Part 4
This earth is made too subtly, of too multiple warp and woof, for prophecy. When he surveys the world around――“the wondrous things which there abound,” the prophet closes foolish lips. Besides, as the historian tells us: “Writers have that undeterminateness of spirit which commonly makes literary men of no use in the world.” So I, for one, prophesy not. Still, we do know this: All English-speaking peoples will go to this adventure of Peace with something of big purpose and spirit in their hearts, with something of free outlook. The world is wide and Nature bountiful enough for all, if we keep sane minds. The earth is fair and meant to be enjoyed, if we keep sane bodies. Who dare affront this world of beauty with mean views? There is no darkness but what the ape in us still makes, and in spite of all his monkey-tricks modern man is at heart further from the ape than man has yet been.
To do our jobs really well and to be brotherly! To seek health and ensue Beauty! If, in Britain and America, in all the English-speaking nations, we can put that simple faith into real and thorough practice, what may not this century yet bring forth? Shall man, the highest product of creation, be content to pass his little day in a house like unto Bedlam?
When the present great task in which we have joined hands is really ended; when once more from the shuttered mad-house the figure of Peace steps forth and stands in the risen sun, and we may go our ways again in the wonder of a new morning――let it be with this vow in our hearts: “No more of Madness――in War, or in Peace!”
VI
TO THE LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION, NEW YORK
Standing here, privileged to address my betters――I, the least politically educated person in the world, have two thoughts to leave on the air. They arise from the title of your League.
I wish I did not feel, speaking in the large, that politics and education have but a bowing acquaintanceship in the modern State; and I wish I did feel that either education or politics had any definite idea of what they were out to attain; in other words, had a clear image of the ideal State. It seems to me that their object at present is just to keep the heads of the citizens of the modern State above water; to keep them alive, without real concern as to what kind of life they are being preserved for. We seem, in fact, to be letting our civilisation run us, instead of running our civilisation. If a man does not know where he wants to go, he goes where circumstances and the telephone take him. Where do we want to go? Can you answer me? Have you any definite idea? What is the Ultima Thule of our longings? I suppose one ought to say, roughly, that the modern ideal is: Maximum production of wealth to the square mile of a country――an ideal which, seeing that a man normally produces wealth in surplus to his own requirements, signifies logically a maximum head of population to the square mile. And it seems to me that the great modern fallacy is the identification of the word wealth with the word welfare. Granted that demand creates supply, and that it is impossible to stop human nature from demanding, the problem is surely to direct demand into the best channels for securing health and happiness. And I venture to say that the mere blind production of wealth and population by no means fills that bill. We ought to produce wealth only in such ways and to such an extent as shall make us all good, clean, healthy, intelligent, and beautiful to look at. That is the end, and production whether of wealth or population only the means to that end, to be regulated accordingly. As things are, we confuse the means with the end, and make of production a fetich.
Let me take a parallel from the fields of Art. What kind of good in the world is an artist who sets to work to cover the utmost possible acreage of canvas, or to spoil the greatest possible number of reams of paper, in deference to the call from a vulgar and undiscriminating market for all he can produce? Do we admire him――a man whose ideal is blind supply to meet blind demand?
The most urgent need of the world to-day is to learn――or is it to re-learn?――the love of quality. And how are we to learn that in a democratic age, unless we so perfect our electoral machineries as to be sure that we secure for our leaders, and especially for our leaders of education, men and women who, themselves worshipping quality, will see that the love of quality is instilled into the boys and girls of the nation.
After all, we have some common sense, and we really cannot contemplate much longer the grimy, grinding monster of modern industrialism without feeling that we are becoming disinherited, instead of――as we are brought up to think――heirs to an ever-increasing fortune.
It seems to me that no amount of political evolution or revolution is going to do us any good unless it is accompanied by evolution or revolution in ideals. What does it matter whether one class holds the reins, or another class holds the reins, if the dominant impulse in the population remains the craving for wealth without the power of discriminating whether or not that wealth is taking forms which promote health and happiness.
A new educational charter――a charter of taste, affirming the rule of dignity, beauty, and simplicity, is wanted before political change can turn out to be anything but cheap-jack nostrums, and a mere shuffling around.
I would just cite three of the many changes necessary for any advance:
(1) The reduction of working hours to a point that would enable men and women to live lives of wider interest.
(2) The abolition of smoke――which surely should not be beyond attainment in this scientific age.
(3) The rescue of educational forces from the grip of vested interests.
