they are both friends of yours. Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811, and spent five or six years there. Some of his books have got realistic descriptions of the Indian nabobs—that is, the English people in India who, having collected a huge fortune and become fat and peppery, returned to England to enjoy themselves.

  This is as much as I propose to write about the writers of the early nineteenth century. It is ridiculously little about a big subject. A person who knows the subject could write charmingly about it; he would also, no doubt, tell you a lot about the music and art of the period. All this requires telling and knowing, but they are beyond me, and I shall wisely keep to solid ground.

  I shall finish up this letter by giving you a poem from Goethe’s Faust. This is, of course, a translation from the German:

  Alas, alas!

  Thou hast smitten the world,

  Thou hast laid i
t low,

  Shattered, o’er thrown,

  Into nothingness hurled

  Crushed by a demi-god’s blow

  We bear them away,

  The shards of the world,

  We sing well-a-day

  Over the loveliness gone,

  Over the beauty slain.

  Build it again,

  Great child of Earth,

  Build it again

  With a finer worth,

  In thine own bosom build it on high!

  Take up thy life once more:

  Run the race again!

  High and clear

  Let a lovelier strain

  Ring out than ever before!

  130

  Darwin and the Triumph of Science

  February 3, 1933

  From the poets let us go to the scientists. The poets, I am afraid, are still considered rather ineffectual beings; but the scientists are the miracle-workers of today, and they have influence and honour. This was not so before the nineteenth century. In the earlier centuries a scientist’s life was a risky affair in Europe and sometimes ended at the stake. I have told you of how Giordano Bruno was burnt in Rome by the Church. A few years later, in the seventeenth century, Galileo came very near the stake because he had stated that the earth went round the sun. He escaped being burnt for heresy because he apologized and withdrew his previous statements. In this way the Church in Europe was always coming into conflict with science and trying to suppress new ideas. Organized religion, in Europe or elsewhere, has various dogmas attached to it which its followers are supposed to accept without doubt or questioning. Science has a very different way of looking at things. It takes nothing for granted and has, or ought to have, no dogmas. It seeks to encourage an open mind and tries to reach truth by repeated experiment. This outlook is obviously very different from the religious outlook, and it is not surprising that there was frequent conflict between the two.

  Experiments of various kinds have, I suppose, been carried on by different peoples in all ages. In ancient India, it is said that chemistry and surgery were fairly advanced, and this could only have been so after a great deal of experimenting. The old Greeks also experimented to some extent. As for the Chinese, recently I read a most astonishing account, which gave extracts from Chinese writers of 1500 years ago, showing that they knew of the theory of evolution, and of the circulation of the blood through the body, and that Chinese surgeons gave anaesthetics. But we do not know enough about these times to justify any conclusions. If the ancient civilizations had discovered these methods, why did they forget them later? And why did they not make greater progress? Or was it that they did not attach enough importance to this kind of progress? Many interesting questions arise, but we have no materials to answer them.

  The Arabs were very fond of experimenting, and Europe in the Middle Ages followed them. But all their experimentation was not truly scientific. They were always looking for what was called the “Philosophers’ Stone”, which was supposed to have the virtue of turning common metals into gold. People spent their lives in complicated chemical experiments to find the secret of such transmutation of metals; alchemy this was called. They also searched diligently for an “elixir of life” or amrit, which would give immortality. There is no record, outside fairy tales, of anyone having ever succeeded in finding this amrit or the famous stone. This was really dabbling in some kind of magic in the hope of gaining wealth and power and long life. It had nothing to do with the spirit of science. Science has no concern with magic and sorcery and the like. The real scientific method, however, developed gradually in Europe, and among the greatest names in the history of science is that of the Englishman, Isaac Newton, who lived from 1642 to 1727. Newton explained the law of gravitation—that is, of how things fall; and with the help of this, and other laws which had been discovered, he explained the movements of the sun and the planets. Everything, both big and small, seemed to be explained by his theories, and he received great honour.

  The spirit of science was gaining on the dogmatic spirit of the Church. It could no longer be put down or its votaries sent to the stake. Many scientists patiently worked and experimented and collected facts and knowledge, especially in England and France, and later in Germany and America. The body of scientific knowledge thus grew. The eighteenth century in Europe, you will remember, was the century when rationalism spread among the educated classes. It was the century of Voltaire and Rousseau and many other able Frenchmen who wrote on all manner of subjects and created a ferment in the minds of the people. The great French Revolution was being hatched in the womb of the century. This rationalistic outlook fitted in with the scientific outlook, and both opposed the dogmatic outlook of the Church.

