Part 3
Did we? Do we? That is the great question. Is our gaze really fixed on the far horizon? Or do we only dream it; and have the slain no comfort in their untimely darkness; the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no shred of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but the salving of national prides? And shall the Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with his laughter?
The House of the Future is always dark. There are few cornerstones to be discerned in the Temple of our Fate. But, of these few, one is the brotherhood and bond of the English-speaking races; not for narrow purposes, but that mankind may yet see Faith and Good Will enshrined, yet breathe a sweeter air, and know a life where Beauty passes, with the sun on her wings.
We want in the lives of men a “Song of Honour,” as in Ralph Hodgson’s poem:
“The song of men all sorts and kinds As many tempers, moods and minds As leaves are on a tree, As many faiths and castes and creeds As many human bloods and breeds As in the world may be.”
In the making of that song the English-speaking races will assuredly unite. What set this world in motion we know not; the Principle of Life is inscrutable and will for ever be; but we do know, that Earth is yet on the upgrade of existence, the mountain top of man’s life not reached, that many centuries of growth are yet in front of us before Time begins to chill this planet, till it swims, at last, another moon, in space. In the climb to that mountain top, of a happy life for mankind, our two great nations are as guides who go before, roped together in perilous ascent. On their nerve, loyalty, and wisdom, the adventure now hangs. What American or British knife would sever the rope?
He who ever gives a thought to the life of man at large, to his miseries, and disappointments, to the waste and cruelty of existence, will remember that if American or Briton fail in this climb, there can but be for us both, and for all other peoples, a hideous slip, a swift and fearful fall into an abyss, whence all shall be to begin over again.
We shall not fail――neither ourselves, nor each other. Our comradeship will endure.
III
FROM A SPEECH AT THE LOTUS CLUB, NEW YORK
I wonder whether you in America can realise what an entrancing voyage of discovery you represent to us primeval Anglo-Britons. I prefer that term to Anglo-Saxon, for even if we English glory in the thought that our seaborne ancestors were extremely bloodthirsty, we have no evidence that they brought their own women to Britain in any quantities, or had the power of reproducing themselves without aid from the other sex!
Can you, I say, realise how much more enticing to my English mind America is, than the Arabian Nights were to your fascinating fabulist, O. Henry? One longs to unriddle to oneself the significance and sense of America. In the English-speaking world to-day we need understanding of each others’ natures, aims, sympathies, and dislikes. For without understanding we become doctrinaire and partizan, building our ship in compartments very watertight, and getting into them and shutting the doors when the ship threatens to go down.
We English have a reputation for self-sufficiency. But speaking for myself, who find no name that is not English in my genealogy, I never can get up quite the interest in my own race that I can in others. We English are so set and made, you Americans are yet in the making. We at most experience modification of type; you are in process of creating one. I have often asked Americans: What is now the American type? and have been answered by――a smile. When I go back home my countrymen will ask me the same question. I would I could sit down and listen to you telling me what it is.
It will not have escaped you, at all events, that for four years the various branches of the English-speaking peoples have been credited with all the virtues――a love of liberty, humanity, and justice has, as it were, been patented for them on both sides of the Atlantic, and under the Southern Cross, till one has come to listen with a sort of fascinated terror for those three words to tinkle from the tongue. I am prepared to sacrifice a measure of the truth sooner than pronounce them to-night. Let me rather speak of those lower qualities which I think we English-speaking peoples possess in a conspicuous degree: Commonsense and Energy. From those vulgar attributes, I am sure, the historian of the far future will say that the English-speaking era has germinated; and that by those vulgar attributes it will flourish. Deep in the American spirit and in the English spirit is a curious intense realism――sometimes very highly camouflaged by hot air――an instinct for putting the finger on the button of life, and pressing it there till the bell rings. We are so extraordinarily successful that we may expect the historian of the far future to write: ‘The English-speaking races were so rapid in their subjugation of the forces of Nature, so prodigal of inventions, so eager in their use of them, so extremely practical, and altogether so successful, that the only thing they missed was――happiness.’
