Part 17
If one dwells too much on the miseries this world contains, there must come a moment when one will say: “Life’s not worth living; I will end it!” But by some dispensation few of us reach that point—too sanely selfish, or saved by the thought that we must work to reduce the sum of misery.
For these greatest of all sufferers—these helpless and incurable—can we do too much, ever reach the word: Enough?
To you, women of Great and Greater Britain, it has fallen to raise on Richmond Hill this refuge and home for our soldiers and sailors totally disabled. Where thirty-two are now lying there will soon be two hundred more. Nearly all my life I have known the spot on which this home will stand; and truly, no happier choice could have been made. If beauty consoles—and it can, a little—it is there in all the seasons; a benign English beauty of fields and trees and water spread below, under a wide sky.
One hundred thousand pounds you need to raise this monument of mercy in tribute to the brave. If it were five hundred thousand you would give it; for is not this monument to be the record and token of your gratitude, your love, and your pity? Each one of you, I think, however poor, must wish to lay one brick or stone of the house that is to prove your ministering.
If the misery through this war could be balanced in scales, I do not think men’s suffering would pull down that of wives, and mothers, sisters, daughters; but this special suffering of incurable disablement—this has been spared you, who yet by nature are better at enduring than men. It has been spared you; and in return you have vowed this home for the helpless; a more sacred place than any church, for within it every hour of day and night pain will be assuaged, despair be overcome, actual living tenderness be lavished.
When you have built this refuge for the prisoners of Fate—when you have led them there to make out the rest of their lives as best they can—remember this: Men who are cut off in their youth from life and love will prize beyond all things woman’s sympathy, and the sight of woman’s beauty. Give—your money to build, your hands to lead them home; and, when they are there, take them your sympathy, take them your beauty!
CARTOON
(From _The Nation_, 1916.)
. . . I cannot describe the street I turned into, then, like no street I have ever been in; so long, so narrow, so regular, yet somehow so unsubstantial; one had continually a feeling that, walking at the gray houses on either side, one would pass through them. I must have gone miles down it without meeting even the shadow of a human being; till, just as it was growing dusk, I saw a young man come silently out, as I suppose, from a door, though none was opened. I can depict neither his dress nor figure; like the street he looked unsubstantial, and the expression on his shadowy face haunted me, it was so like that of a starving man before whom one has set a meal, then snatched it away. And now, in the deepening dusk, out of every house, young men like him were starting forth in the same mysterious manner, all with that hungry look on their almost invisible faces.
Peering at one of them, I said:
“What is it—whom do you want?”
But he gave me no answer. It was too dark now to see any face; and I had only the feeling of passing between presences as I went along, without getting to any turning out of that endless street. Presently, in desperation, I doubled in my tracks.
A lamplighter must have been following me, for every lamp was lighted, giving a faint flickering greenish glare, as might lumps of phosphorescent matter hung out in the dark. The hungry, phantom-like young men had all vanished, and I was wondering where they could have gone, when I saw—some distance ahead—a sort of grayish whirlpool stretching across the street, under one of those flickering marsh-light looking lamps. A noise was coming from that swirl, which seemed to be raised above the ground—a ghostly swishing, as of feet among dry leaves, broken by the gruntings of some deep sense gratified. I went on till I could see that it was formed of human figures slowly whirling round the lamp. And suddenly I stood still in horror. Every other figure was a skeleton, and between danced a young girl in white—the whole swirling ring was formed alternately of skeletons and gray-white girls. Creeping a little nearer still, I could tell that these skeletons were the young men I had seen starting out of the houses as I passed, having the same look of awful hunger on their faces. And the girls who danced between them had a wan, wistful beauty, turning their eyes to their partners whose bony hands grasped theirs, as though begging them to return to the flesh. Not one noticed me, so deeply were they all absorbed in their mystic revel. And then I saw what it was they were dancing round. Above their heads, below the greenish lamp, a dark thing was dangling. It swung and turned there, never still, like a joint of meat roasting before a fire—the clothed body of an elderly man. The greenish lamp-light glinted on his gray hair, and on his features, every time the face came athwart the light. He swung slowly from right to left, and the dancers whirled from left to right, always meeting that revolving face, as though to enjoy the sight of it. What did it mean—these sad shapes rustling round the obscene thing suspended there! What strange and awful rite was I watching by the lamp’s ghostly phosphorescence? More haunting even than those hungry skeletons and wan gray girls, more haunting and gruesome, was that dead face up there with the impress still on it of bloated life; how it gripped and horrified me, with its pale, fishy eyes, and its neck thick-rolled with flabby flesh, turning and turning on its invisible spit, to the sound of that weird swishing of dead leaves, and those grunting sighs! Who was it they had caught and swung up there, like some dead crow, to sway in the winds? This gibbeted figure, which yet had a look of cold and fattened power—what awful crime towards these skeleton youths and bereaved gray-wan maidens could it be expiating?