  The nineteenth century, I have told you, was, among other things, the century of science. The Industrial Revolution, the Mechanical Revolution, and the amazing changes in the methods of transport, were all due to science. The numerous factories had changed the methods of production; railways and steamships had suddenly narrowed the world; the electric telegraph was an even greater wonder. Wealth poured into England from her far-flung empire. Old ideas were naturally much shaken by this, and the hold of religion grew less. Factory life, as compared to an agricultural life on the land, made people think more of economic relations than of religious dogmas.

  In the middle of the century, in 1859, a book was published in England which brought the conflict between the dogmatic and the scientific outlook to a head. This book was the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. Darwin is not among the very great scientists; there was nothing very new in what he said. Other geologists and naturalists had been at work before Darwin, and had gathered much material. Nonetheless Darwin’s book was epoch-making; it produced a vast impression and helped in changing the social outlook more than any other scientific work. It resulted in a mental earthquake and made Darwin famous.

  Darwin had wandered about in South America and the Pacific as a naturalist and had collected an enormous amount of material and data. He used this to show how each species of animals had changed and developed by natural selection. Many people had thought till then that every species or kind of animal, including man, had been separately created by God, and had remained apart and unchangeable since then— that is to say that one species could not become another. Darwin showed, by a mass of actual examples, that species did change from one to another, and that this was the normal method of development. These changes took place by natural selection. A slight variation in a species, if it happened to be profitable to it in any way or helped it to survive others, would gradually lead to a permanent change, as obviously more of this varied species would survive. After a while this varied species would be in the majority and would swamp the others. In this way changes and variations would creep in, one after the other, and after some time there would be an almost new species produced. So in course of time many new species would arise by this process of survival of the fittest by natural selection. This would apply to plants and animals, and even man. It is possible, according to this theory, that there might be a common ancestor of all the various plant and animal species we see today.

  A few years later Darwin published another book—The Descent of Man—in which he applied his theory to man. This idea of evolution and of natural selection is accepted by most people now, though not exactly in the way Darwin and his followers put it forward. Indeed, it is quite a common thing for people to apply this principle of selection artificially to the breeding of animals and the cultivation of plants and fruits and flowers. Many of the prize animals and plants today are new species, artificially created. If man can produce such changes and new species in a relatively short time, what could not Nature do in this line in the course of hundreds of thousands or millions of years? A visit to a natural history museum, say the South Kensington Museum in London, shows us how plants and animals are continually adapting themselves to nature.

  All this seems obvious enough to us now. But it was not so
obvious seventy years ago. Most people in Europe still believed at the time in the Biblical account of the creation of the world just 4004 years before Christ, and of each plant and animal being created separately, and finally man. They believed in the Flood and in Noah’s Ark with its pairs of animals, so that no species might become extinct. All this did not fit in with the Darwinian theory. Darwin and the geologists talked of millions of years as the age of the earth, and not a paltry 6000 years. So there was a tremendous tussle in the minds of men and women, and many good people did not know what to do. Their old faith told them to believe in one thing, and their reason said another. When people believe blindly in dogmas and the dogmas receive a shock, they feel helpless and miserable and without any solid ground to stand upon. But a shock which wakes us to reality is good.

  So there was a great argument and great conflict in England and elsewhere in Europe between science and religion. There could be no doubt of the result. The new world of industry and mechanical transport depended on science, and science thus could not be discarded. Science won all along the line, and “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” became part of the ordinary jargon of the people, who used the phrases without fully understanding what they meant. Darwin had suggested in his Descent of Man that there might have been a common ancestor of man and certain apes. This could not be proved by examples showing various stages in the process of development. From this there grew the popular joke about the “missing link”. And, curiously enough, the ruling classes twisted Darwin’s theory to suit their own convenience, and were firmly convinced that it supplied yet another proof of their superiority. They were the fittest to survive in the battle of life, and so by “natural selection” they had come out on top and were the ruling class. This became the justification for one class dominating over another, or one race ruling over another. It became the final argument of imperialism and the supremacy of the white race. And many people in the West thought that the more domineering they were, the more ruthless and strong, the higher up in the scale of human values they were likely to be. It is not a pleasant philosophy, but it explains to some extent the conduct of Western imperialist Powers in Asia and Africa.