When I read of some great new American invention, or of a Lord Leverhulme converting an island of Lewis into a commercial Paradise, I confess to trembling. Gentlemen, it is a melancholy fact that the complete man does not live by invention and trade alone. At the risk of being laughed out of Paradise, I dare put in a plea for Beauty. Both our peoples, indeed, are so severely practical that I do feel we run the risk of getting machine-made, and coming actually to look down on those who give themselves to anything so unpractical as the love of Beauty. Now, I venture to think that the spirit of the old builders of Seville cathedral: ‘Let us make us a church such as the world has never seen before!’ ought to inspire us in these days too. ‘But it does, my dear Sir.’ I shall be answered: ‘We make flying machines, and iron foundries, Palace hotels, stock-yards, self-playing pianos, film pictures, cocktails, and ladies’ hats, such as the world has never seen before. A fig for the Giralda, the Sphynx, Shakespeare, and Michael Angelo! They did not elevate the lot of man. We are for invention, industry, and trade.’ Far be it from me to run down any of those things, so excellent in moderation; but since I solemnly aver that man’s greatest quality is the sense of proportion, I feel that if he neglects Beauty (which is but proportion elegantly cooked)――the ‘result of perfect economy’ Emerson had it――he sags backwards, no matter how inventive and commercially successful he may be.
But this is to become grave, which is detestable, even in a country which has just been taking its ticket for the Garden of Eden.
I believe I shall yet see (unless I perish of public speaking) America taking the long cut to Beauty――for there are no short cuts to Her, no cheap nostrums by which she can be conjured from the blue. Beauty and Simplicity are the natural antidotes to the feverish industrialism of our age. If only America will begin to take them freely she has it in her power to re-inspire in us older peoples, just now rather breathless and exhausted, the belief in Beauty, and a new fervour for the creation of fine and rare things. If on the other hand America turns Beauty down as a dangerous ‘bit of fluff’ and Simplicity as an impecunious alien, we over there, one behind the other, will sink into a soup of utilitarianism so thick that we may never get out.
Gentlemen, I long to see established between the English-speaking peoples a fellowship, not only in matters political and commercial, important as these are, but in philosophy and art. For after all those laughing-stocks, philosophy and art――the beautiful expression of our highest thoughts and fancies――are the lanterns of a nation’s life, and we ought to hang them in each others’ houses.
IV
FROM A SPEECH TO THE SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, NEW YORK
I do not know what your chief thought is now; for me the overmastering thought is that of Creation――Re-creation. You know when we look at a bit of moorland where the gorse and heather have been burned――swaled we call it in Devon――how we delight in the green, pushing up among the black shrivelled roots. I long to see the green pushing up, the creative impulse at work in its thousand ways all over the world again; each of us on both continents in his own line doing creative work; and not so much that wealth and comfort, as that health and beauty may be born again.
But, confronting as I do to-night, the Arts and Sciences, let me divide my words. You sciences have no need to listen. You have never had such a heyday as this; in engineering, in chemistry, in surgery, in every branch except perhaps ‘star-gazing,’ you have been shooting ahead, earning fresh laurels, putting new discoveries at the service of bewildered Man. Science drags no lame foot, it dances along like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I had better not pursue the simile. But the Arts, with faces muffled to the eyes, stand against the walls of life, and gaze a little enviously, a little mournfully at the passing rout. This is not their time for carnival; their lovers sleep, heavy with war and toil. It is to those poor wallflowers the Arts, that I would speak: Drop your veils, have the courage of your charms; you shall break many a heart yet, make many a lover happy.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have all noticed as I have the difference between a town by daylight and a town by night; well, the daylight town belongs to the Sciences, the night-lit town to the Arts. I don’t mean that artists are night-birds, though I have heard of such a case; I mean that the Arts live on Mystery and Imagination. Have you ever thought how we should get through if we had to live in a town which never put on the filmy dark robe of night, so that hour-in, hour-out we had to stare at things garbed in the efficient overalls of Science, with their prices properly pinned on? How long would it be before we found ourselves in Coney Hatch? Well, we are in a fair way to abolish Night――Mystery and Imagination are ‘off,’ as they say, and that way sooner or later madness lies.
It is time the Arts left off leaning against the wall, and took their share of the dance again. We want them to be as creative, nay, as seductive as the Sciences. We have seen Science work miracles of late; now let Art work her miracles in turn.
People are inclined to smile at me when I suggest that you in America are at the commencement of a period of fine and vigorous Art. The signs, they say, are all the other way. Of course you ought to know best; all the same, I stick to my opinion with British obstinacy, and I believe I shall see it justified.
V
ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
A doubter of the general divinity of our civilisation is labelled ‘pedant.’ Anyone who questions modern progress is tabooed. And yet there is no doubt, I think, that we are getting feverish, rushed, complicated, and have multiplied conveniences to such an extent that we do little with them but scrape the surface of life.
We were rattling into a species of barbarism when the war came, and unless we check ourselves shall continue to rattle now that it is over. The underlying cause in every country is the increase of herd-life, based on machines, money-getting, and the dread of being dull. Everyone knows how fearfully strong that dread is. But to be capable of being dull is in itself a disease.
