NOTES ON CULTURE
147
relation to the rest of society, may be disposed of in several ways.
It may be ignored as in France, extirpated as in
Russ~a
or diluted
as in England. But the duties which it has failed to fulfill are not
all
taken over by another class, or by society as a whole, and the mere
removal of an inefficient class does not solve the problems of society.
A society which has preserved enough vitality to recover from its own
revolutions will probably evolve slowly a new upper class, integrated
with the rest of the community as its predecessor was not, and with it
a new culture. But at this stage we are not concerned with such
mutations, but with the possibility of the preservation and growth
of such culture as we have. With the decay of an upper class, or more
precisely of an upper middle class, its cultural values tend to disappear
also; and the question to consider is whether modern society-in any
country-has enough vitality to preserve its fundamental
cultur~
and
to adapt it to modern conditions, and to adapt modern conditions to it.
No healthy society, however little advanced, is without its own
culture: some have become, through adverse circumstances or some
radical error, definitely retrograde ; others have been demoralized
through association with more advanced cultures. For if a culture is
a whole, the effect upon it of a higher civilization is to disintegrate it,
and to impose upon the minds of its members a greater strain than
they can bear. To alter the land tenure system, the marriage customs,
or the administration of justice in a savage tribe may be to repbce
the worse by the better, but it is attended by great and often unpre–
dictable perils: tamper with the pattern of primitive culture at one
point, and the whole structute may fall to pieces. I mention the
influence of a higher culture upon a lower only as a preparation to
considering what a higher culture may do to itself. The abuses of a
rigidly stratified society, giving rise to a sense of injustice which stirs
the forces of revolution, represent only the more political aspect of
deterioration, and produce an over-emphasis upon the political ele–
ment in culture. Other aspects of decline are to be seen in other
separations of activities and groups than those immediately related
to political and economic conditions. Religion, philosophy and art–
each becomes a distinct province, cultivated by a different group of
people. The artistic sensibility is impoverished by its separation from
the religious sensibility, the religious by its separation from the artistic,
and the vestige of
manners
may be left to those who, having their
sensibility uninformed either by religion or by art, and their minds
unfurnished with the material for witty conversation, have nothing
left but an inherited behavior which ceases t9 have meaning. Culture
shrinks to the ambit of a group, a group not necessarily identical