Then with a shudder I seemed to recognize that grisly thing—suddenly I knew: I was watching the execution of the Past! There it swung! Gibbeted by the Future, whom, through its manifold lusts it had done to death! And seized with panic I ran forward through the fabric of my dream, that swayed and rustled to left and right of me. . . .
HARVEST
(From the _Book of the Homeless_, 1916.)
The sky to-night looks as if a million bright angels were passing—a gleaming cloud-mesh drawn across the heaven. One star, very clear, shines beside a full moon white as the globe-campion flower. The hills and valleys, the corn-stooks, casting each its shadow, the grey boles of the beeches—all have the remoteness of an ineffable peace. And the past day was so soft, so glamorous; such a hum, such brightness, and the harvest going on. . . .
These last years millions have died with energy but one third spent; millions more unripe for death will yet herald us into the long shades before these shambles cease—boys born just to be the meat of war, spitted on each other’s reddened bayonets, without inkling of guilt or knowledge. To what shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this green, unripe corn, field on field, being scythed by Death for none to eat? There is no solace in the thought that death is nothing!—save for those who still believe they go straight to Paradise. To us who dare not know the workings of the Unknowable, and in our heart of hearts cannot tell what, if anything, becomes of us—to us, the great majority of the modern world—life is valuable, good, a thing worth living out for its natural span. For, if it were not, long ere this we should have sat with folded arms, lifting no hand till the last sighing breath of the human race had whispered itself out into the wind, and a final darkness come; sat, like the Hindu Yogi, watching the sun and moon a little, and expired. The moon would be as white, and the sun as golden, if we were gone, the hills and valleys as mysterious, the beech-trees just as they are, only the stooks of corn would vanish with those who garner them. If life were not good we should make of ourselves dust indifferently—we human beings; quietly, peacefully; not in murderous horror reaped by the curving volleys, mown off by rains of shrapnel, and the long yellow scythe of the foul gases. But life _is_ good, and no living thing wishes to die; even they who kill themselves, despairing, resign out of sheer love of life, out of craving for what they have found too mutilated and starved, out of yearning for their meed of joy cruelly frustrated. And they who die that others may live are but those in whom the life-flame burns so hot and bright that they can feel the life and the longing to live in others as if it were their own—more than their own. Yes, life carries with it a very passion for existence.
To what, then, shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this harvest of too young deaths, the harvest of the brave, whose stooks are raised before us, casting each its shadow in the ironic moonlight? Green corn!
If, having watched those unripe blades reaped off and stacked so pitifully, watched the great dark Wagoner clear those unmellowed fields, we let their sacrifice be vain; if we sow not, hereafter, in a peaceful Earth that which shall become harvest more golden than the world has seen—then Shame on us, unending, in whatever land we dwell. . . .
This harvest night is still. And yet, up there, the bright angels are passing. One Star!
AND—AFTER?
AND—AFTER?
(From _The Observer_, 1916.)
I—PRELUDE
Peace! The thought of it has become almost strange. Yet we must face that thought, or we shall be as unprepared for it as we were for war. Practical men are fighting this war, practical men will make the peace that comes some day. And this unpractical pen ventures no speculation on how it will be brought about; it jots down merely some of the wider thoughts that throng, when for a moment the vision of Peace starts up before the mind!
Statesmen have said that the sequel of this war must be a League for Peace—a League for the enforcement by international action of international right. Whether that can be brought about at a Round Table Conference of the belligerents, or whether the League must be formed by the victorious Allies with the adherence of the neutral countries, and the Central Empires invited to fall in with their conclusions, on pain of ostracism, I hazard here no opinion. But, by whichever means the League for Peace is formed, it will be valueless unless three elements of security are present. Due machinery to secure time for the arbitration of dispute; due force to secure submission to such arbitration; due intention on the part of individual nations to serve the League loyally for the good of all. And the greatest of these three is the last.
The strength of a League for Peace will depend before all on the conduct of each separate nation. We in this country cannot control the faith, conduct, or stability of the other members of the League; we _can_ control our own.