And most of modern life seems to be a process of creating disease, then finding a remedy, which in its turn creates another disease, demanding fresh remedy, and so on. We pride ourselves, for example, on scientific sanitation; but what is scientific sanitation if not one huge palliative of evils which have arisen from herd-life enabling herd-life to be intensified, so that we shall presently need even more scientific sanitation? The true elixirs vitæ――for there be two, I think――are open-air life, and a proud pleasure in one’s work, but we have evolved a mode of existence in which it is comparatively rare to find these two conjoined. In old countries such as mine, the evils of herd-life are at present vastly more acute than in a new country such as yours. On the other hand, the further one is from hades, the faster one drives towards it, and machines are beginning to run along with America even more violently than with Europe.
When our Tanks first appeared, they were described as snouting monsters creeping at their own sweet will. I confess that this is how my inflamed eye sees all our modern machines――monsters running on their own, dragging us along, and very often squashing us.
We are, I believe, awakening to the dangers of this ‘Gadarening,’ of rushing down the high cliff into the sea, possessed and pursued by the devils of――machinery. But if any would see how little alarmed he really is――let him ask himself how much of his present mode of existence he is prepared to alter. Altering the modes of other people is delightful; one would have great hope of the future if we had nothing before us but that. The mediæval Irishman, indicted for burning down the cathedral at Armagh, together with the Archbishop, defended himself thus: “As for the cathedral, ’tis true I burned it; but indeed an’ I wouldn’t have, only they told me himself was inside.” We are all ready to alter our opponents, if not to burn them. But even if we were as ardent reformers as that Irishman, we could hardly force men to live in the open, or take a proud pleasure in their work, or enjoy beauty, or not concentrate themselves on making money. No amount of legislation will make us “lilies of the field” or “birds of the air,” or prevent us from worshipping false gods, or neglecting to reform ourselves.
I once wrote the unpopular sentence: “Democracy at present offers the spectacle of a man running down a road followed at a more and more respectful distance by his own soul.” For democracy read rather the words modern civilisation which prides itself on redress after the event, foresees nothing and avoids less; is purely empirical if one may use so high brow a word.
I look very eagerly and watchfully to America in many ways. After the war she will be more emphatically than ever, in material things, the most important and powerful nation of the earth. We British have a legitimate and somewhat breathless interest in the use she will make of her strength, and in the course of her national life, for this will greatly influence the course of our own. But power for real light and leading in America will depend, not so much on her material wealth, or her armed force, as on what her attitude towards life, and what the ideals of her citizens are going to be. Americans have a certain eagerness for knowledge; they have also, for all their absorption in success, the aspiring eye. They do want the good thing. They don’t always know when they see it, but they want it. These qualities, in combination with material strength, give America her chance. Yet, if she does not set her face against “Gadarening,” we are all bound for downhill. If she goes in for spreadeagleism, if her aspirations are towards quantity, not quality, we shall all go on being commonised. If she should get that purse-and-power-proud fever which comes from national success, we are all bound for another world flare-up. The burden of proving that democracy can be real and yet live up to an ideal of health and beauty will be on America’s shoulders, and on ours. What are we and Americans going to make of our inner life, of our individual habits of thought? What are we going to reverence, and what despise? Do we mean to lead, in spirit and in truth, not in mere money and guns? Britain is an old country, though still in her prime, I hope; America is yet on the threshold. Is she to step out into the sight of the world as a great leader? That is for America the long decision, to be worked out, not so much in her Senate and her Congress, as in her homes and schools. On America, now that the war is over, the destiny of civilisation may hang for the next century. If she mislays, indeed if she does not improve the power of self-criticism――that special dry American humour which the great Lincoln had――she might soon develop the intolerant provincialism which has so often been the bane of the earth and the undoing of nations. Above all, if she does not solve the problems of town life, of Capital and Labour, of the distribution of wealth, of national health, and attain to a mastery over inventions and machinery――she is in for a cycle of mere anarchy, disruption, and dictatorships, into which we shall all follow. The motto “noblesse oblige” applies as much to democracy as ever it did to the old-time aristocrat. It applies with terrific vividness to America. Ancestry and Nature have bestowed on her great gifts. Behind her stand Conscience, Enterprise, Independence, and Ability――such were the companions of the first Americans, and are the comrades of American citizens to this day. She has abounding energy, an unequalled spirit of discovery, a vast territory not half developed, and great natural beauty. I remember sitting on a bench overlooking the Grand Canyon of Arizona; the sun was shining into it, and a snow storm was whirling down there. All that most marvellous work of Nature was flooded to the brim with rose and tawny-gold, with white, and wine-dark shadows; the colossal