I would have all educational institutions financed by the State, but give all the _directing_ power to heads of education elected by the main body of teachers themselves. I would not have education dependent on advertisement or on charity. I would not even have newspapers, which are an educational force――though you might not always think so――dependent on advertisements. A newspaper man told me the other day that his paper had printed an article drawing attention to the deleteriousness of a certain product. The manufacturers of that product sent an ultimatum drawing the editor’s attention to the deleteriousness of their advertising in a journal which printed such articles. The result was perfect peace. What chance is there of rescuing newspapers, for instance, until education has implanted in the rising generation the feeling that to accept money for what you know is doing harm to your neighbours, is not playing the game. Or take another instance: Not long ago in England a College for the training of school-teachers desired to make certain excellent advances in their curriculum, which did not meet with the approval of the municipal powers controlling the College. A short, sharp fight, and again perfect peace.
I suppose it would be too sweeping to say that a vested interest never yet held an enlightened view, but I think one may fairly say that their enlightened views are rare birds.
How, then, is any emancipation to come? I know not, unless we take to looking on Education as the hub of the wheel――the Schools, the Arts, the Press; and concentrate our thoughts on the best means of manning these agencies with men and women of real honesty and vision, and giving them real power to effect in the rising generation the evolution of ethics and taste, in accordance with the rules of dignity, beauty, and simplicity.
VII
TALKING AT LARGE
It is of the main new factors which have come into the life of the civilised world that I would speak.
The division deep and subtle between those who have fought and those who have not――concerns us in Europe far more than you in America; for in proportion to your population the number of your soldiers who actually fought has been small, compared with the number in any belligerent European country. And I think that so far as you are concerned the division will soon disappear, for the iron had not time to enter into the souls of your soldiers. For us in Europe, however, this factor is very tremendous, and will take a long time to wear away. In my country the, as it were, professional English dislike to the expression of feeling, which strikes every American so forcibly, covers very deep hearts and highly sensitive nerves. The average Briton is now not at all stolid underneath; I think he has changed a great deal in this last century, owing to the town life which seven-tenths of our population lead. Perhaps only of the Briton may one still invent the picture which appeared in _Punch_ in the autumn of 1914――of the steward on a battleship asking the naval lieutenant: “Will you take your bath before or after the engagement, sir?” and only among Britons overhear one stoker say to another in the heat of a sea-fight: “Well, wot I say is――’E ought to ’ave married ’er.” For all that, the Briton feels deeply; and on those who have fought the experiences of the battlefield have had an effect which almost amounts to metamorphosis. There are now two breeds of British people――such as have been long in the danger zones, and such as have not; shading, of course, into each other through the many who have just smelled powder and peril, and the very few whose imaginations are vibrant enough to have lived the two lives, while only living one.
In a certain cool paper called: “The Balance-sheet of the Soldier Workman” I tried to come at the effect of the war; but purposely pitched it in a low and sober key; and there is a much more poignant tale of change to tell of each individual human being.
Take a man who, when the war broke out (or had been raging perhaps a year), was living the ordinary Briton’s life, in factory, shop, and home. Suppose that he went through that deep, sharp struggle between the pull of home love and interests, and the pull of country (for I hope it will never be forgotten that five million Britons were volunteers) and came out committed to his country. That then he had to submit to being rattled at great speed into the soldier-shape which we Britons and you Americans have been brought up to regard as but the half of a free man; that then he was plunged into such a hideous hell of horrible danger and discomfort as this planet has never seen; came out of it time and again, went back into it time and again; and finally emerged, shattered or unscathed, with a spirit at once uplifted and enlarged, yet bruised and ungeared for the old life of peace. Imagine such a man set back among those who have not been driven and grilled and crucified. What would he feel, and how bear himself? On the surface he would no doubt disguise the fact that he felt different from his neighbours――he would conform; but something within him would ever be stirring, a sort of superiority, an impatient sense that he had been through it and they had not; the feeling, too, that he had seen the bottom of things, that nothing he could ever experience again would give him the sensations he had had out there; that he had lived, and there could be nothing more to it. I don’t think that we others quite realise what it must mean to those men, most of them under thirty, to have been stretched to the uttermost, to have no illusions left, and yet have, perhaps, forty years still to live. There is something gained in them, but there’s something gone from them. The old sanctions, the old values won’t hold; are there any sanctions and values which can be made to hold? A kind of unreality must needs cling about their lives henceforth. This is a finespun way of putting it, but I think, at bottom, true.
The old professional soldier lived for his soldiering. At the end of a war (however terrible) there was left to him a vista of more wars, more of what had become to him the ultimate reality――his business in life. For these temporary soldiers of what has been not so much a war as a prolonged piece of very horrible carnage, there succeeds something so mild in sensation that it simply will not fill the void. When the dish of life has lost its savour, by reason of violent and uttermost experience, wherewith shall it be salted?
