Part 49

Considering everything, Ulster was at that time as comfortably and honourably out of the war as any part of the world, and all that seemed needed to keep it safely out to the end was a little tactful firmness in the Dublin Convention. There was plenty of everything in the loyal province at that time—men, meat, butter, Dublin stout, and self-righteousness; and Lady Charlotte expanded again like a flower in the sun. She reverted to driving in a carriage; it was nice to sit once more behind a stout able-bodied coachman with a cockade, with a perfect excuse for neutrality, and she still did her best for old England from eleven to one and often from five to six by writing letters and dabbling in organization. Oswald she kept in mind continually. Almost daily he would get newspaper cuttings from her detailing Sinn Fein outrages, or blue-marked leading articles agitating for a larger share of the munition industries for Belfast, or good hot stuff, deeply underlined, from the speeches of Sir Edward Carson. One dastardly Sinn Feiner, Oswald learnt, had even starved himself to death in gaol, a most unnatural offence to Lady Charlotte. She warmed up tremendously over the insidious attempts of the Prime Minister and a section of the press to get all the armies in France and Italy under one supreme generalissimo and end the dislocated muddling that had so long prolonged the war. It was a change that might have involved the replacement of regular generals by competent ones, and it imperilled everything that was most dear to the old lady’s heart. It was “_an insult to the King’s uniform_,” she wrote. “_A revolution. I knew that this sort of thing would begin if we let those Americans come in. We ought not to have let them come in. What good are they to us? What can they know of war? A crowd of ignorant republican renegades! British generals to be criticized and their prospects injured by French Roman Catholics and Atheists and chewing, expectorating Yankees and every sort of low foreigner. What is the world coming to? Sir Douglas Haig has been exactly where he is for two years. Surely he knows the ground better than any one else can possibly do._”

Once the theme of Lady Charlotte got loose in Oswald’s poor old brain, it began a special worry of its own. He found his mind struggling with assertions and arguments. As this involved trying to remember exactly what she had said in this letter of hers, and as it was in his pocket, he presently chose the lesser of two evils and took it out to read over:—

“_I suppose you have read in the papers what is happening in Clare. The people are ploughing up grass-land. It is as bad as that man Prothero. They raid gentlemen’s houses to seize arms; they resist the police. That man Devil-era—so I must call him—speaks openly of a republic. Devil-era and Devil-in; is it a coincidence merely? All this comes of our ill-timed leniency after the Dublin rebellion. When will England learn the lesson Cromwell taught her? He was a wicked man, he made one great mistake for which he is no doubt answering to his Maker throughout all eternity, but he certainly did know how to manage these Irish. If he could come back now he would be on our side. He would have had his lesson. Your Bolshevik friends go on murdering and cutting throats, I see, like true Republicans. Happily the White Guards seem getting the upper hand in Finland. In the end I suppose we shall be driven to a peace with the Huns as the worst of two evils. If we do, it will only be your Bolsheviks and pacifists and strikers and Bolos who will be to blame._

“_The whining and cowardice of the East Enders disgusts me more and more. You read, I suppose, the account of the disgraceful panic during the air raid the other day in the East End, due entirely to foreigners of military age, mostly, no doubt, your Russian Bolsheviks. I am well away from such a rabble. I suffer from rheumatism here. I know it is rheumatism; what you say about gout is nonsense. In spite of its loyalty Ulster is damp. I pine more and more for the sun and warmth of Italy. Unwin must needs make herself very tiresome and peevish nowadays. These are not cheerful times for me. But one must do one’s bit for one’s country, I suppose, unworthy though it be._

“_So Mr. Peter is back in England again wounded after his flying about in the air. I suppose he is tasting the delights of matrimony, such as they are! What an affair! Something told me long ago that it would happen. I tried to separate them. My instincts warned me, and my instincts were right. Breed is breed, and the servant strain came out in her. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Why you let them marry I cannot imagine!!! I am sure the young lady could have dispensed with that ceremony!!!! I still think at times of that queer scene I passed on the road when I came to Pelham Ford that Christmas. A second string,—no doubt of it. But Peter was her great chance, of course, thanks to your folly. Well, let us hope that in the modern way they won’t have any children, for nothing is more certain than that these inter-breeding marriages are most harmful, and whether we like it or not you have to remember they are first cousins, if not in the sight of the law at any rate in the sight of God, which is what matters in this respect. Mr. Grimes, who has studied these things in his leisure time, tells me that there is a very great probability indeed that any child will be blind or malformed or consumptive, let us hope the latter, if not actually still-born, which, of course, would be the best thing that could possibly happen...._”

§ 5

At this point Oswald became aware of Joan coming out of the house towards him.