carvings as of huge rock-gods and sacrificial altars, and great beasts along its sides, were made living by the very mystery of light and darkness, on that violent day of Spring; I remember sitting there, and an old gentleman passing close behind, leaning towards me and saying in a sly, gentle voice: “How are you going to tell it to the folks at home?” America has so much, that one despairs of telling to the folks at home, so much grand beauty to be to her an inspiration and uplift towards high and free thought and vision. Great poems of Nature she has, wrought in the large, to make of her and keep her a noble people. In my beloved Britain――all told, not half the size of Texas――there is a quiet beauty of a sort which America has not. I walked not long ago from Worthing to the little village of Steyning, in the South Downs. It was such a day as one seldom gets in England; when the sun was dipping and there came on the cool chalky hills the smile of late afternoon, and across a smooth valley on the rim of the Downs one saw a tiny group of trees, one little building, and a stack, against the clear-blue, pale sky――it was like a glimpse of heaven, so utterly pure in line and colour so removed, and touching. The tale of loveliness in our land is varied and unending, but it is not in the grand manner. America has the grand manner in her scenery and in her blood, for in America all are the children of adventure, every single man an emigrant himself or a descendant of one who had the pluck to emigrate. She has already had past-masters in dignity, but she has still to reach as a nation the grand manner in achievement. She knows her own dangers and failings; her qualities and powers; but she cannot realise the intense concern and interest, deep down behind our provoking stolidities, with which we of the old country watch her, feeling that what she does reacts on us above all nations, and will ever react more and more. Underneath surface differences and irritations we English-speaking peoples are fast bound together. May it not be in misery and iron! If America walks upright, so shall we; if she goes bowed under the weight of machines, money, and materialism, we too shall creep our ways. We run a long race, we nations; a generation is but a day. But in a day a man may leave the track, and never again recover it! Nations depend for their health and safety on the behaviour of the individuals who compose them.
Modern man is a very new and marvellous creature. Without quite realising it, we have evolved a fresh species of stoic――even more stoical, I suspect, than were the old Stoics. Modern man stands on his own feet. His religion is to take what comes without flinching or complaint, as part of the day’s work, which an unknowable God, Providence, Creative Principle, has appointed. By courage and kindness modern man exists, warmed by the glow of the great human fellowship. He has re-discovered the old Greek saying: “God is the helping of man by man”; has found out in his unselfconscious way that if he does not help himself, and help his fellows, he cannot reach that inner peace which satisfies. To do his bit; and to be kind! It is by that creed, rather than by any mysticism, that he finds the salvation of his soul, for, of a truth, the religion of this age is conduct.
After all, does not the only real spiritual warmth, not tinged by Pharisaism, egotism, or cowardice, come from the feeling of doing your work well and helping others; is not all the rest embroidery, luxury, pastime, pleasant sound and incense? Modern man is a realist with too romantic a sense, perhaps, of the mystery which surrounds existence, to pry into it. And, like modern civilisation itself, he is the creature of West and North, of those atmospheres, climates, manners, of life, which foster neither inertia, reverence, nor mystic meditation. Essentially man of action, in ideal action he finds his only true comfort. I am sure that padres at the front have seen that the men whose souls they have gone out to tend, are living the highest form of religion; that in their comic courage, unselfish humanity, their endurance without whimper of things worse than death, they have gone beyond all pulpit-and-deathbed teaching. And who are these men? Just the early manhood of the race, just modern man as he was before the war began, and will be now that the war is over.
This modern world, of which we English and Americans are perhaps the truest types, stands revealed from beneath its froth, frippery, and vulgar excrescences, sound at core――a world whose implicit motto is: “The good of all humanity.” But the herd-life which is its characteristic, brings many evils, has many dangers; and to preserve a sane mind in a healthy body is the riddle before us. Somehow we must free ourselves from the driving domination of machines and money-getting, not only for our own sakes but for that of all mankind.
And there is another thing of the most solemn importance: We English-speaking nations are by chance as it were, the ballast of the future. It is _absolutely necessary_ for the happiness of the world that we should remain united. The comradeship that we now feel must and surely shall abide. For unless we work together, and in no selfish or exclusive spirit――Goodbye to Civilisation! It will vanish like the dew off grass. The betterment not only of the British nations and America, but of all mankind is and must be our object.
From all our hearts a great weight has been lifted; in those fields death no longer sweeps his scythe, and our ears at last are free from the rustling thereof――now comes the test of magnanimity, in all countries. Will modern man rise to the ordering of a sane, a free, a generous life? Each of us loves his own country best, be it a little land or the greatest on earth; but jealousy is the dark thing, the creeping poison. Where there is true greatness, let us acclaim it; where there is true worth, let us prize it――as if it were our own.