However it ends, this war must leave the bitterest feelings. League for Peace or none, there will remain for this country a menace from without.
If Germany were what is called “crushed”—a queer notion in connection with sixty-five millions of people—she would smoulder with such a fire of vengeance that a victorious British nation, slumbering in dreams of security, waxing fat and swollen-headed, would in a few years time be in as great danger as ever. If Germany be merely shorn of her pretensions and forced back within her former boundaries, then, unless good fortune bring her a social revolution and the comparative blessings of Democracy, Germany may be much the same as she has been, a soldier-ridden State, quickly or slowly gathering force, to reforge the iron machinery of the Prussian soul, and lead the armoured dance again. Stung to the quick by memory of mistake, knowing that she misjudged our nature and our power, she will not make mistake a second time. However ardently the successful may desire to forget—it takes two to bury the hatchet. Let no one think that Germany will forget. Should we, if we were beaten, or even badly thwarted?
The writer is as great a lover of Peace as any who will resent his suggestion that enmity will not readily be changed. But it is well to remember that the menace from without is only increased by forgetting that human nature is fundamentally the same all the world over; and still more increased by not remembering that what we dream and desire is not as a rule what we can obtain. Granted, that all must hope and strive for the constitution of a League for Peace, and aim at making its conditions permanent, it will still be folly to blink the contingency of further war for years to come.
The validity of such a League will hang on the first years. Keep it intact, enforce respect for its decisions, _get men’s minds used to it_, and after a short span nothing is more unlikely than that they will forego its blessings. But militarism will automatically and proportionately decrease only as men gain confidence in the League’s authority, recognizing at last that an impartial justice may apply to nations every bit as well as to individuals, when there is the force of general consent behind it. Given a generation of its rule, and the nations will no longer carry daggers to stab each other in the back, or swords to avenge their “honour.” There is no need for premature disarmament. Recognition of the menace from without will not harm a League for Peace during its first years, so long as we shy at all spirit of aggression, and are loyal to its first principle of “All for one, and One for all.”
But Peace will also bring to us in this country the menace from within which was with us before the war began, as it is with every nation at whatever time of life—the menace of its individual failings, of its rankness and its uncompleted justice, its riot after riches at the expense of national health, its exaggerated party strife, its penny wisdom and pound folly, its lack of an ideal, and perpetual drifting it knows not whither. If when the war ends we remain a nation, masters of our own lives—and there is no Briton who is not convinced that we shall—the menace from within must again be faced; faced with a stouter heart and a quicker brain; faced at last with some sort of corporate will to that victory over ourselves, so much more difficult to win than over hostile fleets and fortresses. To win the war, and thereafter lose to our own weakness, would cap the event with irony indeed!
It is the fashion with some to talk glibly of this war as if it were a purge that will drain from our State innumerable ills. The war’s honourable necessity none of us dispute, but for us it has in truth only the one advantage—of having revealed to ourselves our quality, re-established our faith. That quality, that faith, to be of any lasting use, will have to stand not only the dreadful spasm of war, but the long exhaustion, the manifold increase of economic stress and social trouble that will infallibly begin when the war ends. Unless we are resolved to carry on our effort of sacrifice, good-will, and courage long into the future, the last state of this land will be worse than the first. The purge that we like to speak of will be proven nothing but a debauch, paid for, like all debauches, by lassitude and spleen.
All national energy at the moment is inevitably bent to the ending of a state of things dreadful to every man and woman living; but, while doing this with all our might, we need to keep alive in our minds the feeling that the fight is not for mere gratification of the passion to down our foes, not just a spurt of military heroism, to be drowned in the drink and applause of victory; but a fight for something abiding in ourselves and in the world—for spiritual, not material, ends.
If, even while we are at war, we cannot keep the feeling that what we are fighting for is a permanent and steady advance in the just and reasonable life of nations, _beginning with ourselves_, we had better never have fought, for at the end we shall but have added to our vanity, and taken from the stock of our patience, our humanity, and our sense of justice. And so the feelings of the present are linked with the feelings and necessities that will arrive with peace. If the fine phrases we have used, and are still using, about Liberty, Humanity, Democracy, and Peace are not genuinely felt, they will come home to us and roost most vilely. By the outside world we shall be judged according to the measure of actuality we give hereafter to the claim we now make of being champion of Freedom and Humanity; and only according to our inward habit of thought during the war shall we be able to act when it is over. We can _do_ nothing now perhaps, save prosecute the fight to its appointed end; but, if we are not to turn out fraudulent after the event, it is already time to feel ahead—to accustom our minds to the thought of the future efforts, Imperial and social, needful to meet future dangers, and to fulfil the trusts we shall have taken up.