He looked at his watch. “Much too early yet, Joan,” he said.

“Yes, but I want to be meeting him,” said Mrs. Joan....

So they walked down to the station and waited for a long time on the platform. And Joan said very little to Oswald because she was musing pleasantly.

When the train came in neither Joan nor Peter took much notice of Oswald after the first greeting. I do not see what else he could have expected; they were deeply in love and they had been apart for a couple of weeks, they were excited by each other and engrossed in each other. Oswald walked beside them up the road—apart. “I’ve got some work,” he said abruptly in the hall. “See you at lunch,” and went into his study and shut the door upon them, absurdly disappointed.

§ 6

Peter came on Wednesday. It was not until Friday that Oswald found an opportunity to deliver his valediction. But he had rehearsed it, or rather he had been rehearsing experimental fragments of it for most of the night before. On Thursday night the cloudy malaise of his mind broke and cleared. Things fell into their proper places in his thoughts, and he could feel that his ideas were no longer distorted and confused. The valediction appeared, an ordered discourse. If only he could hold out through a long talk he felt he would be able to make himself plain to them....

He lay in the darkness putting together phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, developing a long and elaborate argument, dipping down into parentheses, throwing off footnotes, resuming his text. For the most part Joan and Peter remained silent hearers of this discourse; now his ratiocination glowed so brightly that they were almost forgotten, now they came into the discussion, they assisted, they said helpful and understanding things, they raised simple and obvious objections that were beautifully overcome.

“What is education up to?” he would begin. “What is education?”

Then came a sentence that he repeated in the stillness of his mind quite a number of times. “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” He did not reckon with Peter’s tendency to prompt replies.

He would begin in the broadest, most elementary way. “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” so he framed his opening: “a creature restlessly experimental, mischievous and destructive, as sexual as a monkey, and with no really strong social instincts, no such tolerance of his fellows as a deer has, no such instinctive self-devotion as you find in a bee or an ant. A solitary animal, a selfish animal. And yet this creature has now made for itself such conditions that it _must_ be social. Must be. Or destroy itself. Continually it invents fresh means by which man may get at man to injure him or help him. That is one view of the creature, Peter, from your biological end.” Here Peter was to nod, and remain attentively awaiting the next development. “And at the same time, there grows upon us all a sense of a common being and a common interest. Biologically separate, we unify spiritually. More and more do men feel, ’I am not for myself! There is something in me—that belongs to a greater being than myself—of which I am a part.’... I won’t philosophize. I won’t say which may be in the nature of cause and which of effect here. You can put what I have said in a dozen different ways. We may say, ’The individual must live in the species and find his happiness there’—that is—Biologese. _Our_ language, Peter. Or we can quote, ’I am the True Vine and ye are the Branches.’” Oswald’s mind rested on that for a time. “That is not _our_ language, Peter, but it is the same idea. Essentially it is the same idea. Or we can talk of the ’One and the Many.’ We can say we all live in the mercy of Allah, or if you are a liberal Jew that we are all a part of Israel. It seems to me that all these formulæ are so much spluttering and variation over one idea. Doesn’t it to you? Men can quarrel mortally even upon the question of how they shall say ’Brotherhood.’...” Here for a time Oswald’s mind paused.

He embarked upon a great and wonderful parenthesis upon religious intolerance in which at last he lost himself completely.

“I don’t see that men need fall out about religion,” was his main proposition.

“There was a time when I was against all religions. I denounced priestcraft and superstition and so on.... That is past. That is past. I want peace in the world.... Men’s minds differ more about _initial_ things than they do about _final_ things. Some men think in images, others in words and abstract ideas—but yet the two sorts can think out the same practical conclusions. A lot of these chapels and churches only mean a difference in language.... Difference in dialect.... Often they don’t mean the same things, those religious people, by the same words, but often contrariwise they mean the same things by quite different words. The deaf man says the dawn is bright and red, and the blind man says it is a sound of birds. It is the same dawn. The same dawn.... One man says ’God’ and thinks of a person who is as much of a person as Joan is, and another says ’God’ and thinks of an idea more abstract than the square root of minus one. That’s a tangle in the primaries of thought and not a difference in practical intention. One can argue about such things for ever.... One can make a puzzle with a bit of wire that will bother and exasperate people for hours. Is it any wonder, then, if stating what is at the root of life bothers and exasperates people?...