The American Civil War was very long and very dreadful, but it was a human and humane business compared to what Europe has just come through. There is no analogy in history for the present moment. An old soldier of that Civil War, after hearing these words, wrote me an account of his after-career which shows that in exceptional cases a life so stirring, full, and even dangerful may be lived that no void is felt. But one swallow does not make a summer, nor will a few hundreds or even thousands of such lives leaven to any extent the vast lump of human material used in this war. The spiritual point is this: In front of a man in ordinary civilised existence there hovers ever that moment in the future when he expects to prove himself more of a man than he has yet proved himself. For these soldiers of the Great Carnage the moment of probation is already in the past. They _have_ proved themselves as they will never have the chance to do again, and secretly they know it. One talks of their powers of heroism and sacrifice being wanted just as much in time of Peace; but that cannot really be so, because Peace times do not demand men’s lives――which is the ultimate test――with every minute that passes. No, the great moment of their existence lies behind them, young though so many of them are. This makes them at once greater than us, yet in a way smaller, because they have lost the power and hope of expansion. They have lived their masterpiece already. Human nature is elastic, and hope springs eternal; but a _climax_ of experience and sensation cannot be repeated; I think these have reached and passed the uttermost climax; and in Europe they number millions.
This is a veritable portent, and I am glad that in America you will not have it to any great extent.
Now how does this affect the future? Roughly speaking it must, I think, have a diminishing effect on what I may call loosely――Creative ability. People have often said to me: “We shall have great writings and paintings from these young men when they come back.” We shall certainly have poignant expression of their experiences and sufferings; and the best books and paintings of the war itself are probably yet to come. But, taking the long view, I do not believe we shall have from them, in the end, as much creative art and literature as we should have had if they had not been through the war. Illusion about life, and interest in ordinary daily experience and emotion, which after all, are to be the stuff of their future as of ours, has in a way been blunted or destroyed for them. And in the other provinces of life, in industry, in trade, in affairs, how can we expect from men who have seen the utter uselessness of money or comfort or power in the last resort, the same naïve faith in these things, or the same driving energy towards the attaining of them that we others exhibit?
It may be cheering to assume that those who have been almost superhuman these last four years in one environment will continue to be almost superhuman under conditions the very opposite. But alack! it is not logical.
On the other hand I think that those who have had this great and racking experience will be left, for the most part, with a real passion for Justice; and that this will have a profoundly modifying effect on social conditions. I think, too, that many of them will have a sort of passion for humaneness, which will, if you will suffer me to say so, come in very handy; for I have observed that the rest of us, through reading about horrors, have lost the edge of our gentleness, and have got into the habit of thinking that it is the business of women and children to starve, if they happen to be German; of creatures to be underfed and overworked if they happen to be horses; of families to be broken up if they happen to be aliens; and that a general carelessness as to what suffering is necessary and what is not, has set in. And, queer as it may seem, I look to those who have been in the thick of the worst suffering the world has ever seen, to set us in the right path again, and to correct the vitriolic sentiments engendered by the armchair and the inkpot, in times such as we have been and are still passing through. A cloistered life in times like these engenders bile; in fact, I think it always does. For sheer ferocity there is no place, you will have noticed, like a club full of old gentlemen. I expect the men who have come home from killing each other to show us the way back to brotherliness! And not before it’s wanted. Here is a little true story of war-time, when all men were supposed to be brothers if they belonged to the same nation. In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage. One, pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. The other, elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large cigar.
The young man, who looked as if his days were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man. His nose twitched, vibrated by the scent of the cigar, and he said suddenly:
“Could you give me a light, sir?”
The elderly man regarded him for a moment, drooped his eyelids, and murmured:
“I’ve no matches.”
The young man sighed, mumbling the cigarette in his watering lips, then said very suddenly:
“Perhaps you’ll kindly give me a light from your cigar, sir.”
The elderly man moved throughout his body as if something very sacred had been touched within him.
“I’d rather not,” he said; “if you don’t mind.”
A quarter of an hour passed, while the young man’s cigarette grew moister, and the elder man’s cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and said:
“Unless you’d like to take it from the edge.”
On the other hand one has often travelled in these last years with extreme embarrassment because our soldiers were so extraordinarily anxious that one should smoke their cigarettes, eat their apples, and their sausages. The marvels of comradeship they have performed would fill the libraries of the world.
The second main new factor in the world’s life is the disappearance of the old autocracies.