From facile imaginings and Utopian dreams of a purged social life and a fortified _morale_ to the real conditions that this war will leave is likely to be the farthest cry any of us will ever hear. We cannot have it both ways. If war, as most of us believe, is a terrible calamity, it will not leave an improved world. A sloppy optimism is not the slightest good, no more than a deliberate pessimism. “It will be all right after the war!” is, no doubt, the attitude of many minds just now. It will only be all right after the war if, with all the might of a sustained national will, we take care that it is. A great and solemn opportunity, the greatest our country has ever known, will be there, to be made or marred. The records of history are not too cheering, and experience of human nature in the past brings no very happy augury—for after too great effort comes reaction. But this age has higher aspirations, more self-consciousness than any that has gone before. To turn the possible calamity of this war to blessing we shall have to set our foot on Fatalism. There is no real antagonism between the doctrines of Determinism and Free Will. When things have happened, we see that they must have happened as they did; but how does this affect the freedom of our will _before_ they happen—before we know which way they will turn out? Men and nations are what they make themselves.
What are we going to make ourselves—after?
II—FREEDOM AND PRIVILEGE
What is this thing called the British Empire? A family of children, ruled by a Mother, or a gathering of kinsfolk under the roof of one ideal? Is it in reality an Empire or a Confederacy? It has been the first, it is fast becoming the second.
Imperialism is governed for good or ill by the principle that underlies it. At the time of the American War of Independence British government stood for the principle of Domination; even so late as the Boer War there is much doubt whether, for the moment at least, it stood for anything very different. A great change has come. The British Empire stands now, as it never yet stood, for the principle “Live and let live”; for coherence through common ideals and affections, rather than for coherence through force. In this war we have not ceased to assert that, besides the preservation of our own safety, we fight for the independence of little countries, and the rights of nations to settle their own affairs. By this declared championship, unless we wish to bring down poetic justice on our heads, we have consecrated the principle of Freedom within the confederacy of the British Empire; we have abrogated the right of coercion. Whether we realize it or no, we have fixed our national attitude. When the war is over, the feeling of Britain towards her kindred will be warmer and more generous than it has ever been; they have stood side by side with us like men and brothers, in touching loyalty. And the feeling in the kindred countries will be warmer and fuller of respect; they have seen the Old Country on her trial, have seen that she did not fail of what the world expected from her; seen that she had stuff in her beyond their hopes—for a new country is ever inclined to impatience, even to a certain contempt, for an old country. It was just as well for Britain’s reputation with her kinsfolk that this war came.
Yes, we shall be a true Confederacy, a great Democratic Confederacy, bound in honour to observe towards the world the principles that it observes towards itself; to keep its hands clean of narrow and provincial patriotism, of that raw overriding of the rights and interests of others, the ugliness of which we have just seen in the violation of Belgium, the Nemesis of which we are about to see.
And, looking first at home, we have got to get used now, at once, while we are still fighting, before we have the leisure and the energy to revive old animosities and party cries, to the idea that civil strife in Ireland after this war is over would be criminal lunacy, making us the playboy of the world, and destroying the prestige we shall have gained. It seems that our statesmen now recognize this. But whatever seems to settle the Irish question in time of war may not survive the strain of the peace that follows. If the lamentable cleavage in Ireland reappears—as it well may, for it is based on such real differences of temperament—let us in England be resolute not to be re-involved in partizanship. Let us resolve to force neither one party nor the other; confine ourselves to insisting that those who object so strenuously to inclusion in an opposite camp shall be as loth to include their opponents as they are to be included. Only of its own free will can Ireland ever be made one. If the halves be not forced, they will become one the faster. Time is the healer; time and forbearance, given an elastic machinery to encourage and ripen reconciliation. Of a surety, renewed trouble over Ireland would be the very worst augury for the future of an Empire that stands, and is to stand, for Freedom.
To be trustee for the principle “Live and let live”; watchdog against aggression by herself or any other; cornerstone of a world so built that all peoples, however small and weak, may know that they can safely work out their own destinies—that would be for Britain the grand ideal. But the British Empire can only hope to stand for it by keeping the form of a Free Confederacy, by the most rigid scrutiny of its own conduct, and by developing the feeling that it is beneath Imperial dignity to wrest material benefit from the losses of others.