“Personally, I should say now that all religions are right, and none of them very happy in the words and symbols they choose. And none of them are calm enough—not calm enough. Not peaceful enough. They are all floundering about with symbols and metaphors, and it is a pity they will not admit it.... Why will people never admit their intellectual limitations in these matters?... All the great religions have this in common, this idea in common; they profess to teach the universal brotherhood of man and the universal reign of justice. Why argue about phrases? Why not put it in this fashion?”...

For a long time Oswald argued about phrases before he could get back to the main thread of his argument....

“Men have to be unified. They are driven to seek Unity. And they are still with the individualized instincts of a savage.... See then what education always has to be! The process of taking this imperfectly social, jealous, deeply savage creature and socializing him. The development of education and the development of human societies are one and the same thing. Education makes the social man. So far as schooling goes, it is quite plainly that. You teach your solitary beast to read and write, you teach him to express himself by drawing, you teach him other languages perhaps, and something of history and the distribution of mankind. What is it all but making this creature who would naturally possess only the fierce, narrow sociability of a savage family in a cave, into a citizen in a greater community? That is how I see it. That primarily is what has been done to you. An uneducated man is a man who can talk to a few score familiar people with a few hundred words. You two can talk to a quarter of mankind. With the help of a little translation you can get to understandings with most of mankind.... As a child learns the accepted language and the accepted writing and the laws and rules of life it learns the community. Watching the education of you two has made me believe more and more in the idea that, over and above the enlargement of expression and understanding, education is the state explaining itself to and incorporating the will of the individual....

“Yes—but what state? What state? Now we come to it....”

Oswald began to sketch out a universal history. There is no limit to these intellectual enterprises of the small hours.

“All history is the record of an effort in man to form communities, an effort against resistance—against instinctive resistance. There seems no natural and proper limit to a human community. (That’s my great point, that. That is what I have to tell them.) That is the final teaching of History, Joan and Peter; the very quintessence of History; that limitlessness of the community. As soon as men get a community of any size organized, it begins forthwith to develop roads, wheels, writing, ship-building, and all manner of things which presently set a fresh growth growing again. Let that, too, go on. Presently comes steam, mechanical traction, telegraphy, the telephone, wireless, aeroplanes; and each means an extension of range, and each therefore demands a larger community.... There seems no limit to the growth of states. I remember, Peter, a talk we had; we agreed that this hackneyed analogy people draw between the life and death of animals and the life and death of states was bad and silly. It isn’t the same thing, Joan, at all. An animal, you see, has a limit of size; it develops no new organs for further growth when it has reached that limit, it breeds its successors, it ages naturally; when it dies, it dies for good and all and is cleared away. Exactly the reverse is true of a human community. Exactly? Yes, exactly. If it can develop its educational system steadily—note that—if it can keep up communications, a State can go on indefinitely, conquering, ousting, assimilating. Even an amoeba breaks up after growth, but a human community need not do so. And so far from breeding successors it kills them if it can—like Frazer’s priest—where was it?—Aricia? The priest of Diana. The priest of The _Golden Bough_....”

Oswald picked up his thread again after a long, half dreaming excursion in Frazer-land.

“It is just this limitlessness, this potential immortality of States that makes all the confusion and bloodshed of history. What is happening in the world today? What is the essence of it all? The communities of today are developing _range_, faster than ever they did: aeroplanes, guns, swifter ships, everywhere an increasing range of action. That is the most important fact to grasp about the modern world. It is the key fact in politics. From the first dawn of the human story you see man in a kind of a puzzled way—how shall I put it?—_pursuing the boundary of his possible community_. Which always recedes. Which recedes now faster than ever. Until it brings him to a fatal war and disaster. Over and over again it is the same story. If you had a coloured historical atlas of the world, the maps would be just a series of great dabs of empire, spreading, spreading—coming against resistances—collapsing. Each dab tries to devour the world and fails. There is no natural limit to a human community, no limit in time or space—except one.

“Genus _Homo_, species _Sapiens_, Mankind, that is the only limit.” (Peter, perhaps, might be led up to saying that.)...

“What has the history of education always been? A series of little teaching chaps trying to follow up and _fix_ the fluctuating boundaries of communities”—an image came into Oswald’s head that pleased him and led him on—“like an insufficient supply of upholsterers trying to overtake and tack down a carpet that was blowing away in front of a gale. An insufficient supply of upholsterers.... And the carpet always growing as it blows. That’s good.... They were trying to fix something they hadn’t clearly defined. And you have a lot of them still hammering away at their tacks when the edge of the carpet has gone on far ahead.... That was really the state of education in England when I took you two young people in hand; the carpet was in the air and most of the schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, writers, teachers, journalists, and all who build up and confirm ideas were hammering in tacks where the carpet had been resting the day before yesterday.... But a lot were not even hammering. No. They just went easy. Yes, that is what I mean when I say that education was altogether at loose ends.... But Germany was different; Germany was teaching and teaching in schools, colleges, press, everywhere, this new Imperialism of hers, a sort of patriotic melodrama, with Britain as Carthage and Berlin instead of Rome. They pointed the whole population to that end. They _taught_ this war. All over the world a thousand other educational systems pointed in a thousand directions....

“So Germany set fire to the Phœnix....

“Only one other great country had any sort of state education. Real state education that is. The United States was also teaching citizenship, on a broader if shallower basis; a wider citizenship—goodwill to all mankind. Shallower. Shallower certainly. But it was there. A republican culture. Candour ... generosity.... The world has still to realize its debt to the common schools of America....

“This League of Free Nations, of which all men are dreaming and talking, this World Republic, is the rediscovered outline, the proper teaching of all real education, the necessary outline now of human life.... There is nothing else to do, nothing else that people of our sort can do at all, nothing but baseness, grossness, vileness, and slavery unless we live now as a part of that process of a world peace. Our lives have got to be political lives. All lives have to be made political lives. We can’t run about _loose_ any more. This idea of a world-wide commonwealth, this ideal of an everlasting world-peace in which we are to live and move and have our being, has to be built up in every school, in every mind, in every lesson. ‘You belong. You belong. And the world belongs to you.’...”

What ought one to teach when one teaches geography, for instance, but the common estate of mankind? Here, the teacher should say, are mountains and beautiful cities you may live to see. Here are plains where we might grow half the food of mankind! Here are the highways of our common life, and here are pleasant bye-ways where you may go! All this is your inheritance. Your estate. To rejoice in—and serve. But is that how geography is taught?...

“We used to learn lists of the British possessions, with their total exports and imports in money. I remember it as if it were yesterday.... Old Smugs—a hot New Imperialist—new then....

“Then what is history but a long struggle of men to find peace and safety, and how they have been prevented by baseness and greed and folly? Is that right? No, folly and baseness—and hate.... Hate certainly.... All history is one dramatic story, of man blundering his way from the lonely ape to the world commonwealth. All history is each man’s adventure. But what teacher makes history much more than a dwarfish twaddle about boundaries and kings and wars? Dwarfish twaddle. History! It went nowhere. It did nothing. Was there ever anything more like a crowd of people getting into an omnibus without wheels than the History Schools at Oxford? Or your History Tripos?”... Oswald repeated his image and saw that it was good....

“What is the teaching of a language again but teaching the knowledge of another people—an exposition of the soul of another people—a work of union?... But you see what I mean by all this; this idea of a great world of co-operating peoples; it is not just a diplomatic scheme, not something far off that Foreign Offices are doing; it is an idea that must revolutionize the lessons of a child in the nursery and alter the maps upon every schoolroom wall. And frame our lives altogether. Or be nothing. The World Peace. To that we all belong. I have a fancy— As though this idea had been hovering over the world, unsubstantial, unable to exist—until all this blood-letting, this torment and disaster gave it a body....

“What I am saying to you the University ought to have said to you.

“Instead of Universities”—he sought for a phrase and produced one that against the nocturnal dark seemed brilliant and luminous. “Instead of the University _passant regardant_, we want the University militant. We want Universities all round and about the world, associated, working to a common end, drawing together all the best minds and the finest wills, a myriad of multi-coloured threads, into one common web of a world civilization.”

§ 7

Also that night Oswald made a discourse upon the English.

“Yours is a great inheritance, Joan and Peter,” he said to the darkness. “You are young; that is a great thing in itself. The world cries out now for the young to enter into possession. And also—do you ever think of it?—you are English, Joan and Peter....